motown

"Last night I went to sleep in Detroit City..." the old song says.

Remember that Bobby Bare song? Suppose Rip van Winkle went to sleep there and woke up this morning? Detroit, or rather the ruins of it, is on the cover of Time magazine this week.

Detroit is the U.S. The strength of the Republic, for the 110 years between 1865 and 1975 was its eastern and midwestern, Great-Lakes-region cities. Now the industrial belt is gone to rust -- a rust belt. It's a ruin, and so is the country. The old U.S. I grew up in is vanished like a ghost.

The shouting matches that unwind via the electronic media sound like the degenerated ruins of political debate and discussion.

Even still, a ruined empire tries to carry on a ridiculous, hopeless war at the ends of the earth. That's not even a policy, but only the reflexive twitching of a nearly-dead foreign policy based on world hegemony.

We need to bring the troops home, and transfer them from the army to a revitalized Civilian Conservation Corps that will salvage and partially rebuild Detroit. We need to resuscitate the factories and re-tool them to build locomotives, and rolling stock for our railroads.

If the U.S. is going to rise from its ashes, it'll have to be a salvage operation.

Photo for Time Magazine by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre