Blues for Detroit

I don't suppose it's really novel to look at a city as a metaphor, but Detroit, Michigan seems to have served as a few different kinds of metaphors over the last century.

The most obvious sense in which this is so is its role as the symbol of American industrial might from about 1905 to about 1970.  The various car manufacturers in the area, and various types of companies in their supply chains, consolidated into the Big Three auto makers.  It was one of those cities that drew huge waves of immigrants, from the American South and Europe, primarily.  They provided the muscle that shaped the sheet metal and gave twentieth-century America another shot at mobility in the aftermath of the end of the frontier.

With the rise of the Motown recording empire, Detroit became a metaphor for a couple of things: black entrepreneurship done right, and the gathering of various elements of black American music into a streamlined form of pop that made crossover an unprecedented possibility for black American cultural contributions.  Who didn't love the Supremes and the Four Tops, with the possible exception of the architects of Southern soul, Motown's down-home main competitor?

As the 1970s progressed, it became a metaphor for something else: unchecked union power.  Lots of people knew the benefits packages negotiated by the UAW were unsustainable.  There were rumblings that Japan had taken the quality-assurance concepts of Americans such as J.M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming and run with them, and were about to strike a serious blow at Detroit's status as the world's car capital.  Chrysler was where the first concrete evidence of that appeared in 1979.

Then it came to serve as a metaphor for how human frailty got the better of the civil-rights movement.  The city has for all intents and purposes had a black government for four-plus decades, and antics such as those of Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers came to characterize the way things were done.

All these metaphors really wind up folding together.  There's no denying that soot and noise and blazing foundries and the mindless repetition of the assembly line were characteristics of Detroit's rise to automotive greatness.  Like a lot of northern cities, it was loud, sweaty and cramped.  Let's not forget that, along with its black-music legacy (certainly Motown, but also black gospel, as embodied by C.L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church, and jazz, from the days of McKinney's Cotton Pickers through the postwar wave of hard boppers such as Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef), it had a  white rock and roll tradition distinguished by a harder edge than, say the rock of New York or Southern California or Britain.  Witness the MC5 and The Stooges.  This tradition continued through the rap-era emergence  of Eminem.  The sense of a barely-tamed urban landscape goes way back in Detroit's history.

The city's black population saw Detroit's musical prominence and saw political predominance as a logical next step.  There was one small problem.  Berry Gordy built Motown the free-market way.  He started it with an $800 loan from his parents.  (His sister had, at that time, just accepted a much larger loan from Leonard Chess of the Chicago-based r&b Chess powerhouse, but Berry was too proud to jump on her bandwagon.)  Public administration in Detroit became predicated on the notion that there would never be any end to the flow of public gravy.  Welfare became easy to obtain, and the well-documented crumbling of traditional family life followed in short order.

Now Detroit, in 1950 the fifth largest city in the US, and 10th largest as recently as 1990, is smaller than Columbus, Ohio.    And, as we know, it is bankrupt.

A couple of years ago, the city was celebrating the fact that its high school graduation rate had clawed its way back to the point where only one-third of students were dropping out, but its student-achievement gap vis-a-vis the country at large, and the gimme mentality of the teachers' union tell the real story.

Ultimately, and most scarily. Detroit serves as a metaphor for where post-America is headed: a power structure made possible by the foment of societal division and the exalting of dependency, a retreat from  basic literacy and decency, and a once-rich popular culture turned to junk.

These things happen because of the conscious choices of multitudes of individual human beings.  People take some huckster's notion of what is valuable, or righteous, or hip, and completely turn their backs on their own inner moral filters.  The buying-in gains momentum, and civilizational death is well under way.