If Mike Royko was a fox, John Kass is a hedgehog. Royko had a way of looking at the world, and no matter what his eye fell on he entertained us with his take on it. Kass is different.
A couple weeks ago a panel of federal appellate judges upheld George Ryan’s conviction on corruption charges but stayed his prison sentence while the entire Seventh Circuit decided whether to hear his appeal. The hell with him, responded Chicago’s newspapers. In the August 23 editorial “Start Ex-Gov’s prison term now,” the Sun-Times said, “Those feeling sorry for Ryan need to shift their sympathies to Scott and Janet Willis who lost six children in a fiery 1994 crash caused by a trucker tied to the licenses-for-bribes scandal under Ryan’s watch as secretary of state. But prison really isn’t the harshest punishment for Ryan. He has already tarnished his self-imposed legacy as the governor who stopped state executions and subsequently was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize–an act, some believe, orchestrated to keep him from being charged.”
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Kass wrote a column about the staying of Ryan’s sentence. He saw what he always sees. Venality. Cronyism. Ryan getting a deal. Kass managed to salt his column with his usual suspects whether they had anything to do with Ryan’s case or not–Victor Reyes, Timothy Degnan, the already convicted City Hall patronage boss Robert Sorich. Over yonder the mayor. And above and beyond, the attorney who defended Ryan and didn’t charge him a dime, former governor Jim Thompson, “the man who gave birth, in immaculate fashion, to the Illinois combine that runs things.”
In recent days Kass has written incessantly of the “Family Secrets” trial, which he’s called the “whole ballgame in Chicago,” the event that “reveals the infrastructure of a great metropolis, illuminating part of the iron triangle that runs things, with the Outfit at the base of the triangle.” For three days running he mused on defendant Tony Doyle, a bad cop caught on tape talking to defendant Frank Calabrese about “giving electric shocks” to Frank’s faithless brother Nick. “There was talk of many volts and a cattle prod inserted just so.”
The writer allowed that she’d had to “imagine” this conversation, and now we know that it might not have been imagined all that accurately. According to the letters she left behind, God said nothing to Mother Teresa for something like 50 years, throwing her into a profound despair she endured but never threw off. In his syndicated column, Andrew Greeley said she’d simply experienced the Dark Night of the Soul, and he was indignant that secular journalists weren’t as familiar with the concept as he was. How, he wondered, “do you explain to a religiously illiterate secularist reporter about the Dark Night?”
