Rammekin

I’d be lying if I said otherwise

That I never catch myself missing those strange orange evenings

And the winters that only lasted a few hours a day.

There I breathed easier, rested more

and it is easy to revel in one’s insignificance when staring at the ocean.

But tonight I remembered how beautiful the paleness can be

the dampened silence and the notblack night,

that precious quiet that most miss in hurry.

It is not so much the gloating that I have a problem with, it is the fetishization of the area in which I grew up as some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Is it a tragic example of the shortcomings of capitalism, industrialized society, and political corruption? Yes, absolutely. But it is also, in many ways, a vibrant city and a testament to human vitality. We gave the world Motown, changed the face of electronic music, and made some solid contributions to the punk scene, like Iggy Pop and MC5. The city is currently a forerunner in the urban agriculture movement. Not to mention Detroit (and Michigan as a whole) playing a major part in the history of workers’ rights and unionization in the last century or so.

When the author cites ‘ruin porn’ I take his meaning as porn in the sense of titillation without context. A “lowest common denominator” sort of emotional response. The vast majority of people taking these “ruin porn” pictures are not from Michigan let alone Detroit. Most come to the city and photograph the same 5 abandoned buildings that every art student at CCS has photographed dozens of times. No one ever takes pictures of the well kept, fully inhabited brick row houses in Corktown, or the little Polish bakeries in Hamtramck, or the folk art installations throughout the city. Series and series and series of pictures of the 1/3 of the city that is abandoned is only a one-dimensional viewpoint, much like the way that pornography really only represents a small fraction of the complexity of real-life sexuality.

I am not above appreciating the sort of “tragic beauty” in these photos; some of them are incredible. But, to those of us who grew up there, it’s simply been done before. And like the author mentioned, this isn’t the first major destruction that Detroit has suffered. Hell - the city’s motto is “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus” (We shall hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes) and I guarantee that it wasn’t something recently adopted. The Detroiters/Michiganders I have spoken to about this feel similarly: we know that our city has failed, and no one has any illusions about its shortcomings being many. But instead of fixating on and fetishizing the ruin, the blight, the decay, many of us have chosen to focus on the opportunity afforded by basically starting from scratch. Michiganders are an industrious lot, and I am excited to see what’s in store.