Back in 1995, Theodore Dalrymple toured one of England’s public housing projects. He arrived independently at many of the same conclusions about England’s public housing that Jane Jacobs did in the mid-1960s regarding America’s then still-burgeoning urban renewal projects, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s probably not all that surprising that most of her findings translate all too well across the Atlantic.
As Dalrymple wrote in his piece:
Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers. I had spent much of my childhood playing in deserted bomb shelters in public parks: and although I was born some years after the end of the war, that great conflagration still exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of British children of my generation.I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.
Advertisement“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”
“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”
The City Council—the people’s elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering’s air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.
While England’s City Council turned much of its public housing into a Le Corbusier-inspired dystopian béton brut concrete wasteland, it’s remarkably functional compared with much of Detroit. (QED) England’s Guardian recently published a series of tableaux titled “Detroit in Ruins” that make the city really look like it had been overflown by a fleet of Messerschmidts and Heinkels.
Or as Mark Steyn noted while sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on Monday, and then in a follow-up interview yesterday (audio here) with Detroit talk radio host Frank Beckmann:
Steyn, a conservative commentator filling in for Rush Limbaugh on Monday, said the commercial wrongly placed Detroit in a positive light. “We’re now being told that this is the model for America in the 21st century,” he said. “If it is, we’re all doomed.”
Beckmann, who interviewed Steyn during his show today, said he missed the point of the ad and said suggestions that it falsely hid the decay that has gnawed at the city were ridiculous. The goal of the ad, Beckman said, was to sell cars, not tell the world the seamy details of Detroit’s problems.
“We know those problems, he’s not the first to notice them,” Beckmann said. “(The ad) shows a gritty side of Detroit. It shows us how we are.”
On Monday, Steyn referred to a book published last year that showed the city’s ruins, comparing Detroit to European cities reduced to rubble during world wars.
“Unlike European cities, no bombs fell on this American city,” he said. “This American city did it to themselves.”
Beckmann said he agreed with Steyn on some issues: the roots of the city’s decline lay with unions, liberal political leaders and a sense of entitlement.
Beckmann asked Steyn, “What would you have us do, just quit trying?”
Jeebus but that was good.
Here’s one: We Play “Is It Detroit Or Is It A Fallout3 Screencap?”
Ed is such a showoff.
We should agree that the ad was successful in getting people to talk about the Chrysler 200 and to consider its purchase.
Yes, Detroit is a failure as a political entity but there remain people there who want to build cars for sale.
They may want to sell cars, but after the clip of the Chrysler workers skipping out to chug beers as their lunch, I’ll stick with the Foreign cars… Thanks
Don’t forget the big fat joints they were hoovering.
I’m sorry, but if someone wants to sell cars why don’t they make ads that talk about things like reliability, performance, economy, you know, stuff that matters to car buyers????
Oh, yeah… Chrysler. Now I understand.
Buck O’Fama said: “Oh, yeah… Chrysler. Now I understand.”
If like me, you owned one Chrysler product, one is all you’ll need to understand Buck’s comment.
It figures, it had to be my very first new car… never again.
My 1997 Chrysler Town & Country LXI minivan is still going strong after 190,000 miles and one moderate accident. Engine, (V6- 166 HP) is great, good mileage, plenty of room, great steering/control, etc.
Ah, that was back then when cars were made with care. Now, I have no idea what I would buy to replace it.
Detroit: Let a communist like Coleman Young run it for decades and you see what you get. A fawning article on Young was written by Wash. Post writer William Greider on June 25, 1978. It announced the next coming of a black messiah.
I think Greider, if he wasn’t a leftist/socialist, would have written, the “next coming of a black mess”. And the Detroit City Council was run by Communist Party-affiliated hacks (Mahaffey and Henderson, among others), from the mid-70′s until the 90′s).
If Detroit had been run by the true black entrepreneurs – Bennett, Johnson, Simmons, etc) – Detroit would truly be known as the “Emerald City”, not the craphole of the nation.
My parents’ Dodge Caravan should’ve had a Jesus Chrysler transmission in it, considering the number of times it had to be “resurrected”.
Now ponder how much some ad agency was paid to create this stupidity.
Wolfsburg Germany is pretty socialist. Heck, cities like Oslo, Copenhagen, Seattle, Portland, Stockholm, Cologne, even modern Berlin, are very, very socialist, liberal, have heavy union presence and political control.
The idea that “unions and liberalism” killed Detroit or Le Corbusier just doesn’t hold water. It is not proven by other, very liberal, very Le Corbusier-type places with heavy union presence failing at all. In fact, places like Wolfsburg, or Seattle, or Portland, are very nice places to live, rain and SWPL-protesters aside. Real estate prices there reflect that reality.
What killed Detroit was becoming a Black Majority city and Black voters upon gaining dominance not demanding good social behavior.
Socialism vs. Libertarianism vs. “Conservative” don’t matter as much as what your base populace demands from itself in social behavior (and enforces outside the legal system) and politically. Japan is notoriously corrupt, socialistic, featherbedding, with giant Le Corbusier style apartment blocs yet wealthy and powerful despite an aging population because Japanese demand socially their neighbors and friends and relatives and children all adhere to fairly rigid social control.
That social control has downsides: high suicide rates, desperate loneliness, eternal adolescence for some. But it provides the social stability that Black Majority Detroit lacks, and thus the wealth it lacks. Chaotic and violent places don’t generate wealth. There is a reason Japan is wealthy and Egypt is not. Anti-social behavior: gangs, widespread illegitimacy, casual criminality, disdain for learning, propensity for street violence, guarantees poverty (as Dalrymple shows in the White British Chav downward descent from 1950) and nothing but rigid internal social control will stop it. There is a reason the British Midlands were once wealth factories like Old Detroit and now are miserable poverty factories. Lack of social control internally guarantees poverty. You get very poor when your population is constantly fighting in the street, falling down drunk (the Daily Mail pictures of Drunk Britons being shocking and easily also describing Detroit), casually criminal, and casually illegitimate.
Detroit, like White British Chav-ia, will remain a poor and miserable place until the majority there demand (by force) rigid social behaviors (mostly outside the law). This is the true, Burkean conservative wisdom.
Please read this Wiki article on the Detroit Riot of 1967. I can’t vouch for every aspect, but certainly the overall description sounds right. I don’t know Detroit; however the same tensions were felt in many cities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot
You will note in the section Aftermath, that there was an element of white radical chic involved in elevation of the most radical and destructive blacks to the position of the authentic voice of all blacks. Many of the black middle class were treated as Uncle Toms. Detroit never recovered from 1967.
Here is Baltimore, we are “celebrating” the slowest decline in population since the 50′s.
The race riots that racked cities after Dr King’s death did a lot to accelerate many problems, pretty much to the breaking point. I dislike the term “white flight” as that tells only half the story. It was a crippling flight of the middle class that is killing many cities. Here in Baltimore, your either very rich and you can afford to pay for all private services, or your too poor to move out and your stuck depending on grossly underfunded public services. Add in decades of inept cronyism from our cities leaders…and you get my home town.
Seattle is not so nice as it is more Pythonesque in practice. Loons rule Portland and with the aircraft production leaving on the next train, a Detroit in the making. Have you looked at the upcoming tax structures of Washington state. Socialism will never work in the end. Yes the Germanic tribes practice some form of socialism, it’s understood that it is more of a educational system than anything. Deciding who gets to work where ….and when…All these successful societies you mention are ALL one race…One people…..The nail that sticks up gets hammered down society. Democrats and their social experiments killed a entire race. Threw them to the wind for one more vote. Literally killed them. Socialist indeed. National Socialist if you will minus the camps.
My man Whiskey is exactly correct–as far as he goes. What he leaves out is the co-terminal event of massive industrial changes that occurred at approx. the same time as the black family/culture was being destroyed by misguided welfare policies and other maj. cultural shifts that occurred in the mid-sixties. The introduction of Japanese auto competition/imports at the very time when auto worker union wages hit a peak while the work ethic was being destroyed by cultural changes which affected quality control on US models sent the US auto industry into a death-spiral as the American buying public turned to the foreign competition. This not only threw many blacks out of work; it helped destroy Detroits tax-base, greatly excaberbating the trends Whiskey discussed and financially precluding any governmental-led recovery efforts. The same can be seen in New Orleans where, prior to the automatization of shipping via containers and “Ro-RO’ (Roll on, Roll off) shipping some 20,000+ long-shoremen–mostly black–worked on the docks unloading “break-bulk” shipping at middle-class wages. By the early 70′s those jobs had shrunk to approx. 8, 000 with the change in shipping technology/techniques. Not coincidentally, New Orleans began it’s decline during this period as a once 70-30 major white city began to become a majority black city with the per-centages reversed as whites fled crime caused by out-of-work blacks turning to drug sales to support themselves with all the associated crime and killings this brings in its train. And while previous white city hall administrations may have been racist and corrupt–at least they had been relatively (by big city standards) efficient and even reformist at times. With the ascension of blacks to power at City Hall in New Orleans efficient delivery of city services, much like Detroit, went out the window as blacks decided it was “their turn” to “get their fair share” of corruption that whites had previously enjoyed. The white administrations had usually been merely corrupt. The black ones were both corrupt AND incompetent.
And let us not forget the effect that the horribly mis-guided policies of “Urban Renewal” had on inner cities beginning in the 70s where major swaths of formerly healthy (mainly black) middle & blue-collar working class commercial and residential neighborhoods were destroyed, razed to the ground, with former residents scattered throughout the city and many business destroyed never to return–all in the name of a vision that never came to pass and left little but empty parking lots and barren land in its wake, whether it be Pittsburgh, Louisville, Detroit, whatever.
Combine all the above with the sociocultural forces Whiskey describes and one has a prescription for social disaster and total societal breakdown.
Virgil, you’re 100% correct in agreeing with Whiskey on his assessment on the socioeconomic-racial roots of Detroit’s woes. Your chronology of the auto industry’s demise is a little off, however.
Detroit automakers and their workers initially laughed at the little putt-putt Japanese cars (and the Beetle)in the ’60s. The first cracks in the Big Three’s aura of invincibility came only with the first gas crisis during the Arab oil embargo in 1973. The really serious threat to the domestic auto industry came during Carter’s inept regime; by that time, with HNIC Coleman Young in command of Detroit, the Motor City’s goose was grilled.
What’s sad is Young’s years at the helm hurt Detroit far worse than the ’67 riot. Other cities have come back from terrible internal strife, but Young made sure that didn’t happen in Detroit.
A highly intelligent and shrewd fellow, Young said he turned to the left because of the racism he had encountered as a young man. Unfortunately, once he took power, he was determined to gain revenge on those who had hurt him in the past. This antagonistic behavior is what set up the wall between Detroit and its suburbs that has crippled its development to this day.
I’ve often wondered what Detroit would be like if a peacemaker like Nelson Mandela has taken office in the early 1970s instead of the warped, bitter and ultimately corrupt Coleman Young.
Thus enter Shari’a…
I agree with a lot of what you say, but you are totally off base about Egypt here. It is neither chaotic nor violent. (Well, maybe it is these last couple of weeks but not historically.) There have been isolated violent incidents directed against specific groups (like Coptic Christians or European tourists) but all in all it is a very safe place. I have wandered the vast slums of Cairo for days, alone and at all hours, with never a hint of being at any risk. Doing this in Detroit or the South Side of Chicago would be totally nuts. Don’t get me wrong, Egypt is one messed up place, but it is a poor example for the (very valid) point you are making.
Did you notice in the “Ruins of Detroit” photos that the shelves of abandoned libraries are still full of books, neatly stacked as the librarian left them? And in the abandoned police station, files, photos, and fingerprint cards are scattered all over the floor. As if the city was suddenly invaded by illiterate barbarians, like the Visigoths “picking their noses in the Roman Forum and wondering what the public baths were for” (James Burke)
That is precisely what happened, except for one detail.
It didn’t happen suddenly.
Eminem is the perfect symbol of these illiterate barbarians.
Ah, Whiskey? Portland OR is not a great example of liberal greatness. Its broke and going down hill. PDX is just about 5-15 years behind Detroit. Typically Oregon is behind the trends and was in the housing bubble. Housing prices are unrealistic, government (state and local) is pushing out business at ever increasing rates. Portland cops are known for being overzealous thugs and getting worse.
Check out http://www.bojack.org/ for a take on local issues. Its not pretty. The Portland mayor is a gay guy who had an affair with an intern… 17 years old.
Or go look up the “Portlandia” tv show that just started. Its pretty accurate portrayal.
While I agree with most of what you say, Islam and Islamic countries have a high level of social control and demands and they are hell on Earth. Thus, it is not just social control that is important it is the type that is important. Of course, the best type is Judeo-Chistian.
Living here in the northeast suburbs of everyone’s favorite New Fallujah you’re imbued (well, I am) with a certain ambivalence towards the constant, and yet often deserved punchline-age. For example, a few years ago the City Council feverishly worked to declare Detroit a “World Class City”…seriously. Time was spent, lunch was ordered, classiness debated…you get the idea.
The very best example of the complete failure of the Great Society is the Motor City. In the 40′s, 50′s, and early 60′s, the black family structure was very much intact and pride and personal responsibility was the norm, not the exception, as it is today. What could have happened? Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Jack Kerouac once wrote that “walking on water wasn’t built in a day” and neither was the destruction of Detroit — at 44, I can’t remember a time when national press coverage amounted to anything other than a catalogue of that decline, except for the occasional sports championship.
Shakespearean Twitter insults aside, Frank Beckman, at least, is normally a reliable conservative voice in this Mad Max town. As a Mark Steyn fan, it’s tough to click on the audio link….think I’ll listen tomorrow.
P.S. The commercial was stupid.
“World Class City” is the key to understand what IS happening.
Trying to be Rome or Antioch will turn any city into ruins. When everyone was trying to become America we started trying to become “world class”. Big mistake. The country was build by misfits expelled from the “world” and even to this day there are those who are born Americans in spirit and eventually find their way here.
The dream is not over. Liberalism, unions, MAD, the pill, abortion, and many other things have taken a toll on the American people but now we are just beginning to wake up.
We will be again the country we were –and much better too– May be then the “world” will strive to be “American class” again.
Detroit, once the most affluent city on Earth, was on the front lines of the American fight to make this tired world a better place. It attracted enemy fire, so to speak, and suffered the consequences. She will come back too from the Liberal nightmare.
You bet.
Lightnin’: it was Johnson’s “Great Society” War on Poverty. And it wasn’t restricted to minorities and people of color, it was anybody who put their hand out.
It encouraged single parent (mothers) families to live-out their entire lives on the teat of the taxpayers.
Here we are, forty-five years later, Welfare queens are third and forth generations societal leeches and no incentive for a father to stay, in fact, if the father stays, the paychecks stop. So The war on Poverty became perverted into the War FOR Poverty.
Frances Cloward-Piven: take a bow. This Hell is because of you.
Wow! Beckmann’s performance on that tape should be kept as THE definition of denial.
There is no defense of the ad at all, vis a vis the comparison to the VW ad. Steyn is 100% dead on. Detroit is a textbook case of what happens to a municipality and an economy when Democrat/liberal/statist politicians are in power. Detroit is in ruins, the black family is in ruins, industry is in ruins. Look at any municipality controlled over time by the aforementioned and you will see high taxes, high crime, urban blight and misery. By the way, Chrysler (and GM) are owned by the US government, who spent $9 million of our taxpayer dollars on that ad.
Dresden may have been leveled in anger by the USAAF during WW2, but its our own citizenry that leveled Detroit during the War on Poverty – and they did it out of compassion, or something.
Take into account that the producers of the Super Bowl extravaganza consulted the best advertising people they could pay, and actually tried out practically all of their various “shows” before focus groups, and this is what they came up with.
It is scary enough with the garbage these producers came up with, but when you think that they paid good money for what are considered the “top people” in the various fields of entertainment, well I am horrified.
Death, decay and social pathology in LA have been used on TV for so many decades to make that city “glamorous” that people don’t even notice it anymore. Every LA crime drama is also a tourism promotion. The same effect was good for business in Miami, as alluded to in this article, and also for New York, but when Detroit’s problems are used to similar effect, the whole thing comes in for criticism.
Writers like Driscoll have to decide if they are talking about the area within the Detroit city limits, or the larger area that Detroiters call “Detroit” and that makes the cars. Unlike some Texas cities, for example, Detroit did not annex its suburbs, but what people call “Detroit” actually did grow into a metro area with a population larger than some countries in the European Union. Statistics about the illiteracy level and other educational deficiencies are used to smear the whole metro area, when in fact they only apply to the area within the city limits.
The problems of government welfare policy, appeasement of criminals, corrupt Democratic machine politics, etc., apply to the city proper, but the real “Detroit” includes the suburbs and exurbs, which now dwarf the city proper and are actually full of competent people and quite a nice place to live. That’s where yesterday’s Detroit moved to.
My sense is that people like Driscoll not only object to the ad’s seeming glorification of some of Detroit’s problems, but also to its assertion that there is anything left in Detroit that is worthwhile or anyone left who is capable of achieving anything. If Detroit is not a complete, irredeemable wasteland, it makes their ideological narrative more difficult.
“Beckmann said he agreed with Steyn on some issues: the roots of the city’s decline lay with unions, liberal political leaders and a sense of entitlement.”
What that quote also failed to mention was that most, of not all, of Detroit’s problems were caused by the Democratic Party in that state. Years of pandering to and spending countless sums of money on unions, their workers, as well as the liberal Democratic machine in Detroit has bankrupted not only the city, but the state as well. We should really do a documentary of what Detroit looks like today and just show it at the next Republican National Cenvention. Make all Americans actually see it and then say, “Is this what you want the rest of America to look like? Then just give Obama and the liberals four more years in office.” That will be a more powerful message than any political ad or commercial.
Dallas has officially entered the race to the bottom. This past weekend, a sitting City Councilman, awarded Michael Vick a Key to the City. DFW was hosting the Super Bowl, and Vick, an NFL star and convicted felon (dog fighting), was in town for the game. Apparently Vick was “less than truthful” about the killing of pit bulls.
I’m not sure if Dante’ circle of hell had a place for recreational dog killers but he certainly did for the likes of “The Honorable” Dwaine Caraway, the Councilman who took it upon himself to make the symbolic gesture. Caraway is the Mayor Pro-Tem and will ascend to the top spot if the current Mayor steps-down early. The existing Mayor has already announced that he does not intend on running again.
I can say that the last time I was in the high school in Caraway’s district there were a dozen or so Dallas Independent School District police cars, a couple o undercover cars, and a processing van parked outside. I thought someone had been shot.
I was surprised to learn that the DISD even had it’s very own police department. Who knew?
Was someone shot? No, the show of force was to mitigate the chances of students fighting since it was an early release day. Show of force includes riot helmets and side arms and was in addition to the daily hall cameras and metal detectors.
We have entered the magic kingdom, we are indeed living in Wonderland. Look out Detroit, Dallas does not like to lose.
Lightnin’: “What could have happened?”
I had read somewhere that right up until the passage of the “Great Society,” blacks had almost achieved economic parity with Whites, across the board.
Following that, well.
What I’d read had also mentioned that Republican naysayers had raised numerous issues and concerns about the program’s effects on America, our people, our cities, but were assured by their Democrat opposition not to worry.
46 years later, virtually every negative consequence pondered by the Republicans have occurred.
I agree with Steyn about the City but Beckmann is correct the ad was about selling cars. It was a great Super Bowl Commericial. Will it sell a lot Chryslers? Probably not but that is function of the product, not the quality of the ad. Mr. Steyn sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Mr. Driscoll:
“Of course, this ad’s slogan is neatly answered by the Super Bowl ad. Whatever happened to style? It got mugged on a side street by a wannabe Detroit rapper in a sweatshirt and hoodie.”
Perfect!
One imagines that the residents of Newark,NJ and Oakland,CA are thanking their lucky(?) stars that their cities do not manufacture automobiles.
Where the Chrysler people goofed is that even if I had never busted a knuckle turning a wrench beneath the hood of a Mopar product,(and I have), it would give me pause about buying a car made in a city whose residents either tolerate such municipal maladministration or who choose to live in such corrupt squalor.
And for what it’s worth, save for National Bohemian beer and crab cakes, I would think long and hard about buying anything made in Baltimore either.
I think the Eminem Commercial deserves the Big Lie award; I can only admire the brazen effrontery with which it drives wrong-way against obvious reality. “Style” simply presses the button on the way-back machine and pictures itself back in the age of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Yeah, that’s Detroit alright! By their own self-image, Detroit is a tough rough factory town, where people who wear top hats get served knuckle sandwiches. The last scene of the commercial acknowledges as much, depicting the new so-stylish Chryslers under a pair of rusty industrial cranes. GM’s advertising efforts remind me of a person in the hospice who keeps asking visitors “don’t you think I’m looking so much better today?” Pathetic. Worse than pathetic, you and I paid for this.
One of Detroit’s many problems is it persists in mistaking its memories for its birthright.
I think the Eminem Commercial deserves the Big Lie award; I can only admire the brazen effrontery with which it drives wrong-way against obvious reality. “Style” simply presses the button on the way-back machine and pictures itself back in the age of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Yeah, that’s Detroit alright! By their own self-image, Detroit is a tough rough factory town, where people who wear top hats get served knuckle sandwiches. The last scene of the commercial acknowledges as much, depicting the new so-stylish Chryslers under a pair of rusty industrial cranes. GM’s advertising efforts remind me of a person in the hospice who keeps asking visitors “don’t you think I’m looking so much better today?” Pathetic. Worse than pathetic, you and I paid for this.
But these commercials are symptomatic. Detroit is still mistaking its memories for its birthright. It’s America’s first ghost city.
In Detroit, the nostagia industry is booming. Even Costco sells photos of Detroit landmarks from the decades past. Bookstores in Detroit are full of books about Detroit’s past. The so-called “rebirth” of Detroit has been going on for 40 years and it ain’t happening.
Not only the riots, but also misguided “public works” are what destroyed Detroit.
LBJ destroyed it.
The city fathers who okayed neighborhood-devastating projects destroyed it.
The government destroyed it. And still is trying to.
I actually like the city, but no city would have been able to withstand what gov’t wrought there. Any city is made up of living PEOPLE – living neighborhoods – and that was forgotten, and crushed, under the iron fist of Progress.
Why are the roads so many and so wide? Everything in downtown was built on a scale too large for people.
Why cut apart great swaths of city neighborhoods – effectively turning them to eternal slums – for the convenience of commuters?
For all our faults in Philadelphia, at least we were able to limit (thank you Billy Penn!) what out-of-control government can physically do to a city.
Detroit has only one way to go – up! – I for one believe it can be reborn.
Nevermind the fact that the Chrysler is now run by a company (FIAT) that can’t manage to build a car that any Americans want to buy. If that isn’t confidence-inducing, I don’t know what is!
Maybe we should turn Detroit into the first ever urban National Park where people can tour deserted neighborhoods and “feral houses” returning to nature. Detroit’s perfectly located along a river and near the Canadian border to make it a lovely spot for summer family vacations. I know feral dog packs now live in the abandoned buildings. Surely wolves and coyotes will follow if they have not already done so
Let’s call it Gramsci park in tribute to those who made it what it is today.
Keeper comment, Clarice. That would be a Alinisky moment, wouldn’t it…especially the proposed name.
The “style” ad drives me nuts. It’s a wonderfully put together, prideful montage of cars that are actually interesting and unique. And then it’s three black boxes that all look the same and are about as interesting as a plain cheese pizza. What a horrible, horrible letdown.
If anything, it’s a warning from history, not an overview of why one should buy a new Chrysler.
Those pictures are horrific. It’s hard to see treasurers like that deteriorate. I wish I could do something.
Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, used to call Detroit by its real name. And by the real reason it’s rotten.
“Beckmann, who interviewed Steyn during his show today, said he missed the point of the ad and said suggestions that it falsely hid the decay that has gnawed at the city were ridiculous.”
The ad said that Detroit had been “to hell and back.” Half of that statement is true. The other half is wishful thinking.
If the ad got everyone debating Detroit’s future, rather than accepting the current idea that it’s dead and gone, then the ad did it’s job.
This commercial was simply one more in the Denormalization of America. As if the average American is a wanna-be ghetto-rat, commercial makers have been giving us ‘hip-hop’ (aka rap light) and HomeBoys (be they black or white)for awhile now. Some other commercial-makers have been giving us retro music and showing us with fades to color from black and white how allegedly superior modern times are. Frankly, I’ll take most of the retro. You can keep the HomeBoys and the rap.
“What would you have us do, just quit trying?”
Why did these cities rise in the 19th and early 20th Century?
If those reasons are no longer valid or operable, why continue that which no longer has a rational [vice emotional] justification. The West is covered by old ghost towns who’s purposes had long passed.
Mark made an elementary mistake concerning his Detroit comments. He did so in the context of a glitzy thirty-second TV ad featuring Detroit native son Eminem. (BTW – Have you noticed the trend of once “edgey” and “in-your-face” performers becoming corporate shills?)
Mark’s comments were dead-on. I live south of Detroit and can attest to most of them. If you are coming back from Windsor and make the wrong turn off of the Ambassador Bridge there is a 50/50 chance you will never be heard from again. The Detroit public schools are gladiator academies and at least a quarter of the working population of the city works for some branch of municipal or state government. [In reviewing some of Mark's negative fan mail I could not help but notice that a lot of the heavy weather came from people living in Allen Park, Royal Oak, Dearborn, Romulus, Livonia and other suburbs OUTSIDE of Detroit.]
Very few people give any thought to these facts even if they know ofthem. On the other hand the Chrysler ad was a species of entertainment, sort of a mini-movies, and everyone (myself included) feels competent to be a film critic. That was Mark’s key error. We are a nation of pop culture critics and we value the quality of our entertainment far more than we do knobby, unpleasant and intractable social facts. We are far more invested in our choices in movies, TV shows, music and even Super Bowl commercials than we are in the causes of decline of a once-great city. Think I’m kidding? Before Steyn’s foray into the dynamics of auto advertising the big story of the Super Bowl, almost eclipsing the game itself, was the shaky performance of the Black Eyed Peas during hte halftime show. That generated the same kind of microscopic examination once used by CIA analyists to interpret spy satellite photos of the Soviet Union.
The decline of Detroit began with the “Devil’s Night riots of 1967 but was completed by Coleman Young, five term mayor. This sentence sort of says it all.
“Young’s 1973 Mayoral campaign addressed the role of the violence inflicted upon a predominantly black city by a disproportionately white police department. ”
The rest followed as night follows day.
I was born in and have lived and worked in Detroit and the Detroit metropolitan area for more than 95% of my life; I am now 70 years old and still reside in the area, in a northwest suburb, some 20 miles from the center of the city.
I well remember when Detroit celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1951 when it was the nations fifth largest city and its northern neighbor, Flint, Michigan, was well on its way to becoming the highest per capita income city of its size (200,000) in the USA!
I was on my way across the country to Los Angeles (by car) when the 1967 riots broke out, but I remember that a friend at the local university, Wayne State U, pointed out to us earlier that summer that the rate of growth of police arrests for “loitering and vagrancy” was escalating into harassment on “12th Street” where the riot in fact broke out just a few weeks later. My friend, Loukas Loukopolis.as a representative of the University’s “traffic study group” had spoken to the Detroit City Council about his thesis and had been politely thanked for his concern.
I cannot even recall if there were any notice of Detroit’s 300th anniversary in 2001.
Sadly, Detroit’s moment as a self supporting city is over. It is now simply an entitlement corral. There is and can be no way to replace the middle class sustaining incomes of so many poorly educated workers in the new global economy. Their kind of contribution has been repriced to be attractive only in economies where life styles are rising and from amuch lower level than any of the currently laid-off can even imagine. Their lives as wards of the state are still much better than the lives of most of those who have replaced them, but it is only a matter of a few years before America will have to reduce its subsidies to the great mass of uneducated, unskilled, and, frankly, permanently unemployed.
Sometime in the next generation it will be better to be poor in China than in Flint, Michigan. In terms of oipportunity this may already be true.
Detroit is a zombie.
I’m just waiting for the announcement that OPC is going to start construction of “New Detroit.”
“Old Detroit has a cancer. That cancer is crime.”
+1 to you for the RoboCop reference. I believe they were going to call it “Delta City”. Fitting name, the place already has plenty of “deltas” a la Huxley’s Brave New World.
The distinction (which Steyn should have made) is this: that Detroit is a third world public restroom being held in some semblance of formal civilization by federal taxpayers is not a reason for Detroiters to become nihilists or abandon their civic pride.
It’s just a reason for the rest of us not to be conned into supporting the next bailout and infuriated that our own money is being spent to convince us to do so.
Beckmann asked Steyn, “What would you have us do, just quit trying?”
Uh, yeah. Quit depending on unions, on government, on failed liberal ideology.
The ad may well have be bad, I haven’t made any attempt to judge it’s merits, but attacking it simply because it featured Eminem, probably the most famous and successful musician from the state who’s still alive and relevant isn’t exactly a negative. God knows it’s going to sell a lot more cars than Grace Kelly or Sinatra
If He’d asked me “What do you want us to do, Quit trying?” I would have replied “Looks like you already did.”
They need a staue of RoboCop in Dtroit.
Beckmann asked Steyn, “What would you have us do, just quit trying?”
Please G-d! If the only would…
Quoting the Great Communicator: “The most frightening words a taxpaying American will hear: I’m from the Government, I’m here to help”
FYI, Volkswagen is currently building a factory in Chattanooga, TN which will manufacture the new Passat that was seen in the Super Bowl ad. If you saw Chattanooga in the 1970′s, you would have seen a city seemingly on the path to become a mini-Detroit. However, the city, through a lot of civic action and some enlightened politicians, reinvented itself into clean, high quality of life small city with a vibrant riverfront and downtown. Thus far, VW and Chattanooga are engaged in a love fest which I expect will continue as long as the thugs from the UAW are kept at bay. We still have a few abandoned factories still standing, but perhaps they should be allowed to stand as a reminder of the bad old days. Detroiters should thank Mark Steyn for giving them a dose of needed reality and perhaps should look to Chattanooga as a role model.
I remember growing up in the Detroit metro area and seeing the changes over the years. When I was cleaning up my parent’s house, I found a Detroit News booklet that outlined Detroit’s bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics. I wonder if Detroit had won the bid, would the construction and improvements to the city affected the long-term health or driven Detroit to erupt sooner?
Elect Mugabe, get Zimbabwe. Coleman Young was Detroit’s Mugabe, complete with corrupt cronies and an apartheid restructuring of the police force that left middle-class citizens defenseless against the gangbangers who were Young’s base. Complete with a crony police chief who went to prison for stealing money, but hey, that was just Tha Man keepin’ a brotherman down.
It wasn’t only whites who fled this dystopia, but middle-class and upwardly mobile blacks. Nobody likes a city without the rule of law except for criminals and people who are so stupid and marginal that they don’t understand what that is. Hence, the population of this modern dystopia.
As far as the Chrysler 200 ad goes, it’s a lot of money to spend on an ad to reach the six people who actually buy all Chrysler 200s, the fleet buyers for Hertz, Avis, National, Dollar, etc., and the US Government which buys them for the GSA fleet (and to prop up its wasted investment with more borrowed money in the Ponzi of Ponzis that’s Tax Cheat Tim’s Treasury).
Chrysler has earned a reputation and cemented it over and over. And rather than fix their dreadful small cars, they reskin them with sheet metal and trim copied from… Hyundai. Frankly, they can’t fool us that easily. Hyundai makes pretty good cars. Who would want a shoddy Detroit copy of a good Korean car?
The one good thing about Detroit is that it will never be nuked. I mean, why would anyone bother? It nuked itself and continues to do so.
One day, we’ll probably look back on the wasteland that Detroit has become and wonder what happened. It’s pretty simple. Liberalism in all its permutations took hold of the city and destroyed it. The same can be said for Washington D.C., Gary, Indiana (which is a suburb of Chicago), East St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, San Antonio (which, if not for the military presence there, would be just as blasted-looking), Los Angeles and Oakland.
• As an imported Western Suburbanite who was around during the riots et al. a lot of the problem came from one party controlling city, county and to a degree state politics since the 50s probably back to the 30s but I am going by my memory. The politicians traded entitlement for votes, money was no problem since automotive was an oligarchy and more (union money, taxes money, salaries) was had by raising prices. In the 70s that ended but I disagree whiskey, whites ran the politics till the mid 70s and the decline started before that I put the blame on entitlement mentality, greed and corruption. The unions did what unions do but the politicians sold the whole area down the tubes why because the people were happy with what they were given… entitlement form the New Deal on has done nothing for the country that our enemies wouldn’t if they could.
Why don’t Republicans make an ad highlighting cities run by Republicans for most of the last 40 years vs cities run by Democrats?
Here’s how it works: unions spend millions to get their politicans in office for as long as they want to “serve,” during which the city’s fortunes are signed away to the unions.
California owes $500,000,000,000 (that’s a half trillion) to union retirement/pension plans. Interestingly, no politician is available to take “credit” for this.
Detroit shows how this road to ruin ends.
Everyone of my Detroit-connected FaceBook friends just loved the commercial. I find that very telling.
I keep hoping for a turnaround for Detroit, but I suspect for that to happen you’d have to relocate about 90% of the current population and replace them with entirely new people.
And I’m guessing that Chrysler, for some unfathomable reason, thinks that wannabe gangsters and thugs not only have enough money to buy a new 200 but want one. I’ve got my doubts.
I shouldn’t have to point this out, but none of us are the target market for that ad. It’s for the Chrysler 200, a slightly-upscale 4-cylinder sedan (unless you get the convertible version). It’s an “aspirational” car for the under-30 crowd. Watching it with my nephews in mind, I thought it was an excellent ad.
The ad has a OC Choppers, suburban rap, spunky underdog feel to it that seems to resonate. I can’t say I fully understand it, and I don’t have enough knowledge to explain the societal or aesthetic implications of it, but I’m pretty sure it connected with its target audience. Perhaps Millenials are more accepting of America’s fall from manufacturing grace, and/or more determined to move forward regardless.
The “style” commercial, OTOH, was pretty clearly made with a Gen-X audience in mind. No other generation glorifies the pre-Boomer years the way Gen-Xers do. Obviously, that ad connected too. The current Jeep “rebuilding” ads are also excellent, but maybe less generation-specific. Whatever Chrysler pays their ad agency, they’ve gotten some value out of it.
What’s interesting to me is that Chrysler chose to run the “200″ ad over the “style” ad, which probably says something about their strategy going forward.
There is an e-mail circulating that compares photos of Hiroshima the day after that city was hit by an atomic bomb with photos of Detroit today. It’s hard to tell the difference. The e-mail also shows photos of Hiroshima today – a glistening modern city, which which is what Detroit used to be.
I’m sick of people complaining about ads or articles that “hurt Detroit’s image.” Detroit’s image is accurate. Detroit is a monument to the failure of liberalism, progressivism and the welfare state.
Toyota has factories in Alabama, California, Kentucky, Indiana, Texas, West Virginia, and Mississippi. None in Detroit.
Honda has factories in Ohio, California, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Indiana. None in Detroit.
Volkswagen has factories in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. None in Detroit.
Wonder if Mr. Eminem can explain this?
Note that the Passat in the ads was made by Americans in Tennessee. In a non-union shop that pays great.
My wife bought an ’85 Dodge Shelby Charger just before we got married. Except for the turbo Every Single System on that car failed, even the paint. Then we sold it. Then the turbo failed too.
Chrysler, the “engineering” company, had their chance. There’s a reason Americans quit buying Detroit iron, er, aluminum.
It must have been designed by a progressive politician.
First, a kind of anti-disclaimer of sorts: I am a great fan of Mark Steyn and a bedrock conservative, I live in the metro Detroit area and have worked for all of its indigenous automakers for the last 25 years or so on matters related to marketing. So, this topic is pretty much in my personal wheelhouse (see phrases, baseball), so to speak.
This was just an ad. An ad calculated to sell cars. It might work. It might not. It is really not meant to be imbued with with so much significance outside its intended function that it stands as a defense of the New Deal, Great Society, Mr. Obama’s corporatist progressive agenda or any other overtly political idea. It is only meant to evoke and image for 120 seconds or so, the echo of which is meant to add a post-post-industrial themed subconscious cachet to Chrysler’s product. That’s it. Period.
As for Steyn on Beckmann’s show, Steyn is, of course, correct on the particulars about Detroit literacy, etc., but that has very little to do with the Superbowl ad. Frank Beckmann, someone I listen to on a semi-regular basis, is a very conservative fellow who would ordinarily not contradict Steyn about almost any topic upon which he might comment, and he wasn’t doing so in their recent interview. Steyn dug in his heals and became almost indignant because he would not be deterred from making his point about the political and cultural roots of the city’s dissolution. But, Beckmann was merely happy to see and hear, even for a couple of minutes, a small temporary letup in the national media’s relentless featuring of Detroit as the country’s ultimate dystopia. He merely wanted to get Steyn to not spoil the short-lived party. In the morning-after, we Detroiter’s will have plenty of time to go back to facing the same old problems of which we are all only too well aware. And Beckmann, like virtually all sentient non-progressives living in this area, is also well aware of the causes of our inner city’s rot – socialism, cronyism, corruption, welfare dependency, family breakdown, too much and too short-sighted union influence, one-party political control, the worst types of racial and envy politics, too little cultural discouragement of endemic violence and crime and too little encouragement of academic achievement, and simultaneous massive economic-industrial displacement. We here all know the drill, except for the hopelessly left-of-center weenies who will soon be a lot less influential, by virtue of being marginalized by a new electoral majority tired of all this.
It’s not that we need Steyn, or anyone else, to tell us what’s wrong; we already know that. It’s exactly what to do next that’s a lot more difficult to determine. We’re working on it right now, starting with a new governor (Rick Snyder – “one tough nerd”) and the relatively new, much more pro-business Detroit Mayor, Dave Bing, about the most conservative thinking guy who could possibly be elected there. In the meantime, the people of this area welcome any psychological break, even one as ephemeral and glitzed-up-from-nothing as the Chrysler Superbowl ad, from the constant drumbeat of negativity about Detroit, and, especially to conservatives here, the constant rain of criticism from those of our brothers and sisters so incensed by Obama’s auto bailouts; hey, don’t blame all of us drowning folks for accepting a life ring, even if it’s thrown by a guy we didn’t vote for or wish we hadn’t.
And, last, lest you think that all is doom and gloom here from the constant flow of Detroit “ruin porn” in the national media, huge swaths of the ring of affluent suburban cake which surround the much decayed empty hole that is the actual city of Detroit, comprise what we here call the actual metropolitan Detroit area. In it are some of the nicest and even most affluent suburbs in the entire nation, and there are sections of the old city that are even now at least marginally improving, with, hopefully, much more to come after new policies are given time to do their best.
Yes, there is still hope here in the Motor City. We have a rough road to hoe, but, once in a while, I think we deserve to hear just a little soothing music to keep us traveling down the right path.
Well said (but I still think Detroit is the poster child of progressive cities). You are correct that many of the surrounding communities are as good as any in other states.
If I lived there and could get out, I would. If obamaism isn’t enough of a yoke on you, Detroit surely is. Perhaps Dave Bing is adult enough to make a difference, but he is fighting a monstrous uphill battle to undo multiple generations of abject political idiocy. The only person I can conceive of accomplishing that task is Guilliani. Bing should probably hire him for a billion a year and be his front man.
I live in the Detroit suburbs and I get impatient with the mindless boosterism and happy talk in the local media about Detroit’s rebirth – which is in its 40th year and about as real as the Mideast Peace Process.
Each time a company like Google hires a dozen people in Ann Arbor the local press acts like we’ve turned the corner and this balances the million jobs that have vanished from Michigan over the past ten years.
The Chrysler commercial, which is supposed to be “real,” isn’t. When Eminem says “This is Detroit. This is what we do here,” what he should say is, “This is what we USED to do here.”
Detroit could be turned around, and rather quickly. Get rid of almost every zoning law, and let people put what they want, where they want. Minimize permitting, licensing, and advertising requirements, and make it possible for businesses to go from nothing to up and running in days. Privatize the school system with vouchers, and allow them to be used at any school, even in the suburbs outside of the city (you’ll still have to live in the city to get one, of course). Get rid of as many city employees as possible. Sell as much property as possible that is owned and especially managed by the city. If there is any complexity to the tax scheme, remove it. Remove any existing preference for unions. In other words, make it THE place to be for highly motivated risk takers to set up shop.
No, that’s not the only way to do it. But it would be the fastest, and most likely to work.
“England’s Guardian recently published a series of tableaux titled “Detroit in Ruins” that make the city really look like it had been overflown by a fleet of Messerschmidts and Heinkels.”
Just to be pedantic – Messerschmitt built fighter aircraft almost exclusively, and no bombers. Some German bombers were built by Heinkel, but the majority were built by Junkers.
Rich,
I actually think I knew that about Messerschmidt; I was just trying to think of a couple of different Nazi-era plane manufacturers for verisimilitude. Though evidently not enough!
A bomb did indeed fall upon Detroit. The worse kind of all. Worse than the Nagasaki weapon. It was the “L” bomb. The Liberal bomb did more damage to Detroit than the “A” bomb did to Nagasaki. Look on line for images of the Japanese city and compare how it looks today with the views of Detroit. Nothing will cause the collapse of a society more completely than the dreaded “L” bomb. Coming to a city near you courtesy of the messiah Obama.