Detroit and the Blues (and the Reds)

There's a tendency to romanticize physical labour by those who haven't done any. The old, solid world of industrial manufacturing or the 'timeless' work of the labourer, the peasant, are seen in the light of a dense network of social values: commitment, loyalty, solidarity-as against the free-floating alienated worker who has no connection to 'the land' , a tradition of craftsmanship (Sennett), or place.

True. But if we are to be on guard against an unrealistic idealism let us also take note of the unidealistic realism that holds sway over our brothers..a 'realism' that says we are self-interested individuals and that only, a false universalism (of the market) and a false conception of human nature.

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After this nothing happened.
---Plenty Coups.

Why is there so much interest in a post-apocalyptic state, in what barely survives the deluge? Perhaps part of it is a sense of cultural exhaustion; perhaps it has something to do with a terrible foreboding that our time is up, that the delicate environmental equilibrium is on the brink of toppling into a blackness and forgetfulness that will rival any Dark Age....

Post-American landscape..like Mayan cities, reclaimed by forest, abandoned zones. 'A third of Detroit has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie..an urban void.'

1900: 250,000
1950: 2,000,000
2007: 900,000

Nothing is inevitable.

Is the fate of all one-industry towns? Is this what awaits "sock city" in China?Of the 1.6 million whites after the war 1.4 million have left. 80% of the population is black. 'Even 300 bodies a year were exhumed from the cemeteries and moved because some of the people..don't think the city is good enough for their dead.'

'Detroit was building the machine that would help destroy not just this city but urban industrialism across the continent..the manufacturing belt became the rust belt. The new American cities trade in information , entertainment, tourism, software, finance..dematerialized economies. they are abstract. Even the souvenirs in these new economies often come from a sweatshop in China'

'Detroit will not be rebuilt but forced to become something else'

'The city was the infernal realm, the burning lands, the dragon's lair at the centre of a vast and protective urban sprawl.'

On the Rivera Mural: 'black, white, red, yellow figures lounging on the bare earth. To my eye, though, they look like deities waiting to reclaim the world, insistent on sensual contact with the land and confident of their triumph over and after the factory that lies below them like an inferno.'
---Rebecca Solnit, Harper's

How one becomes what one is.
---Nietzsche.


Poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Song leads us home to where we have not been...Is G-minor, in the western scale, intrinsically triste or does its desolation stem from its use? ..Language will conserve, with uncanny tenacity, names of trees, of fauna, from lands they have long abandoned. They preserve configurations of mores and institutions long past and almost indecipherable to the present. The muted ritual is now eroded, but was once pivotal...
---from George Steiner, Errata.