After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (32 page)

Maybe late forties, but dressed like a child. Our visitor from 1890 has noticed a lot of that since he moved on from 1950. He has one of those T-shirts with an in-your-face attitudinal slogan. But his face doesn’t have much attitude or energy in it, and his legs are missing below the knees.

Along the sidewalk are some parched saplings with a few browning leaves, each tree bearing a sign saying, “This Community Improvement Project 218

after america

brought to you by the Federal-Urban Bureau of Arborial Renewal—

FUBAR: Working Together on the Road Ahead.”

Our time-traveler asks the present owner of his old home what happened. But nothing really “happened”: it just turned out this way. It was never luxurious, but it was a nice neighborhood, and you knew who your neighbors were. The tough times were a few blocks away, with the repossessed homes and the abandoned cars on bricks in the yard. But then the couple three houses down got foreclosed on, and the bank put their property up for sale, and nobody bought. So now the boarded up homes aren’t a few streets away, but next door. And the night is full of sounds: the word gets round that Number 23 and Number 29 are empty, and people break in for copper wiring or anything else there’s a market or a need for. And sometimes they bust in just because they’re up to something and require a place where they know they won’t be disturbed. So the drug dealers creep a little closer, and then the shootings.

On Wall Street, recessions are “cyclical.” Out in the hinterland, the cycle settles in, and it’s vicious: abandoned homes lead to more crime lead to more abandoned homes lead to even more crime lead to even more abandoned homes. . . . A lifetime’s labor has gone to pay the mortgage on a house that will never be worth in real terms what you paid for it and that now stands in a neighborhood the old you—the young you, the one with modest dreams of a better life earned through effort—would never want to live in.

So our time-traveler listens to the present owner of his old home explain that, yes, they could rent out the upstairs, but, even though the Bureau of Compliance at the city Department of Furnished Accommodation approved their fire retardant cushions, the state Agency of Access & Equality says they need a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator. And, even if they could afford that, the only place they could put it is where that ugly old poplar is, and taking that down requires permission from the Board of Environmental Impact, which has a three-year backlog of tree-removal cases. They could just cut it down, and gamble that no one would check, but Ken and Ron down the fall 219

street did it and got fined, and, even though they’re appealing to the Human Rights Commission on the grounds that the fine was homophobic, it wouldn’t be the same for them because they’re not in any minority category, not since the state Supreme Court ruled that diabetes no longer qualified because too many people have it. . . .

The gentleman from 1890 suddenly realizes that for the last ten minutes he has had absolutely no idea what this lady is talking about, but he has an overwhelming desire to get back on his time-machine before the youths sitting on the wall opposite strip it for parts and he winds up stuck forever in . . . well, whatever country this is. “America” doesn’t seem quite the word.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

See the u.S.a. in your cheVroLet

You don’t have to engage in H. G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he’d landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier.

It didn’t used to be: “When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold.” When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something—unless you’re entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it’s a wasteland. It’s a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company’s head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur.11

In 2009, General Motors had a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet 220

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Seat Bidet is too big to fail.12 For purposes of comparison, GM’s market capitalization was then about $2.4 billion versus Toyota’s $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM).13 General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The United Auto Workers is the AARP in an Edsel: it has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely).14 GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan were making a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler, and GM a loss of $500 to $1,500.15

That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that quickly became a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation thirty years earlier, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. Telling your political allies they can now go on overpaying themselves in perpetuity is a piece of cake.

When the going gets tough, the tough get bailed out. Your car business operates on a failed business model? Don’t worry, the taxpayers will prop that failed business model up forever. You went bananas on your credit card and can’t pay it back? Order another round and we’ll pass a law to make it the bank’s fault. Your once Golden State has decayed into such a corrupt racket of government cronyism that the remaining revenue generators are fleeing your borders faster than you can raise taxes on them? Relax, we’re lining up a federal bailout for you, too. Your unreadable newspaper woke up from its 96-page Obama Full Color Inaugural Souvenir bender to discover that its advertising revenue had collapsed with the real-estate market and GM dealerships? Hey, lighten up, John Kerry’s already been pleading fall 221

your case in the Senate.16 Is it really so hard to picture the President calling the Mayor to assure him he has no plans to move the
New York Times
out of New York?

America is now a land that rewards failure—at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?

Nobody did this to Detroit. The city and its business and civic leaders did this to themselves. In once functioning parts of Africa, civil war, a resurgent Islam, and other forces have done a grand job of reversing all the progress of the twentieth century. But the deterioration of Sierra Leone or Somalia is as nothing compared to the heights from which Detroit has slid.

Entire blocks are deserted, and the city is proposing to turn commercial land back into pasture—on the unlikely proposition that attracting Michiganders to graze Holsteins between crack houses will lead to urban renewal.

For a coffee-table book of ineffable sadness, two French photojournalists, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, wandered through the rubble of lost grandeur: the ruined auditorium of the United Artists Theater, built in 1928

in the Spanish-Gothic style, abandoned in the Seventies.17 The shattered ballroom, with upturned grand piano, of the Lee Plaza Hotel, an art deco landmark from 1929, derelict since the Nineties. The Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, pews splintered, dust-caked Bibles and hymnals scattered across the floors. Messieurs Marchand’s and Meffre’s predecessors would have seen such scenes in bombed-out European cities circa 1945.

But this was America, and no bombs fell. And the physical decay is as nothing to the deterioration of human capital: 44 percent of adults in the city have a reading comprehension below Grade Six level.18 Or to put it another 222

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way: nearly half the grown-ups in Detroit could not graduate from elementary school. And, believe me, what Sixth Grade requires of American 12-year-olds is no great shakes.

According to
Time
magazine: “The estimated functional illiteracy rate in the city limits hovers near 50 percent.”

With that pool of potential employees, why would anybody start a business in Detroit? What could you hire people to do?

Detroit did this to itself.

Well, you say, maybe things’ll brighten up with the next generation?

Don’t hold your breath. In March 2010, the president of the School Board, Otis Mathis, sent out the following email: If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for clos-ing school to many empty seats.19

Here’s another one from President Mathis:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS

row’s, and who is the watch dog?

A while back, I heard the English writer Anthony Daniels read aloud some correspondence from Jack the Ripper’s first victim, a 43-year-old domestic servant called Mary Anne Nichols. In 1888, the year of her murder, she wrote to her father:

I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place, and going on all right up to now. . . . It is a grand fall 223

place inside, with trees and garden back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotalers, and religious, so I ought to get on. . . . 20

Mary Anne Nichols was born in 1845—a quarter-century before the Education Act brought universal elementary schooling to all children in England and Wales. The correspondence of an uneducated domestic servant in and out of workhouses and prostitution is nevertheless written with better expression, better spelling, better punctuation and, indeed, more human feeling than the president of the School Board in a major American city.

Otis Mathis is not only a Detroit high school graduate but a college graduate.21 His degree from Wayne State was held up for over a decade because of his repeated failure to pass the English proficiency test. Eventually, he did things the all-American way: he sued the college. So Wayne State dropped the English proficiency, and Otis Mathis got his degree. By then, he’d already been elected to the School Board.

By the way, he’s not the only beneficiary of America’s joke academic standards. In the Eighties, Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, also dropped its English proficiency requirements in hopes of attracting wealthy foreigners. It worked. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, a chap called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed enrolled, fell in with a group of hardcore Muslims, transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study mechanical engineering, and used the knowledge he acquired to pull off the first World Trade Center attack, the African embassy bombings, the assault on the USS
Cole
, 9/11, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl.22 A little larnin’ is a dangerous thing—particularly for Americans on the receiving end.

Whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sees himself as a role model for American students, Otis Mathis certainly does. “Instead of telling them that they can’t write and won’t be anything, I show that that cannot stop you,” Mr. Mathis told the
Detroit News
. “If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that’s something. . . . ”23

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The only one dreaming here is the president of the School Board. Being illiterate “cannot stop you” in Detroit, but try it in Bombay or Bangalore or almost any city in China—and then ask yourself to whom the future belongs. On present projections, at some point around the year 2025 American teachers will be earning two million per annum, and American Twelfth Graders will be unable to count their toes.

Detroit did this to itself.

Its profligate past destroyed the present, and its present will ensure there is no future, because lavishly funded civic institutions are incapable of providing the educational standards of a one-room schoolhouse of 200

years ago. This is an American city at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and one in two of its citizens are illiterate. That’s about the same rate as the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic, which for much of the Seventies and Eighties was ruled by a cannibal emperor. Whereas in the Seventies and Eighties Detroit was ruled by a Democrat mayor, a bureaucracy-for-life, and an ever more featherbedded union army, all of whom cannibalized the city. Say what you like about Emperor Bokassa but, dollar for dollar, his reign was a bargain compared to Mayor Coleman Young’s. Hizzoner called himself the MFIC—the Muthafucker In Charge—

and, by the time it was over, Detroit was certainly fucked, and the only mothers still around were on welfare.