On the south side, Bill Clinton and John McCain are taking part in City Year’s “Convention of Idealism” at the University of Chicago. City Year, which is now in 13 cities, is a high-energy, well-run national-service program that puts a group of 17- to 24-year-olds to work for a year in after-school programs, senior centers and other community-building activities. The highly diverse corps, wearing their trademark sport shirts, khakis and Timberlands, has attracted strong corporate and philanthropic support for its boot camp-meets-Peace Corps mix of camaraderie and service.
Clinton first saw the program in action in Boston in 1991 and modeled his AmeriCorps national-service initiative on it. (In seven years, AmeriCorps has enrolled 250,000 young Americans serving 4.5 million others in a wide range of service programs. That makes the program far larger than the Peace Corps but with a fraction of the publicity). McCain first voted against AmeriCorps in the Senate, but-like many other Republicans-later changed his mind and is now a believer. City Year fits with the notion of service that powered his 2000 campaign for president and may lead to another run in 2004. McCain’s presence suggests that City Year and AmeriCorps are here to stay in a post-Clinton era.
Meanwhile, on the North Side, where I grew up, comes news of a different kind. WGN-TV this week taped its final episode of “Bozo’s Circus,” the clown show that aired locally for 40 years. For generations of young Chicagoans, Bozo was a big deal. (I remember attending a taping as a tyke in the early 1960s as if it were yesterday). Until the 1980s, the show was so popular that waiting lists for tickets were literally 10 years long; people would routinely request seats before their children were born. Other cities had their own local versions of Bozo, and the red-haired clown became so familiar that the elder President Bush could call candidate Bill Clinton a “Bozo” in 1992, and the country knew what he meant.
How are City Year and Bozo related (beyond the Clinton joke)? Each symbolizes something good and not-so-good now happening in cities.
City Year is part of larger community-service movement gaining strength across the country. (I’m moderating a discussion on this subject here this week). Harris Wofford, the former senator who headed AmeriCorps until recently, was an important player in the civil-rights movement. He says that the national-service movement is about where civil rights was in the mid 1950s-still embryonic, but with the potential to rank with the women’s movement, temperance and other great social crusades of American history.
One of the reasons that AmeriCorps works is that the programs are chosen at the state and local level. That helps smooth the way politically for community service ideas that would be rejected if they came from Washington. The irony is that while “all politics is local,” as the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, most popular culture is now national. Bozo’s ratings fell in the face of Disney, Nickelodeon and nationally syndicated trash-talk programs in the afternoon.
The demise of Bozo is the same phenomenon we see in retail, as locally owned stores give way to Starbucks and Virgin Records and the megastores that have made urban redevelopment projects across the country almost indistinguishable from each other. In New York, the good news is that Times Square has been revived; the bad news is that it looks like Orlando.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a good thing that Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project is being partly torn down. There’s even a new Starbucks there where the City Year corps members can get an iced latte while they’re helping out the kids. But as the service ethic takes hold and cities improve, we don’t want them to lose their local flavor and local characters, even if they are a bunch of Bozos.
