Danger Detroit

I will get around to writing about a cheerier experience, Nascar, soon, but for now, this article caught my eye.

According to the study, the area east of the Barton-McFarland community in zip code 48204 is the most dangerous neighborhood in America.

The study said the chances of becoming a victim of violent crime in this west side community over the course of a year are one in seven. According to NeighborhoodScout, one of the more devastating events in this neighborhood over the past year was the closure of the public library — where children took remedial reading and math classes and adults used public computers to apply for jobs.

Sharing similar statistics is the Islandview community in the 48207 zip code on the city’s east side, which ranks as the second most dangerous neighborhood on the list.
It’s in this neighborhood where, according to the study, housing costs have gone down so dramatically that a 3,300 square-foot property sold for just $800 — down from $70,000 in 2002. The study said the chances of becoming a victim of violent crime in this community over the course of a year are one in seven.

Coming in as the third most dangerous neighborhood in the country is the area between Ravendale and LaSalle College Park in zip codes 48213 and 48205.

That is less than three miles from Edmore. 

Classy

I watched some of the coverage of the dedication of the George W. Bush Library yesterday. This column is truth.

Then, finally, W took the podium. Gone were the punched phrases, the comfortable pauses, the perfect elocution of Barack and Bill. Back was the Texas drawl, the too-fast delivery — nerves? No, just impatience — that the wine-sipping media so deplored.
He got right to the point: “For eight years, you gave me the honor of serving as your president. Today I’m proud to dedicate this center to the American people.”

He gave a profound lesson to his successor and his predecessor: “In democracy, the purpose of public office is not to fulfill personal ambition. Elected officials must serve a cause greater than themselves. The political winds blow left and right, polls rise and fall, supporters come and go. But in the end, leaders are defined by the convictions they hold.

“As president, I tried to act on these principles every day. It wasn’t always easy and it certainly wasn’t always popular … And when our freedom came under attack, we made the tough decisions required to keep the American people safe,” he said to loud applause.

But it was the end that gave us the truest glimpse of the man. Like so many other times, the power of America got to him. With tears in his eyes, his voice breaking, he said: “It’s the honor of a lifetime to lead a country as brave and as noble as the United States. Whatever challenges come before us, I will always believe our nation’s best day lie ahead.” By the end he was in tears, barely able to creak out: “God bless.”

There was more than a touch of Ronald Reagan in these remarks, no?

Winter in Springtime

Yesterday, I went to a funeral for a very little baby, only 28 weeks old in life, who never really had a fighting chance in life. As that Gosnell trial continues in Philadelphia, it makes me so angry that life is devalued like that. And that no one cared, really. Those mothers failed their children, and perhaps society failed them. The doctor failed. They never tried to keep those children alive, and they never sought options like adoption or family support. They resorted to a finite option that was really just one act in someone's horror show.

April is a wonderful month, for the most part, with warmer temperatures and flowers and trees blooming. Only too much pollen keeps it from perfection, right? But mornings like yesterday, on a sunny day nearly 80 degrees, there is still such loss. And a bit of winter in springtime. There was something very comforting about the priest's words, as he spoke not of angels, but of saints. Of eternal happiness in heaven as a saint at the right hand of God. As a soul that we can pray to, who was never scorched by the sins of earth. And that is not exactly a blessing, I guess. It is still a tragedy. I hope those babies also receive a bit of sainthood, wherever they are. And they are mourned as baby C was. 

Bush's Fault

This headline in the Washington Post infuriates me: "U.S. Wars Motivated Boston Suspects."

Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan, where President Obama plans to end combat operations by the end of 2014.

Obama has made repairing U.S. relations with the Islamic world a foreign policy priority, even as he has expanded drone operations in Pakistan and other countries, which has inflamed Muslim public opinion.

I can think of about a hundred motivations worse than a war that hardly affected these two murderous young men.  How about a radical "religious" ideology that has propelled them to instill hatred to those surrounding them, both physically and emotionally? What about the extremists who listed step-by-step careful instructions on the internet on how to create a pressure-cooker bomb that would explode and maim and kill hundreds of innocent bystanders? How about their parents and spouse who looked the other way as their sons became indoctrinated? How about liberals who look the other way in espousing diversity-oriented ideologies over loyalties toward America? How about homicide detectives who apparently never connected suspect B with the murder of three people he knew.

There are a lot of people you can blame as motivators. Ultimately, the only ones responsible are those two individuals who set off the bombs and the mayhem, unless others are fingered (and I am not discounting that possibility.) But media, stop pressing this narrative that it was these wars that propelled the hate. The Taliban provoked the war in Afghanistan. And in Iraq, Saddam was a murderous thug and the world is better off without him in it.

Chicago's Little Moments

Another weekend, another one out of town. I feel like the last few weeks have blurred together, and I have several more weeks of travel ahead...Richmond and Austin and NC and Michigan and who knows where. But Chicago...It was a better balance of time with friends, shopping, and time with work stuff. But not perfect, but something is always missing.

I will mention our restaurants. Cru Kitchen & Bar was brunch on Sunday, and it was a hearty breakfast of eggs, biscuit, sausage, and bacon. The french toast looked particularly tasty. Union Bar and Sushi was perfect. The sashimi and the rolls were perfect, cocktail was perfect. Light enough for dinner but very filling, especially with dessert later.

L2O was ridiculous, of course, and I will remember the baby sized portions of beet, risotto, and the bite of filet and lobster. Some surf and turf, right? And don't forget the kit kat. It might have been designed to be a tasting menu, but it was barely enough for a six year old. Heading to Due afterwards with the group was far more memorable and tasty, though I am still recovering from the 2am bedtime.

Having time to run along Lake Michigan in the freezing cold was enough to sustain me, along with conversations with friends and seeing D's mom. And while the hectic-ness will last, I know there will be at least little moments to sustain that.

Such a Week

The headlines have been overpowering this week with tragedy...you have the Boston Marathon Massacre,  you have a fertilizer plan explosion, you have partisan bickering and Obama shaming proponents of Second Amendment rights. You have anniversaries of April events like the Virginia Tech shooting and Columbine and the Oklahoma City bombing. Mid-April has been a remarkable time of national tragedy.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, I learned that Star was going to close. With any luck, as raging thunderstorms curse the midwest, I'll be with a friend tomorrow in Chicago. I remember April 19, 1993 like it was yesterday, and it's never been a favorite date of mine ever. But others mark this time as even more tragic.

You pray for the families and friends of those who lost their lives this week, in 2013 or in 1995 or 2007 or another year. And you hope that this week will bring peace, eventually, and justice. But it's a burden of memory that will never go away, will always exist, and will always be remembered.

London

Remarkable images from London as Margaret Thatcher is laid to rest. Shame on the Obama Administration for not sending a representative. God Bless Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and James Baker for representing all Americans.

TV Time Away

We needed a break from watching the heartbreaking news coming from Boston yesterday. Marathons are joyful times, when runner are rewarded for months of hard training. An entire city celebrates, and its spirit transcends the entire 26 mile course. I know my Boston friends were very much looking forward to it when I saw them on Saturday.

We tuned into an exception National Geographic series on the 1980s.We made it through the first few hours, which was full of anecdotes about Steve Jobs, President Reagan's assassination, the Rubik's Cube, The Day After movie, Madonna, Run DMC, Calvin Klein underwear, Star Wars, CNN, Valley girls, new Coke and the Pepsi Wars, and more. The site has plenty of more background. You could make the case that the 80s was transformative of a decade we've had, where personal computers and cell phones and VCRs and handheld video cameras and new luxuries became common. Disposable income with a booming economy transformed American culture. Yes, the documentary has had a little too much Jane Fonda. But Larry Hagman, RIP, contributed some witty one-liners as he reflected on Dallas.

That was our formative decade, where I went from turning 4 in March of 1980 to leaving as an 8th grader. I remember most of the decade, from Princess Diana's wedding to the Challenger and the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty to President George H.W. Bush's election to the music and the movies and big hair and jelly bracelets to Iranian hostages to Judge Bork's failed confirmation. What a remarkable decade. And now enough time has passed that you can reflect on something 30 years ago and it wasn't just yesterday.

New York, New York

Another weekend means another weekend traveling. I was up in New York for about 24 hours. Dinner at SD-26, which was good, not great. The pasta with marinara was divine--so fresh and homemade. The beet salad was quite good, too. The veal was a little dry. Tiramisu was a nice, though predictable, dessert.

I came home, went to the wedding shower, and then was exhausted. I woke up early, and I went for a typical 5K run. My heart is now with those who were running the Boston Marathon. It is so early to know the fact from the fictions, but multiple explosions at a finish line usually means something very bad happened, and "bad" as in not accidental.

The week ahead means more travel, more appointments, and more time waiting for a car. Here's to a better week ahead.  

Sickening

Yet another reason the mainstream media has failed.

Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial's first day. They've been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.

Let me state the obvious. This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News' Brian Williams intoned, "A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh," as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn't make the cut.

And more:

For this isn't solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn't make national headlines?

But it isn't even solely a story of a rogue clinic that's awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! If I were a city editor for any Philadelphia newspaper the grand jury report would suggest a dozen major investigative projects I could undertake if I had the staff to support them. And I probably wouldn't have the staff. But there is so much fodder for additional reporting. 

Detroit: An American Autopsy

I just started reading Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy. He was on the Colbert show to talk about Detroit's many, many problems.

LeDuff, who wrote for the Detroit News and now works for WJBK-TV (Channel 2), attributed to the city’s problems to “White flight, black flight, business flight, job flight, we even have dead flight,” he said, citing a trend of Detroit residents afraid to even bury their relatives in the city.

During the seven-minute interview with host Stephen Colbert, LeDuff described Detroit’s fiscal crisis as a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. “You better look at Detroit, because that’s what happens when you run out of money.”

LeDuff has anecdote after interview after sad, sad, incident detailed in the first 1/3 or so of the book that I've read. I particularly appreciated his not-funny but literal account of the Kwame sexting scandal, not to mention the Monica Conyers scandal. He also recounts memories of his family, who has also been scarred by Detroit. Great read thus far. 

Tribute to Thatcher

Very few are more eloquent than Paul Johnson. 

Thatcher's long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country's different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did...

Her political success once again demonstrates the importance of holding two or three simple ideas with fervor and tenacity, a virtue she shared with Ronald Reagan. One of these ideas was that the "evil empire" of communism could be and would be destroyed, and together with Reagan and Pope John Paul II she must be given the credit for doing it.

Among the British public she aroused fervent admiration and intense dislike in almost equal proportions, but in the world beyond she was recognized for what she was: a great, creative stateswoman who left the world a better and more prosperous place, and whose influence will reverberate well into the 21st century.

Cincinnati Visit

I finally got to meet the new nephew after a weekend trip to Cincinnati. The entire 40 hours or so that I was there went way too quickly. I mostly ate--chicken chilli, cheese ravioli, salmon, etc. And watched sports--a Reds game, a U-M victory over Syracuse in the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament. I also went on a run in Mt. Adams, which always kicks my as$.

It's so weird..when you are children, you see siblings on a daily basis. And then it's only once or twice a year, and they have their own families and sets of responsibilities and interests and you still them as eight years old. And you wonder what their children be like as they grow. You remember them as a little boy, and it feels like it was just yesterday. Oh how the years go by.

Margaret Thatcher RIP

Now all three of the 1980s icons are gone. Margaret Thatcher passed away this morning at the age of 87.

She, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II were the three great warriors for peace in the 1980s. I don't ever recall a world without her serving as the preeminent female role model, really, role model for any conservative leader.

She will be remembered for her sterling "Iron Lady" credentials at a time of weakness in Great Britain.

Infuriated by Britain’s image as the “sick old man of Europe,” she set out to dismantle Britain’s cradle-to-grave welfare state, selling off scores of massive state-owned industries, crushing the power of organized labor and cutting government spending with the purpose of liberating the nation from what she called a “culture of dependency.”

Ah, the world could use another, but there never be a leader quite like her. It is remarkable that over two generations ago, she rose through Tory ranks to assume a position of leadership in the party. That was nearly forty years ago! She was a sterling symbol of liberty, heroic in her toughness, yet was willing to broker for peace when she met Gorbachev. Her words, unspoken, are some of the most enduring from her friend Ronnie's funeral nearly a decade ago.

Rest in Peace.

Mad for Mad Men

On Sunday, my favorite show Mad Men returns. Not only is the show classic in the sense that it's journeying its way through the 1960s--rumor has it the show resumes in late 1967--but classic in that it remains spoiler-free. It's impossible to get Matthew Weiner to leak. I think that is one reason the show is so powerful. Last season's suicide came as such an abrupt shock not merely because it was so graphic, but because it was so unexpected. Subtle clues may have been written in, but there were no glaring spoilers available online.

That is the way shows used to be enjoyed pre-internet. And that is how I hope to enjoy the new season!

Car Shopping

In light of our incident with the battery dying, blackout inducing Ford Escape, I think we are back to square one on the car shopping trip. I don't know what to do. And it seems every solution means spending more and more money. We have some saving, yes, but I'm also uncomfortable spending a ridiculous amount on a car. We don't need more debt, and I don't want to be a slave to that. And we have other priorities to focus on, at least I do.

Whether we go with a Lexus or a Jeep or an Equinox, we have a lot of decisions to make. I'm sure we'll find the right car. But we could use a sign that we're looking on the right track about now!

Easter Weekend 2013

Easter weekend was lovely. We had not the greatest weather, but we had a great time. Lots of food--salmon and seabass, crabcakes, lunch at Brasserie Beck, burgers at Big Board, brunch at La Grenier, and spaghetti for dinner on Sunday. And we saw a play at the Ford Theater, on the same Holy Saturday that President Lincoln died. Hello Dolly actually had its official opening performance on Saturday night.

We also had plenty of time for Apples to Apples and Taboo, though that last game became a bit rowdy. And time for conversation, too. We also had time for a very long Easter mass service at St. Joseph's.

And we also saw some great Michigan wins. Just in time for Cincinnati!

These weekends are so fleeting, and it's a little crazy that mom and dad only left 24 hours ago. Car shopping is another post, of course. But these are times to remember, they will not last forever...