In Michigan, Still Waiting for the Renaissance

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GM assembly plant

Christopher Morris / VII for TIME

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That nostalgia is what's Michigan about Seger--just take those old records off the shelf. I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself. You hear it in the retro-rock of Detroit bands like the Von Bondies or the White Stripes (who recorded the autoworker anthem "The Big Three Killed My Baby"). And you hear its flip side in Eminem, whose movie 8 Mile was about a guy trying to escape his Detroit trailer park. His ticket out is rap, not the assembly line, but his defiance is as American as any ode to Chevys: "Success is my only m_____f____ option/ Failure's not."

Ironically, whether or not America stands by the car companies, and whether or not the car companies stand by their workers, Michigan still stands by the car companies. When my dad, not an autoworker but a union guy, needed a new car, he would go to Art Moran's dealership in Southfield, Mich., and come back the same day with whatever sedan Pontiac was making at the time. There was no shopping around, no consulting Consumer Reports. Car-buying, American-car-buying, was instinctual, habitual. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit.)

Even now, when I drive my Toyota-made Scion XB--sorry, Dad--from New York to Michigan, I can see the import logos dwindle as I go up I-75. The car culture is hardwired. You want to visit Detroit, you drive; there's no suburban-train system, as there is even in L.A. The only public-transit rail is the People Mover, a system that travels in a small circle downtown, stopping at the Renaissance Center--the gleaming hotel-and-office complex whose name has promised a turnaround, someday, since 1977--and near the Greektown casino, one of three that sprang up in 1999-2000. (This spring the casino filed for bankruptcy, its adjacent hotel looming over it unfinished.)

Michiganders are not blindly loyal. Chrysler worker Nathaniel Wilkerson, 55, gets angry at bosses queueing up for a bailout while planning pain for the assembly line: "Upper management was just lining their pockets. Now it's come back to bite them, and we have to suffer." They're not blind to the ironies of protecting the "American" auto industry, when "domestic" cars may be made overseas and "foreign" cars in the U.S. And in Michigan, like everywhere else, Walmart--and its cheap, cheap imported products--abounds.

Still, the pull of Buy American is powerful. In Flint, blighted by auto-industry outsourcing, 96% of drivers drove domestic cars, according to a 2002 study--the highest rate in the nation. During the presidential campaign, the Obama camp aired an ad in Michigan attacking John McCain for owning three foreign cars. The spot may not have done the job single-handedly, but little more than a week later, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan.

Obama made one of his biggest campaign missteps when he said that people "get bitter [and] cling" to guns, religion and antipathy in depressed regions like the Rust Belt. But behind his condescending phrasing was a truth. When concrete reality is so hard to change, culture and symbolism are all the more important. You want to believe in the place where you live. If you grew up in Michigan and chose to stay, it's for deeply felt reasons: your family, the Midwestern lifestyle, the natural beauty, Detroit's industrial charm. You stick by Detroit--even if Detroit, as an industry, hasn't stuck by you. You need to hope.

Michigan hoped again in the late '90s, when the SUV boom was briefly boosting the car companies and a new owner came in to renovate the Renaissance Center. The fortress-like concrete beams around the complex were torn down, opening it to Detroit's streets. And the new owner put its corporate headquarters in the towers, staking the center's future to its own and placing a bet on Detroit.

That new corporate tenant? General Motors, now fighting annihilation. The Lions? They're zero and 12. And the renaissance? Pushed back again. Just like old times.

See pictures of the recession of 1958.

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