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04/11/2005: Given that this hits the trifecta, we may as well blog it....
I'm a fan of Lewis Black, a regular reader of Juan Cole, and a committed urbanite. So this post by Juan Cole particularly resonated with me:
I saw Lewis Black, the comedian, in Detroit last month. Lewis does angry humor. But at one point he went on a rant about how you just had to look around Detroit to see how the Congress was allowing our cities to deteriorate, and he flew into a genuine rage. A little sheepish, he admitted, "That was a private moment, and I'm sorry you had to see it. Note to self: just getting mad without a joke is not cool."
It is such a shame that there is virtually nothing going on on the streets downtown Detroit in the evening. Even the Borders closes at 7 pm. A single block in Greektown and the casinos are the only exceptions, as far as downtown shops go. An entertainment venue like Cobo Hall is designed so that the suburbanites can actually exit into its parking lot from the freeway, and never have to deal with the city at all. Because Detroit fell below a million in population with the last census, it even lost a good deal of Federal aid.
The true cost of the Iraq misadventure is consistently underestimated by the Bush administration, which does not even include the extra funds in the budget deficit! They even sneak the wounded soldiers back into this country so that the public does not get an accurate sense of the war's human costs for Americans.
...
Imagine what a few billion dollars from US AID could do for downtown Detroit. Bush is wasting it instead on plants in Iraq that probably can't even be kept up afterwards.
Note to self: Just getting angry without a joke is not cool.
Len on 04.11.05 @ 01:02 PM CST
