Mark Steyn - After America

SEE THE U.S.A. IN YOUR CHEVROLET

You don’t have to engage in H.G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he’d landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier.

It didn’t used to be: “When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold.” When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something—unless you’re entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it’s a wasteland. It’s a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company’s head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur. 11

In 2009, General Motors had a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. 12For purposes of comparison, GM’s market capitalization was then about $2.4 billion versus Toyota’s $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). 13General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The United Auto Workers is the AARP in an Edsel: it has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). 14GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan were making a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler, and GM a loss of $500 to $1,500. 15

That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that quickly became a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation thirty years earlier, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. Telling your political allies they can now go on overpaying themselves in perpetuity is a piece of cake.

When the going gets tough, the tough get bailed out. Your car business operates on a failed business model? Don’t worry, the taxpayers will prop that failed business model up forever. You went bananas on your credit card and can’t pay it back? Order another round and we’ll pass a law to make it the bank’s fault. Your once Golden State has decayed into such a corrupt racket of government cronyism that the remaining revenue generators are fleeing your borders faster than you can raise taxes on them? Relax, we’re lining up a federal bailout for you, too. Your unreadable newspaper woke up from its 96-page Obama Full Color Inaugural Souvenir bender to discover that its advertising revenue had collapsed with the real-estate market and GM dealerships? Hey, lighten up, John Kerry’s already been pleading your case in the Senate. 16Is it really so hard to picture the President calling the Mayor to assure him he has no plans to move the New York Times out of New York?

America is now a land that rewards failure—at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?

Nobody did this to Detroit. The city and its business and civic leaders did this to themselves. In once functioning parts of Africa, civil war, a resurgent Islam, and other forces have done a grand job of reversing all the progress of the twentieth century. But the deterioration of Sierra Leone or Somalia is as nothing compared to the heights from which Detroit has slid.

Entire blocks are deserted, and the city is proposing to turn commercial land back into pasture—on the unlikely proposition that attracting Michiganders to graze Holsteins between crack houses will lead to urban renewal.

For a coffee-table book of ineffable sadness, two French photojournalists, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, wandered through the rubble of lost grandeur: the ruined auditorium of the United Artists Theater, built in 1928 in the Spanish-Gothic style, abandoned in the Seventies. 17The shattered ballroom, with upturned grand piano, of the Lee Plaza Hotel, an art deco landmark from 1929, derelict since the Nineties. The Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, pews splintered, dust-caked Bibles and hymnals scattered across the floors. Messieurs Marchand’s and Meffre’s predecessors would have seen such scenes in bombed-out European cities circa 1945.

But this was America, and no bombs fell. And the physical decay is as nothing to the deterioration of human capital: 44 percent of adults in the city have a reading comprehension below Grade Six level. 18Or to put it another way: nearly half the grown-ups in Detroit could not graduate from elementary school. And, believe me, what Sixth Grade requires of American 12-year-olds is no great shakes.

According to Time magazine: “The estimated functional illiteracy rate in the city limits hovers near 50 percent.”

With that pool of potential employees, why would anybody start a business in Detroit? What could you hire people to do?

Detroit did this to itself.

Well, you say, maybe things’ll brighten up with the next generation?

Don’t hold your breath. In March 2010, the president of the School Board, Otis Mathis, sent out the following email:

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats. 19

Here’s another one from President Mathis:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?

A while back, I heard the English writer Anthony Daniels read aloud some correspondence from Jack the Ripper’s first victim, a 43-year-old domestic servant called Mary Anne Nichols. In 1888, the year of her murder, she wrote to her father:

I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place, and going on all right up to now…. It is a grand place inside, with trees and garden back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotalers, and religious, so I ought to get on…. 20

Mary Anne Nichols was born in 1845—a quarter-century before the Education Act brought universal elementary schooling to all children in England and Wales. The correspondence of an uneducated domestic servant in and out of workhouses and prostitution is nevertheless written with better expression, better spelling, better punctuation and, indeed, more human feeling than the president of the School Board in a major American city.