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I’m still recovering from my trip through Detroit, which makes New Orleans’ Ninth Ward look like Salzburg.  It’s been especially striking to travel around Milwaukee the past few days, as Milwaukee, while not a shining city on the hill, seems so livable, well cared-for, and humane by comparison.  For a great sense of the experience, go to http://www.detroitsafari.org/

I dropped off a friend at the Detroit airport a few days ago and couldn’t resist taking a spin over to see Dearborn, one of the unique American places, as it is, proportionally, the most Arab and most Muslim city in America.  It is also the birthplace of Henry Ford and the location of the Ford Motor Company’s headquarters, though I did not investigate these things.  I started with a visit to the Arab-American National Museum; nicely curated and put together, it was a pleasant place to while away an hour.  Its focus was on the immigrant experience and small but significant contributions made by Arab-Americans to our social fabric – the normal ethnic pride you might find at the “Polish-American National Museum” or something similar.

Dearborn, like the Detroit urban fabric itself, is extensive, spread out, and generally hostile to pedestrian life (in the above photo you see no pedestrians, and there were few anywhere in the whole city).  As often in such places, I drove around not entirely certain I was seeing the most interesting things.  The general consensus was that Warren Avenue was where the stores were, so I went there.  I walked it in shifts – parking the car, walking, returning, moving the car down the block, walking again, returning again, and so forth.  I probably walked about three miles of Warren Avenue, until I got to a convent and open fields and the avenue curving into a green distance, which I presumed signaled the end of the developed part of town.

There were a few sights that had just enough exotic and foreign flavor, to make you think that perhaps you were in a Middle Eastern country, like the Karbala Food Mart pictured at left.  But in general that was not the impression.  The place seemed to be just another Midwestern suburban city, with homes with lawns on gridded streets, and interminable avenues with one-storey stores.  The storefronts had Arabic letters on them and the faces were a shade darker than the people who lived in Dearborn sixty years ago, but really this was just normal America.  It was, to my eyes, the least interesting unique place in America.  This is a classic part of the immigrant experience – the thirst for conformity.

Random American drug store y se habla arabic.

Move on, nothing to see here.

One of the yearly events at the Hillbilly Underground is a trip through the ruins of Detroit, which astonished me, though I am a student of ruins and desolation.  Detroit is the most intense urban desolation I have ever seen, anywhere.  I will provide more links to this, as I digest it, but more or less we wandered through vast – unspeakably vast – destroyed buildings, and it was hard not to ask who or what destroyed them, and why.