Somewhere else I will offer a full critique of this "special report," penned by Daniel Okrent, who is quick to let readers know that he himself is a Detroiter as if the fact ensures fair treatment.
It is my practice to deal at the outset with what I call the first frame, that is, the titling of one's rhetoric. In this case, the front cover visual, Detroit's factory ruins, the title "The Tragedy of Detroit (How a great city fell--and how it can rise again), and the publication's own title "Time" (its "T" placed partially behind one of the abandoned buildings) together send a message that is to me, very readable, very clear. The time for America to return to this city is emerging.
One may ask whether Detroit is in fact a tragedy, and there are any number of ways to address that question, most in the affirmative. Asking, then, may simply be an exercise of sorts. But there is another reason to ask, and that is to call into question the idea that what happened to Detroit (and what continues to happen to Detroit even as I write) was not purposeful, i.e., planned. Was there not a concerted effort to kill this city? Asking if Detroit is really a tragedy simply pushes people to confront who the actors were and are. How can one say that Othello is a tragedy without psychologically deconstructing Iago? Detroit did not self-destruct any more than Othello did. However, Detroit was also not a victim of clever manipulation. No. Detroit, simply put, was abandoned by private industry, private citizens, and government--regional and national. And, I am hardly the first person to make this point.
One more word about this article's first frames. Once inside the cover, we are offered yet another title--Notown--written quite boldly. "Notown?" This time, the words appear in black against a white backdrop, and the opposite page is in fact a frame, an apparently gutted building, deconstructed down to the brick interior wall. A window, missing its panes, frames the "abandoned" city below. Fiery-looking grass, with a tuft of green scattered here and there, suggests natural death as well. While it is true that Detroit lost half of its population since the 1950s, there remain upwards of 900,000 residents. Can that large a population be ignored, i.e., rhetorically exterminated in one fell swoop? The answer obviously is yes. Can nearly a million people be erased from the American imagination? Perhaps the answer to that question is more tricky, and it is, arguably, the exact question whose answer the American return to Detroit may depend upon.
While Okrent's is to be an analysis of what happened to Detroit (he offers a list of those to blame), it also offers reason for optimism. The Motor City, he says, can rise again. Call me paranoid, but my suspicion is that Detroit is soon to be a frontier again, and as with every frontier, the natives must be relocated, killed off, or so fully reprogrammed that they won't know until the takeover is well under way that they have been duped yet again .
