In Michigan, Still Waiting for the Renaissance

If you grew up in Southeast Michigan in the past four decades, as I did, you were raised among reminders that things used to be better, once, before you came along. The empty factories. The abandoned blocks in Detroit. The grade-school U.S. maps with the retro pictures, on Michigan's mitten, of Model T's and '57 Chevys. The headlines from the 1970s read like the headlines of 2008: The mayor of Detroit was in trouble. The Lions were losing. And the auto industry was disappearing.

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When a state lives with a story line of decline for so long, it doesn't just affect the mood. It becomes part of the culture. Whereas America's history has been one of expanding horizons, yours has become funnel-shaped. Much like the postbellum South, Rust Belt culture looks backward at an idealized past--a nostalgia not for plantations but for three-bedroom houses paid up on blue collar salaries. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit.)

"It used to be you could get a job at one of those factories, even without an education, and make a decent living to support your family," says letter carrier Dina Schueller, 33, of Saranac. Now her husband has been laid off from his construction job, and her brother moved to Maryland for work. Like many left-behind Michiganders, she'll be seeing fewer family members this season. "Christmas was always his favorite holiday," she says of her brother. "He was always the first one up."

I can understand why people in other parts of the country (like some in Michigan) hate the idea of bailing out Detroit. Why pay for other people's mistakes? Is making cars any more American than any other business? Jobs are globalizing and industries are transforming in every sector. What's so damn special about them?

On the other hand, who ever aired a commercial linking baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and washing machines? When were you ever told, "It's not just your flat-screen TV. It's your freedom"? This is not an argument for the bailout. But it is to say that when the country turns away from you as the maker of a symbol--well, it feels personal.

Michigan, after all, did not romanticize the automobile by itself. We made the cars; the mythology of open-road optimism was an after-market accessory. It was the work of advertising agencies in New York that rhymed U.S.A. with Chevrolet; Californians like the Beach Boys and George Lucas, who made American Graffiti; New Jerseyans like Bruce Springsteen, who sang about pink Cadillacs, Chevrolet Deluxes and suicide machines sprung from cages out on Highway 9.

Michigan's own relation to car culture tends to be more wistful. After the Motown era, which more or less coincided with the end of Detroit's glory days as a city and an industry, you have to look hard to find songs by Michigan musicians about driving. Instead, Bob Seger--Michigan's Springsteen, who gave Chevrolet its "Like a Rock" slogan--reminisced about the backseat of his '60 Chevy in "Night Moves" and sang "Makin' Thunderbirds" about workers building Ford muscle cars in 1955: "They were long and low and sleek and fast/ They were classic in a word."

See pictures of the recession of 1958.

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