I

have to admit it — I fell asleep at my computer last night while doing some

research for today’s program, and I had the most amazing dream.  Well, maybe it was a daydream.

 In it, I was listening to a nationally known journalist and historian talk about his new book recapping the stories he had covered and the history of the last forty or so years.

 “Most people don’t remember this,” he said.  “But if the United States hadn’t adopted ranked choice voting in the 1990s, President Al Gore might have lost the 2000 election to George Bush, who at that time was the governor of Texas.  You can never know for sure,” he continued.

“But a Bush presidency might have been a disaster.  As we know, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, President Gore speedily occupied Afghanistan, and in a brief firefight, U.S. Army Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in a cave that December.

“Following that, a multinational coalition occupied Afghanistan, and Gore, his popularity boosted, was able to rally Congress to enact much of his major agenda to fight climate change.

“Governor Bush criticized that, and in 2005, during a

bizarre interview with Fox News, said he would have used 9/11 as an excuse to

invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, who he accused of “trying to kill my

dad.”  That, foreign policy experts

agree, made no sense.

“In any event, the former governor agreed he was much

happier as Commissioner of baseball than he would have been in the White

House.  But Bush did say he was very

disappointed in what had become of his Republican Party. After losing six

straight Presidential elections, the GOP went off on a bizarre tangent in 2016,

nominating a self-promoting New York developer who pledged to “Make America

Great Again,” despite showing an appalling ignorance of any policy questions. In

the end, after a bizarre sex tape surfaced, Donald Trump won only four small

states.

“Today,” the author continued, “we take our peace and

prosperity for granted. 

“But it’s interesting to note that without ranked

choice voting, Bush would actually have won the 2000 election by carrying

Florida by less than a thousand votes, and our history might have been very

different.” 

At that point, I woke up, shaken, dazed — and

convinced.

Convinced, that is, that Instant Runoff Voting, as I prefer

to call it, is an idea whose time has come. But I also know that it will be

very hard to sell politicians on changing the status quo.

The Peace Corps should be a much easier sell these

days.  I wish I had joined years ago.

There was a long waiting list when I was younger, one of the consequences of

the Vietnam War.

But if my circumstances were different, I would join

now, if only to help show the rest of the world that all Americans are not like

Donald Trump.

Once upon a time, we had a President who stood in

divided Berlin and told the world that while our government may not be perfect,

we had never had to build a wall.

That same President had said in his inaugural address,

“to those peoples in huts and villages in the globe

struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to

help them help themselves, for whatever period is required … because it is

right.”

Yes, that was the President who created the Peace Corps. My biggest

fantasy is that someday,

A

year ago, the prospects for political reform in this state looked pretty

dismal.  Michigan was ranked dead last

when it came to ethics and transparency, and that was just fine with people

like State Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof and Senate Elections Chair Dave

Robertson.

Governor Rick Snyder had failed repeatedly to make something happen that would really fix the roads, and he and his administration had clearly failed, politically and otherwise, in just about every aspect of the lead poisoning and Legionnaires’ disease disasters in Flint.

Gerrymandering seemed to ensure Republicans an iron grip on the legislature, especially the state senate, for, well, something like forever.  Michigan was stuck on stall, shifting into reverse, with the worst roads in the nation, a political culture both ineffective and poisonous, and a population and per capita income that weren’t keeping pace with the rest of the country.

And when it came to governing, bipartisanship was mostly

just a word in the dictionary.

Well, what a difference a year can make.  Michigan now has a nearly all-female leadership

team.  The governor, secretary of state

and attorney general took office New Year’s Day.

Yesterday, in a stunner, Bridget McCormack was elected

chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. That was mildly surprising only

because she is nominally a Democrat, and Republicans still have a 4 to 3

majority on the court.   But McCormack,

probably the most brilliant legal scholar among the justices, has helped lead

the court away from the bitter, and frankly disgraceful, partisanship that

prevailed on Michigan’s highest court a decade ago.

She, together with two Republican justices, David

Viviano and Beth Clement, have formed something of an influential swing group

that often surprises partisans on both sides with their rulings, as when they

voted to put the anti-gerrymandering amendment on the ballot.

 That decision,

which in itself transcended partisanship, will have far-reaching

consequences.  The amendment to end

gerrymandering not only got on the ballot, it won by a landslide.  An independent body of citizens will be

drawing the lines for new congressional and legislative districts two years

from now, and they are virtually certain to make more sense and be more

fair.  Last year, Democratic candidates

for both houses of the legislature got more total votes than Republicans, but

Republicans still ended up with majorities.

But when the new boundaries are in place and people

vote three years from now, we are likely to have a whole lot more competitive

districts.  Other things are happening

too. The legislature cynically passed bills giving workers more pay and sick time

last year, to prevent referenda on those issues from going before the people.

Then, after we voted, lawmakers did the special

interests’ bidding and stripped out the voter protections.  Well, that may not stand. If citizens collect

enough signatures before March 28, the minimum wage hike and sick leave will be

restored.

Even if that doesn’t happen, the courts may overturn

what the legislature did.  There are

other hopeful signs, too.  Former

Attorney General Bill Schuette strongly opposed anyone interpreting Michigan’s

Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act as something that protected gay and transgender

people as well as other minorities.

New Attorney General Dana Nessel has fought for the

Election

Nights used to provide better drama than they do now, in the era of exit polls

and rapid data analysis … analysis that sometimes happens without any data.

One of the most dramatic of all was on November 8,

1960, when the candidates were then-Vice President Richard Nixon and a young

U.S. Senator named John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy took a big early lead, but after midnight, his

margin fell dramatically till it became a photo finish that wasn’t settled till

late the next morning.  Nixon would have

won had he carried Texas and Illinois, but there were rumors of major

hanky-panky in counting those votes.

President Eisenhower and others urged him to contest

the results, but Nixon refused.  He said

it would dangerously divide the nation, something we couldn’t risk during the

Cold War.

In fact, if he had tried, the odds were overwhelmingly

against Nixon succeeding at even getting recounts, let alone winning them, and

he knew it But at some level, he genuinely seemed to be concerned about the

nation’s interests, not just his own.

Frankly, I’ve yet to see any sign of that from Donald

Trump, who during his campaign, said he might not accept the results of the

election if he lost.  Nixon was also a professional

politician who knew how Congress and the major parties worked.  He was quite capable of forging effective

compromises, when he wasn’t crippled by his lifelong paranoia. He wasn’t

especially ideological, and in foreign policy, was something of a genuine

visionary.

Few remember today that Nixon not only opened the

relationship between this country and China, but that his administration

started the Environmental Protection Agency.

Both Nixon and Trump were suspected of misusing their

presidencies to the point where they committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” sufficient

to justify impeachment.

We have no idea how this will play out in the Trump

administration.  But there was a big

difference in the way Nixon viewed the world.  

Nixon never really challenged conventional morality or ethics – he

merely lied about what he had done.

In a way, Watergate was like a Shakespearian morality

play, in which the ruler is accused of foul misdeeds.  He denies this, but at length proof emerges that

he is guilty, and the bad king slinks into the shadows.  When the jig was up, Nixon made no attempt to

defy the Supreme Court; he just turned over the tapes, and then resigned.

I haven’t seen any reason to believe that we could

count on President Trump to behave the same way.  That’s not to justify Nixon.  He helped open the door to much of the

present ugliness in our politics. Even as a young would-be congressman, he

smeared his opponents, slyly hinting they were Communist sympathizers or worse.

Nixon may have colluded with a foreign agent to

prevent the Vietnam War from being settled while he was running for

President.  After he won, he was obsessed

with politically destroying his enemies, but destroyed himself instead.  His downfall began, you may remember, when a team

of stumblebums called “the plumbers” were caught trying to bug Democratic National

Headquarters during a presidential campaign.

The irony is that was an election that Nixon couldn’t

have lost if he tried.

But by trying to rig the system, he lost it all.

Back

in the 1990s, I read about some researchers who had excavated a landfill near

Chicago and discovered some hot dogs, still quite recognizable, that had been

buried since 1952.

That gave me nightmares; I was then about forty, and

those hot dogs were the same age I was. It was enough to make you question

whether hot dogs are in fact actually food. I mean, if a landfill couldn’t

digest them after all these decades, how can we?

Well, landfill operators have better techniques now

for making sure things, at least organic matter, really do decompose in

landfills. But they can’t do much about plastics, which take a thousand years

to break down.  Which makes me think that

somewhere far beneath the surface, those plastic toys I broke back in the

Eisenhower administration are still intact.

So I would like to take this occasion to publicly say

to the Planet Earth that I’m sorry. 

Recycling was essentially unknown half a century ago, and we are doing

more and more of it every year, which is good. However, we weren’t creating and

emptying millions and millions of plastic water bottles every week.  There is actually a profession called

garbology, the study of garbage, and garbologists

are scientists who study garbage and ways of handling it.

However, we may need sociologists, or maybe slobologists, to explain why so many

people think it is all right to throw their trash out the window, dump it in

parks, and not pick up after their dogs. I have no idea whether people are

worse about this now than they were in my childhood, but I do know this much:

There are more people now than there were then.

I have an Australian Shepherd dog who I take for a run

most days in a park in Southfield. There are seldom other people there when I

go, but there are small liquor bottles and sometimes pop cans and other trash scattered

about at the park entrance.

When I can, I pick this stuff up and deposit it in a

trash barrel.  This annoys my dog,

because it takes time away from my flinging the ball, but it makes me feel

marginally better about occupying space on the planet and using up its

oxygen.  Thirty years ago, I might have

worried about what I looked like carrying an armload of trash in the park. I’ve

grown up since then.

I can’t claim, however to be doing nearly as much good

as people like Peg Collins and Jeff Lygon, or others who do as they do.  There are two reasons we should all get a lot

more trash conscious.  One is aesthetic –

we don’t want to live in or around what look like trashy vacant lots.

The other, of course, is environmental. Plastic is

various forms is ruining the seas, killing whales and other marine mammals, and

killing birds and small critters closer to home.  They not only ingest it, they get stuck in

it, and the stuff takes centuries to degrade.

I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist, but I do know

that people who are starting to feel better about themselves and their

surroundings do a better job of keeping them up. In some streets in Detroit

these days, strangers are mowing the lawns at abandoned homes and vacant lots.

That wasn’t happening a decade or so ago, but it’s starting to now.

However, it’s going to take a lot of prodding and

reminding, I think Peg Collins ought to wear her garbage dress every chance she

gets.  Otherwise, we may all be in

garbage, like it or not.

Years

ago, I had a Palestinian-American student at Wayne State University who was a

brilliant young woman, but who wasn’t really cut out for journalism. I didn’t

tell her so; she concluded that herself, after a couple classes. She went on to

do very well in political science.

She married, had a couple of kids, and

earned a law degree. Next thing I knew, she was a very impressive member of the

state house of representatives, and then lost a heartbreaking race for the

state senate against a less qualified character who later went to jail.

 But she rebounded. Last year, Tlaib became one

of the first two Muslim women in history to be elected to Congress. She

genuinely cares about people, and I would have voted for her if I had lived in

her district.

However, on her very first day in

Congress she did something that got her headlines. Headlines that many thought

were the wrong kind of headlines. She announced to a crowd the day she took

office that she had told her young sons that bullies don’t win, and said “we’re

going to go in there, and we are going to impeach the …  

Well, you probably know what she said. Now,

I have no problems with her calling for Donald Trump’s impeachment, although

the Democratic leadership is nervous and thinks it is “too soon” for that kind

of talk.

Tlaib told me almost a year ago that she

wanted to be in Congress most of all because she felt that would be equivalent

to a seat on the impeachment jury.

Greater scholars than she have said they

believe Trump has committed impeachable offenses. But by calling the President a

famous vile epithet, Tlaib hurt herself and her cause in a number of ways, one

of which I suspect no one may have yet realized.

Yes, she did first of all, bring

herself, and by implication, the Democrats down to the gutter level where

President Trump has dragged our politics.

She managed to normalize his vulgar name

calling and personal assaults, and to suggest that her party is exactly the

same.

That, to the extent that voters believe

it, will have an incredibly corrosive effect on our politics.  But she hurt herself much more than she may

know.

Hurt herself politically, that is.  And here’s how. Most people may not know

this, but Rashida Tlaib is in a sense an accidental congresswoman.

Here’s what I mean by that. Her district

is the second poorest in the nation, and is mainly Christian and two-thirds

African American.

Tlaib won the Democratic primary in

August by only 900 votes over Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones. And

she won it because there were two other big African-American names on the

ballot: Ian Conyers, whose great-uncle represented this district for more than

half a century was one.

The other, State Senator Coleman Young.

Had any of those three dropped out, the winner likely would have defeated

Tlaib.

Instead, she won.  However, there are a lot of voters,

especially religious people, who don’t like politicians with potty mouths. Some

were even offended by Governor Whitmer saying “just fix the damn roads.”

Those folks are not likely to be

impressed that their congresswoman said that word to her little boys. It could

be that this will all be forgotten when Tlaib again has to face a primary

election next year. But maybe not.

Governor  Rick Snyder did not leave office a popular

man. That’s in large part because of one word – Flint.  But he also alienated some people early on by

taxing their pensions.

Every

other Michigan governor in the modern era was reelected by a bigger margin than

they got the first time. But Snyder, who scored a landslide in 2010, barely won

in 2014.

Had

he been able to run for a third term this year, my guess is that he wouldn’t

even have won the Republican nomination.

But

here’s something I am fairly sure of. 

Years from now, historians will look back on his years in power far more

favorably than we do today. That’s not to minimize what happened in Flint.

Snyder,

a hands-off style of manager, did not exercise sufficient oversight over what

was happening there.  When the truth

finally came out, he was very slow to react, took forever to make any personnel

moves, and showed a curious lack of empathy for those affected.  Eventually, he woke up and did the right

thing.

But

not before his political future had been destroyed. He did indeed pay a price

for Flint.  However, there was also a

very different Rick Snyder, the leader who essentially saved Detroit by

choosing a superb emergency manager and guiding it through an almost perfectly

executed bankruptcy and bailout of its schools.

Detroit

is solvent and has a chance today largely because of Rick Snyder.  He also was probably the only governor who

could have figured out a way to get past Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun’s

control of our legislature and make a deal with Canada to build a new bridge

which will be badly needed by the economies of both nations in the decades

ahead.

  We also shouldn’t forget that 680,000

lower-income Michiganders have health insurance today because Snyder managed to

get the legislature to accept Washington’s offer to expand Medicaid to those

who are earning slightly more than deep poverty wages.

And

last week, Governor Snyder again was the adult in the room compared to the

irresponsible and ideological legislators, who rammed through more than 400

bills in a two-week lame duck session. 

Many of them were nasty, vindictive and probably unconstitutional.  One two-bill package would have forbidden

local communities to prevent pet shops from selling puppies from puppy mills,

horrible factory operations where dogs are abused.

Perhaps

the most outrageous bill would have allowed the legislature to intervene in

court cases where they didn’t think the state attorney general was doing the

right thing – a clear violation of the constitutional separation of

powers.  They did this, of course, only

because a Democrat won the job last November.

Snyder,

who hasn’t often vetoed bills, did kill both of those, as well as dozens of

other bad laws passed by the legislators, many of whom were term-limited or had

been defeated, and so didn’t have to worry about ever being held accountable.

He

did sign some bills he shouldn’t have. Those included new anti-environment laws

that stipulated the state could not set standards stricter than the federal

government’s. He also happily agreed to cynically weakening minimum wage and

sick time laws they passed earlier to prevent people from voting on them.

In

the end, Rick Snyder should be remembered as someone who almost always sided

To

understand the concern many people have over Line 5, time-travel back to the

fall of 1953. America was obsessed with Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade against

Communists, not environmental regulations. 

Sometime in October or November, a Canadian firm that would become

Enbridge finished putting the twin pipelines on the bottom of the Straits of

Mackinac.

               They’ve been there ever since, carrying

540,000 gallons of oil and other petroleum products every day.  Last spring, a tugboat anchor damaged, but

did not penetrate one of the ancient lines. Earlier in the year, U.S. Senator

Gary Peters told me that he had asked the head admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard

if they could rescue and clean up Lakes Michigan and Huron if the pipelines

were to rupture and a major oil spill occurred.

               The answer was no, that the most

important source of fresh water in our hemisphere likely would be damaged

beyond repair.  The more you learn about

the pipeline, the grimmer the situation seems. The more you learn about the

pipeline, the more it seems crazy to allow this thing to keep operating for

even one more day. By the way, it provides very little for this country.

Essentially, it takes oil from one part of Canada to

another part of Canada, some of it for export aboard. Yes, it does supply a

little less than half the propane the Upper Peninsula needs, but experts say

that need could be met by a couple railroad cars a day, or four or five tanker

trucks. Yes, the price would be a little higher, possibly a nickel a gallon.

But you can’t possibly put a price tag on the value of

keeping the Great Lakes free from an oil spill. Here’s all you have to know

about Enbridge:  Eight years ago, that

firm’s pipeline near the Kalamazoo River ruptured. When the alarms went off,

incompetent Enbridge workers somehow concluded that the line was just clogged,

and so they kept forcing oil through.

The cleanup cost more than a billion dollars and is

still not complete. Now, if you know about state government in Michigan, you

know that it takes forever to get anything done. I’m not a conspiracy theory

kind of guy.  But isn’t a little

suspicious that they were able to create a new body, this Mackinac Straits

Corridor Authority, in a manner of days?

Isn’t it curious how so many automatically swallowed

Enbridge’s claims not only that it can put the pipeline in a tunnel, but how

long that would take, how much it will cost and how safe all this would be? And

why are so many, including Governor Snyder, so concerned about making sure

Enbridge gets exactly what it wants?

Did you realize, by the way, that the tunnel idea

means they want to keep pumping oil through these ancient pipes for decades

more?  When asked what would happen were

the pipelines to rupture inside the tunnel, Enbridge’s answer is that it won’t.

It’s pretty clear that somebody in high places sees

money in this for themselves. The bottom line goes something like this. If

Enbridge’s theory is right, then they and their shareholders will get a little

richer. If they are wrong, the ecology and the fresh water supply of this quadrant

of the world could easily be ruined beyond repair.

Let’s hope that Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney

General Dana Nessel have the power and the willpower to do the right thing, and

Imagine

that the Detroit Tigers somehow, by a miracle, get into the World Series next year,

and against all odds, dramatically win the seventh game in the bottom of the

ninth inning.

How would you react if the other team then said: “Not

so fast.  We want the Commissioner of

Baseball to change the rules to make this a best five-out-of-nine series.”

Everybody would rightly regard that as outrageous.  Well, how would you react if, having lost an

election, the outgoing political party decided to change the rules to

significantly reduce the powers of the people who were just elected.  In a sense, that would be even worse.

Politics and government are a public business.

Baseball is private enterprise.  But

that’s exactly what Republicans in the current lame-duck session of the

legislature are trying to do.  The only

questions are whether outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder will sign some of their bills.

First, a little background.  Republicans have controlled the governorship,

both houses of the legislature and had a majority on the state supreme court

for the last eight years, years in which Flint was poisoned, pensions were

taxed, and they failed to fix the roads.

Well, whatever happened nationally in November, there

was without a doubt a blue wave in Michigan. Democrats easily won the races for

governor, secretary of state and attorney general. They defeated an incumbent

Republican Supreme Court justice, and took two seats in Congress away from the

GOP.  Democrats also won a majority of

the popular vote for both the state house and senate, but because of outrageous

gerrymandering, Republicans kept control of both bodies, though the Dems gained

five seats in each chamber.

But as soon as the results were known, Republicans

called a lame duck session of the legislature and began an orgy of passing

bills that they hadn’t dared to pass before, and which they know would never

have a chance of becoming law in January. Earlier this fall, they had cynically

passed bills that would have increased the minimum wage, especially for tipped

workers, and which would have guaranteed all workers sick time.

They did this to prevent ballot proposals that would

have done these things from going before the people, because they feared the

people would have approved them. Once the election was over, they passed new

laws making conditions for workers as bad or worse than before.

Rick Snyder happily signed them. The lawmakers and

Snyder also approved a bill to somehow put the dangerous oil-carrying Line 5 on

the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac into a concrete tunnel, though it is

clear a majority of the people want it shut down.

But the real outrage is in ongoing attempts to

infringe on the powers of the executive branch of government and future

lawmakers. They did abandon an attempt to take away oversight of campaign

finance laws from the secretary of state.

But there are still attempts to curb the powers of the

attorney general, but giving the legislature the right to intervene in any

court proceeding in the state, and to prevent the governor from enacting any

environmental standard stronger than the federal standard.

These bills are anti-democracy, possibly

unconstitutional, and certainly wrong. Most of them will reach Governor

Snyder’s desk, and in the next twelve days he will have to decide whether to

sign or veto them.  He has always said he

You can be anti-war, and yet honor and respect those who join the armed forces and take on the job of defending our nation. As a matter of fact, you should. Years ago, I saw a movie – I don’t remember the title – that was essentially anti-war; this was soon after Vietnam. 

But at some point, one of the main characters said that as much a mistake as Vietnam may have been, we should never forget that we have the freedom to protest wars and the military because someone, somewhere, is standing on a wall protecting us.

 I have never forgotten that, and neither should you.  Now,I never seriously considered enlisting, because I came of age in the later years of the Vietnam War. 

That was 1970, and the nation and its military were both deeply disillusioned with a war our men were dying in, but our government was clearly not even trying to win.

I had a student deferment, and then was lucky enough to get a safe number in the draft lottery; the next year we went to an all-volunteer army.

Yet I later came to deeply admire all those men and the few women who did serve in that war, as in all our wars before and since.  They were doing what their country asked them to do, just as soldiers, sailors and marines do today. No group of enlisted men sitting around their barracks decided this nation should get involved inVietnam.

Enlisted men didn’t make the decisions to get involved in Iraq and Afghanistan either. However, they did the fighting and the dying, and some are still doing so.

Again, at least for now, if our country is to survive, we need some men and women to choose military careers, or at least give a few years of their lives to military service.

Today, however, they have choices recruits of my generation never did.  The military is much smaller now than it once was, and the pay is considerably higher. For many, serving three years is the only way they will ever be able to afford higher education. There is still danger and stress, though it is different.  A wounded soldier is much more likely to receive medical treatment far faster than his counterparts in past wars did.

Yet while the stress is different, it is still there.Today, a soldier or Marine can be face time chatting with his family one minute, and be dead in a firefight less than an hour later.  There’s something else lonely about today’s military.  In Vietnam everyone was subject to the draft. Sure, there were a lot of phony deferments and just plain draft-dodging.

But even rich kids sometimes had to go. Now, most upper and middle class people can get away with ignoring the military’s needs and the smaller wars we fight; their kids will never have to fight in them. When I was of draft age, I selfishly thought a volunteer army was a good idea. Now, I’m not so sure. I am sure more of us need to pay attention to those who serve.

Finally – I want to thank those who in past years and at this very moment are putting their lives on the line for all of us, as members of America’s Armed Forces.

They saved the planet from evil in 1945, saved this nation from falling apart in 1865, and have racked up more glory than any of us will ever know. 

A military career will never be for everyone. But for many young people, the benefits are worth considering –benefits to those who serve, and for all the rest of us as well.

Somebody once challenged me to be honest, and answer this question: “Aren’t you sometimes afraid of immigrants, especially when they travel in packs and don’t speak English?”

 I told her that she had her terminology wrong.  Creatures that travel in packs and don’t speak English are called wolves.  I added that the people who scared me were unhappy white males in their early 20s who were born in this country.  Those included the assassins of President Kennedy and John Lennon and the would-be killers of President Reagan and George Wallace, as well as many of those responsible for the mass shootings at places like Sandy Hook.

That made that woman unhappy and she went off in a huff, but I didn’t much care.  I should have cared, and I should have tried harder to reason with her. 

 People who think as she does don’t realize how much we owe to immigrants, that rather than taking jobs they are much more likely to create them. Think of Yousef Ghafari, or the late Heinz Prechter, founder of the American Sunroof Corporation, or any number of others.

 Immigrants have been adding to this country and helping it grow, and adding to our rich cultural mix for as long as America has existed. Jazz has been called the one uniquely American music, a multi-layered art form filled with influences from across the world and from over the centuries, a music born out as many different threads as can be imagined.

 Spencer Barefield, of course, knows more about that than I or most of us ever will. But what I know is that our music and our culture, our literature and our politics will continue to be enriched by immigrants and what they bring to our tables. America will continue to grow in every way, in terms of prosperity and an ever-more vibrant culture, as long as we remain open.

 Otherwise, we will slowly decay, ossify and shrivel.  Detroit has always been undervalued as a center of culture by the nation’s critics, who largely reside in New York, Washington or Los Angeles. To them, we were a one-trade town which did manage to create a subspecies of rock called Motown, something that grew out of racial tensions and the auto industry.

 Well, yes, both of those things were shaping influences on our culture and art. But they were only two of many threads. Think of all the different peoples who poured into this town to make the cars a century ago, people that took Detroit from a small city of 285,000 in 1900 to more than a million and a half thirty years later.

 If you don’t think Detroit was making its own unique contribution to music and culture long before Diana Ross was born, listen to Victoria Spivey’s amazing blues classic Detroit Moan, recorded in 1936. Go look at the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

 Look at the different cultural influences, from Marxism to fantastic Hispanic dream-like imagery, all combined with and transformed by this assembly line town. Diego Rivera was, of course, a Mexican and a Trotskyite, and it seems safe to say Donald Trump never would have let him in.  But he gave us a gift to last for the ages.

Spencer and Barbara Barefield have been continuing and deepening that tradition, as have the people saved by Freedom House and helped by Global Detroit. Yes, there is something wrong with immigration and this country: We need a lot more of it.  See you next time.

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