no man is an island

I’m looking for some kind of point here, but I’m not seeing anything. Detroit was riding high for many years because of the auto industry which became arrogant and inflexible and fell and took the city with it. Most of the people with means left to get jobs elsewhere leaving the people without means to remain there and sometimes behave badly. End of story, could happen to anybody, so what?

You know Beagles, you have an itchy secede finger, you are always wanting to secede from something, the country, part of the state, even Cheboygan, to stand proudly with your cracked deer rifle facing the border where all the gay dogs howl because they will never get to marry you, because Beaglesonia forbids it.

I’m sure you know the impossibility of seceding, and it is some kind of running joke with you. “No man is an island,” said that tiresome long-winded, as many of them are, old timey English poet. He did not say “No man is an island except Beagles.”

When Detroit was fat and providing all those fat jobs to the young lads of Cheboygan and filling the coffers of the state which built the roads and infrastructure of Cheboygan, did it say screw these hicks who are taking the jobs that Detroiters should keep for themselves and spending our money on improvements to their desolate waste, we should secede their ass. They did not, out of the good of their hearts they held out their hands to you, and now that Detroit is no longer your sugar daddy you want to secede. Shame.

And what do riots have to do with it? And of course when we are talking about riots we are not talking about what white people do when their sports team wins something or other, we are talking about black people looting liquor stores in some podunk neighborhood of theirs. Some of the black people like it because they feel like they are standing up to whitey. Some of the white people like it because it is proof of the world going to hell because of the liberals. CNN likes it because they can stay away from those boring shows where there panels of experts drone on forever about something they know nothing about.

Maybe I am going overboard here, and you know I decry some of my fellow liberals who see racism everywhere, but I see a bit of racism in the elevation of riots to a big event causing something like oh, white flight out of Detroit. People watch The Grapes of Wrath and feel for those Okies, and they look at those photo books of craggy Appalachians, and they think they should lend a hand, out of the good of their hearts. But then they look at black people rioting in their outlandish hip hop clothes and their obscenity-laced anti whitey slogans, and even though these are less than one percent of all blacks, they think they don’t need to do anything to help black people because look how they act. They just want to secede from them and keep them off their island.

Some friends from St Joseph are arriving today for my opening and they will be around until Monday, so I probably won’t be getting back to The Institute until Tuesday.