Category Archives: Unpacking Detroit

The Sins of the Father ► A Pastoral Letter

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Pastor Kenny Pastorizing his flock

Dear Pastor Kenny:

It was great seeing you last month, as unexpected as it was. Almost immediately after the Not Now Silly Newsroom officially announced there would be no Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research this year …. What’s that old Jewish expression? “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

Since God and I are not on speaking terms, I have absolutely no idea how He might have learned of my plans to stay home this year. Unless He reads my facebookery.

When I made my announcement, I obviously didn’t know that Hurricane Irma would force a Road Trip on me. However, by the time I finally made the decision to flee, Irma was headed straight for the condo as a Category 5. Originally, I was only going to go to as far as Pensacola to get out of her path. However, in the final analysis that wouldn’t have done any good. Irma curved to the west side of the state. I’d either have had to continue north or make a left in the panhandle and head west towards Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

At the last minute, however, a facefriend of some years standing, whom I had never met, suggested we hightail it to Michigan, where he also has relatives. At first I resisted, then changed my mind. In the end that proved to be the least expensive option. Driving anywhere else would have required us to spring for hotel/motel fees, more meals in restaurants, and other accessories.

Talk about your synchronicity: It was only when I was finally in Ohio, traveling north along I-75, I asked Siri to call you. Siri didn’t know your number because it was in my old Windows Phone, where Cortana ruled the roost. Not long afterwards — at the very next rest stop, in fact — I opened up my facebookery and the top post on my timeline was one of your infrequent (compared to me) ones.

That’s when I facebooked you and we set up our time together. This year we spent more time together than any previous year. I especially enjoyed visiting the old neighbourhood with you:

https://www.facebook.com/headly.westerfield/videos/1054733027995662/

FULL CONFESSION: I only really think of sin when I’m writing to you. Otherwise, I just carry on day to day without a single thought of eternal damnation whatsoever.

Of course, Jews don’t really believe in Heaven. Nor Hell. To bastardize Woody Allen’s joke: I’m a Reformed Jew. I’m so Reformed, I’m a Atheist.


♫ ♪ ♫ Knock, knock knockin’ on h— WAIT!!! WHAT???

Regardless, in “Heaven and Hell in Jewish Tradition“, at the Jewish Learning website, it says (among a bunch of other stuff worth reading):

What the next world is, however, is far from clear. The rabbis use the term Olam Ha-Ba to refer to a heaven-like afterlife as well as to the messianic era or the age of resurrection, and it is often difficult to know which one is being referred to. When the Talmud does speak of Olam Ha-Ba in connection to the afterlife, it often uses it interchangeably with the term Gan Eden (“the Garden of Eden”), referring to a heavenly realm where souls reside after physical death.

The use of the term Gan Eden to describe “heaven” suggests that the rabbis conceived of the afterlife as a return to the blissful existence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the “fall.” It is generally believed that in Gan Eden the human soul exists in a disembodied state until the time of bodily resurrection in the days of the Messiah.

One interesting talmudic story, in which the World to Come almost certainly refers to a heavenly afterlife, tells of Rabbi Joseph, the son of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, who dies and returns back to life.

“His father asked him, ‘What did you see?’ He replied, ‘I beheld a world the reverse of this one; those who are on top here were below there, and vice versa.’ He [Joshua ben Levi] said to him, ‘My son, you have seen a corrected world.’”

Ken, anything you can add to this internal discussion is always welcome, but it occurred to me a long time ago that I’m really writing to myself. These Pastoral Letters, as you know, are a self-examination of my spirituality, or — to put it into other terms — my relationship with a non-God.

Anyway, as I say, my mind jumps to sin at times like these. Having actually never done so, I decided to use Der Googleizer. Who knew there were so many kinds of sin?

There’s Mortal Sin,, when you’re going to straight to Hell, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. Venial Sin, in which you’re surely testing the limits of your relationship with God, but you know in the back of your mind that all you have to do is beg forgiveness, and BINGO! It’s a done deal. In fact, the same goes for Mortal Sins. That’s why confession is good for the soul. Because it lets one off the hook.

Then there are the Seven Deadly Sins, which is what people tend to think of when they think of sin. The WikiWackyWoo suggests the Seven Deadly Sins should not be confused with Mortal Sin. It adds:

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of Christian origin, of vices.[1] Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give birth to other immoralities.[2] According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth,[2] which are also contrary to the seven virtues. These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat).

But later, just to confuse the issue, the Wiki also says:

The seven deadly sins in their current form are not found in the Bible, however there are biblical antecedents. One such antecedent is found in the Book of Proverbs 6:16–19, however only in the Masoretic Text (the earlier translated Septuagint version of this passage lacks a clear preface and lists only five). Among the verses traditionally associated with King Solomon, it states that the Lord specifically regards “six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto Him”, namely:[6]

  1. A proud (vain) look
  2. A lying tongue.
  3. Hands that shed innocent blood
  4. A heart that deviseth wicked acts
  5. Feet that be swift in running to mischief
  6. A false witness that speaketh lies
  7. He that soweth discord among brethren[7]

Another list,[8] given this time by the Epistle to the Galatians (Galatians 5:19–21), includes more of the traditional seven, although the list is substantially longer: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, “and such like”.[9] Since the apostle Paul goes on to say that the persons who practice these sins “shall not inherit the Kingdom of God”, such sins are usually listed as mortal sins (unless sufficient reflection and deliberate consent are not present) rather than capital vices.[10]

Who’s got time to keep track of all those sins? Especially the “and such like” category, in which you can lump just about anything? Instead, let’s (quickly) take the Cardinal Sins one by one.

  • Lust. Most people think this means “sex”, but there is lust for things as well: money, status, and respect. Personally, I lust after nice pieces of brass.Meanwhile, sexual lust can’t be evil. Otherwise, only a practical joker of a God would have hardwired it into us. It’s what one does with that sexual lust that can be evil — or illegal, for that matter.
  • Gluttony. This week I ate a quart of ice cream by myself, but for the most part I’m not a glutton, except for punishment.
  • Greed. The unfettered acquisition of money has never been one of my problems. In fact, had it been one of my problems, I’d have fewer problems.
  • Sloth. It comes and goes. I can be real lazy when I set my mind to it. But a sin? Not to me.
  • Wrath. I get angry, but can blow & go; get pissed off about something and then forget all about it after the volcano erupts. But, I never take it out on people that don’t deserve it, if that helps.Yet I also recognize that there are some people on my shit list that I will take pot shots at again and again, and never forgive.
  • Pride. Like jingoistic flag-waving? Not my problem. However, there’s some things I justifiably take pride in. Is it Foolish Pride? Just crank it up and D A N C E ! ! !

  • Envy.

Envy? You ask.

DING! DING!! DING!!! Oh yeah, that’s the one. I’ve long recognized it’s my biggest fault; my biggest sin.

Now, I’m not envious of people’s money, or the things they have acquired [see above]. I’m envious of people’s situations, which is really hard to explain. The story I told you about pretending to be on the Safety Patrol (way back when) must have been born from my envy of you.

Here’s how sick I really am (and I’m not talking about this vaguebooking): I have a dear friend, who happened to fit incredibly comfortably into a situation, due to an introduction I made. At the very same time a brass ring I had been reaching for receded well beyond my reach and was denied me. Thru’ the facebookery, I am forced to confront both of these things simultaneously. I should be happy for my friend for the former, but I am nothing but envious due to the latter.

Read “Facebook, the “spiral of envy,” and our Botox Life“

Since I returned from Michigan, I even started to envy you, Ken.

As you know I offended one of your parishioners deeply. When I apologized and asked for her forgiveness, she replied that she had, but only because I’m an old friend of yours. I envy that relationship you have with her; instead of having her accuse me — in the same sentence — of both mansplaining and whitesplaining. She would never accuse you of Pastorsplaining. She would have listened.

I’ve always said that the most important thing to remember in discussions about race is that White folk need to listen when Black folks speak about Racism. I still believe that. They’re on the front lines. They have the experience(s). However, it wouldn’t hurt Black folks to listen once in a while. I may not be totally woke, but I’ve been wiping the sleep from my eyes about Race Relations since I was a teenager working in Pops’ store on 12th Street, now known as Rosa Parks Boulevard. I feel I have something to contribute to the discussion and to use terms like whitesplaining and mansplaining is not designed to have a dialogue, only to turn one into a pillar of salt.

TO BE FAIR: She was not wrong to be offended. I used an offensive word. But, here’s the thing, Ken: Pops never said “the N-Word” in his life. Pops said “nigger”. I’m not going to WHITEwash what Pops said, as ugly as it was. This is the titular “Sins of the Father“. I don’t let Pops off the hook just because he’s 1). Dead; 2). My father. Using the word when appropriate is just an extension of my essay, which predates our reunion, “A Reasoned Defense of the Word Nigger“. Furthermore, I see no contradiction in using the word and being sorry that I did.

If you think of it, Ken, please show this essay to her. Not to offend her all over again, because I truly fell in love with her. But, to offer her as much space in rebuttal as she’d like to take. I promise to print every word.

As always, the same goes for you.

I’ll sign off here, Ken, as this Pastoral Letter is long enough already. As they often do, this one went to places I never intended when I started and I’ve had enough self-examination for one day.

With all my love,
From your oldest friend in the world,

Marc Slootsky

A Civil Rights Champion Born ► Throwback Thursday

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Happy Birthday to Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, born on this day in 1913. On December 1, 1955, at the age of 42, Parks refused to give up her seat to a White person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It lasted just over a year and, finally, integrated the buses in that southern city.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a defining event in the country’s history. There had been other attempts to integrate buses (which you can read about in the Wiki essay Events leading up to the bus boycott). However, this one attracted national attention and led to the Supreme Court ruling that the laws behind Montgomery and Alabama’s bus segregation were unconstitutional.

According to the National Archives: 

Mrs. Parks was not the first person to be prosecuted for violating
the segregation laws on the city buses in Montgomery. She was, however, a
woman of unchallenged character who was held in high esteem by all
those who knew her. At the time of her arrest, Mrs. Parks was active in
the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), serving as secretary to E.D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery
chapter. Her arrest became a rallying point around which the African
American community organized a bus boycott in protest of the
discrimination they had endured for years. Martin Luther King, Jr., the
26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, emerged as a
leader during the well-coordinated, peaceful boycott that lasted 381
days and captured the world’s attention. It was during the boycott that
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., first achieved national fame as the
public became acquainted with his powerful oratory.

Parks was not the quiet seamstress that history tends to remember. The WikiWackyWoo picks up the story:

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee
center for training activists for workers’ rights and racial equality.
She acted as a private citizen “tired of giving in”. Although widely
honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired
from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received
death threats for years afterwards. Her situation also opened doors.

Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US.

After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and lived a largely
private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and third non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. 
 

Detroit honoured this Civil Rights icon by renaming 12th Street, where the 1967 riot occurred, Rosa Parks Boulevard.

Is Ted Nugent Racist? ► Throwback Thursday

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For this week’s Throwback Thursday I am — once again — reaching into my vast writing archives. In 2012 I was freelancing for Stones Detroit, a website out of…err…Detroit. This original article was commissioned by my editor.

Is Ted Nugent A Racist?
Our Stones Detroit Writer Says, “Yes”
OPINION by Headly Westerfield — October 2012

 

The house I lived in on Gilchrist Street

When I was growing up in Detroit I lived on Gilchrist Street, 5 houses away from David Palmer, the original drummer for the Amboy Dukes. When the Amboy Dukes were rehearsing in Dave’s garage, all us neighbourhood kids would gather at the end of the driveway and listen, but we’d catch hell if we took one step onto the property. As a teenager I saw the Amboy Dukes dozens of times in large and small venues and, consequently, have followed the career of Ted Nugent ever since, culminating in his crazy, racist rant earlier this week.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the Vietnam War. Nugent, who is a long-time board member of the NRA, and brandishes weapons on stage, was a self-admitted Draft Dodger.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard, really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’ kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants got crusted up.

Nice imagery.

Nugent, the coward, also claimed to have snorted crystal meth just before his physical. However, that’s all old news. More recently Nugent had to explain himself to the Secret Service for remarks he made earlier this year:

Because I’ll tell you this right now: if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. Being at the NRA event, God Bless ya, good indicator, but if you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house of this vile, evil America Hating Administration, I don’t even know what you’re made out of.

This column could be filled with just the incendiary comments he’s made, like when he called President Obama a punk and suggested he suck on the machine gun he was brandishing on stage. However, I’d much rather deal with the comments he made this week to Brett M. Decker of The Washington Times.

Decker: You and I are Motown soul brothers, as you’ve put it before. When outsiders visit our hometown today, the reaction is always the same: This place looks like some post-apocalyptical disaster area. Once one of America’s richest, most dynamic business centers, how did the Motor City fall so far and what lessons can be learned from the demise of Detroit?

Nugent: It is so very true that my birth city of Detroit was the cleanest, most neighborly, positive-energy, work-ethic epicenter of planet earth when I was born there in 1948, right on through to the 1960s. Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive, there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down that same path. Truly amazing.

This is wrong on so many levels. Let’s count the ways, shall we? To begin with Coleman Young didn’t become mayor until 1974, well after the ’60s ended. What sent Detroit “straight down the toilet” was racism, pure and simple.

At a time when Detroit could have become a model for integration, it was already going the other way and becoming one of the most segregated cities in the United States. As far back as the 1920s respectable people like Dr. Ossian Sweet found that Whites were not going to share their neighbourhoods with Black folk.

The racial strife only became worse during World War Two. Blacks from the south were recruited to help in the factories of the Arsenal of Democracy, as Detroit was called at the time. In 1943 Packard promoted 3 Black men to work the line and 25,000 Whites went out on strike.  During the strike one voice was heard on the loudspeaker to say, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” This was just 3 weeks before the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.

After the war ended and throughout the ’50s, when both Blacks and Whites had enough money to buy houses, Whites could purchase anywhere they wanted, but Blacks could not. Properties were “redlined,” in the vernacular of the day, and Blacks could only buy in certain neighbourhoods, if they could get bank loans at all. Meanwhile, White folk started to buy and build in the suburbs beyond 8 Mile Road. White Flight had already begun in the 1950s, but it truly sped up after the Detroit Riot of 1967. Had the White folk stayed in the city, things would have been much different.

I’m not going to mince words: I find Ted Nugent’s comments racist. The Detroit he remembers was “the cleanest, most neighborly, positive-energy, work-ethic epicenter.” This was the White Detroit of Nugent’s halcyon memories. The neighbourhood Nugent grew up in, and the neighbourhood I grew up in, were all-White. Black Detroit? For Nugent that’s the Detroit of the “liberal death wish” of Coleman Young, the Black mayor, who put a “voodoo curse” — a Black curse — on his beloved Detroit. “Pimps, whores and welfare brats” are all Nugent’s impression of Black Detroit as well. No one describes White folk that way.

Detroit gets knocked by a lot of people, but to hear Nugent ignore Detroit history to spout racist tripe is beyond the pale.

It’s hard to sum up a few hundred years of history in a short post. I’ve written far more extensively about Detroit’s Race Relations on my blog in an essay called The Detroit Riots ► Unpacking My Detroit. Please check it out and tell me what you think.

Originally published at Stones Detroit.

Is Ted Nugent A Racist? Our Stones Detroit Writer Says, “Yes”

OPINION by Headly Westerfield
When I was growing up in Detroit I lived on Gilchrist Street, 5
houses away David Palmer, the original drummer for the Amboy Dukes. When
the Amboy Dukes were rehearsing in Dave’s garage, all us neighbourhood
kids would gather at the end of the driveway and listen, but we’d catch
hell if we took one step onto the property. As a teenager I saw the
Amboy Dukes dozens of times in large and small venues and, consequently,
have followed the career of Ted Nugent ever since, culminating in his
crazy, racist rant earlier this week.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the Vietnam War. Nugent, who is a
long-time board member of the NRA, and brandishes weapons on stage, was a
self-admitted Draft Dodger.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that
day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more
washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris
build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard,
really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’
kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with
nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never
touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the
syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to
the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants
got crusted up.

Nice imagery. Nugent, the coward, also claimed to have snorted
crystal meth just before his physical. However, that’s all old news.
More recently Nugent had to explain himself to the Secret Service for remarks he made earlier this year:

Because I’ll tell you this right now: if Barack Obama
becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in
jail by this time next year. Being at the NRA event, God Bless ya, good
indicator, but if you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to
clean house of this vile, evil America Hating Administration, I don’t
even know what you’re made out of.

This column could be filled with just the incendiary comments he’s
made, like when he called President Obama a punk and suggested he suck on the machine gun he was brandishing on stage. However, I’d much rather deal with the comments he made this week to Brett M. Decker of The Washington Times.

Decker: You and I are Motown soul
brothers, as you’ve put it before. When outsiders visit our hometown
today, the reaction is always the same: This place looks like some
post-apocalyptical disaster area. Once one of America’s richest, most
dynamic business centers, how did the Motor City fall so far and what
lessons can be learned from the demise of Detroit?
Nugent: It is so very true that my birth city of
Detroit was the cleanest, most neighborly, positive-energy, work-ethic
epicenter of planet earth when I was born there in 1948, right on
through to the 1960s. Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman
Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal
Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you
train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive,
there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the
toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to
be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and
welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a
president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down
that same path. Truly amazing.

This is wrong on so many levels. Let’s count the ways, shall we? To
begin with Coleman Young didn’t become mayor until 1974, well after the
’60s ended. What sent Detroit “straight down the toilet” was racism,
pure and simple.
At a time when Detroit could have become a model for integration, it
was already going the other way and becoming one of the most segregated
cities in the United States. As far back as the 1920s respectable people
like Dr. Ossian Sweet found that Whites were not going to share their
neighbourhoods with Black folk. The racial strife only became worse
during World War Two. Blacks from the south were recruited to help in
the factories of the Arsenal of Democracy, as Detroit was called at the
time. In 1943 Packard promoted 3 Black men to work the line and 25,000
Whites went out on strike.  During the strike one voice was heard on the
loudspeaker to say, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” This was just 3 weeks before the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.
After the war ended and throughout the ’50s, when both Blacks and
Whites had enough money to buy houses, Whites could purchase anywhere
they wanted, but Blacks could not. Properties were “redlined,” in the
vernacular of the day, and Blacks could only buy in certain
neighbourhoods, if they could get bank loans at all. Meanwhile, White
folk started to buy and build in the suburbs beyond 8 Mile Road. White
Flight had already begun in the 1950s, but it truly sped up after the
Detroit Riot of 1967. Had the White folk stayed in the city, things
would have been much different.
I’m not going to mince words: I find Ted Nugent’s comments racist.
The Detroit he remembers was “the cleanest, most neighborly,
positive-energy, work-ethic epicenter.” This was the White Detroit of
Nugent’s halcyon memories. The neighbourhood Nugent grew up in, and the
neighbourhood I grew up in, were all-White. Black Detroit? For Nugent
that’s the Detroit of the “liberal death wish” of Coleman Young, the
Black mayor, who put a “voodoo curse” — a Black curse — on his beloved
Detroit. “Pimps, whores and welfare brats” are all Nugent’s impression
of Black Detroit as well. No one describes White folk that way.
Detroit gets knocked by a lot of people, but to hear Nugent ignore Detroit history to spout racist tripe is beyond the pale.

It’s hard to sum up a few hundred years of history in a short post.
I’ve written far more extensively about Detroit’s Race Relations on my blog in an essay called The Detroit Riots ► Unpacking My Detroit. Please check it out and tell me what you think.

– See more at:
http://stonesdetroit.com/is-ted-nugent-a-racist-our-stones-detroit-writer-says-yes/#sthash.JbhxdXZB.Tx3mALHp.dpuf

Is Ted Nugent A Racist? Our Stones Detroit Writer Says, “Yes”

OPINION by Headly Westerfield
When I was growing up in Detroit I lived on Gilchrist Street, 5
houses away David Palmer, the original drummer for the Amboy Dukes. When
the Amboy Dukes were rehearsing in Dave’s garage, all us neighbourhood
kids would gather at the end of the driveway and listen, but we’d catch
hell if we took one step onto the property. As a teenager I saw the
Amboy Dukes dozens of times in large and small venues and, consequently,
have followed the career of Ted Nugent ever since, culminating in his
crazy, racist rant earlier this week.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the Vietnam War. Nugent, who is a
long-time board member of the NRA, and brandishes weapons on stage, was a
self-admitted Draft Dodger.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that
day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more
washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris
build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard,
really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’
kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with
nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never
touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the
syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to
the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants
got crusted up.

Nice imagery. Nugent, the coward, also claimed to have snorted
crystal meth just before his physical. However, that’s all old news.
More recently Nugent had to explain himself to the Secret Service for remarks he made earlier this year:

Because I’ll tell you this right now: if Barack Obama
becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in
jail by this time next year. Being at the NRA event, God Bless ya, good
indicator, but if you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to
clean house of this vile, evil America Hating Administration, I don’t
even know what you’re made out of.

This column could be filled with just the incendiary comments he’s
made, like when he called President Obama a punk and suggested he suck on the machine gun he was brandishing on stage. However, I’d much rather deal with the comments he made this week to Brett M. Decker of The Washington Times.

Decker: You and I are Motown soul
brothers, as you’ve put it before. When outsiders visit our hometown
today, the reaction is always the same: This place looks like some
post-apocalyptical disaster area. Once one of America’s richest, most
dynamic business centers, how did the Motor City fall so far and what
lessons can be learned from the demise of Detroit?
Nugent: It is so very true that my birth city of
Detroit was the cleanest, most neighborly, positive-energy, work-ethic
epicenter of planet earth when I was born there in 1948, right on
through to the 1960s. Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman
Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal
Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you
train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive,
there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the
toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to
be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and
welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a
president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down
that same path. Truly amazing.

This is wrong on so many levels. Let’s count the ways, shall we? To
begin with Coleman Young didn’t become mayor until 1974, well after the
’60s ended. What sent Detroit “straight down the toilet” was racism,
pure and simple.
At a time when Detroit could have become a model for integration, it
was already going the other way and becoming one of the most segregated
cities in the United States. As far back as the 1920s respectable people
like Dr. Ossian Sweet found that Whites were not going to share their
neighbourhoods with Black folk. The racial strife only became worse
during World War Two. Blacks from the south were recruited to help in
the factories of the Arsenal of Democracy, as Detroit was called at the
time. In 1943 Packard promoted 3 Black men to work the line and 25,000
Whites went out on strike.  During the strike one voice was heard on the
loudspeaker to say, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” This was just 3 weeks before the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.
After the war ended and throughout the ’50s, when both Blacks and
Whites had enough money to buy houses, Whites could purchase anywhere
they wanted, but Blacks could not. Properties were “redlined,” in the
vernacular of the day, and Blacks could only buy in certain
neighbourhoods, if they could get bank loans at all. Meanwhile, White
folk started to buy and build in the suburbs beyond 8 Mile Road. White
Flight had already begun in the 1950s, but it truly sped up after the
Detroit Riot of 1967. Had the White folk stayed in the city, things
would have been much different.
I’m not going to mince words: I find Ted Nugent’s comments racist.
The Detroit he remembers was “the cleanest, most neighborly,
positive-energy, work-ethic epicenter.” This was the White Detroit of
Nugent’s halcyon memories. The neighbourhood Nugent grew up in, and the
neighbourhood I grew up in, were all-White. Black Detroit? For Nugent
that’s the Detroit of the “liberal death wish” of Coleman Young, the
Black mayor, who put a “voodoo curse” — a Black curse — on his beloved
Detroit. “Pimps, whores and welfare brats” are all Nugent’s impression
of Black Detroit as well. No one describes White folk that way.
Detroit gets knocked by a lot of people, but to hear Nugent ignore Detroit history to spout racist tripe is beyond the pale.

It’s hard to sum up a few hundred years of history in a short post.
I’ve written far more extensively about Detroit’s Race Relations on my blog in an essay called The Detroit Riots ► Unpacking My Detroit. Please check it out and tell me what you think.

– See more at:
http://stonesdetroit.com/is-ted-nugent-a-racist-our-stones-detroit-writer-says-yes/#sthash.JbhxdXZB.Tx3mALHp.dpuf

Pastor Kenny Responds

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Pastor Kenny. Pics stolen from his facebookery.

A Response to Your Pastoral Letter (Or How One Pastoral Letter Begets Another, Begets Another, Begets Another)

I’m a FB neophyte, so it took me quite a while to dig out your last pastoral letter once I had a little time to respond to it. I’ve not known how to respond to your pastoral letter because I wasn’t sure if or what might have been expected of me.  Was it an invitation to dialogue? In what forum?  I was just a little befuddled.  SO I figured, heck, I’ll just write something down on word doc and if Headly wants to publish it, so much the better.

I am going with Headly at your request, though I knew you as Marc.  I think we lost regular connection before you became Headly so it was good to hear your story about how the name came [about] and took.  Ken or Kenny works for me. Only my sisters, Marilyn and Nancy call me Kenny, so it reminds me of my past. (The name, btw was ruined by association with Barbie, and if it’s not too insulting to a fine musician, Kenny G. Nobody seems to name their kid Kenneth anymore.  Someone told me in Scottish (?) it means “handsome,” which [may] also account for its unpopularity. Who would want to name their kid “handsome”?  Alas. Mark has fared much better as a name, and the variant Marc (short for “Marcus”?) is a little exotic, given that we’re in the 1950’s Tom-Dick-Harrry-Mary-Deborah genre of Wonder Bread Names to begin in. But I digress.

I must say I have been honored by your interest in my little LGBT soap opera. Spreading the word about Letter to My Congregation, being interested, curious, sympathetic.  But it has also been comforting to reconnect a little bit with my Gilchrist past through your reaching out. 

Pastor Ken Wilson with wife Julia

My wife, Julia, grew up in Holland Michigan, where her dad still lives in the house she grew up in. (Her dad was an English Professor at Hope College.) She can go back to the house and stay overnight, as we have a few times since we got married.  Recently, at her moms memorial service, she met all sorts of people from her growing up years—people who babysat for her and for whom she babysat, teachers from high school, old friends.  It helped me realize how the decline of a city like Detroit can disconnect you from your past. 

Going back to the old neighborhood recently was stunning—urban blight such as I’d never seen just a few blocks South of where we grew up. Such an empty feeling. And no one from the old neighborhood to share it with. So reading your posts—especially your history of the Detroit riots—triggered all sorts of memories for me. Thank you.

One of the things I’d forgotten was just how racist things were growing up. You reminded me what it was like to grow up Jewish—and it all came rushing back, the horrible jokes about Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and well, non WASPS. I remember being warned by someone not to attend a Catholic Mass because they spoke Latin and you didn’t know whether they were saying bad stuff or not.

It made me feel ashamed. Using the N-word was strictly forbidden in my family. Same with anti-Jewish rhetoric. But talk of “Injuns,” “Krauts” and “Japs” was tolerated. Now I’m ashamed. But I was also ashamed because of my forgetting. Forgetting how bad the Christian participation in anti-Semitism was in that era. Remembering how my late wife Nancy and I came to visit you in Toronto talking all our Jesus talk without remembering how your ears would have heard Jesus talk, having been called, as was common in that time, “Christ killer.” I can’t imagine what it would be like to associate the Jesus that I’m so ga-ga over with that kind of treatment from people who claim to be part of the religion he started. I have to admit, it’s a pretty reasonable thing to judge a religious figure by the behavior of the religion that he founded. So I can’t blame you for not picking up what Nancy and I were laying down in that trip to Toronto. 

Pastor Kenny’s very important
book, which got him thrown out of
the church he founded 45 years ago

By the way, it was fun to talk about that Toronto trip and to hear you say that you found it kind of interesting despite the fact that the God talk went on a little too much for your tastes. New converts to anything are a trip and I imagine I was one too. You should hear me talk to my friends who show any interest in my Fitbit. I get enthusiastic about things and want the whole world to adopt them. (Say Headly, have you tried the Fitbit? It’s amazing how it helps you be more active—I walk so much more now that I have one of these little wonders.)  But I digress again. I think you bring the elementary school of me, the Kenny locked up in Pastor Ken. 

I do know that there’s a connection between the mistreatment of the LGBT community and the Jewish community. In much the same way that anti-Semitism was tolerated in the Church for millennia—based on a handful of biblical texts taken out of historical context—a handful of texts taken out of historical context have propped up teachings that are harmful to vulnerable sexual minorities. The Second Vatican Counsel—which took place while we were growing up in Detroit—signaled an important reversal on this. Now there’s virtually no respectable Christian tradition in which it is OK to refer to Jewish people as “Christ-killers.”  Maybe the same reversal is underway today when it comes to sexual minorities. I certainly hope so.

And drum circles. I found it fascinating that you’ve gotten into them.  I’ve always thought they would be a blast.  I walk through the Diag sometimes and there’s a drum circle happening. They don’t seem to be looking for people to join them, but I’d like to. I always think of you now when I see them.  The feeling of connection with other people that happens with a drum circle has got to be pleasurable. You could do a lot worse for a communal spiritual practice than a drum circle. He said, approvingly.

OK now I have to figure out how send you this word doc via FB. Oh crap, is that even possible? 

Grace and peace to you, fellow pilgrim and pastoral letter writer.

Editor’s note: Kenneth John Wilson is my oldest friend in the world. We grew up together on Gilchrist Street in Detroit, catercorner from each other. We lost track of each other in the early ’70s.


Last year I was made aware that Pastor Kenny is shaking the foundations of organized Christianity with his book A Letter to my Congregation, which argues for full inclusion of the LGBT communities in all congregations. We have since reconnected to my extreme happiness.

There has been some slight editing of this Pastoral Letter for clarity and spelling.

Finding An Old Friend ► Unpacking My Detroit

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EMAIL TO: Pastor Kenny
SUBJECT: Long Time No See
Dear Pastor Kenny:
Lately my life is in turmoil. I am in need of something pastoral. Tag. You’re it.
I think back to the last time I saw you. If I’m not mistaken you were on your honeymoon with Nancy.
You visited me in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and, from my point of view, it was a very strange visit. Now that I think about it, it was the very last time I saw any of my childhood friends.
[I understand that Nancy has passed and that you’re remarried. Condolences and congratulations. I’m a sucker for love and it sounds like you have had decades of it.]
It was a strange visit for me because during much of your visit you and Nancy were trying to sell me on Jesus, despite knowing I grew up in a Jewish home and had even thrown off that religion years before. I had never known you to be evangelical before.
We had an amicable discussion, but neither of us convinced the other. When you left, you left behind (no pun intended) a Good News Bible, which you inscribed to me. I carried that Bible – along with a pilfered Gideon’s Bible, an Old Testament, and a book on Scientology – with me until about a decade ago, when I lost my small religious book section in my last break up.
Before the internet made biblical text searches much easier, I would refer to that Good News Bible occasionally for research, or just to rifle through it and read passages. Each time I couldn’t help but think of you and wondered what happened to you. I’ve thought of you often over the years and not always when reaching for that book. Just this summer, when I last visited family in Michigan, I went to Gilchrist. However, after taking a picture of my old house, I stood
and stared at yours for a while.
Outtake from While Detroit Crumbled, Gilchrist
Street Hung On. That’s Kenny Wilson’s house on
the far right, across the street, with Danny Harris
of the Gilchrist Block Club in the foreground.
This visit prompted me to write While Detroit Crumbled, Gilchrist Street Hung On.
I visit Gilchrist often because I’m still looking for something there. Me, I think.
As mentioned above, I have found my life to be chaotic as of
late. Pops is 88 and, after my mother died, I moved from Canada, where I lived for 35 years – taking out citizenship in the process – to take care of him. I’ve been in Sunrise, Florida, for the past 9 years. Some days are harder than others and on Friday I expressed my opinion to Pops at full volume.
Skip ahead to Sunday morning. I was still feeling remorseful that I lost my temper with Pops when I got an IM on Facebook from a name I didn’t recognize. She said she had lived on Fenmore. After exchanging a few messages it turns out I didn’t know her or her brother Randy at all. But then she asked me if I knew you.
I said “yes” and that you were one of my best friends growing up, and that I had been looking for you for years with no luck. Do you know how many Kenneth John Wilsons there are in this world? The internet was no help.
She told me you were a pastor in Ann Arbor, which I did not find surprising, considering our last encounter. However, what she told me next surprised me a great deal. She told me that you were the first person in Michigan to wed a same sex couple. I thought, “WAY TO GO, KENNY!!!” I am a long time supporter of the LGBT communities, believing they should have the right to marry in every state. Sadly I read today that all the Michigan marriages that happened in the interregnum are null and void. How sad for those people. How sad for love.
This book seems like a game-changer for evangelicals.
The internet was an immediate help in finding Pastor Kenneth Wilson, but I’ve still not confirmed you were the first to marry a same sex couple, or that you have actually wed any same sex couples. No matter. I have since read about your book ‘Letter to My Congregation’ and several interviews with you. It’s a brave stance.WAY TO GO, KENNY!!!
I have a hard time squaring that with the evangelicals I am always reading about. I know the squeaky wheel gets the ink, but I keep reading of evangelical hate for various factions of folk in this world, whether it’s The Gay, or the poor, or people of colour, or immigrants both documented and un. While the religion preaches love, there’s a whole lot of hate expressed quite openly. One shudders to think of what might be said in private.
Right after having this Facebook conversation I left for a drum circle. This is a new hobby/habit I’ve developed in the past year. It turns out that I still have no rhythm in my left hand, something I should have remembered when I tried to play guitar as a teenager. That’s why I was the singer in the band that Dean Donaldson drummed in; I couldn’t play an instrument. After 2 attempts at a drum circle I remembered that my left hand will simply not fire when I want it to. It’s pretty useless. However, I managed to find my niche within these drum circles by playing claves, which only needs one coordinated hand, while the other is passive.
What does this have to do with anything? Almost nothing, except this particular drum circle meets in Snyder Park, an oasis in the middle of a heavily industrial area of Fort Lauderdale. You would hardly know you were in the middle of a city. While in the park I took a panorama which I sent to my Facebookery with the caption “How pastoral.”
As I played the claves, and zoned out into the rhythm, I suddenly realized why the word “pastoral” came so readily to mind. By the time the drum circle had ended, I had already written parts of this email in my head.
So, what’s new with you?
Your childhood friend,
Marc Slootsky
P.S. I’m a writer and it looks like you are too. I’m planning on printing this email at the Not Now Silly Newsroom. Unless you expressly forbid otherwise, I plan to share your response, if there is one.

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Don’t forget to read my Not Now Silly blog and look for me on Twitter and facebook.

While Detroit Crumbled, Gilchrist Street Hung On

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The little house I used to live in.
Pops bought it for around $3,000 in 1957.

I left Detroit in 1971, but my parents stayed in the little house I used to live in for the next several years. I returned to Gilchrist Street frequently for visits until my parents moved 2 miles north, out of the city, into Oak Park.

Despite my parents having moved, I continued to return, year after year, decade after decade, from one millennia into the next. It seems almost a lifetime ago because it was. I rarely visited Motown without dropping in on the old neighbourhood. Gilchrist was my talisman. I was looking for truths that remained hidden, especially from me. So, I kept returning, reaching for something just beyond my vision; just past my memory. I was looking for something I never found.

This provides me with an overview to chart the devolution of a neighbourhood in a way that most can’t. I watched my old neighbourhood become infected with the disease that destroyed so much of Detroit, ‘Merka’s first throwaway city. It’s no accident I have been calling Detroit ‘Merka’s first throwaway city for almost 2 years. It was a case of “Out of sight, out of mind.” Until Detroit’s bankruptcy was announced — and an Emergency Manager appointed to oversee the democratically elected city government — most people had forgotten Detroit even existed.

Just one of hundreds of houses like this in my old neighbourhood

I can still recall my first memory of what would come to be called Urban Blight in later years. It was a large, mixed-use, yellow-bricked building on the surface/ service drive, viewed from the John C. Lodge Ditch. There would have once been apartments on the upper stories with storefronts at street level. I was 14 or 15 when it was boarded up. It remained boarded up for more than 30 years that I recall. Then the Lodge fell into disuse as the highway used to get in and out of downtown from the ‘burbs, so I don’t know what happened to it in the last 2 decades. For all I know it’s still there. Or, it may be gone by now, just another building missing from Motown’s landscape. But for me this building was far more iconic of Detroit’s road to ruin than the Michigan Central Station, which I had only seen in pictures.

White Flight, Urban blight, and Demolition by Neglect — in that order — are the major forces which have helped to destroy Detroit, the once proud Arsenal of Democracy. People tend to peg the fall and decline of Detroit with the 1967 Riot. However, they are shocked to discover it began almost immediately after Germany and Japan surrendered at the end of WWII.

Racial strife was so common in Detroit in the ’40s that propaganda
posters were made to warn people not to give comfort to the enemy.

There had already been several warnings. As I have written in The Detroit Riots, the 1863 Riot set the stage for most of what came after. That was a White Riot determined to eradicate Black folk from Detroit. In 1863 Detroit was such a new city, it didn’t have a police force yet. The rebellion had to be put down by the army. When the Detroit Police Department was formed soon after, it was tasked — IN THE INCORPORATING DOCUMENTS!!! — with keeping Blacks in line. And, Detroit Police took that oath seriously, right into the 1970s.

However, the warnings that should have been headed were those in the 1940s that indicated the races in Detroit were never going to get along. As Black and White soldiers were fighting Fascism overseas, those who remained on the home front fought each other. During the war Black and White southerners migrated to Detroit to take up jobs in the defense industry. Racial problems began almost immediately. As I wrote 2 years ago in The Detroit Riots:

When the Feds announced a housing projects [sic] for Detroit, on the edge of a traditional White neighbourhood, the local community assumed it was for their own kind. When it was named the Sojourner Truth housing project, Whites protested. The government reversed its decision and decided this would be for Whites and it would find another location for a Black housing project, even tho’ it would retain the Truth name. Then Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries, Jr. got involved and the Feds reversed their decision again: This housing would be for the Black people of Detroit who desperately needed housing. On moving day Whites protested, turning away the first families. It was months before people would eventually move in.

That was just the appetizer. Less than a year later there was a wildcat strike at the Packard Motor Plant after the company promoted 3 Black men to work the line. According to the WikiWackyWoo:

In early June 1943, three weeks before the riot, Packard Motor Car Company promoted three blacks to work next to whites in the assembly lines. This promotion caused 25,000 whites to walk off the job, effectively slowing down the critical war production. It was clear that whites didn’t mind that blacks worked in the same plant but refused to work side-by-side with them. During the protest, a voice with a Southern accent shouted in the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.”[7]

Then came the 1943 Detroit Riot. That was really the beginning of the end. White Flight began the minute it could. It started when peace was declared, increased as prosperity reigned, and became a wave when vast subdivisions were thrown up north of 8 Mile, outside the city limits. White Flight only became a tsunami after the 1967 Riot.

Two houses on Biltmore Street a few doors down from The Millers

Today Detroit’s population of 700,000 is a fraction of its 1950 peak of 1.8 million. Entrepreneurs are buying up whole swaths of Detroit for wholesale gentrification. Tens of thousands (!) of abandoned structures are slated for demolition by new blight removal programs. Urban farms are being planted where houses, parks and schools once stood. Detroit is being transformed and what it will become is anybody’s guess at the moment

Returning frequently, I watched the urban blight grow over the decades. It was as pernicious as the mold and mildew that attacks houses in the south. It kept nibbling around the edges, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until it reached my old neighbourhood just on the northern edge of Detroit, immediately south of the famed 8 Mile Road. Then I watched as it infected block after block of the square mile I lived in bounded by 8 Mile and 7 Mile Roads, with Greenfield and Southfield to the east and west. Now, in that square mile are hundreds of homes boarded up, burned up, or missing entirely.

Danny Harris. of the Gilchrist Block Club, cutting the grass

As the years took its toll on Detroit, something unexpected happened to Gilchrist, the street I grew up on: NOTHING!!!

While every surrounding block had anywhere from 3-10 destroyed homes per block, Gilchrist — from Pembroke Avenue to 8 Mile Road — still appeared to be in pristine condition. While I watched blight strike everywhere else in my old neighbourhood, somehow this half mile stretch of Gilchrist was spared.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Obviously I didn’t drive up and down every street in Detroit on my 2nd Annual Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research, but I must have driven some
20-30 miles just up and down the streets in my old neighbourhood. I saw no other half mile stretch that appeared to be untouched
by blight except this 1/2 mile stretch of Gilchrist. There were small stretches of nice, but not a full half
mile of it.

TO BE FAIR: On closer inspection there are a few boarded up houses along Gilchrist, but because the lawns are kept neat and tidy, they don’t jump out at you the way they do on the other blocks. And, there are far fewer of them on Gilchrist.

While taking pictures of my old house I ran into Danny Harris two doors down. Mr. Harris is a member of the registered non-profit Gilchrist Block Club, a kind of “Keep Gilchrist Beautiful” community group in operation since 1984. Harris was cutting the grass of the house at the corner of Hessel. While he lived closer to Pembroke, Mr. Harris walked his lawnmower 3 blocks to take care of this patch of grass. Perhaps this community volunteerism is what spared Gilchrist from the same fate that’s affected all the other surrounding blocks.

Retired Detroit police officer Robert Miller on Biltmore Street

Biltmore, one street to the east, has no block club. Just around the corner from where Harris cut the grass live Robert and Kim Miller. The Millers bought their home 28 years ago and watched the block slowly crumble around them. The two houses pictured above are just a few doors down from the Millers, whose front yard is a testament to how a little landscaping and care can make all the difference.

Robert is a retired Detroit Police officer who paid for his home about what Pops got for his when he moved to the suburbs. At the time the neighbourhood was solidly middle class, but changing demographics rapidly as the first blocks in this neighbourhood were “busted” in the mid-to-late ’70s. That’s when White Flight would have begun in the area, accelerating over the years.

Now, on paper, Robert Miller’s house on Biltmore is worth the same $30,000 that he paid for it. However, he can’t even get offers on a house in a neighbourhood where hundreds of homes are abandoned and crumbling. He and his wife have their eye on a gated-condo complex in Novi, Michigan, with amenities, where they will be moving within the next 6 months. They’ll leave the house to their daughter, hoping that eventually the neighbourhood will stage a comeback. It can hardly get worse.

However, no comeback for Gilchrist Street because Gilchrist never left. I’ve watched this street for the past 40 years. It hasn’t changed. It hasn’t become blighted. It hasn’t suffered the same fate as miles and miles of Motown housing tracts. Gilchrist may offer clues to Detroit’s revival, provided the city’s not gentrified beyond recognition.

Yet visiting my old neighbourhood never fails to make me cry. This time it was my Junior High School that got to me and began the waterworks. Last year Coffey Junior High School was still in operation. Now it’s one of many schools closed as Detroit’s population, and tax base, can no longer support so many schools. However, the scrappers have already started to strip it of anything and everything of value.

This is why, for me, Detroit represents the total failure of ‘Merkins to live up to the lofty words about equality inscribed in the founding documents. Everything that subsequently happened to Detroit happened because of systemic Racism and White Flight. Your mileage may vary, but I contend that if people learned to live together decades ago, Detroit would not have become ”Merka’s first throwaway city.

 

The 2nd Annual Sunrise to Canton Road Trip For Research

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NOW UPDATED!!!

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! SECOND YEAR RUNNING!! MORE THAN 3,000 MILES OF HARD ROAD!!! WORSE FOOD!!!! SIGN UP EARLY!!!!!! DON’T MISS OUT!!!!! MORE EXCLAMATION POINTS THAN LAST YEAR!!!!!!!

Last year’s Sunrise to Canton Road Trip For Research was such a rousing success, that I am doing it all over again in 2014. However, this year I’m adding a week to the festivities and YOU’RE ALL INVITED!!!
CANTON, MICHIGAN

Fun fact: Canton is a township, not a town
• Official Wesbite •
• Wikipedia Entry •
• Canton Weather •
• Public Safety Office •
• Public Library •

◄ MEDIA ►
• Observer and Eccentric – Canton •
• Plymouth-Canton Patch •
• Canton Videos •
• Canton at ClickOn Detroit •

◄ WHAT’S UP IN CANTON? ►
• Things to do in Canton •
• Attractions near Canton •
• IKEA Canton •

◄ BOOKS ABOUT CANTON ►
• Canton Township •
• Cornerstones: A History of
Canton Township Families •

◄ BOOKS THAT MENTION CANTON ►
• Seven Fatality Christmas Tree Fire •
• Encyclopedia of Invasive Species: From
Africanized Honey Bees to Zebra Mussels •
• Leaving Home to Find Home •

◄ NOTABLE RESIDENTS OF CANTON ►
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED: I will be leaving Sunrise, Florida on the 13th of July and heading north to Michigan. While in the Wolverine State I will be conducting some research, collecting more documents, exploring the 8 Mile Wall, and gathering further historical context for Farce Au Pain.
Naturally I’ll be traveling up and down the I-95 and/or I-75 corridors. If you live somewhere not too far off those beaten tracks — and want the full Aunty Em experience — then get in touch with me privately. We’ll exchange info and I’ll add you to my itinerary.
DON’T BE SHY: Maybe you live too far from those highways, but still want to meet. Why not suggest a halfway point somewhere along the road? We can see if that’s doable. Speak up. Now’s your chance. I’m open to suggestions.
A FUNTASTIC OFFER TO ALL MY MICHIGAN FRIENDS: Just as I did last year, I will be setting up a “Meet & Greet” for all of us to get together. It will probably take place at a coffee shop to be named later. However, I’m open to other suggestions for a Michigan Meet Up because I know my Michigan friends know some incredible places.
NB: I’ll be putting together my intinerary between now and just before I leave on July 13th. However, it won’t get ‘locked in’ until the day before I leave. If you can handle that uncertainty, you’re the kind of people I want to meet.
MAY 28 UPDATE: There are already 5 separate stops booked on the 2014 Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research. So far the trip totals 3050 miles, for a total driving time of 5 days, 6 hours and 4 minutes, give or take a rest stop, or two.

MAY 30 UPDATE: Not Now Silly has added 1 more definite stop — and one possible — on the 2014 Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research. Amazingly, this adds only 27 miles to the road trip because they are so close to the highway. Confirmed stops on the Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Researchinclude: Bonita Springs, FL; Tallahassee, FL; Miamisburg, OH; Columbus, OH; Canton, MI; Elyria, OH; and Morgantown, WV; with Cleveland, OH as the possible.

I’ve also recalculated the driving time. That was based on 8 hour days. I tend to drive until I drop, so I’ve asked the computer program (Microsoft Streets & Trips) to calculate the trip based on 11 hour days, which is more realistic. That puts my driving time at 4 days, 2 hours, and 9 minutes.

ALL DATES AND TIMES SUBJECT TO CHANGE!

Read: Not Now Silly and/or Road Trips

Where Did July Go? ► Unpacking The Writer

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As July almost comes to a close, it’s time to look back on what has been an especially exciting month for me. A website I read and respect has seen fit to publish a few of my articles this month. 

My more faithful readers may have already found Why Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law Has Got To Go and Detroit is the New Conservative Wet Dream over at PoliticusUSA. If you’ve not been over there, take a look and let me know what you think. Thanks go to Managing Editor Sarah Jones who recognized my writing ability. While I will still keep updating Not Now Silly several times a week, I will also be freelancing for other publications, such as PoliticusUSA. I already know this writer/editor relationship won’t be the total disaster WebVee Guide turned out to be.

However, by far the best new thing on the internet this month — maybe the entire year — is what happens when you plug “Flying Monkey Squad” into the Googalizer Image Search Engine:

For the uninitiated, The Flying Monkey Squad™ is the name I’ve given to Mark Koldys, aka Johnny Dollar, Ashley Graham, aka Grayhammy, and the entire crew of J$’s ass-kissing sychophants. I don’t know of any of those fancy, schmancy SEO tricks, but clearly I must be doing something right.

Facts & Figures: Top Ten for July

Another thing I must be doing right is delivering words people want to read. The Top 10 for the month are, for the most part, blog posts I’m quite proud of. You can compare how this month stacks up with my All Time Top Ten by taking a gander at the column on the right.

The Top Ten For July

  1. The Detroit Riots ► Unpacking My Detroit ► Part Five
  2. Another Dispatch From Detroit, ‘Merka’s First Throwaway City
  3. Loofah Lad’s Attack Dog Jesse Watters Attacks LGBT Folk
  4. The First Three Stooges ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
  5. Brian Jones ► A Musical Appreciation [My all time most popular post]
  6. No Skin In The Game ► Part One
  7. How Jamaica Conquered The World ► The Day I Met Bob Marley
  8. Happy Birthday Doc Pomus ► A Musical Appreciation
  9. The Case of the Growing Child ► Perry Mason and Me
  10. Dance Music To Change The World ► Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela

If you’ve gotten this far, it’s because you care. Show you truly care by clicking on one of the adverts in the right column on this page. It won’t cost you a thing, but I make a few pennies, and I do mean few. Show you really, really care by clicking two adverts.

Advertising makes the world go round.

Another Dispatch From Detroit, ‘Merka’s First Throwaway City

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Once upon a time Detroit was called “The Arsenal of Democracy.” However, the consequences of 60 years of White Flight — systemic racism, to be blunt — finally came home to roost in Detroit, my hometown. On July 18, 2013, at approximately 4:06 PM EDT, Detroit’s unelected, possibly illegal, Emergency Manager Kevin Orr filed for bankruptcy. 

It’s conventional wisdom — conventional, but completely wrong — that Detroit’s White Flight began after the 1967 riot. White Flight had already been going on for almost 20 years at that point. The ’67 riot only accelerated the exodus.

Detroit: The Arsenal of Democracy

Detroit’s race problems go right back to the earliest days of the city. In my earlier [very long] essay The Detroit Riots I report on the little known 1943 riot and the far lesser known 1863 riot. Understanding these earlier riots is the key to understanding Detroit’s current demographics. Both of these earlier riots not only set the table for the 1967 riot, but also set the table for the Detroit’s systemic racism, which manifested itself in the White Flight that eventually killed the Motor City.

The 1863 Detroit riot exploded in the wake of Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration. There had already been tensions between Blacks and Whites, and the openly racist Detroit Free Press was happy to fan the flames for months on end. When a rumour swept through the neighbourhoods that a Black man did something, something, something to a White person, White folks went crazy. [Isn’t that always the way? See: May 31, 1921 ► When Whites Went Crazy In Tulsa] They roamed the streets screaming, “Kill all the niggers,” beating people on sight. At the time it became known as “the bloodiest day that ever dawned on Detroit.”

Prior to that day Detroit did not have a police force. However, one was quickly formed and in the original incorporating documents the city fathers of Detroit made it clear that one of its primary jobs would be to keep the Blacks folk in line.

A sign in Detroit during the war, when the Feds proposed
to build Black housing to relieve overcrowding

The 1943 Detroit riot came during war time, but it also came in the midst of what has been called The Great Migration, when rural and southern Blacks made their way to cities in the north. Detroit was clamoring for unskilled workers and Black folk came by the tens of thousands. However, that didn’t mean anyone wanted to share their neighbourhoods with Black folk, nor work side-by-side with them. The 1943 riot was a result of these tensions and more.

[This is the simplified version. The conditions that led to these 3 riots are explained in much greater detail in The Detroit Riots, my earlier article on these topics.]

As soon as World War Two was over, prosperity reigned, in Detroit and across the nation. Part of that prosperity was due to the fact that all across the country houses had to be built for all the returning soldiers. ‘Merka saw a housing boom like no other. This was great for the economy and for the growing White Middle Class. However, it didn’t trickle down to Black folk.

In the Detroit area, developers started building north of 8 Mile, the city limits made famous by Eminem’s 2002 movie. These suburbs grew exponentially during the ’50s and ’60s and were attractive to the people with the same mindset as those who refused to share their neighbourhoods and work places with Blacks during the 40s.

The last remnant of a vibrant Black
neighbourhood and business district

Black families were redlined out of the suburbs, just as they were from most of the neighbourhoods in north Detroit. During the ’40s and ’50s Blacks were unable to expand much beyond Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, the neighbourhoods they already occupied. During the early ’50s a few Middle Class Blacks moved to the 12th Street area, which had been predominantly White. That’s when the first Whites started leaving because — you guessed it — they didn’t want to live in the same neighbourhood as Blacks. By the time Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were razed for I-75, the die was cast. The only area accepting Black folk was surrounding 12th Street, because the first Blacks had already “busted the blocks,” in the parlance of the day. White folk fucked off in droves. The entire demographics of the neighbourhood reversed itself in a single decade. [This is also told in greater detail in The Detroit Riots.]

Then came several decades of terrible local government, which just made
everything in Detroit a whole lot worse. But, let’s be clear. What these
politicians made worse was already there: an absolute division of Black
and White and the continued blighting of a once great city. Systemic
racism is the foundation on which it was built. The White folk of Wayne
County moved across 8 Mile and, quite literally, turned their back on
Detroit.

That, dear reader, has been the story of Detroit from the very beginning. As soon as Black folk gained a small toehold in a neighbourhood, that neighbourhood eventually turned all Black. Block by block. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Until the entire city was virtually Black, while the suburbs became predominantly White. Eventually integration came to the suburbs, but it never had a chance in the City of Detroit.

IRONY ALERT:
Detroit’s seal, which represents the fire of 1803
Speramus Meliora = We hope for better things
Resurcet Cineribus = It will rise from the ashes

This White Flight to the suburbs reduced Detroit’s population and ‘Merka’s systemic racism kept it low. At one
time there were almost 2 million people in Detroit proper. When I was
growing up in Detroit, we were proud to call Detroit the 5th largest
city in the country. Now it’s the 18th, sandwiched between Charlotte,
North Carolina, and El Paso, Texas. Its population of just over 700,000
is about a 3rd of what it was during the go go ’50s. As the city’s
population shrank, so did it’s tax base. These are the conditions that led to Detroit’s bankruptcy.

This would be as good a time to remind people that Detroit is responsible for two things that not only made ‘Merka better, but made ‘Merka great: Cars and Motown. These products of Detroit have been bought and sold all around the country during the same 6 decades that Detroit has slid into decline. Detroit cars and Motown — and it almost seems like they were made for each other — were bought and sold all around the world over the last 6 decades.

The people north of 8 Mile, the greater country at large, and the rest of the world took ittle notice of the problems facing Detroit until recently. During the last 6 decades they couldn’t have cared less what was happening to the city. That’s why I call Detroit ‘Merka’s first throwaway city.

Take it away, MC5:


CRANK IT UP!!!

Further Reading on Not Now Silly:
Unpacking My Detroit