Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Detroit

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Fellow Michiganian Michael Barone explains why he went from “liberal” to conservative:

Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.

To get a feel for what this particular hell is like, you should read Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy…

His book opens as he notices in the ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft in one of Detroit’s many, many abandoned buildings the feet of a corpse. We see him having a drink with Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the congressman’s wife who later went to jail for bribery—and stopping off before to see the 13-year-old girl who, while attending a council session, criticized Conyers for calling the council president “Shrek.” He makes the mistake of stopping for gas on the east side (“semi-lawless and crazy”) and escapes being robbed by two goons when he pulls a gun from his glove compartment. He hangs out with honest guys whose job is to cope with the city’s violent murders and arson-set fires—”murder dick” Mike Carlisle; firefighters Mike Nevin, who is unjustly sacked, and Walt Harris, who says grace at firehouse meals and dies in a fire set by an arsonist for $20. Detroit is no longer the nation’s murder capital—though, LeDuff notes, police officials systematically undercount homicides—and Halloween is no longer Devil’s Night (with 810 arsons in 1984). But the good guys are fighting uphill. City and county buildings are dilapidated; firemen have to bring their own toilet paper to work and don’t have water pressure to put out a fire set in their own firehouse; the morgue doesn’t have room for all the bodies.

Dan Austin’s Lost Detroit (2010), a book highlighting a dozen of the city’s abandoned architectural landmarks, shows photos of the old Packard plant, closed since 1956, where young men drive cars to the top and then pitch them to the ground, trees growing inside what were once downtown office buildings, and a grand 1920s downtown theater whose interior is now used as a parking lot (without many cars). LeDuff helps you see the rot. As he goes about his rounds he shows you “neck-high grass that went ignored and the garbage heaps that went uncollected,” “sewers backed up into houses,” and the disgusting disrepair of public buildings.

Socialism never works, really, but the anti-science Left always returns to it, because many see it as a route to power, and there is a flaw in human nature to which it irrationally appeals for the uneducated.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary

James Gandolfini’s Heart

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Was he really a walking time bomb?

Maybe. He certainly sounded like a good candidate, given his weight, though we don’t really know what his other stats were, probably for privacy reasons. I think that the doctor quoted is just speculating, and his credibility went down with me when I read this:

A holiday heart attack is a surprisingly common phenomenon, said Dr. Crandall, chief of the cardiac transplant program at the world-renowned Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.

“Heart attacks often manifest on holidays when you’re not eating the normal meals,” he said. “You eat excessively, indulging in high fatty foods, and this causes the blood to thicken. The result is a blood clot, which can rupture, resulting in the blockage of blood flow to the heart, causing heart attack and sudden death.”

Do “high fatty foods” really “cause the blood to thicken”? Is there any actual empirical evidence for this? Or is it just nutritionally ignorant lipophobia?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, War Commentary

Er Ist Kein Bewohner Von Berlin

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Or should I just say, “Er ist kein Berliner”?

An uncomplimentary British review of The One’s latest blather in Germany:

In stark contrast to that of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries, and the championing of more big government solutions.

In other words, business (or lack of business) as usual.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

“Art”

8 Comments

A screed:

I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.

If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.

Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.

Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.

No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

As The Middle East Burns

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…the White House fiddles:

The combination of grave and growing dangers in the Middle East with a lightweight policy response in Washington is genuinely frightening. We have no doubt that the administration wants a peaceful and stable Middle East that is moving toward greater democracy and greater respect for human rights. We share its desire to see this happen without massive US intervention. But the evidence is mounting that America’s present course in the Middle East is leading to a very bad place; real trouble looms unless the administration can begin to engage in a much more serious and thoughtful way.

Serious and thoughtful ways are not a hallmark of this administration. And this sort of fecklessness is no less than any intelligent person would have expected from the neophyte’s campaign rhetoric in 2008.