Dan Calabrese

I try not to let myself get too parochial when writing for The National, but the problems facing Detroit ought to serve as a warning to a nation that often shows too many signs of spiraling in the same direction.

Ghost city.

One of the biggest problems facing Detroit is the tendency of those who have spent their lives there – from business leaders to elected officials to media – to succumb to forest-for-the-trees disease. They either fail to recognize the fundamental problems with how things are done there, perhaps because they’ve never known anything else, or they reflexively spring into action against “Detroit-bashing,” often missing an opportunity to learn something important in the process.

One member of the Detroit media who has managed to avoid this disease is Daniel Howes of The Detroit News. Most of Howes’s writing focuses on the automotive industry, and there he opens the reader’s eyes on a consistent basis to the phenomenon of what he calls the “Detroit bubble.” But he sometimes ventures into broader topics, and today Howes holds forth on the larger tragedy represented by the abysmal student performance numbers recently made public from the Detroit Public Schools.

The entire piece is exceptionally poignant, but here is where Howes really gets to the heart of the matter:

Charles Dickens would be all over this story. His likely take would be devastating: The self-absorption, preening egos and petty power trips of those in charge begetting wave after wave of young people unprepared for the challenges and change of contemporary society.

His tale of this city would feature a parade of squabbling school board members who don’t know governance from management and whose over-riding obsessions are dividing the spoils among competing interests. There would be union loudmouths who defend teachers’ performance even as the quantifiable results go from bad to worse to inexcusable.

There would be the parents who don’t help and others who don’t set the right tone as still others search for ways out. And there would be state legislators too content to look the other way, business leaders who say it’s not their problem, outsiders who look in with contempt and a governor afraid to wield the full force of her powers in the name of a single word: stop.

This is the unraveling of an American city, a haunting parallel to the reckoning that is forcing fundamental change on the Detroit auto industry, its people, unions and communities. The keepers of the city’s institutions are desperately fighting to maintain a status quo that is operationally broken, intellectually spent and morally indefensible.

I would advise anyone who would like to see the real-life result of this leadership malpractice to drive the city’s neighborhoods and see the devastation, the burnt-out houses and the hopelessness on the faces of the people who wander by. I’m not sure I should advise that, though, because if you take my advice you are likely putting your own life in danger.

And while I’m sure many of my regular readers will jump on this as an example of liberalism run wild, I have to tell you that this is not strictly an ideological story. It is true that Democrats have run Detroit forever, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the classic liberal view of government as the essential master to be served has helped spawn the fiefdoms and corruption that characterize Detroit.

But that is only part of the story, and I’m not even sure it’s one of the biggest parts. Today’s Detroit was created by generations of leaders who were guilty of far worse than misguided ideology. They were guilty of complete and utter disregard for the best interests of the citizenry. And when far too many of your citizens are perfectly happy to sit back and let it happen while destroying themselves via drugs, crime, prostitution and any number of other societal pathologies, you have a toxic combination that cannot be primarily pinned on ideology.

It’s hard to imagine a sadder story. I love Detroit. My immigrant grandfather settled there, got a job at Ford Motor Company and worked on the line for 40 years, raising my dad and my aunt in a modest but perfectly livable – back then – Detroit neighborhood.

If you travel downtown today, you can still see the deteriorating remains of what was once an incredibly viable city. But it’s getting hard to recognize any of it, and far too many of the people who should be committed to fixing all this are merely protecting their own interests.

New Mayor Dave Bing, a former Detroit Pistons great and a successful businessman, seems to be a responsible man who understands the reality of the situation. That offers some reason for hope. But so much is wrong here, and leadership remains compromised in so many quarters, it’s hard to see how any one person – even the mayor of the city – can affect enough change to truly make a dent in all that is wrong here.

But we can pray that he can, and we should, because the things that ruined Detroit could ruin any other part of this nation – or all of it, if we let them.

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