Don's Tuesday column

    THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/13/2013

Detroit—in fantasy, reality, tragedy

Tonight, the Tea Party Patriots will host Christine Stanley from the Wild Land Firefighters Association, 6 PM, Westside Grange. Considering the seemingly perpetual smoke in our skies (which Barb and I will find upon returning to Odell Lake by the Willamette Pass in Oregon), this is a pretty timely guest.

Our extended family, while growing up, ranged from South Dakota, to Minneapolis, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and to Detroit, Michigan, and the family we were usually geographically closest to: the Rippetoes. Aunt Dolores, Uncle Jim and their three boys provided a whirl of activities when we visited; their neighborhood was like so many we lived in and visited growing up in the 50s and 60s.

Everyone knew everybody and if you did something wrong, word would get back before you could return on your bike to explain your side. We grade-school cousins would be turned out for the day, after letting folks know our plans, to ride wherever we wished and call on their friends, but were expected back for lunch—or let the adults know who was feeding us. We lived with youthful abandon, occasionally riding out in front of a car that always stopped (whose driver would make sure our parents knew), and had lots of summertime programs at the school a few blocks away.

I’ll always remember things like playing “Horse” on their driveway with the garage basketball hoop, and their unique way of visiting friends: they’d walk up to the back door and, without knocking, simply yell “Call for Ronny (or fill in name).” One time we got it in our heads to take a bunch of rolls of cap gun caps—the ones with the little round spots of gunpowder on a paper roll—down to the basement and use a hammer to bang as many as we could until an adult discovered the cloud of smoke wafting up the stairs and shut us down.

As we got older into junior high school in the mid-60s, our interests changed, along with clothing, hairstyles and the gender of the friends we’d visit. One of Jimmy’s buddies had this new hairstyle with a thick crew cut on top but long sides and back—we didn’t know it would later be called a “mullet.” My brother, sister and I just called it “the Detroit City look.”

This was a Detroit completely foreign to the Detroit of the last 4 decades. There was little concern for safety or crime; the neighborhood of well-kept two-story, manicured, middle-class homes was convenient to shopping, churches and jobs in offices or factories. Uncle Jim, our Mom’s brother, was a cop—not a peace officer or public safety officer—a cop. With Aunt Delores’ office job they, like most families, were well provided for.

We never visited the Rippetoes after early high school, around 1966, due to subsequent events (i.e. 1967 riots by black residents). However, in retrospect, I can’t help but reminisce about, and juxtapose, the life and times we experienced, around Buckingham Street in Detroit, with the subsequent history of that city. For one thing, the “n-word” routinely came out of Uncle Jim, the Detroit cop’s, mouth (a habit absent from the others); and we never interacted with any black kids when we were there. We never saw any black people because we never drove anywhere that adults didn’t take us; I’d had black friends from elementary through high school but “normal” was different in their (white) parts of Detroit.

Since Detroit’s bankruptcy was first announced, one part of the narrative is the role of race in the rise and fall of that once great-and-affluent city. Zev Chafets’ seminal work, “Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit,” published in 1990, has received renewed references in background discussions. His portrayal is unsympathetic to either white or black residents and leaders. You could say that racism begat racism; black residents were aggressively kept in “their” parts of the city. After the 1967 riots, “white flight” to the suburbs accelerated and radical black leadership, exemplified by Coleman Young, replaced liberal white city leaders. His attitude, persona and viciousness toward surrounding white suburbs only reinforced the return of the same anathema towards the majority-African-American city.

What does it say about Detroit’s culture and mores that October 30 became a night of major crime and, notably, hundreds of arsons known as “Devil’s Night”? “The destruction reached a peak in the mid- to late-1980s, with more than 800 fires set in 1984, and 500 to 800 fires in the three days and nights before Halloween in a typical year.” Recent numbers: 2010—169; 2011—94; 2012—93. (Wikipedia.org)

Aside from liberal apologists and hack defenders of unfettered, one-party, Democrat urban rule, cushy union deals, wasteful urban projects and antagonism towards businesses and entrepreneurs—any objective analysis of Detroit’s demise simply must admit the obvious. Look up “How Coleman Young Ruined Detroit” (July 31) and “Detroit and the Rubble of Liberalism” (August 1), at Powerlineblog.com and DonPolson.blogspot.com .

George Will, on American taxpayers bailing out Detroit: “There you have today’s liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of ‘voting in elections’ — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals, and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.” Is this the future for California and its cities?