Nolan Finley and Frank Beckmann and, it seems, the whole of The Detroit News have just had enough of Detroit City Council Member George Cushingberry.
Their recent frustration began when the News published an article attacking the Detroit City Council for voting for Brenda Jones as President and Cushingberry as Pro-tem. Voicing this frustration when City Council has virtually no power because of the EM is, well, a bit odd.
Finley and Beckmann and many of their readers have gotten what folks like Finley and Beckmann have long said they wanted: "Someone just come in and take over Detroit...start from scratch!"
But from their perspective this vote was a horrible return to "bad habits": http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140107/OPINION01/301070003/1007/OPINION01/City-Council-off-bad-...
Cushingberry responded on Facebook by telling the News to "Go to Hell. Go straight to Hell."
There was an explosion, of course, of indignant comments about the unprofessional and uncivil language.
The outrage! The hurt sensitivities of The Detroit News readers and regular Facebook commenters! Oh the humanity! Lions and tigers and bears sleeping together! Or was it cats and dogs?
At any rate, Finley followed up with this editorial mocking the behavior of the City Council , which he says, has "amused" him for years, or at least since the early 1980s:http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140109/OPINION01/301090025/1271/OPINION0305/Did-Detroit-get-ano...
Finley positioned himself in this op/ed as the working man's detached voice of reason and wit, a part of yet still clearly apart from the wild antics of Detroit, somewhere in the state that knows how to manage itself properly.
Uh huh.
On Friday before MLK weekend, long time commentator Frank Beckmann sang a comparable refrain, one bolstered by the fact that Cushingberry was pulled over -- the day after the electronic "Go to Hell" dust-up -- by Detroit Police with an empty bottle of booze in his car and a passenger with medical marijuana (who it turns out is a medical marijuana advocate Cushingberry wants to employ). Detroit Police are investigating the whole matter, as Cushingberry was let loose that night by a police supervisor.
The whole story seemed to turn in to an odd mix of the digital new -- beginning with a Facebook discussion - and old -- Detroit street scene, maybe even outside a "strip" bar.
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140117/OPINION01/301170011/Frank-Beckmann-Cushingberry-City-Cou...
This is all too familiar, Finley and Beckmann and their readers cried, that crazy, despicable Detroit Council -- those people who can't control themselves. We know this well, they say, we have been seeing it and watching it for years. This is the sort of thing that keeps Detroit "back" and Detroit should not look back.
With Governor Snyder and the EM we are looking forward! Tally ho!
As a 50ish white guy whose family leaped across 8 mile years ago (all the way to 9 mile), these events evoke memories for me, too, depressing memories -- although of a slightly different sort.
I have heard the voices of men like Finley and Beckmann ALL my life.
And those voices, in my opinion now, have done far more damage to SE Michigan than the flailings of Mr. Cushingberry who is now under the scrutiny of a Detroit media that is otherwise, well, hapless, with the exception of two or three notable reporters, in covering government in Michigan.
For me, then, the Finley/Beckmann tirades evoke not simply the ugliness and stupidity of Detroit City Council members, but also -- and more disturbingly -- the ugliness and stupidity of primarily white suburban males my age and older who could talk non stop about this kind of behavior, guffawing in amusement at those people, those people that can't control themselves, can't govern themselves.
And that ugliness and stupidity is of an entirely different order than Cushingberry's.
That is why we left Detroit my "people" cried!
And now in every other community we find peace and civility and grace and intelligence in local politics?
Please.
MY demographic could turn a blind eye to its own failings (the ugliness of white Warren politics, for example...the FBI investigating and prosecuting white East Detroit school officials for getting in to tight with contractors and looting the public food king, spending big on Martinis at The Olive Garden...the driving habits of the patron saint of Oakland County, L. Brooks .... or to take a more current figure...Andy "I am still on the payroll get the cellphone officers-- quick!" Dillon).
In my rather charming neck of the woods, Bloomfield Hills, the District still needs a paid facilitator to conduct community planning sessions after what was a ten year (and counting) debate about whether to consolidate what was either the number 2 or3 best high school in the state and the 13th or 14th best high school.
Self control -- so easily imagined.
What Beckmann and Finley, et. al., refuse to acknowledge or even consider is that their ugliness in pursuing Cushingberry in the way they are maintains the status quo of all SE Michigan -- indeed keeps the ugly past alive -- every bit as much as the words and actions of George Cushingberry.
Perhaps more.
I don't condone Cushingberry's actions or even his initial outburst (Go to Hell Detroit News). But at more than any other point in my life I now understand the sentiment.
Thankfully -- at last -- I understand it.
At 60 something, Cushingberry is now hopelessly outgunned in his own city, his own polis.
Finley and Beckmann and their ilk? My ilk? I suppose.
I have clear memories of what is driving them and appealing to their audience. Reading their columns is like listening to memories of voices in my head at long ago basketball games, Christmas parties, backyard bbqs, birthdays parties, swimming lessons -- where and whenever the subject of Detroit came up. The grammar is a bit better.
It is, again, not just Cushingberry (if he is) that is dragging the region backwards.
Or, should I say, given his Facebook (forsooth) language, downwards?
Dante, still the world's leading expert on Hell outside Linda Blair, organized the place in circles. Those that couldn't control their impulses did far better in Hell than those that acted in a knowingly fraudulent manner to stir up ugly passions. That is, the former were placed near the upper circle, closer to purgatory where Dante's narrator finds his guide Virgil. The latter were placed closed to the very bottom, near Lucifer the Landlord -- the bottom of the inverted cone.
So on the trip into Dante's Hell this mid life narrator expects to see Cushingberry first -- but he knows he will need to keep travelling down further to meet his own folks who refused to let go of their own ugly past to move forward.
