For me, the child of auto and cannery workers, there’s only one answer: Detroit in the early 1960s. It was when the unions were strong, wages were high, blue-collar skills were still at a premium and unextraordinary people spent their lives creating extraordinary automobiles to the soundtrack of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. I’d go back to Motown. Of course, it’s impossible to go backwards in time, so blue-collar America must make do with the Detroit of today, where their children scavenge among the city’s industrial ruins, stripping the lead from factory roofs to the beat of gangsta rap, like squatters stripping marble from the ruins of Rome after the triumph of the barbarians. In 1960, thanks to its auto industries, Detroit had the highest per capita income of any city in the United States. Think of that: not New York and its bankers, but Detroit and its factory workers were the locus and symbols of global affluence. That’s called democracy. Since then the city’s population has fallen by sixty-three per cent, 78,000 of its homes lie abandoned, and its murder rate is eleven times higher than New York’s – mainly because the auto plants shut down, taking ninety per cent of all manufacturing jobs.
What do You think about The Best Australian Essays 2014?
