Dear, Dirty Detroit

Dear, Dirty Detroit

In one of his greatest novels, Ulysses, the Irish writer James Joyce famously referred to his nation’s capital as “dear, dirty Dublin,” thereby expressing his love-hate ambivalence toward the city and land of his birth.

After many years in recovery from the repressive British yoke, Ireland, with Dublin as its centerpiece, would rise from Joyce’s dirt to become the vaunted Celtic Tiger of Europe with the Irish enjoying one of the most robust economies on the face of the planet.

James Joyce would be proud today.

Some of that luster has been lost in the current recession, due as much to the general downturn as to Ireland’s abandonment of proven successful, free enterprise, low taxation, fiscal policies.

Ireland could be an object lesson for the American city of Detroit were it not that Detroit were so far gone. It would be a real stretch for any Detroiter to find much Joycean love for that city.

Once the 4th largest city in America, Detroit is almost moribund. The most liberal big city in the nation has slipped to 11th largest as things became worse and worse and about a million of its citizens gave up and fled.

It has been suggested the best thing to do with this crime-ravaged and economically-destitute town is to bulldoze it and begin all over again.

Would that bulldozing were feasible.

As Rich Lowry wrote on Realclearpolitics.com, Detroit “stands as a stark statement of the failure of urban liberalism.”

Detroit’s decline and fall may have begun with the race riots stoked by MLK in 1968 but the election in 1974 of its first black mayor, Coleman Young, clearly greased the skids. The collapse and bailout of the auto industry merely iced the cake with rancid topping.

Young would reign for 20 years. . . .

(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1337)