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Detriot
As you pass the city limits a blanket of gloom, neglect and cheapness descends. The buildings are shabbier, the paint is faded. The businesses, where they exist, are thrift shops and pawn shops or wretched groceries where the goods are old and tired. Finding somewhere to have breakfast, normally easy in any American city, involves a long hunt. ‘God bless Detroit', says one billboard, just beside another offering the alternative solution: liquor. - Peter Hitchens, dailymail.co.uk Detroit is our Atlantis, largely spoken of in the past tense, reverently, as we speak of the dead. Makers of apocalypse movies use its corpse as a ready-made set, unending industrial ruins, abandoned and serially trashed neighborhoods, and moldering urban treasures. Detroit itself is gone. Something else squats in its place. Ol' Remus has done time in some dangerous and scary places, East St. Louis and Juarez and Port-au-Prince come to mind, but Detroit is in a class by itself. He remembers when it was different, the "before" of the before-and-after. He also remembers his fear in the "after" when it came time to drive out of the rental lot and take his chances. He knows what happened to Detroit, he saw it happen. For those who saw it, no explanation is necessary. For those who didn't, no amount of explaining is enough. It's understandable, the truth was bound, gagged and thrown down the cellar steps. It's still there. We Shall Overcome wasn't understood as a dewey-eyed ideal in Detroit, it was understood as a blatant threat and license for violent aggression. And aggression there was. Noncombatants started leaving after the 1967 riots and, as it went on, literally without end, fully half the population self-evacuated. Since the year 2000, another twenty-five per cent have left. A quarter of Detroit's 140 square miles is deserted outright. Much of what's left makes mere squalor look good. Not usually mentioned by the ideologues, because it doesn't fit their liberation narrative, the rush for the exits included professional and middle class blacks, people any viable community would welcome. The only option for these families was to sell their homes for whatever they could get in a free-fall market and escape as if from Pompeii or Genghis Khan. Nobody stood up for Detroit's true dispossessed, the people who built the city and kept it going. Quite the opposite, accusations and insults were heaped on their heads. So they got out. While fleeing they were threatened and taunted as bigots and criminals. Middle class blacks were rebuked as cowardly turncoats for "abandoning an opportunity to build a new Detroit based on social justice" and other claptrap. Escapees are still blamed, even at this distance in time. Absolution is always on offer however, currently by way of pro bono heavy maintenance on the city's neglected infrastructure. A generation later those who bought in still think themselves morally superior to those who decamped and replicated the former Detroit elsewhere. This, all by itself, explains a lot. Collectivists and supremacists and social engineering fops took control under the reign of Mayor Coleman Young, a twenty-year carnival of corruption, extortion and excess. It continues to this day. With forty years of rule, top to bottom, it's reasonable to conclude the outcome we see was the outcome intended. A breakthrough mea culpa is unlikely, one may search Detroit all day and not find the militants who brought it about, they're busy liberating other places. What you will find is ruins on a staggering scale, genuine civil collapse and marauding gangs. Detroit has been the murder capital or a strong contender for most of this time, but cities in their pre-scorched-earth phase are offering spirited competition , perhaps because they're target-rich by comparison. Look for an appeal to the rules committee. City Council proceedings most nearly resemble the reading of a will to contentious heirs. Having little to do beyond allocate found money, it beclowns itselffreely. Their supporters having no higher expectations than their critics, entertainment rises to a major obligation. As a general proposition, and to be as charitable as the facts allow, they're short term clever and long term stupid. As the city became more Diverse - now at 84% and closing fast on perfection - academic standings fell as if out a tenth-story window. At present they're the lowest in the country, and accelerating. Odds are Detroit high school graduates can't read their diploma or write a coherent sentence. Nor could their School Board president. When reproached he presented this deficiency as evidence of authentic solidarity, an argument which defies refutation. The schools themselves reprise trench warfare; much noise, many casualties, no gain. Sexual maturity appears at age nine or ten, homicidal violence somewhat earlier, hard drugs only a little later. Among the teaching staff, desertion is more common than retirement, and more understandable. Those who stay exhibit trauma of the sort treated at veteran's hospitals. Formerly known for its affluence and sturdy communities Detroit is now a virtually unpolicedholding pen supported by what amounts to foreign aid. And the check had better not be late or short of expectations - the term of art being "fully funded". No payoff, no peace. We shouldn't wonder why Detroit is the model aspired to by community organizers at similar venues. Trust fund kids may be incrementally better off but the principle is the same: they'll be fed, clothed - costumed actually, housed, utilitied, schooled, automobiled and cell phoned at no cost to themselves. At intervals they'll be vouchered and class action bonused, to 'keep hope alive' one imagines. In return for being freed of adult responsibility, their sponsors ask only that they not burn the place down all at once, for appearance's sake, and so it is Detroit proper still stands, or near enough. But that's about all it does. Tracts of once attractive commercial buildings are now shells open to the air, inhabited by birds and rats, mold and weeds, dreary memorials to what was and could have been, a puzzle awaiting future archeologists. Miles of former middle class neighborhoods have reverted to grasslands dotted with the occasional swayback or burned out house slowly sagging to the ground. Imagine a movie of Detroit's history stopped at a freeze-frame of 1970, then run backwards on fast rewind. The reversion is plainly visible in satellite photos. Still they blather about the place being reanimated. Perhaps they've put Doctor Frankenstein on the case.
They sang We Shall Overcome. And so they did. The sack of Detroit brought the whole region to outright penury. Some time ago the average house in suburban Detroit was valued at about the price of a very used car. They may be free now, perhaps with the purchase of a toaster. What income there is comes largely from the poverty industry, make-work such as training centers for imaginary jobs, the endless "renaissance" scam and similar bowerbird antics, lavish federal financing, along with a scattering of legitimate businesses of the irreducibly indispensable or utterly fatuous sorts, with pretty much nothing in between. Redistribution of public funds at street level is routinely handled by community organizations and other quasi-official criminal enterprises. Social justice has arrived. Only bad juju - meaning you know who - keeps it from stunning success, it's said. State supervision is in the works, that the insolvent may better invoice the bankrupt one supposes. Detroit is the land version of the Titanic. Being more accessible, the wreckage is looted, cut up for scrap or plowed under with real efficency. The place is as close to the endpoint of urban collapse as we're likely to see short of a near-extinction event. It, and places like it, are to be actively avoided. Not avoided "if". Avoided period. Should the SHTF and its feeding tubes withdrawn, avoiding Detroit will take on a new meaning. Until then, it's a useful worst-case benchmark for analyzing, predicting and calibrating the ongoing collapse of its sister cities.
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Ol' Remus offers his opinions as-is, where is. He rarely cites support for his opinions so they are, in that sense, unwarranted. He comes by them largely by having lived and watched and listened rather than by argument or persuasion. His opinions are, therefore, not particularly accessible by debate or vulnerable to claims of illegitimacy. He entertains opposing opinion but he feels no inclination, much less obligation, to discuss or defend his own. Whatever usefulness or amusement the reader may find in them is their own business. 