Blog

It’s a little bit hectic around here this morning. Carpeting guys are in to take care of the mess that happened Dec. 27, when our record snow cover was hit by near-record heat and pounding rain, creating a nice flood in the basement. The same basement that flooded in Sept with our “once in a century” rainfall. My wife isn’t sure she can take many more of these “rare” events. (I’m sure the flooding was a lot worse downstate that week, so we don’t feel much more than inconvenienced, relatively. There’s always someone worse off than you, til you’re dead, and even then, who knows?)

Our Christmas trip to Michigan between our families was fine and uneventful. Would’ve wished for more snow, so we could’ve gone X-country skiing like we did so many times last year. It was rather frazzle-making, though, as every single day was spent in the car on the way to somewhere. I expected to hear a lot more stories about the sinking economy from Michiganders, but since that’s what we’ve heard on visits there for the past 15 years, the current mess didn’t particularly stand out. If the country has enjoyed any kind of economic boom in this century, the Great Lakes region didn’t see it. It’s still a place where people are working two or three jobs to keep their head above water, and barring any big changes in the way the world works (like the Federal government protecting pensions or offering health care) I think it’s going to stay that way.

Among other events, we visited The Henry Ford Museum (now known as “The Henry Ford”, b/c some marketeer told them “People won’t come visit you if you call yourself a museum.” Next up for renaming: proctologists, prisons, and possibly Detroit itself). It’s a great place, as anyone can tell you. Though it’s changed a lot since I worked there during college, it’s still a remarkable collection of artifacts from America’s industrial heyday. The museum also contains the limo that Kennedy rode in Dallas, the Rosa Parks “Sorry, Lady, I ain’t doin’ it” bus, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, so you can’t fault them for variety.

The current special museum exhibit displayed costumes from sci-fi and adventure movies. The tourists were in complete awe of seeing the nippled Batsuit, the Star Trek Gorn, and Darth Vader’s togs. I’ve never been able to understand this. Have you ever seen a movie prop or costume that didn’t look like a cheap trinket up close? This very day, in shop classes around the country, kids are welding together Star Wars blasters that look more feasible, durable and just plain cool than the cheap tire iron on display there (probably more deadly, too). It must be a unique skill for prop and costume designers to put together things that look so good on screen out of such cheap material (granted, most items have been heavily used during filming). Conversely, anytime I’ve visited an art museum and seen a familiar painting or sculpture in its original form and scale, it’s almost never failed to blow me away. It’s one of the paradoxes of living, solved only by copious amounts of drinking.

A visit to one’s childhood stomping grounds elicits an endless litany of “Oh, such-and-such used to be there” or “That’s where we used to ride bikes before it was a mall.” It’s a tediously surefire path to geezerhood. But driving through Dearborn we passed by the redoubtable Dearborn Music, and I did a quick swerve into the parking lot. The place is still hanging on (it’s even bigger than it was when I was young). It used to be an old style store that sold guitars, pitch pipes, harmonicas, small percussion instruments, sheet music, and LPs. I bought my first few 45s there–Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, and the Cowsills singing the theme from “Hair”. Now in the era of digital downloads, they’re still there selling new and used CDs, DVDs, and LPs for the purists, plus shirts, posters, 3 Stooges pint glasses, etc., and the guys behind the counter told me, “We plan on being here a long time.” Huzzah for you, noble and tenacious retailer! I salute you!

Years ago, I sped out of Dearborn and Detroit lickety-splitly when I had the chance. Now when I visit, my brain is tickled by ridiculous notions of what my life would’ve been like had I stayed. Maybe my subconscious is just playfully creating an alternate reality, a “What If?” universe to keep itself entertained. Driving through Dearborn and seeing its brick bungalows and Dutch colonials decorated for Christmas, I feel the warm cuddlies pulling at me, and I try and imagine relocating my family there.

I think of the simple satisfaction of eating in an old pizzeria, a place in which we never ate when I was a kid. Enamored with the idea of parents and grandparents living nearby, I think of the generational framework of families I knew, which in reality have scattered to the four winds over the past 30 years. I wonder how happy I’d have been if I went to high school there, and didn’t get a taste of the wider world. And all these thoughts are based on nothing, since I was a very solitary youngster and only came out of my shell in high school. I may have been so grateful to gain a couple of friends in my teenage years that I would misplace my affection to the area and hang onto its dwindling possibilities too long. Just because a place is familiar doesn’t mean it’s suitable. While writers are ignored just about everywhere in the country except New York, they are an extreme oddity in an industrial city like Detroit. I was able to reinvent myself in Chicago just enough to retain my sanity.

I love my life now–city streets, restaurants, theaters and opera, two baseball teams to choose from, interesting yet down-to-earth friends, and a cottage to retreat to when necessary. What would’ve happened if I’d stayed in town and married Suzie Schmaltzkopf (my dad’s invariable name for an unknown girlfriend)? Thankfully, it’s just a daydream.

But oh, memories of Belle Isle, Bookie’s Club 870, Buddy’s Pizza in Hamtramck, Stroh’s Beer, and the soundtrack of the Four Tops, the MC5 and Iggy Pop (RIP Ron Asheton)……

Many a fine life could be built with such a foundation.

I must have been so busy last week with holiday matters that I missed the story of Republican senators explicitly detailing their blockage of the Big 3 automakers’ loan request. Not for any high-minded purpose, of course. Not because they don’t believe in government intervention in industry, or want to teach the capitalists a lesson in free market discipline, or want to protect taxpayer money.

They only want to bust the UAW and embarrass the Democratic party. From the Senate Republicans “Action Alert” internal memo:

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

At least after all these years, the Republicans can’t be bothered to hide how little they care for people trying to earn a living in this country. If they want to eliminate their support in the industrial belt and really cement their standing as a backwoods party, they can be my guest. As Crooks & Liars’ John Amato said today, “If Republicans want to immolate themselves into even further irrelevancy, I’m inclined to let them. The trick is to keep them from taking the whole country down along with them.”

I was raised in Dearborn, Mich., hometown of the Ford Motor Company (my dad worked for the Ford Moter Credit Company), so I don’t have to hear any stories about fat union workers earning way too much money. I heard plenty growing up, and most of them were true. The “job bank” that the unions squeezed from the companies a few years was one of the most wasteful ideas ever conceived. But the program is almost gone now, and union membership has been shrinking for decades. It is NOT the impediment to producing cars economically in this country. The impediment is the huge cost of health care and pensions for retirees, and until the government does something about it, the auto companies will not be able to operate.

But to hear these tinpot hillbilly senators, it’s time to teach the union a lesson. It’s also time to give a huge boost to the foreign car companies who have built union-free factories in their states. If the Big 3 go into Chapter 11 (or god help us, Chapter 7), the union contracts will be weakened or voided, and the physical assets like factories (of both the companies and their suppliers) will be put up for sale and grabbed by….my only guess is foreign automakers.

The last thing this country needs is to have our industrial policy held hostage by jerkwater senators from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. For decades, their states produced nothing but rickets and moonshine until they threw a lot of public money at foreign car companies to build factories there. Now they’re trying to tell us what’s best for the country? Or is it what’s best for “real Americans”? (Where did they go in the past six weeks, anyway?)

You can bore me with all the whiny anecdotes about bad-quality American cars (which are outdated, of course, if you bother to check things like the JD Power rankings) and the stupidity of the company management (who apparently should’ve foreseen the credit meltdown this year, when everyone in the financial industry missed it). But unions CREATED the middle class in this country, Clem, and without them, the quality of life for the vast majority of us would be appalling. No one would need a pension, because people would have to work until they keeled over dead. How these GOP hyenas can blithely speak of letting the car industry go belly up (crap, think of the implications to national security, if nothing else) just to bust the union and embarrass the Democrats is beyond appalling.

What is the OPPOSITE of patriotism?