The Reader Travels

When I think of the south side of Chicago, two songs come to mind - Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and the theme song to the ’70s TV show Good Times. Recently, Chappelle’s Show taught me that the lyrics to the theme song were not, “Blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah,” but, rather, the title of this post. I was glad for this newfound knowledge.

The songs and the TV show give us images of a tough life, but with a comic appeal, so we don’t get buried in heaviness like the world of Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Leroy and Jay Jay were thriving some 40 years after Bigger went down. Certain things had gotten better, while others just got worse.

I’ve never been to South Chicago, but I have lived in the working class metropolis of Houston, Texas, especially the area south and east of Houston, along the ship channel lined with oil refineries. We can laugh about the pollution and the high cancer rate. We can laugh about the wretchedness of race relations and the pedagogy of the oppressed, wherein the oppressed become the oppressors. We can laugh about high crime and high debt.

How can we laugh, you ask? Because no matter what, we have TV. Good times.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 10:25 pm and is filed under US and Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.