Word: detroits
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Nothing so cheers the soul of a hardened businessman as the sight of a competitor on his knees. So you'd expect the spectacle this week of Detroit's struggling Big Three carmakers begging Congress for $34 billion in loans and lines of credit would be cause to break out the sake in Japanese boardrooms...
...grew up in Southeast Michigan in the past four decades, as I did, you were raised among reminders that things used to be better, once, before you came along. The empty factories. The abandoned blocks in Detroit. The grade-school U.S. maps with the retro pictures, on Michigan's mitten, of Model T's and '57 Chevys. The headlines from the 1970s read like the headlines of 2008: The mayor of Detroit was in trouble. The Lions were losing. And the auto industry was disappearing...
...history has been one of expanding horizons, yours has become funnel-shaped. Much like the postbellum South, Rust Belt culture looks backward at an idealized past--a nostalgia not for plantations but for three-bedroom houses paid up on blue collar salaries. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...
...understand why people in other parts of the country (like some in Michigan) hate the idea of bailing out Detroit. Why pay for other people's mistakes? Is making cars any more American than any other business? Jobs are globalizing and industries are transforming in every sector. What's so damn special about them...
Michigan's own relation to car culture tends to be more wistful. After the Motown era, which more or less coincided with the end of Detroit's glory days as a city and an industry, you have to look hard to find songs by Michigan musicians about driving. Instead, Bob Seger--Michigan's Springsteen, who gave Chevrolet its "Like a Rock" slogan--reminisced about the backseat of his '60 Chevy in "Night Moves" and sang "Makin' Thunderbirds" about workers building Ford muscle cars in 1955: "They were long and low and sleek and fast/ They were classic in a word...