Rachel Ray’s Magnificent Ass
Loving America's Basket Case
Friday, November 6, 2009 
Detroit, you’re the hot mess girlfriend who stole my car and used it to transport a convicted felon across state lines with a minor and a backpack full of crystal meth in the back seat. Thank you for the good times.
Now, stop pretending you can do anything about the demise of your city. It’s over. It’s finished. It really is gone. Your chance to do something passed back in, oh, I would say, 1984.
Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.
“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”
John made that decision in late May, when he and a friend were touring one of the Packard plant’s more than 40 buildings. John recalls spotting the rusted shell of the truck, parked on the fourth floor.
After 8 broken jacks and 3 months of work, they finally pushed the truck out of the hole they made in the building’s wall. Then they left after rejoicing at the crash.
Already, he boasts, he and some friends had pushed two boats and the remains of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle out of upper floors at the Packard plant. The truck would be his biggest feat yet, the perfect finale to years of tomfoolery.
What’s more, the tires still had air in them. “We were like, ‘Wow, this is doable,’” John recalls. They left with a batch of digital photographs and a plan.
Karen Nagher seethes when she hears about such capers. Executive director of Preservation Wayne, a nonprofit organization that holds out hope for even the most forlorn buildings, Ms. Nagher says it infuriates her that people come from “all over the world” to poke around Detroit. “Piece by piece, they’re disassembling those buildings, making it harder and harder to restore them,” she says.
The city has had no luck in its long quest to redevelop the Packard plant. Its current owner, Romel Casab, did not return calls seeking comment.
What a disaster. What an unmitigated disaster. Have you heard of a thing called cops? You know, people who go around and enforce the law and protect private property? Some cities hire them and that’s exactly what they do—they keep the peace and help prevent the looting and burning of your city. Someone in Detroit might want to think about hiring some cops and maybe getting rid of the hundreds of corrupt politicians who have helped make the place a squirming basket case.
The incompetence is incredible to behold.
Norman Rogers | tagged Corruption, Globalization, Government, Greed, Infrastructure, News, People, Scandal | in American Politics, American Society, Crazier Than a Shithouse Rat, Democrat Party Nuttiness, Democrat Politicians, Don't Serve Me That Weak Tea, Freak Show, It's a Calamity, Monetary Issues, Sell Crazy Somewhere Else Email Article 
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