[lbo-talk] happiness in place

[Adrian Doerr]

i'd amplify what alan says here--it's not just the elderly, but the
entire populace of michigan--growing up in that semi-rural wasteland
south of ann arbor was depressing enough--visiting it a month ago was
even worse--it's as if the collective miseries of the entire state are
worn onto everyone's faces/movements--the utter lack of jobs, an
infrastructure that is totally falling apart, those endless grey
skies.  it felt like the antithesis of "hope". my partner loathes
going with me because each time we visit it's a bit more depressing.
add on to this wonderful mixture all the strong anxieties about what
would happen to the other businesses built up around the auto
industry, should something catastrophic happen to the latter, and you
have a recipe for exactly what dennis describes.
and then there's the nasty xenophobia and racism that seems, somehow,
even a bit more vicious now.  my family members who work construction
(and were laid-off when i was visiting) are more bitter, more
us-vs.-"them" than ever.
sigh
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>
>>
>> On Feb 27, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Dennis Perrin wrote:
>>
>>  Going food shopping outside of Ann Arbor is quite depressing. The sad
>>> expressions on people's faces. The heft. The slo-mo gaits. Death seems to
>>> have already arrived. Only gravity holds together what's left.
>>>


> Martin, living an hour WNW of Ann Arbor, in East Lansing, and working an
> hour N of here, in Mount Pleasant, my sense is that Dennis isn't writing
> about the elderly... its large swaths of the population at all age levels.
>
> Outside of the university towns and few wealthier areas of Michigan, Real
> America dominates (and while the history of industrial labor unions means
> that our Traditional Values folks are a little more likely to have a left
> economic populism attached to their right cultural populism than in some
> other regions...) and xenophobic anti-cosmopolitanism reigns whether you're
> talking about consumption or politics, religion or the environment, or guns
> or sex/gender/sexuality.  Sometimes the xenophobia dominates and sometimes
> the anti-consmopolitanism but each almost always informs the other... my
> students often speak of folks not like them as if they were (space or
> illegal) aliens.
>