Leaving for Japan

I had intended to do some serious posting during the past several days, but, as is often the case, my reach exceeded my grasp. I'm leaving for Japan in the am and will be returning on May 13th and hope to be more diligent about this blog during the summer. I do have one bit of news. My website is more or less finished. I thought of sending out an invitation to just about everyone I know to visit, but will delay for just a while longer. While all of the images are posted, I do want to write captions and some descriptive material and a fair amount of reordering of the images needs to be done. Neither will take more than a week or so. Do bear with me. I think that it will be worth the wait to get it a bit more refined.
Byron

Theme: Detroit In Ruins. Here is my contribution.

One of the iconographic images of Detroit in Ruins. The Packard Motor Car Company.

Byron

Detroit 2011

Because I have difficulty properly placing videos and photos in relation to appropriate text in these postings I am dividing this entry into 2 parts. The Internet is filled with still photos of the recent devastated state of the City of Detroit and there are a good many excellent videos on YouTube. I have a modest collection of photos that I took a couple of years ago, but other than a dramatic image of the abandoned Packard Motor Company plant-- a very unoriginal photo subject-- nothing that I could post here equals this video for impact. Indeed, in my opinion video captures the astounding derelict status of the city much better than can be achieved by still photography.

By the way, I don't think that dereliction of vast swaths of an American city is unique to Detroit, but it is the place that I know best, having grown up and lived there until I was 16 years old. This was, for those who don't know the historical context, what many consider to be zenith of Detroit's prosperity and predominance as the nations premier industrial center. Starting when I was 12, I travelled throughout the city , mainly by bus, but also by bike and hitchhiking (I didn't say I was smart, just adventurous and well travelled) and knew it fairly well. Not until, during my adult years, when I gained perspective and realized how far the place had deteriorated could I appreciate its onetime magnificence... and the tragedy of its downfall.

I suspect that my contemporaries who grew up in places like Memphis, East St.Louis, Newark and lots of other bedraggled cities would have similar thoughts.

Brief Update to Maintain the Flow

I have a great deal I want to write about and no time to do it. For lots of reasons getting all ducks in a row for tax preperation was late and finally finished a couple of days ago. Beth Schaldach and I have started dealing with the garden and what needs to be done doesn't seem so forboding as progress is being made. Tomorrow I am going to visit the yurt to see what the recent unusually harsh winter has wraught. And the list of excuses goes on.

Ever since I began blogging I have known that what ruins the blog is long gaps between posts. Therefore, I am posting this picture that I took in Madrid NM of my friend Kam who is quite remarkable in lots of interesting ways. I'm not sure that I've ever met anyone who is able to embrace and befriend strangers so naturally without guile nor artifce. This was certainly an asset and it allowed me to photograph people in situations where I would usually be either inhibited or intrusive.
Byron

My Awakening

Perhaps you remember this monumentally self-serving, deluded pretty boy whose overweening ambition mislead him into believing that he ought to be President of these United States. He was, fortunately, brought low by a sexual imbroglio which, parenthetically, is a matter between him and his late wife and not of our concern here. My objection to the always impeccably coiffed and turned out, but otherwise empty suit was his blatant opportunism and lack of any real political conviction to say nothing of integrity. Because, during the last Presidential primary season, the center was crowded the position most open was the populist left, so he exploited it. He donned a denim shirt and jeans and feigned an abiding concern of the working poor and the impoverished. I never bought it. Yet his slogan, "There Are Two Americas", can not be dismissed out-of-hand.

As I've traveled the heartland of America, avoiding as much as possible the Interstate highway corridors, I have seen the truth of what Edwards posited. I've been gathering up some of the photographs I have taken of the rotting remains of abandoned residential and commercial buildings in the Midwest, South, and High Plains and parts of the West. The extent of the dereliction and decay that I encountered in much of travel was shocking and heartbreaking. Can this really be the America that I have always believed to be endlessly renewing; a place of unlimited opportunity in which its inhabitants continuously prosper and with the prosperity the land is groomed and not only maintained by constantly improved? This was a different America than I have known and I don't think that I am particularly naive nor generally uninformed. Do you think that perhaps I'm exaggerating? Well my friends, stay a couple of days in Dodge City, Kansas or take a slow drive through Pecos in West Texas or a few dozen other places I've been to during the past few years.

I'm trying to understand these experiences but it is difficult, if not insurmountable, to do so. Obviously, depopulation, which in the Great Plains started during the dust bowl era, is an important factor. What about the methamphetamine epidemic, governmental failures, social pathologies, out of country job transfer and who knows what else. I'm pondering and will try to write more if I have anything worthwhile to say.

I will leave you with one final admission. In large part much of my political stance is based on a life-long and rock solid belief in the equality of opportunity in our country. Much of my entire social-political belief system flows from that. Yet, what I have been encountering has caused me to question the validity of this tenet. I am starting to think that for many of our fellow inhabitants the game is rigged.

For those who have persisted in visiting this blog, my everlasting thanks. I will try to acknowledge your fortitude by being more diligent about making entries... but don't count on it. I have good intentions,  but, as often happens, my reach exceeds my grasp.
Byron