Friday's column: Every 17 years
Once in 17 years. That little statistical gem got tossed around a lot this week, with Mayor Daley's first veto of a City Council resolution. And it makes you wonder if, cicadalike, the mayor will now wait until 2023, when he's serving his 10th term in office, to once again publicly demonstrate his mastery of the whole checks-and-balances-in-government concept.
Political insiders are suggesting that Daley got a big rush out of the whole veto thing -- or, more specifically, out of taking in the spectacle of aldermen pulling off John-Kerry-in-a-yoga-class contortions of logic to justify changing their minds about the big-box ordinance they had originally supported -- and that now that he's had a taste of what it's like to bend the Council to his will after they vote on something, he's likely to trot out the big red veto stamp more often.
(Of course, political insiders also point out that there is no actual big red veto stamp, like the one I remember quite distinctly from the "I'm Just A Bill" episode of Schoolhouse Rock. This is why political insiders are generally no fun at parties.)
The principles of higher mathematics, however, suggest that Daley is likely to stick with the 17-year pattern. And I'm going with the math geeks on this one.
While historians tend to mark off time in even numbers -- like the first hundred days of a presidential administration -- hard-science types tend to go for slightly more esoteric measures. And, for some reason, 17-year periods seem particularly prevalent.
Bugs and prime numbers
The best-known 17-year pattern is, of course, the cicada cycle. The bane of outdoor concertgoers and control freak summer brides everywhere, cicadas are insects that mainly live underground, in a sort of suspended animation, until they emerge for a brief, noisy flurry of singing and mating. It's not entirely clear why this strange life cycle is exactly 17 years long, rather than, say, 16 or 18 years, but researchers believe that 17 being a prime number somehow prevents predators from figuring out the pattern.
Similar cycles play out in other fields, as well. Techies, for example, love to cite the truism that, since Newton's time, humanity's scientific knowledge has doubled every 17 years. And economists have charted inflationary cycles (the last one started in 2002) as also being about 17 years long.
Chicago has an extra-cold autumn (as we did last November, when temperatures dipped into the teens) about once every 17 years. And the distance between Earth's and Mars' orbits moves from closest to most distant on a 17-year cycle as well.
Even fashion trends fit the pattern. Seventeen years ago, in 1989, I -- along with pretty much every other liberal arts college-bound teenage girl on the East Coast -- was busy perfecting a newly "interesting" identity for myself, which involved blank verse, red lipstick, black tights and Doc Martens. If all goes according to schedule, we should be trotting out that regalia once again for our Goth-themed quarter-life crises. Savvy investors are already cornering the market on jet-black hair dye.
Daley: the Olympic years
For Mayor Daley, marking the close of his first 17 years in office with a veto is a smart political move, one that manages to send an "I-am-scary-powerful" message without resorting to the actual, physical crushing of those who would question his judgment, which can be both demoralizing and -- even worse -- messy. The veto is the mayoral equivalent of the impossible-to-drown-out buzz of the cicada song. It doesn't win a lot of points for beauty or artistic merit -- though the ordinance itself was flawed and unworkable, it did at least have a certain righteous indignation behind it, while taking the side of Wal-Mart, no matter how right they happen to be, will always be hopelessly uncool -- but it has created a nice distraction from everything else. Like hiring scandals. And Jesse Jackson Jr.
If the mayor's first political life cycle began in crisis, after the Council War years and the death of Harold Washington, his next one -- shall we call them the Olympic years? -- starts off at a moment of relative prosperity and calm. Though scandal is in the air and the economy seems poised to take a tumble, the mayor has secured not-since-the-first-Daley levels of both popularity and executive power. With control of the public schools and a hand in transforming public housing, he's got the chance to extend his reach to everything from mass transit to high culture. Plus, he could sell off a few less desirable neighborhoods to private developers in order to pay for maintaining the rest.
By the end of this cycle, then, Chicago could be a very different place, a city with sculpted abs rather than big shoulders.
And, with the City Council having been abolished sometime during Daley's eighth term, there will hardly be a need for another veto.
