Read Online You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
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home, having followed his father into a job at GM. Bill was just then running for reelection to the Michigan House of Representatives. His district happened to include the section of east Detroit that his old college buddy had been buying up. Robert gave a lot of money to the campaign. It was all very cozy.
But Robert also brought in a team of consultants, specialists in urban renewal, and the truth is, they called most of the shots. I remember a black woman named Barbara—Barbara Stamford from Stanford, this is how she introduced herself, one of these women who jogs eight miles a day and lives off cottage cheese. She wore cheerful bright-rimmed Prada glasses. I asked her once what got her interested in Detroit, and she said her work at Stanford was on “optimal inefficiencies.” Efficient economies need to adapt instantaneously to changes in the market, in technology, but there’s a measurable human cost to all this. People don’t want to adapt all the time, they want to not adapt. What economists do is put a value on everything; you can calculate the cost of adaptation, too, and what she liked to think about was the optimal rate of change. Not too slow, not too fast. Detroit was like a poster child for getting it wrong. But I could tell she was talking down to me.
Once or twice a week we met up in the big dining room, with printouts and laptops cluttering the table. Sometimes I came straight from the house, with the leathery smell of gardening gloves on my hands and paint scabs spotting my hair and pants. The contrast made a deep impression on me, and maybe explains why from the beginning of this whole business, I felt like an outsider.
8
M eanwhile, the weather improved. Baton Rouge doesn’t make much of spring, but over the Detroit sidewalks trees bloomed and lawns, pushing off the snow, broke out in daffodils. On Robert’s block gardeners in dirty overalls produced expensive and colorful displays of hydrangea, lilac and rose. But even in the overgrown yards of burned-down houses bindweed and dandelions blossomed.
Robert and I went running sometimes on Belle Isle Park, along the river, where the wind was cold but not bitter. A skyline view of Detroit, as clean as you like, stood up straight-backed on the far shore. There were cold blue days busy with clouds and hot white afternoons and gray mornings where the rain came down as hard as if it fell off a roof. But Robert didn’t care what the weather was. He liked to get out of the house and ask me questions about what was going on inside it. Also, he thought I spent too much time with Tony Carnesecca. In his hard-to-read conscientious way, which was partly ironic, he said, “Tony’s a bad influence. Has he given you any books to read yet? This is the kind of thing he does.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You know, more than one. Cultural Amnesia , by a guy called Clive James. The Confessions of St. Augustine .”
This was true. Tony wanted to raise his kid a Catholic, like he was raised. He planned to give his son everything he himself had as a boy, including some of the misery. Both my parents are Catholic, though my dad gave it up in college, without a second thought. Like you give up mowing the lawn when you move out of home. And my mom found it hard to persist with after they started going out, which she sometimes reproached him for. Tony took her side and kept bugging me to show my face some Sunday morning at St. Barnabas, one of those bungalow-type churches with a sloped roof and yellow-brick front. He pointed it out to me once, from the car. He promised to pay for my pancake breakfast if I went, at the IHOP in Roseville, which is where he always took his wife and kid. But I’d resisted.
Maybe Robert had some Scot Calvinist beef against all this, or maybe he just felt left out. Tony and I had developed a manner, as boy roommates do in college, which was quick, abusive, satisfying and hard to butt into, for an outsider. When he didn’t feel like
But Robert also brought in a team of consultants, specialists in urban renewal, and the truth is, they called most of the shots. I remember a black woman named Barbara—Barbara Stamford from Stanford, this is how she introduced herself, one of these women who jogs eight miles a day and lives off cottage cheese. She wore cheerful bright-rimmed Prada glasses. I asked her once what got her interested in Detroit, and she said her work at Stanford was on “optimal inefficiencies.” Efficient economies need to adapt instantaneously to changes in the market, in technology, but there’s a measurable human cost to all this. People don’t want to adapt all the time, they want to not adapt. What economists do is put a value on everything; you can calculate the cost of adaptation, too, and what she liked to think about was the optimal rate of change. Not too slow, not too fast. Detroit was like a poster child for getting it wrong. But I could tell she was talking down to me.
Once or twice a week we met up in the big dining room, with printouts and laptops cluttering the table. Sometimes I came straight from the house, with the leathery smell of gardening gloves on my hands and paint scabs spotting my hair and pants. The contrast made a deep impression on me, and maybe explains why from the beginning of this whole business, I felt like an outsider.
8
M eanwhile, the weather improved. Baton Rouge doesn’t make much of spring, but over the Detroit sidewalks trees bloomed and lawns, pushing off the snow, broke out in daffodils. On Robert’s block gardeners in dirty overalls produced expensive and colorful displays of hydrangea, lilac and rose. But even in the overgrown yards of burned-down houses bindweed and dandelions blossomed.
Robert and I went running sometimes on Belle Isle Park, along the river, where the wind was cold but not bitter. A skyline view of Detroit, as clean as you like, stood up straight-backed on the far shore. There were cold blue days busy with clouds and hot white afternoons and gray mornings where the rain came down as hard as if it fell off a roof. But Robert didn’t care what the weather was. He liked to get out of the house and ask me questions about what was going on inside it. Also, he thought I spent too much time with Tony Carnesecca. In his hard-to-read conscientious way, which was partly ironic, he said, “Tony’s a bad influence. Has he given you any books to read yet? This is the kind of thing he does.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You know, more than one. Cultural Amnesia , by a guy called Clive James. The Confessions of St. Augustine .”
This was true. Tony wanted to raise his kid a Catholic, like he was raised. He planned to give his son everything he himself had as a boy, including some of the misery. Both my parents are Catholic, though my dad gave it up in college, without a second thought. Like you give up mowing the lawn when you move out of home. And my mom found it hard to persist with after they started going out, which she sometimes reproached him for. Tony took her side and kept bugging me to show my face some Sunday morning at St. Barnabas, one of those bungalow-type churches with a sloped roof and yellow-brick front. He pointed it out to me once, from the car. He promised to pay for my pancake breakfast if I went, at the IHOP in Roseville, which is where he always took his wife and kid. But I’d resisted.
Maybe Robert had some Scot Calvinist beef against all this, or maybe he just felt left out. Tony and I had developed a manner, as boy roommates do in college, which was quick, abusive, satisfying and hard to butt into, for an outsider. When he didn’t feel like
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