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Whatever, Michigan |
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During my teenage years, when I was just beginning to acquaint myself with the small, smirking pleasures of ironic humor, I owned and frequently wore a blue t-shirt with maize lettering in the familiar “University” font that read: “Harvard: The Michigan of the East.” I wore the shirt as a kind of badge of allegiance, more to the State of Michigan itself—at the time, I was living in Maryland—than to the University, which I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to attend. (Of course, I did anyway.) For most of my life, being a Michigander, no matter where I happened to be living at the moment, has been one of the handful of core tribal identities by which I’ve consistently defined myself; it’s right up there with being a Beatles fan, a Detroit Tigers fan, and a Democrat. Somewhere along the line, probably right around the time I first left the state, against my will, at the age of 12, I began to think being from Michigan conferred a kind of inherent virtue on a person. Not on myself, necessarily, but let’s just say it probably wasn’t a coincidence that the first rock concert I attended was by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Sometime later, probably in my mid-20s, when I was living near Boston and wishing I could come back West, I conceived the idea that I had a special affinity for people from Michigan, a basic understanding and sharing of values, that I would probably never find anywhere else. Call it an infatuation, the kind some people keep for old flames they haven’t seen in decades. I’ve been back in Ann Arbor for nearly eight years now, long enough for reality to work its corrosive magic on my nostalgic notions; and while I don’t intend on leaving Michigan any time soon, in the interest of not letting my doubts and unpleasant feelings fester and become toxic, the time has come to address some particulars that have shaken my confidence in recent months. First: how to put this politely? Sometimes, Michigan, you’re just a little too eager to please. You don’t know how to play it cool. The classic example is the embarrassing boosterism of the old “Say Yes to M!ch!gan” campaign—were those exclamation points really necessary?—but you can see it to this day in an organization like Southwest Michigan First, or in the State’s reaction to all those plant-closing scenarios of the past few years, which usually involved lots of groveling and offers of extreme tax breaks; most or all the companies wound up ditching Michigan anyway. Sometimes you’re like the unpopular kid in school who hangs around the edge of the pack pretending to understand all the in-jokes, especially the ones at your expense, in the hopes you’ll be accepted. I want to take you by the Thumb and shake you: where’s your self-respect, your dignity? If manufacturing companies don’t want to keep their plants in Michigan open, I say screw ‘em. We’ll start our own companies. Which brings me to concern number two: since when, Michigan, did you stop being a hotbed of innovation (cars, corn flakes, Motown) and start jumping on any bandwagon that happened to come along? The latest bandwagon is biotech; the U of M built a fancy new building to support genetics research, and the state has millions in venture capital waiting for fledgling biotech companies to come knocking. But as is so often the case, Michigan, you were slow on the uptake, in this case by a matter of years, during which time practically every other state in the Union put its own biotech initiative on the table. Then there’s the gas/electric hybrid car fiasco—now both GM and Ford are buying Toyota technology that they could have developed on their own years ago. My history books tell me there used to be a culture of invention and risk-taking here, but I have yet to see a glimmer of it in all the time I’ve lived here. Finally, there’s the matter of Detroit. Like all Midwest states, Michigan has its share of rustbelt cities like Flint and Saginaw, but Detroit is in a league all its own, not unlike the buried ruins of Pompeii. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to help Detroit be a living city again? This is not an idle question. You’re in trouble, Michigan. You must know this. Your unemployment rate is the highest in the nation . . . you’re the second most obese state after Mississippi . . . your housing boom is deflating rapidly . . . you’ve tapped out most of your economically viable natural resources . . . you’ve recklessly drained nearly all the wetlands and allowed invasive species to wreck the forests and the lakes . . . your schools are struggling . . . you have really lousy weather . . . and to top it all off, you’ve got Detroit, that smoking cinder, that blasted hull. No one wants to touch it, not the immediate suburbs, not Lansing, no one. But turning Detroit around, giving people and businesses reasons to move back there, would have to get you at least halfway to turning the whole state around. Detroit is a city with a history as rich as that of New Orleans. There must be something there that’s worth saving. Michigan,
I say all this because I still care. The bloom may be off, but with
all this history between us, I can’t just stand by and watch
you destroy yourself. Let’s get you back on your feet. Come
on, let’s get you moving again. a2p |
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