old detroit, new eastern europe

there is not much I can say about Detroit that has not been said lately by other people before me. Maybe the things I bring to the table, me being myself, are that it reminds me in many ways of the old East German towns abandoned by a world that was moving too quickly. The world moves at a fast pace--that is something you deal with, and the resistance to efficiency and change leaves behind great ruins. 

I'm used to sitting around kitchen tables listening to people who grew up in an entirely different system mourning a way of life in which things were not so chaotic, in which you were taken care of either by the government or some kind of large company. It was something to push back against and at the same time, according to the younger people, stultifying. To blend into the group, resist change, resist the events of the outside world...  

so many human memories and traditions woven into these big factories.  There are human stories here, friendships and alliances and petty feuds. 

But it was this comfort and resistance to change  and blindness to the world outside that made the fall particularly painful. There are many parts of Berlin that look exactly like parts of Detroit--former east German newspaper buildings empty and covered with graffiti, great skyscrapers ready to be demolished because everyone has moved away.

As many people before have told me, there's an eerie Mad Max effect to Detroit that can't quite be duplicated by many places in the world outside of Eastern Europe. You go through East Germany and it's the same story: cities standing half-empty, huge skyscrapers in downtown boarded up and forgotten. It's a ghost town. Even the homeless people move slowly, in a daze, as if there were a nuclear bomb; i saw a woman sitting very, very still staring into space for a long time on these steps. It was incredible. This was in Detroit though. There are not really so many homeless people in East Germany.

The outskirts of Detroit are where you go when you have not seen a fresh vegetable for a long time so much so that you really notice it and realize why San Francisco and New York are not like the rest of the United States. 

This is real hippie stuff, sitting down and chewing real greens between your teeth. Most people in this country subsist on french fries, or so the European media would lead us to believe. 

Here is the largest Arab-American population in the united states. Nobody really knows why (why?), but if you drive out to Dearborn, where the Arab American museum is, there begin the signs in Arabic and neat brick suburban houses with children playing and women strolling down the street in hijabs. If you go here, which is something that I may have done, desperate to eat "real" food after daily assaults of deep fried burgers and deep fried seafood and deep fried onions, you can go, as I might have gone, to a Lebanese grocery store and ask for the directions to the nearest decent restaurant. The men might not speak English as well as they would have wished, but they are all good intentions and directed me as they might direct you down the road, turn right, can't miss it, the best restaurant in town.

And this is change and new life right here, when the tabouli and falaffel are in front of you, and across the street I could see, as you might see, a sign for halal subway sandwiches, which is something I have never seen before, although I have been in many halal neighborhoods in my life. It's something new in a place where I never thought I would encounter something new.