After America - Mark Steyn [109]
Whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sees himself as a role model for American students, Otis Mathis certainly does. “Instead of telling them that they can’t write and won’t be anything, I show that that cannot stop you,” Mr. Mathis told the Detroit News. “If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that’s something....”23
The only one dreaming here is the president of the School Board. Being illiterate “cannot stop you” in Detroit, but try it in Bombay or Bangalore or almost any city in China—and then ask yourself to whom the future belongs. On present projections, at some point around the year 2025 American teachers will be earning two million per annum, and American Twelfth Graders will be unable to count their toes.
Detroit did this to itself.
Its profligate past destroyed the present, and its present will ensure there is no future, because lavishly funded civic institutions are incapable of providing the educational standards of a one-room schoolhouse of 200 years ago. This is an American city at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and one in two of its citizens are illiterate. That’s about the same rate as the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic, which for much of the Seventies and Eighties was ruled by a cannibal emperor. Whereas in the Seventies and Eighties Detroit was ruled by a Democrat mayor, a bureaucracy-for-life, and an ever more featherbedded union army, all of whom cannibalized the city. Say what you like about Emperor Bokassa but, dollar for dollar, his reign was a bargain compared to Mayor Coleman Young’s. Hizzoner called himself the MFIC—the Muthafucker In Charge—and, by the time it was over, Detroit was certainly fucked, and the only mothers still around were on welfare.
Return to those auto statistics: GM has one worker for every ten retirees and dependents. That math is Detroit’s math, too. The city’s population has fallen by over 50 percent since 1950.24 So who’s left? Thirty percent of the population are government workers.25 According to the Detroit News, another 29 percent are out of work, “using the broadest definition of unemployment.”26 According to Dave Bing, Mayor Young’s successor as MFIC, the real unemployment number is “closer to 50 percent.”27
An unemployable, dysfunctional citizenry, a rapacious government, crimeridden streets, and an education system that dignifies moronization as a self-esteem program: in Detroit, everything other than government is dead.
Decay sets in imperceptibly, but it accelerates, and, by the time you notice it, it’s hard to reverse. Somewhere like Detroit isn’t Somalia, not yet. But like other parts of the country it is en route to Latin America—a society with a wealthy corrupt elite that controls the levers of power, and beneath it a great swamp of poverty, whose inhabitants divide into two species—predators and prey. The Motor City is the Murder City, with one of the highest homicide rates on the planet—and 70 percent of them go unsolved.28
It will not seem quite such an outlier in the future.
BIG LOVE
The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring yourself of the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a huge population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or college subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another huge population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a transfat monitoring bureaucracy, a Bureau of Compliance for this, a Bureau of Compliance for that) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private