James Warren writes a column for the Chicago News Cooperative.

Rahm Emanuel should beckon America’s army of grim, cost-cutting politicians to two Chicago spots — eight miles apart and seemingly with nothing in common — to remind them about something forgotten in this age of scarcity: imagination.

I thought about a downtown video sculpture and a nondescript white frame house in a working-class Latino neighborhood after hearing of the health-related resignation of Steve Jobs as chief executive of Apple Inc.

Mr. Jobs was routinely likened to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Those comparisons may miss the mark since he’s perhaps more akin to the American icon born in that Northwest Side two-flat, which bears no mention of him: Walt Disney.

The morning after Mr. Jobs’s announcement, I watched our 2-year-old son lying on the kitchen floor and adroitly moving a finger here, a finger there, using an iPad’s touch screen to find a Thomas the Train video and the wildly popular Angry Birds puzzle video game.