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The Gateway To Windsor
Thursday, February 2, 2006
3:21:00 PM EST
Why hasn't PETA planned demonstrations in Detroit this week? After all, Detroit was founded by fur traders who specialized in killing the fuzzy wuzzy beaver. PETA could argue that the sad state of Detroit was karma's way of evening out things. However, PETA is too chickenshit to travel to Detroit in the winter. Synthetic clothing just isn't as warm as good old fashioned animal pelts.
It seems as if this year it has become taboo to bag on the host city of the Super Bowl. Since everyone knows Detroit is one of America's largest shitholes, people have been politely declining to make fun of it, as if they would be smacking a special needs kid on a little yellow school bus. The city was spared during the All Star Game, and now it is being spared during the Super Bowl.What type of pussified politically correct culture have we become if we can't rip on Detroit, Michigan?
Look, when the Lions plated in the Silverdome, the team should have been re-named the Detroit White Flights. Sure, the story line is that the Silverdome was built because a bunch of football players lost their shoes in the mud during a late season game, and the shoes couldn't be found until next spring. What an apt metaphor for the city of Detroit. People are still digging through the mud to find what the politicians and corporations have stolen from them for decades. However, the Silverdome was built in Pontiac so the white man didn't have to drive to the ghetto to watch the NFL.
A few decades later, urban renewal became hip as the jerk off sixties generation had grown into material consuming locusts with an insatiable lust to own more than their parents ever did. Once their houses were full of electronics, they still felt empty because they didn't have their parents memories of a glorious urban past. The solution was simple; refurbish downtown areas to drive to like an amusement park, and presto, urban renewal grew legs.
Detroit bought the urban renewal myth hook, line, and sinker, mainly because the heavy construction equipment would bulldoze new barricades to keep blight out of the suburbs and in the city where it belonged. Plus, the prairie was threatening to reclaim long abandoned industrial areas, and if that happened, it would be just a matter of time before there was another Indian problem. So up went things like corporate office buildings and stadia while the infrastructure was ignored. The same story played out across the land, even in Indianapolis, a city that never really had "urban structure" before, just a large lot of land where the corn and beans were processed.
Soon the urban renewal yo-yo's realized that just bulldozing blighted areas is akin to spray painting a mud puddle. The scenery doesn't change much; you are just left with a toxic film on your puddle. So now Detroit has embraced a new grass roots urban rebirth plan which is supposed to have better results than the corporate urban renewal. Oxymorons aside, this plan might be a better magic trick than a corporation pulling a stadium out of the tax payer's ass, but any long range success is doubtful. This is, after all, is the city that burns itself down after sports championships and every Halloween.
There is an important lesson to be learned from Detroit; the lesson of what happens when large corporations are allowed to corrupt local politics for personal gain and to keep down the oppressed to better regulate their work force. This lesson will go unnoticed this weekend as bitter debates will rage about whom double dipped in the guacamole.
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3:21:00 PM EST
The Gateway To Windsor
It seems as if this year it has become taboo to bag on the host city of the Super Bowl. Since everyone knows Detroit is one of America's largest shitholes, people have been politely declining to make fun of it, as if they would be smacking a special needs kid on a little yellow school bus. The city was spared during the All Star Game, and now it is being spared during the Super Bowl.What type of pussified politically correct culture have we become if we can't rip on Detroit, Michigan?
Look, when the Lions plated in the Silverdome, the team should have been re-named the Detroit White Flights. Sure, the story line is that the Silverdome was built because a bunch of football players lost their shoes in the mud during a late season game, and the shoes couldn't be found until next spring. What an apt metaphor for the city of Detroit. People are still digging through the mud to find what the politicians and corporations have stolen from them for decades. However, the Silverdome was built in Pontiac so the white man didn't have to drive to the ghetto to watch the NFL.
A few decades later, urban renewal became hip as the jerk off sixties generation had grown into material consuming locusts with an insatiable lust to own more than their parents ever did. Once their houses were full of electronics, they still felt empty because they didn't have their parents memories of a glorious urban past. The solution was simple; refurbish downtown areas to drive to like an amusement park, and presto, urban renewal grew legs.
Detroit bought the urban renewal myth hook, line, and sinker, mainly because the heavy construction equipment would bulldoze new barricades to keep blight out of the suburbs and in the city where it belonged. Plus, the prairie was threatening to reclaim long abandoned industrial areas, and if that happened, it would be just a matter of time before there was another Indian problem. So up went things like corporate office buildings and stadia while the infrastructure was ignored. The same story played out across the land, even in Indianapolis, a city that never really had "urban structure" before, just a large lot of land where the corn and beans were processed.
Soon the urban renewal yo-yo's realized that just bulldozing blighted areas is akin to spray painting a mud puddle. The scenery doesn't change much; you are just left with a toxic film on your puddle. So now Detroit has embraced a new grass roots urban rebirth plan which is supposed to have better results than the corporate urban renewal. Oxymorons aside, this plan might be a better magic trick than a corporation pulling a stadium out of the tax payer's ass, but any long range success is doubtful. This is, after all, is the city that burns itself down after sports championships and every Halloween.
There is an important lesson to be learned from Detroit; the lesson of what happens when large corporations are allowed to corrupt local politics for personal gain and to keep down the oppressed to better regulate their work force. This lesson will go unnoticed this weekend as bitter debates will rage about whom double dipped in the guacamole.
Written by bads85 Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
