When I think of Rahm Emanuel in a third term as mayor of Chicago, I wish I were still practicing yoga.
I was able to do a lot of yoga in 2012, after being laid off for the second time. That year, Chicago was adjusting to its new mayor, who came to town in 2011, financed by the same investment and tech community that would later put Republican Bruce Rauner in the governor’s mansion. Investors and techno-preneurs loved the word "disruption." It aggravated me, having been disrupted out of a job twice. To add to the stress, my son faced a health crisis that kept him home from school for most of that school year. So one day I talked him into visiting the yoga studio around the corner from our apartment.
He was a good sport about it. He wore flannel pajama pants and a colorful knit sweater from the thrift store. His hair was dyed bright red. He wasn’t the typical yoga practitioner. But the woman who ran the studio, Andrea, welcomed us. She corrected our poses and invited us to come back. I went. He didn’t.
I attended a few more classes, then Andrea announced that she needed a new studio assistant, someone to sign in students as they came to class and clean the mats and floors at the end of the day.
“I need a job,” I said.
“Well, this isn’t a paying job,” she said. “More like an internship. But free classes.”
I longed to have value attached to my time, even if that value was agility and inner peace.
That summer I finessed my downward facing dog. Rahm Emanuel, known for his liberal use of a different F word and for mailing a dead fish to a pollster in anger, disrupted life for vulnerable residents in Chicago. He closed a half-dozen public mental health clinics. He bemoaned the length of the public school day and year and the lack of teacher accountability through test scores, even as he sent his own children to a private school that doesn’t give standardized tests. He grew closer to the tech and investment firms that donated to his campaign and inauguration. Among them was Groupon and one of its founders, Eric Lefkofsky, a guy so enamored of disruption he wrote a book about it.
Groupon commanded a lot of attention that year, not just locally but nationally. The company had recently had the biggest IPO of any internet company since Google. Forbes called it the fastest-growing company ever. It was supposedly changing the way small business reached consumers. Writers I knew aspired to work at Groupon, to write coupon copy known for its irreverence. I’d heard tales of the lengthy application process, submitting sample copy describing activities from hot-air balloon flights to pedicures. Yoga, even. If the samples passed, the writer went on to Groupon Academy, to master Groupon Voice. In an interview with the New York Times in 2011, the firm’s director of recruiting bragged that he’d had applicants from Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal. Their writing didn’t cut it.
“It’s easier to teach people than to unteach them,” he said. In the same interview, a senior editor said that, at 27, she felt like one of the oldest people in the office. Being 20 years older than that, I didn’t apply.
Cleaning the yoga studio was a good distraction from the demoralizing job-application process, because I could see the results. It was easier than cleaning the snack and creative-project debris my children scattered across our apartment. The studio was quiet in the evening. An aromatherapy oil diffuser filled the air with an earthy lavender scent. With the lights turned down low, I swept. Because the floor had been cleaned 24 hours earlier, there wasn’t much to sweep. Then I mopped as Andrea taught me: Spritz Method wood cleaner (which also had a soothing scent) on the floor, then wipe it away with a damp cotton cloth attached to a Swiffer, crossing the studio in small sections. I wiped the bathroom with some sanitizing cleanser and emptied the trash. It took less than 30 minutes.
Andrea worked hard to create community among the teachers at her studio and the two assistants. She invited us to a potluck lunch in her apartment attached to the studio. We sat on the floor around her coffee table and ate vegetarian food. We talked about our lives off the mats. She encouraged us to take classes from all the teachers, to learn different styles of yoga and meditation.
Over the course of the summer, Andrea’s serene face grew worried.
She knew I had a student at the elementary school in between the studio and my apartment.
“How do you think I can attract more of the parents?” she asked, as she showed me how to process students taking discounted introductory classes.
I suggested morning sessions, right after the drop-off. Mothers stand around outside the school talking.
“They’re already in yoga clothes,” I said.
“I tried that,” she said. “No one came to the morning classes.”
She only offered evening classes during my tenure. Even those didn’t fill up. Young women with coupons from Groupon, or one of the businesses modeled on Groupon, frequently showed up to take their one sample class. They never returned, likely because that kind of marketing allowed them to sample classes at yoga studios across the neighborhood.
Andrea began renting out her attached apartment on Airbnb. And my studio assistantship became less of an internship and more of a hotel-maid gig. For no pay. At first I didn’t mind. I liked Airbnb. My family used it when we traveled. The visitors from out of town were always friendly. But a few weeks in, I resented having to wash bed sheets that weren’t my own. The divine spark in me didn’t bow to the couple who left the sink full of dirty dishes. I silently observed my thoughts as I pulled hair from the bathtub drain. They weren’t positive. I didn’t blame Andrea. She needed to pay rent on the commercial space, and she needed to pay her teachers. But I had a family who already created dirty sheets and dirty dishes.
I quit at the end of the summer to pursue an MFA. By then, Groupon looked as malevolent to me as did Rahm Emanuel. I returned to school the same week my children did, but their year was interrupted about a week later by a seven-day teachers' strike, because Emanuel demanded a longer school day with no pay increase for the teachers.
Now Emanuel is running for his third term. He’s carrying a lot of baggage: He oversaw the 2014 cover-up of an incident when a police officer fired 16 shots at an unarmed teenager. An investigation earlier this year found that his hand-picked school board had deprived special education students of services, in violation of federal law. Gun violence is a massive problem. Protesters shut down an interstate running through Chicago on July 7, demanding that city and state leaders invest more in communities on the South and West sides, the same neighborhoods where Emanuel had closed dozens of public schools that now sit empty and crumbling; where hospitals, grocery stores and jobs are few.
Still, he’s likely to win. A lot of the same financiers and tech-industry executives have donated millions to his campaign, including Lefkofsky, who donated $100,000 in April through one of his corporations.
Lefkofsky is, of course, not as malevolent as Emanuel. He and his wife have a family foundation whose mission is to enhance the quality of human life “in the communities we serve,” and they’ve pledged half their net wealth to charitable causes. They’ve donated more than $1 million to cancer research and his new firm’s mission is to attack cancer with big data. In the local education scene, the foundation also helps fund a project to support middle-grade students in public schools. It also supports the Academy for Urban School Leadership network of charter schools, which faced a lawsuit from the teachers' union alleging racially motivated teacher firings and questionable contracts awarded by school-board members with ties to the same charter network.
This is where the “communities we serve” comes into play. Public-private enterprise is a hallmark of Rahm Emanuel’s tenure. Elon Musk is about to join the city’s cadre of tech-bro disruptors, building a rapid rail line to carry passengers from downtown to O’Hare International Airport. The Chicago Transit Authority already provides such a service. It could be improved. But this wouldn’t necessarily benefit the community Emanuel serves: tourists and wealthy campaign donors.
The yoga studio is gone. The storefront is now a high-end audio specialist, offering evaluations and installations for in-home stereo or home-theater systems. It opened after the neighborhood Best Buy closed. Like yoga, public education and campaign finance, speaker sales have been disrupted.
Shares