Top school grads need not apply

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I’ve only been to New Trier once, but the visit was so singular that even the invitation to the high school stands out in memory. It was initiated via email, as most things are nowadays, but soon leapt to an actual phone conversation that went something like this:

“We’re hoping you’ll participate in the literary festival at New Trier...”

“Sure,” I said.

“You’ll talk to the students about writing, and afterward there’s a luncheon.”

“Great.”

“We’ll also give you a gift bag.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“And there’s a $1,000 honorarium.”

“You know...” I said, “you had me at ‘literary festival’...”

Fancy place, New Trier. As someone who tried and failed to find a house in the New Trier catch basin both cheap enough for me to buy and big enough for my family to live in, I might be forgiven had I reacted sneeringly to this luxurious institution in lush Winnetka. Most schools have trophies marking past basketball victories; New Trier has the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics on display, a token of gratitude from the alumnus who won it.

But envy is such a petty emotion, and social class disdain is as objectionable directed up the ladder as it is down. People forget that. I’ve known co-workers who didn’t have a college education, and while I could easily recognize their hard-earned excellences, they didn’t always return the favor, stuck on the notion that if you learn in a college classroom, you never learn anything anywhere else.

Thus Gery Chico -- who I like to think of as being as qualified as Rahm Emanuel to be mayor -- distinguished himself, in a bad way, last week with a naked play to voters’ basest emotions of envy and class pride, suggesting that Emanuel is somehow unfit to be mayor because he went to a good high school.

“Growing up in our city in the Back of the Yards and living with the threat of violence even in my own neighborhood stays with you,” Chico said. “There are people like Mr. Emanuel, who grew up in the wealthy North Shore and probably never experienced that ... I do not see how you can relate to the people of the city of Chicago when you have not walked these streets and lived here. If you come from Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, that’s what you think like. I didn’t go to some elite high school. I went to Kelly High School.”

It was a strange statement, first for its endorsement of “living with the threat of violence” as being almost beneficial, something that anneals one into a tougher, more mayoral person. At least Chico isn’t saying he would put gangs on the Chicago Public Schools payroll for the character-strengthening influence that living with threatened violence gives the locals.

The mayoral campaign of 2011 has become the “Stranger comin’!” election -- you remember the opening of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” when Tommy Lee Jones shows up in his jeep and sets off cries of “Stranger comin!’ It’s all you need to know about the place.

Between the endless legal wrangling over whether Emanuel’s name should be on the ballot, his opponents lining up to tar him as an “outsider” (the prize for hypocrisy, of course, being retired by Carol Moseley Braun for flying in Princeton’s Cornel West to deliver the pronouncement) and the discussions of whether the city would lose its middle class if workers weren’t forced by law to live here, you’d think Chicago was Butcher Holler itself.

Isn’t this the same Chicago that constantly agonizes over whether it is truly a “World Class City,” whatever that means? Half the time we’re aspiring to be cosmopolitan actors on the international stage, bidding for the Olympics, hosting the president of China.

The other half, when convenient, we suddenly become the tribe in “Quest for Fire,” painting ourselves blue, warily sniffing each newcomer for the stench of other places.

Well, some candidates. I have to point out one undeniable aspect of the campaign. Emanuel, the supposed foul-mouthed hothead of the pack, is the one, alone among his opponents, who hasn’t been slinging slurs at anybody. Yes, he’s in the lead, but maybe that’s part of why he’s in the lead. Identity politics is not a new idea -- in fact, it’s the oldest idea, and maybe people are finally tired of it. As good as I-was-raised-running-away-from-gangs-in-the-Back-of-the-Yards sounds when Chico says it, it’s a big city, and knowing one spot very well isn’t much of an endorsement for someone hoping to run the whole place.

Pretend you were picking, not a mayor, but a doctor, or a drywall installer, or an auto mechanic. How big a factor would be where he or she went to high school? Why is searching for the best mayor any different?