There, in all its politicized caricature and ugliness, are serial travesties that would be just that if viewed without the vital context they require.
You know the list: There’s an unelected emergency manager endowed with unparalleled powers. The city’s water department shuts service to deadbeats who couldn’t — or wouldn’t — pay their bills, a prelude to all-but-certain privatization. Labor contracts the city cannot sustain and pension obligations its tax base cannot support are rewritten in bankruptcy.
“The banks” responsible for luring Detroit’s leaders into deals they could not afford (but desperately wanted because the alternative seemed too hard) are getting off easy, though the facts and the historic “grand bargain” are proving otherwise. And none of this would be happening had Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican cabal not cooked the books and precipitated a crisis that didn’t have to happen.
To which I ask this: Where have these people been? How many times has Sally Kohn, whose Daily Beast screed this week lamented that “Detroit, the political entity, is dead,” been to the city over the past, oh, decade? How often did Jason Stanley, a Yale University philosophy professor, visit to see the reality of the city, or its allegedly functioning democracy, before his moralizing post on a Times blog?
Not often, I’m guessing.
This town, in this time, is not living theory. It is experiencing reality, reckoning with 50 years of bad choices and bad economic breaks, changing demographics and feckless leadership that combined to make the Arsenal of Democracy a hollowed urban shell. If anything, the story of the past year or so is one more of hope and possibility than despair and defeat.
