Yeah yeah yeah Detroit sucks. That's some really fresh material there Glen Beck. Wow. And we all heard your sekrit message in the Hiroshima comparison. The dog whistle aint working. That Detroit is so f*ed up we should just blow it up literally and start over. Look, see how Hiroshima is all shiny and beautiful now. No abandoned cars, no crack houses, no piles of trash, no empty gutted skyscrapers, and oh yeah minor detail but no n*s there either, right Glenn! In fact, Detroit is such a complete craphole the only way to fix it is to blow it up and start over. Tell everyone to leave town and just nuke it. Now normally when some racist makes makes that joke they first turn left and right to make sure there are none of "them" around to hear it but Beck doesn't need to worry, he's way smarter than that. He doesn't say outright we need to nuke Detroit. No, he pulls out the Hiroshima metaphor instead and Fox nation knows eggs-actly what he's talking about and they shout Hell Yes Glen! at the TV. Ahh ratings...
One thing, Glenn Beck doesn't make anything up on his own. If he ever had an original idea it would die of loneliness. He and his staff muck around the bottom-feeders of the net and read through Bircher pamphlets and all the conspiracy theory chain e-mails your Uncle Paul sends you and even listen in on the Alex Jones radio show to steal the latest juiciest scoops and then tone down the kookiness just enough to eke by the Ethical Standards Department at Fox News. He isn't really leading the parade like a drum major. He's just a clown who saw the band marching by and jumped out in front.
So yeah we all know Detroit has tons of abandoned homes that need to be levelled and neighborhoods that need to be rebuilt and a school system that needs to be overhauled. It needs to attract new industry build a new infrastructure and every city department needs to be scrubbed clean of the crooks and liars. And its going to take more than just administrative tweaking, the entire system for providing all municipal services needs to be rethought from the ground up. If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.. right? But really, other than the part about all the abandoned homes, the same problems could be cited for nearly every urban area in the USA. But go ahead, kick the D. That theme always scores well in the ratings and that's the only thing that drives Glenn Beck.
Another thing, a minor point I suppose, for all the horrible photos Beck showed of the decay in the city, what he didn't give a hint to was how lush and green the city becomes in the Spring and Summer, what with all the abandoned lots on every street, all the vacant fields becoming overgrown with plants and trees again. I could do without the packs of wild mutts roaming the streets and alleys, but there is no doubt the city is rejuvenating itself its own way while man tries to figure out how.
In this climate Mother Nature reclaims land quickly by sprouting trees and inviting critters back if you don't mow the fields for a few years. I call it this natural greening effect "Ghettos to Meadows" and Detroit is perhaps the greenest ghetto of them all. I wouldn't be surprised to see start-up farms sprouting with all the available acreage of vacant land in the city, the tempered climate, the water supply and food prices going through the roof from climate chaos. More on that some other time..
Oh and I had my own post about Detroit a while back here.
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