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

Update

One of the downsides (and there are several) of having more than one blog is there is a danger of accidentally co-mingling posts, which is what I did on Monday of this week. I intended to enter the post you see below this one on this blog but mistakenly entered it onto The WWIG Blog. It's here now.

I haven't been posted for quite a while but haven't been wasting my time either. I have spent almost entire days working on getting my web gallery ready for introduction to my totally indifferent public (ed., in case you don't recognize it, this is attempted sardonic humor). Getting the images prepared properly has been a long and tedious process, but entering them has been very daunting indeed. Using  WordPress software is entirely Terra Incognita for me and at this point I have to memorize the steps rather than understanding the process. The problem with this approach is that my memory often fails and to get back on track I have to resort to unappealing solutions like calling someone for help-- about as appealing as asking for directions from strangers or at a gas station when I'm  lost while travelling. My other time-killing project is that I have been trying to learn and use ProShow Gold to make a slide show. The slide show part isn't too hard but syncing the music has been a very difficult task. I initially had some help from my friend Ben Stern, but one  can only lean on others so much. I'm floundering but should be able to make it work eventually. I snowed here yesterday and the garden is completely covered. Good! This means I don't have to look at the mess and start thinking with dread of spring cleanup.

Tomorrow Susann and I will be going to New York to attend the wedding of her nephew Rick Ordower. Allison, Dave and Damian will be there, but neither Brad nor Charlie will-- one is being exposed to radiation in Japan --albeit low grade-- and the other is being exposed to Hamas rockets in Israel.   I'll be there for 4 days and hope to resume blogging when I return.
Byron

Thinking About The Mythic American West

There isn't going to be anything original posted today. I need to work on getting images ready for my website gallery which was started but has sat dormant for several weeks. I hope to have it running this week. It won't be anywhere near final form but the main structural elements will be in place. However, I have some things written by others which may be pertinent to things that I have or will be posting about here. One cannot look into the vast historical literature of the Great Plains much less the American West and not encounter the Turner Hypothesis:

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," presented in Chicago before the American Historical Association, is one of the most important pieces of nineteenth century writing about the west. Turner's "frontier hypothesis"--that American development could be explained by the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward--had widespread implications for historiography, sociology, literary criticism, and politics. Turner argued that the West--rather than the proslavery South or the antislavery North--was the most influential among American regions and that the frontier--rather than an imported European heritage--was responsible for the novelty of American attitudes and institutions. Significantly, his hypothesis emphasized geographical determinism, agricultural settlement, and the affirmation of democracy, all of which can be traced back to the myth of the garden of the world. Turner shared this myth's erroneous judgments about the economic forces that had come to dominate 19th-century life. His essay expressed the aspirations of a people rather than their actual situation. From Virgin Land  By Eric Gislason

John Steinbeck posited much the same idea, but in touching and lyrical way in the 1933 short story The Leader of the People.

"... I tell those old stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to fell when I tell them. It wasn't the Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering... When we saw the mountains at last, we cried-- all of us. But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering... The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement pile up and piled up until the Continent was crossed. The we came down to the sea, and it was done..."
When Jody spoke, Grandfather stared and looked down at him. "Maybe I could lead the people some day," Jody said.
The old man smiled. "There's no place to go. There's the ocean to stop you. There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them."
"In boats I might, sir".
"No place to go, Jody. Every place is taken. But that's not the worst-- no, not the worst. Westering has died out of the people... It's all done. Your father is right. It is finished."

We'll come back to this poignant passage in subsequent posts. In the meantime I want to let you know about some of the books read as I've begun to try to understand what I have seen and experience on the Southern Great Plains.





I read Grassland by Richard Manning 10 or 12 years ago and remember it as being very informative about a subject I knew little about. I need to reread it.

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town is shocking and, I think essential reading for anyone wanting to comprehend little known changes occurring in small towns in the heartland. It is set in Olwein Iowa which is quite close to La Crosse.

Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains describes the activities and ideas of a Rutgers University couple who have been relentless proponents of The Buffalo Commons.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl.  Reads as smoothly as fiction. Essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand 20th century American History, environmental
movement, social trends, and this blog.













Byron