A constant that one hears from all recovered drug addicts is that what was necessary to get them onto the path to recovery was to hit absolute rock bottom. Prior to that, denial holds too strong a grip on the brain to let them see the error of their ways.
In a not too dissimilar way, such is the case with communities that for too long have consumed the “drug” of Leftism. In this regard, Detroit, Michigan is clearly the poster child in North America for failed cities run into the ground by the policies of the Left. This earlier post on SDA and the comments therein explain this most succinctly.
Yesterday Mark Steyn guest hosted Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and had a few biting, but accurate, comments about Detroit. Some in Michigan were not pleased.
This morning Steyn appeared on Detroit radio station WLQV-AM. The full interview can be listened to and should be by all because the points raised have repercussions far beyond the hulking ruins in what was once an industrious, thriving city.
You really can’t comprehend Detroit until you’ve been there. Entire city blocks that with nothing but charred craters filled with garbage where homes once stood. I have driven over 2 million miles, through every major city in North America and nothing rivals Detroit. Even the homes that are still inhabited look abandon. Yeah Socialism!
Detroit has never been the same since they screwed Barry Sanders.
Talk about ‘stopping on a dime’, acceleration and handling.
gotta love the bit on Otis Mathis…a functionally illiterate Supt. of schools for Detroit…….AND a fella who while in office had a habit of indulging his onanistic impulses in front of his female colleagues….
why does the expression ‘the lunatics are running the asylum’ come to mind?
I wouldn’t believe you, Trent, if I hadn’t visited Detroit a few times when I lived in southwestern Ontario.
Parts of Detroit are like bombed-out neighbourhoods after a world war. Sure, there are some luxury hotels and magnificent buildings, but alongside whole main streets of dilapidated, boarded-up ruins and weed-infested, vacant lots, they stick out like sore thumbs and you wonder how they can exist side-by-side without Detroiters noticing the incongruity and doing something about it.
Marks’ right: The tragedy is the waste of human capital in Detroit. So much potential alongside so much corruption. Detroit’s had 40 years to clean up the mess after the riots in the ’60s, but the mess is still there. What struck me was the inertia: a crummy, lousy, street one year and, the next year, the same crummy, lousy street, maybe even a little worse. You never saw anyone out picking up the garbage or painting a house or storefront, just papers blowing in the wind, peeling paint, and gutted, burned-out, buildings.
Mark told the truth and, like many a truth teller before him, he’s taking a lot of flack.
Truth hurts, eh. Mind you, all of Michigan isn’t going down the toilet. Dearborn seems to be growing…. ooops.
Haven’t been there since the mid 80’s. I attended a big auto show, stayed in Windsor and drove over every day. Had armed guards in the parking lot and at night an armed escort to get to our cars.
Or maybe I was in Chechnya?
In late ’80 you could watch Detroit news on cable in Winnipeg. For a Winnipeg resident where local news were about baking show or a car accident , the Detroit news filled with reports of shooting and stabbing were alien. Progress 20+ years and local Winnipeg news are similar to these in Detroit back then.
I wonder how long ago Detroit tried to revitalize downtown?
The real Black History Accomplishments. Gutted out cities.
30% of workers are employed by the city? Ouch! 1/3 of your paycheque goes to paying the person on your right or paying the person on your left. The rest of your paycheque goes towards paying the people who don’t work at all.
30% employed by government.
Sounds like Halifax, except without the crumbling buildings.
Slightly related ….
US NTSA finds Toyota not at fault for car acceleration … Nevertheless …. sees need for more regulation and further study … to justify still more regulation……
But to the point of the post …. yes it is addicting …. socialism creates dependence and thrives on it…. until the socialists run out of other peoples money and (hopefully) get what they deserve.
OK, I agree 100% about the reasons for the state of decay in Detroit. I even agree that its residents denial prevents them from taking the steps necessary to reverse the decline. After all, here in Sask. we had to listen to years of NDP drivel insisting that our “heart” and compassion was superior to Alberta’s economic success and population growth. Nostalgia, defensiveness and feelings of superiority do not create prosperity.
Having a bit of experience with directness bordering on obnoxiousness, I don’t buy Steyn’s protestation of innocence and confusion about why people in Detroit are pissed at him. Has insulting peoples religion, occupation, community or behavior ever won any popularity contests?
The stuff about advertising was stretching the truth a bit, too. Ads are designed to make you buy stuff you don’t need by using techniques like appealing to vanity, manipulating emotions or exploiting insecurities (NTTAWRT). Honesty is rarely a primary objective. Why not just admit that the ads were a convenient segue to discuss the topics of decline via unions and big government?
Steyn…90% humorous brilliance and 10% BS.
Seems the reaction to Steyn was a typical “shoot the messenger” reaction.
First ya gotta get it. Until then the problems will remain completely unresolved.
An example of the way folks prefer the pretty lies to truth.
They stoned people for telling the truth.
Steyn is right. Its the human capitol that matters.
Thats your civilization. Not towers or gadgets.
Without an informed former the latter becomes impossible.
JMO
After all, here in Sask. we had to listen to years of NDP drivel insisting that our “heart” and compassion was superior to Alberta’s economic success and population growth.
Difference is, Detroit might be a has been but Sask is a never was.
xiat: I lived up in Lynn Lake, Manitoba between 1987-89. I learned then that the CRTC dictated that Northern Canadian cable TV providers had to broadcast the 3 network stations from Detroit. I always thought it a strange choice. Why there? Why not NYC or Chicago or L.A.? Perhaps in their wisdom they quite deliberately wanted the view of America to be coming from Detroit.
And just a point of order re: “human capitol”, humans aren’t capitol as though their worth can be measured in dollars or some arbitrary measure of material success.
Pulling their own weight is another matter…
Detroit does have some very good destinations.However,over the years the neighbourhoods that you do not want to stray into have increased in number and size.
I think this is one of the unintended consequences of a federal program that started in the seventies.Aid for Dependent Children (ADC) was a program that gave cheques to feed the less fortunate. Unfortunately it also led to a substantial increase in births from those who were not fit to raise children. A couple of generations later,you have Detroit today. There are other factors that have contributed to the decline,of course,but the welfare mentality is one of the main problems.
One of my favourite Detroit stories is from a few short years ago. I stopped along East Jefferson to pick up some Stroh’s and asked my lady if she wanted to come in. She looked at the area and said “No way”. Then she freaked when she realized that she would be alone in the car. Eventually I convinced her to come inside,likely because she didn’t want to be stopped any longer than necessary.
The thing that just slays me about Detroit is that the sonsabiscuits keep it that way on purpose. You know? They -work- at it.
There’s some pretty heinous dumps in New York City and Philly and what have you, but for sheer widespread decay nothing beats Dee-twa.
Phantom: ‘Nothing beats Dee-twa.’? Take a drive through some of the pathetic IR’s. No better. Same attitude.
You can’t go wrong buying real estate!
Can someone tell me, is it April 1st already?
I ask, because Jay Forbes appears to be mocking Mark Steyn’s intellect.
The day that a Leftard by Forbes actually is smarter & wiser than Mark Steyn is the day the Sun will rise in the West.
Having been in Detroit recently, I now have a sense of what London or Glasgow looked like after the blitz in WWII.
The city is destroyed. Entire neighbourhoods are simply wastelands.
As I understand it, the city is planning to bulldoze a number of these neighbourhoods and turn the land back into forested areas. Perhaps to eliminate the embarassment.
From what I saw…good plan….
Having been in Detroit recently, I now have a sense of what London or Glasgow looked like after the blitz in WWII.
The city is destroyed. Entire neighbourhoods are simply wastelands.
As I understand it, the city is planning to bulldoze a number of these neighbourhoods and turn the land back into forested areas. Perhaps to eliminate the embarassment.
From what I saw…good plan….
Having been in Detroit recently, I now have a sense of what London or Glasgow looked like after the blitz in WWII.
The city is destroyed. Entire neighbourhoods are simply wastelands.
As I understand it, the city is planning to bulldoze a number of these neighbourhoods, filled with derelict homes with no residents, and turn the land back into forested areas. Perhaps to eliminate the embarassment.
From what I saw…good plan….
Having been in Detroit recently, I now have a sense of what London or Glasgow looked like after the blitz in WWII.
The city is destroyed. Entire neighbourhoods are simply wastelands.
As I understand it, the city is planning to bulldoze a number of these neighbourhoods, filled with derelict homes with no residents, and turn the land back into forested areas. Perhaps to eliminate the embarassment.
From what I saw…good plan….
geez…sorry about the triple post…I do not know what happened…the bot stopped me from posting and, well, nuff said
Detroit was the world’s motor empire for the last century and like any rich empire, greed soon sets in, then when the coffers are bare but everybody is still demanding more, banks start lending the future which keeps getting raped and pillaged more and the problem is kick down the road further by the also greedy “let’s live for the moment” politicians. All empires since the beginning of time have all fallen from within because of man’s insasiable greed and the Detroit case is nothing new. Pittsburg (Steel city) went through the same hell a few decades ago.
Mark Steyn makes his living repeating, that because of the human condition (Greed, corruption), the empire of western civilization is on it’s way out at supersonic speed.
The Detroit region is no worse than Greece, Europe or the USA as a whole.
The problem is that the human capital is rotten to the core and there is no way to reverse the trend until true mass suffering occurs…IMO…We haven’t suffered enough yet, hell we haven’t even truly started.
Difference is, Detroit might be a has been but Sask is a never was. Posted by: fiddle at February 8, 2011 9:10 PM
That’s why you sometimes hear Sask. referred to as “next year country”. I suppose that next year could easily be replaced by next election, next decade, next century…but there is always the potential, right? Being a sad, stale old has been boring everyone with stale, old stories of greatness is far more pathetic in my opinion.
Why is Detroit thought of as ‘a problem’?
It isn’t the concrete, or the buildings, or the lots, although people take creepy cool pictures of them. Those are inert objects. They just naturally decay.
Anyone, save kids, who is in Detroit, wants to be in Detroit. 99$, Greyhound gets you ANYWHERE in the country. A pair of sneakers. Some crack.
Government jobs( welfare ). Welfare. Bums. Losers.
Smart people go to MIT and Stanford. Dumb, mouth breathing nose pickingly dumb exist in Detroit. Which is fine. Better there then Utah, or the Keys, because then they’ll just go on welfare, crime or do the hustle for a layabout gov job riding the taxpayers back for the next 20 years.
Detroit isn’t a problem. It is a solution. A modern, self selecting tribe of losers, living off gov handouts who are too stupid to get out, or too lazy to get a room and a job somewhere else.
Actually, socially, Detroit is a beautiful thing.
All they need is Snake Plisken, eh, Paul?
> was necessary to get them onto the path
> to recovery was to hit absolute rock bottom.
It’s the only reason I’m clean and sober now. I kept looking for the easy way out until I hit bottom and the only choices I had left were hard choices or death.
LBJ declared a war on poverty. Detroit is the Nagasaki of that (ongoing) war.
Pittsberg and other rust belt citys are not far behing Detroit in decay process. The cycle is the same. City made large and affluent by industrialists employing workers. Unions and kleptocrat goverments pillage the industrial affluence, making the industry unprofitable and noncompetative. Industry vacates to more accommodating jurisdictions. Workforce laid off are kept by welfare democrats like a vote plantation addicted to welfare and non productivity. Cultural and social decline set in, illiteracy, drug addiction and lawlessness run rampant in the Dem rust belt welfare plantations.
Steyn calls attention to this and he is made the political scape goat for Dem inner city policies.