Granted, you have to pay attention to the news, especially now, when the democracy we have nurtured and cherished for so many years is under threat — as is so much else.
The word idiot, after all, was originally a Greek term for someone who didn’t take any part in civic affairs. But there’s also a danger in paying attention only to the moment.
Fill your entire day with Donald Trump’s mad rages and tweets, the endless yammering from the seemingly endless phalanx of Democratic Presidential candidates, and perpetual “breaking news” from the manic cable news shows, and you could topple into something like catatonic depression. Paying too much attention to what’s coming out of Lansing may well produce a similar effect, especially if you listen to lawmakers who say they want to fix the roads and properly educate our children and pretend this can be done without raising taxes.
Those battles have to be fought. But we also have to remember that there is more to life, and that this is a state filled with fascinating people who aren’t in the news all the time. Twenty-some years ago, I met a remarkable man living in a little blue house in Birmingham. He was Billie Holiday’s alter ego and Gloria Swanson’s last husband, and almost no one knew he was there.
He’s gone to wherever brilliant film scripts and ballads like Strange Fruit come from, but I still can clear my head by spending a little time with Mitch MacKay, who I think of as the Sage of East Jordan. He’s a 75-year-old Canadian-born philosopher, musician and artist, who once ran with the likes of Judy Collins and the immortal Leonard Cohen, and had TV shows of his own in Nashville and Toronto years ago.
But these days, he’s content to hang out with his cane and beret in East Jordan, the city where for decades they’ve made all those manhole covers. He’s written a number of books, including Johnny Heartache, a saga of the life of a songwriter in Nashville, or Music City, and these days, mainly crusades for justice for those caught in Michigan’s criminal justice system.
That includes the wrongly accused, the imprisoned, rightfully or not, and other cases. I caught up with him earlier this month in a classic up north place, Larry’s Seven-Ski Inn, which where M-32, 131 and the snowmobile trails converge.
It is part bar, part hamburger joint, and entirely unique. The tables, the chairs and the décor are straight out of 1966, the year Larry and Dorothy Sevenski bought the place.
Larry, now almost 86, made headlines on St. Patrick’s Day two years ago, when he went to talk to a state trooper he thought was harassing his patrons. Sevenski ended up with a bloody nose and a broken arm. What happened isn’t clear because the dashboard camera in the trooper’s car wasn’t working.
Nevertheless, the old man was convicted, though he plans to appeal on the grounds of excessive force. Mitch MacKay was indignant, but not surprised. “These guys, the “deliberate indifference” Robocops, are pretty much cloaked in impunity, thanks to many decades of court and prosecutorial collusion. Yes, collusion. Everybody knows it when they see it.”
That’s not to say Mitch isn’t fully aware of the national scene; he writes a lot on what’s happening in Washington. He is beyond appalled. “Obstruction of justice is the deal going down,” he said, between bites of his cheeseburger. But he has seen this play before. “The final curtain is inevitable, with slight variations on plot. Those who float now are soon to float downstream in the rippling current of none other than the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote me later.
We will, he believes, be all right in the long run. I sincerely hope the Sage is right.
