Tag Archives: Detroit

Desperately Seeking Simpatico

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I like words. I even used to have a blog with the title, Words Matter. Yes, they do.

One of the many benefits to being a reader is that unless you are reading material aimed at second graders, you are apt to find unfamiliar words that stretch and if you take the time to look them up—build your vocabulary. I know—having a robust vocabulary puts me back in the 1950s when we still had a middlebrow culture—rather than the dumbed-down, brain-addled one here in the second decade of the 21st century.

Can you spell as well as a 14-year-old? (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Can you spell as well as a 14-year-old? (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

I’m halfway through my second book of 2016. It’s a book about the collapse of Detroit City. On page 62, there is the following sentence, about midway down the page:

In the same way that the microsocieties formed at Zuccotti Park and other Occupy encampments in 2011 provided, for the simpatico, an exhilarating glimpse of freedom, postindustrial Detroit could be an unintentional experiment in stateless living, allowing for the devolution of power to the grass roots.
–Mark Binelli, Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis Continue reading →

We are all Detroit

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Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant are seen on September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. (courtesy of Chicago CBS-2 affiliate)

Ruins at the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant are seen on September 4, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. (courtesy of Chicago CBS-2 affiliate)

 

“It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of ‘Detroitism’.”—British historian and MP Ramsay Muir in 1927

“Mayors come and go—it is the footmen that tie the knots and divide the bag—the longtime little men; bureaucrats, cockroaches.”—from Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff

Country at War

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The George Zimmerman verdict denotes a nation at a crossroads. Maybe we’ve already crossed some kind of line of demarcation. Post-racial America? Maybe if you’re a Beltway elite you think that. For those of us keeping score elsewhere, I contend we’re not at all.

While the Zimmerman trial garnered the lion’s share of coverage via the MSM, other news stories continued to trickle out.

Rolling Stone magazine, once the quintessential rock rag, featured Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev  on its recent cover. Predictably, the binary, black/white moralists were outraged, claiming that Rolling Stone “glamorized” Tsarnaev, giving him the “rock star” treatment. If you actually read the article, a nuanced, well-written piece by Janet Reitman, you might come away with the idea, like I did that circumstances and ideological persuasion can change people, turning docile, well-liked young men into cold-blooded killers. Continue reading →