She’s With Stroger

She’s With Stroger
“Famous hothead” Chris Geovanis has emerged as a voice for the beleaguered Cook County Board president.

By Michael Miner

May 21, 2009

Chris Geovanis recalls the chat that sent her into action. It was with a “nice lady who considers herself politically progressive” and had just announced her intention to vote for the white, north-side challenger, Forrest Claypool, over black, south-side incumbent Cook County Board president John Stroger in the 2006 Democratic primary.

“She said, ‘I’m excited at the opportunity to vote for him—we need a reformer in there.’” says Geovanis. “I said, ‘What makes you think he’s a reformer? The man has a photo of Ayn Rand on his office wall.’ She said, ‘He’s independent—he’s not tied up with the machine.’ I said, ‘Darling, he was Daley’s chief of staff, not once but twice.’ She said, ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.’ I know why she didn’t—he’s the smooth-talking white boy, she took him at face value.

“That conversation was the final straw. The next day I took an unpaid leave of absence to work on John’s campaign.”

Which was the legal thing to do as Geovanis was a county employee, already working for Stroger in his com­munications office. She’s been writing and researching for the county for the past 17 years.

Then John Stroger had a stroke but defeated Claypool anyway, and then party bosses replaced him on the ticket with his son Todd, whose tainted election has helped make him the most scorned, ridiculed, and lambasted board president Cook County has ever known.

But when I heard Geovanis on the radio recently speaking for Todd Stroger, my estimation of him shot up. In the past year, back at work in his communications office, she’s emerged publicly as a name in the news and a voice on the newscasts—and a piercing voice at that. No mere empty suit would dare assign a Chris Geovanis to burnish his public image.

The thing about Stroger, she tells me, is that “he’s basically a very nice, extremely polite, somewhat reserved individual who is typically much more thoughtful and much less inclined to work on the slick sound bite than a lot of people we see running for and winning elective office. He’s not a smoothie.”

And though she concedes he’s made mistakes, she insists he’s unfairly getting hammered for everything wrong with county government even though he controls a small part of it—about $190 million of a $3 billion annual budget.

Not by everybody, of course. Here, for example, is the Reader’s Ben Joravsky wondering in March why the media—and the politicians running for Congress in the Fifth District—treated Stroger as a punching bag but laid off Mayor Daley: “The answer, I suspect is that they pull their punches when it comes to Daley because they don’t want to take on the real power in this town. Plus, there’s something about black patronage, as opposed to white patronage, that irritates the hell out of a lot of white people. So the north siders pound away at Stroger, an easy target without the political capital to pound back.”

And here’s John Kass in the Tribune:

“Stroger is the media’s favorite piñata because they’re not afraid of him. I’m no fan of Urkel’s, but let’s acknowledge his true role. He’s a hapless puppet, used to frighten the children of Chicagoland into believing that without the Daleys running things, the Urkels will get them. That’s been the subtext for years. If you can’t see race in that, then please have your eyes examined. Many who rip on Stroger for ‘corruption’ and support Cook County Commissioner Claypool (including many in the media) willfully ignore a critical fact: That Claypool was Daley’s chief of staff at City Hall when kinky deal after kinky deal went down, and not one peep then from the brave reformer, Sir Forrest of Claypool.”

“Those are two smart guys,” says Geovanis of Joravsky and Kass. When she preaches on the public persecution of Todd Stroger, the two columnists’ view of the hypocrisy of it all is scripture.

Geovanis also likes to say the journalistic ranks in Chicago have been so ravaged by layoffs that no one has the time or personnel any longer to probe beyond stereotypes, and that at the Sun-Times in particular—the paper that broke the story of Stroger’s $12,000 tax lien this month—“the facts will never trump the frame. The frame is that Todd Stroger needs to find another job. That frame comes from high up the food chain.”

So what about “Urkel”? I ask her. That’s Kass’s pet name for Stroger—after the nerdy black kid in the old sitcom Family Matters. “That language has been invoked around a dynamic that is racist to its core,” she says. So much for Kass.

Until she hooked up publicly with Stroger, I thought of Geovanis as primarily a zealot on behalf of the indy-media movement. But name a cause, and if she’s for it she will not be silenced. “I want to be clear,” she says. “There’s my day job and there’s my after-hours pro bono work. For my pro bono work, I guarantee you that if I’d worked for the city, I’d have been fired. That administration does not tolerate deviation from the norm, and Daley would certainly not have tolerated one of his own staffers protesting his retrograde policy on freedom of speech and police brutality.”

Freedom of speech?

“I’ve done the press for every important antiwar protest in the city since 2001 on a pro bono basis,” says Geovanis. “One of the huge issues has been the city’s refusal to allow people access to Michigan Avenue, so we’ve essentially had to mount legal permit battles with the city every year since the war began. It’s a standing free-speech fight with the city of Chicago.”

And police brutality?

“In the wake of the [1999] shootings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ there were three weeks of protests at City Hall. I coordinated those protests on my lunch hour.”

She didn’t have to leave the building.

Indy media figured in both her arrests. One time she was pinched during a protest at the Mexican consulate, “when an independent media colleague of ours was shot and killed in Oaxaca. I was told I couldn’t actually lean a picture of the guy killed against the consulate wall, and we went back and forth and it was clear he was looking for an excuse to arrest me.”

The other arrest I wrote about in 2002, introducing Geovanis to my readers as a “famous hothead in Chicago’s progressive media circles.” She was at a conference at Loyola University sponsored by Chicago Media Watch, a grassroots organization fighting the takeover of American media by a handful of corporate giants like the Tribune Company. (It was a different era.) Sut Jhally, a renowned exegete of marketing messages, made it clear in advance what his message would be—in his view the American public’s support for Israel was “the end result of perhaps the most powerful example of propaganda and public relations we can find in the world.” This being a message that divided the conference into two camps, CMW president Liane Casten decided the way to go was to send someone to the mike after Jhally spoke to give Israel’s side. Jhally and everyone who agreed with him were outraged.

As Casten began to introduce the pro-Israel speaker, Geovanis’s voice rang out from the floor. “Why? Why are you giving him equal time?” she shrieked. “You have done a disgusting disservice to media activists here like myself that you brought in under false pretext to have to listen to an apologist for a racist state.”

And she kept shrieking: “You have betrayed the principles of this organization. I’m ashamed to know you! I’m ashamed to know you! It’s disgusting! It’s disgusting. It’s disgraceful. You’re a disgrace. You sold out the basic principles of this organization, Liane!”

Casten called for security, and Geovanis was ordered to leave the campus. When instead she lit a cigarette, security turned her over to the Chicago police. She was charged with criminal trespass.

Ever been convicted? I ask Geovanis. “There’s no official city charge of lippiness,” she says. “So no convictions.”

I ask her what pro bono crusades she’s been up to lately.

“Oh my God,” she says. “Like today we were working on getting the word out about Gay Liberation Network cofounder Andy Thayer [a Chicagoan], who was just arrested in Moscow with 30 other LGBT activists. They’re protesting the big European pop music festival in Moscow. Russia is viciously hostile to gay rights, so much so that at annual pride events what typically happens is that the Moscow police arrest everyone and rightist thugs beat the shit out of everybody. That’s been the dynamic since the fall of the Soviet Union.”

And then there’s Viva Palestina. “It’s a joint project of the British progressive MP George Galloway and Ron Kovic. Locally we’re organizing for support.” The goal is to raise $10 million, buy medical supplies and ambulances in Cairo, and convoy them into Gaza. “If we’re able to pull this off,” she says, “it’ll be the single largest grassroots humanitarian aid campaign on behalf of the people of Gaza in U.S. history.”

She allows that in her years doing pro bono work as a county employee there have been bosses “who have looked askance.” In the mid-90s she discreetly did her movement writing under the nom de guerre Lilith del Cerdo. “I drew the first name from the old Hebrew myth,” she explains. “Lilith was a powerful woman of ancient mythology and an absolute stone feminist. She did not tolerate patriarchy and male oppression. And ‘del cerdo’ of course means ‘of the pig,’ a wise and extremely intelligent animal that gets mightily maligned.”

But she’s out in the open now. “I never got any grief from John Stroger about this work, I never got any grief from [interim president] Bobbie Steele about this work, and I have never gotten any grief from Todd Stroger about this work. Todd Stroger is totally aware of my activist work. John and Todd have both been very opposed to the war in Iraq. Of course this has never gotten any coverage.”