Years ago, a great columnist for the New York Times named Red Smith left the paper, came back years later, and began his first column with … “as I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted.”
Well, same here. I wrote this column every week for an alternative paper in Detroit from April 1993 until a few weeks ago. I never missed a week, and it was selected the top alternative column in the nation four times over those years.
Then, they decided to suspend it, and I decided – who needs this? So I am back with what I hope will be even better columns than ever on this new blog, taking advantage of newer technology.
For those who may not know me, I have been a journalist for more than four decades, since the age of typewriters, working in virtually every medium and reporting, at one time, from more than 40 countries, some of which no longer exist.
But in recent decades, I have specialized in national politics and economics and especially the state of Michigan. And that is what this column has been and largely will be about.
Not that it will always be serious, though we live in serious times; I sometimes am irreverent, sarcastic, lighthearted – and the ultimate goal is never to be boring. But my bottom line is this:
Life could be better. In many ways – certainly not all ways – this was a better country and a better state. The America I grew up in back in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t afraid of immigrant children.
Yes, we had racism and prejudice and poverty and all the rest of it, but we mostly thought we should, at the very least, try to hide or suppress our worst impulses. Never before did we have a President of the United States who encouraged them.
We also believed, as a nation, that our kids should have lives better than the ones we had. We made sacrifices so they could get higher education and were willing to vote to tax ourselves to have better elementary, junior high and high schools.
Not anymore.
Today, there’s no way anyone can achieve anything resembling what used to be called a “middle-class” lifestyle without some form of higher education – not necessarily traditional college.
But we have made high ed harder and harder to afford. Here’s an example: When I started as a freshman at Michigan State, back in the fall of 1969, tuition was, in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars, a mere $101.72. Last fall, a credit hour at MSU cost $482 – and it is bound to be a few points more expensive this fall.
Nobody whose parents aren’t rich can afford that, so except for a very few lucky enough to win full-ride scholarships, today’s students take out massive loans they may never be able to repay.
Meanwhile, income disparity among their parents’ generation has been widening, so that more and more people find it harder and harder to make a living. Why is this? Why do we tolerate it?
And what can we do about it?
That may just be the biggest issue facing this country, as we struggle to hold on to what democracy we still have. It is an issue which in various forms, I plan to revisit again and again.
But my short answer is this:
The America my generation grew up in was a country that knew what it was and was confident about its future. The parents of we Baby Boomers had survived and licked the Great Depression and won World War II, and watched life get steadily better.
There was another reason too, one we seldom talk about. The late Dick Wright, a marvelous auto writer and editor who used to teach with me at Wayne State University, told me years ago that the fall of the Soviet Union would turn out to be a disaster for America.
Especially, that is, for the ordinary working man. “The Soviet Union was a corrupt, horrible dictatorship, and everyone knew that,” Dick told me sometime in the early 1990s. “But as long as it existed, there was always some restraint on how the bosses treated American workers, because there was always that tiny threat of Communism.
Alas, when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system to make it actually work for the people, the whole thing blew up and fell apart. What has that meant?
Well, among other things, Michigan is now a right-to-work state, and just last month, the legislature voted to eliminate “prevailing wage,” meaning it is now legal to pay substandard wages to construction workers toiling on state office buildings.
(Try not to get assigned space in one of those.)
The decline in Michigan has been even more pronounced than nationally. Back in the 1950s and 60s, we were one of the richest and fastest-growing states in the nation, with per capita income far above the national average, and better schools than surrounding states.
Today, the brutal fact is that we are a poor state, 30th in per capita income, a good $5,000 less a year than the national average.
Granted, that’s better than we were doing in the depths of the Great Recession a decade ago, when we briefly fell to 40th.
But it is horrible, and signs are that unless we change the disastrous policies that we are now pursuing, things will get worse.
Yes, some of our old prosperity was doomed, because it was based on a world where someone without any real skills could get a job on an assembly line and make a good income forever.
Automation and foreign competition doomed that world, and we should have seen it coming. Politicians of both parties, back to Gov, G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams in the 1950s, knew we needed to diversify Michigan’s economy, but never seriously tried.
The bigger problem in recent years, however, has been the capture of our state government by a fanatical right-wing faction that believes that all taxes and government spending are bad — even for infrastructure improvements that are vitally necessary to attract new jobs and businesses and keep the ones here now.
That’s why we have the worst roads in the nation, according to numerous independent studies, and our water and sewer systems are collapsing, and our young and talented people are fleeing to Atlanta and Chicago and everywhere else with jobs.
Part of the problem is a lack of leadership, and outrageous gerrymandering and term limits have helped prevent good and effective leaders from emerging.
Well, that’s just a small sample of the issues we face, and which I plan to keep trying to make sense of. I won’t run out of material anytime soon – or out of hope, either.
And we can fix this state and this nation if we really are willing to work hard enough. We have before; we need to again.
For when it comes right down to it – what other choice is there?
Listen To Me On The Radio
Beginning July 9, I will be on 910 AM, a 50,000-watt superstation every weekday between 9 and 11, looking at major Michigan and national issues, interviewing people worth interviewing, doing my famous signature essays – and also hopefully talking with some of you.
I’m looking forward to this new adventure– and I hope many of the thousands of people who have read and listened to me over the years will enjoy it too.
