December 26 — St. Stephen, The First Martyr

Stephen's name means "crown," and he was the first disciple of Jesus to receive the martyr's crown. Stephen was a deacon in the early Christian Church. The apostles had found that they needed helpers to look after the care of the widows and the poor. So they ordained seven deacons, and Stephen is the most famous of these.

God worked many miracles through St. Stephen and he spoke with such wisdom and grace that many of his hearers became followers of Jesus. The enemies of the Church of Jesus were furious to see how successful Stephen's preaching was. At last, they laid a plot for him. They could not answer his wise argument, so they got men to lie about him, saying that he had spoken sinfully against God. St. Stephen faced that great assembly of enemies without fear. In fact, the Holy Bible says that his face looked like the face of an angel.

The saint spoke about Jesus, showing that He is the Savior, God had promised to send. He scolded his enemies for not having believed in Jesus. At that, they rose up in great anger and shouted at him. But Stephen looked up to Heaven and said that he saw the heavens opening and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

His hearers plugged their ears and refused to listen to another word. They dragged St. Stephen outside the city of Jerusalem and stoned him to death. The saint prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" Then he fell to his knees and begged God not to punish his enemies for killing him.

After such an expression of love, the holy martyr went to his heavenly reward.

Stephen Henderson What killed Detroit? August 6, 2009 I came across the piece below this week at NewMajority.com, a political blog edited by David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and the guy who coined the phrase, "axis of evil" after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Normally, Frum writes about politics, but this piece is about history and social progress right here in Detroit. Some of his observations (those of an outsider) are eerily, and painfully accurate. And much of his advice is counterintuitively sharp. Other parts I thought were pretty obtuse, even callous. Either way, though, I figured it might inspire a good discussion here. By David Frum Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time. The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line of sight, exceeding Philadelphia and St. Louis, rivaling Chicago and New York. I had a chance to tour central Detroit recently, my first visit to the downtown core in many, many years. Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved. But for the most part, all is decay. Whole towers stand empty, waiting to join the long line of grand structures that have either been abandoned to pillage and ruin, like Detroit’s once magnificent neoclassical skyscraper of a train station, or else pulled down entirely, like the downtown Dayton Hudson department store, once the largest enclosed shopping space in the United States. Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise. In 1960 it remained a thriving city, showing early signs of future trouble yes, but still strong, rich, and proud. By 1970, Detroit was a byword for urban dystopia. Detroit Then and Now, by Cheri Gay, compiles a series of photographs to illustrate the change. The book in one way is a disappointment: it’s written in a tone of forced boosterism that requires the author to deny the reality of the collapse she’s chronicling. Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction. This mode of argument will convince nobody. But sustaining it does require the author to avert her glance from those sections of the city where the theme of evolution cannot possibly be sustained: the acres of abandoned houses, the vacant lots where commercial enterprises once stood. But here is one thing that I do learn from the book: Detroit has never been protective of its past. In the prosperous early 1960s, it used federal urban renewal funds to pull down its grand Romanesque 19th century city hall. (Detroit wants to use today’s TARP money to repeat its vandalism, this time on the old train station.) Detroit sacrificed a handsome row of pre-Civil War mansions built by then-leading citizens to allow the Detroit News to erect a bland new office and printing block. It has erased almost all traces of its pre-automobile past from the downtown, and only lack of demolition funds preserved its oldest surviving downtown neighborhood, now faintly recovering as a yuppie-gay historical enclave. Not all the urban renewal schemes failed. I was dazzled by a Mies van der Rohe townhome project, a human-scale garden streetscape in the middle of the city, so lovely that you could almost forgive the grim adjoining Mies van der Rohe high-rise apartment projects. More often, however, urban renewal was to Detroit what the RAF was to Dresden. One heart-rending contrast: the General Motors plant in Hamtramck, where acres of solid working-class housing were bulldozed — not to make way for the factory itself, which required relatively little space, but so that the factory could be surrounded by parking lots, grass and a wide moat of highway from the rest of the city. It makes a heart-rending contrast to the abandoned 1920s Packard factory I visited, where cottages had been built literally across the lane from the factory wall: literally 40 feet away. What killed Detroit? The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more? Two other factors have to be considered. The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses. Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers. After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city. As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with fresh grievances. The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State. A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.” Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new. It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

http://markszine.net/
Virtual Exhibit put together by Deb King of MARK(S)ZINE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cTJ0Hs4tRw

Just pitched one Detroit / Hamtramck style!

Subject: Deepak Chopra
>
> Obama and the Palin Effect
> by Deepak Chopra
>
> Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national
> psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly
> illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the
> Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she
> outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given
> her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing.
> Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the
> job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By
> comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's
> pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes
> deeper.
>
> She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his
> idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological
> terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight,
> countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are
> ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and
> suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers
> those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for
> us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden
> reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not
> making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The
> shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I
> recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome
> by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to
> understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a
> rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change
> and a higher vision.
>
>
> Look at what she stands for:
>
> Small town values - a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a
> denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded
> parochialism.
> Ignorance of world affairs - a repudiation of the need to repair
> America's image abroad.
> Family values - a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for
> social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to
> be needed.
> Rigid stands on guns and abortion - a scornful repudiation that these
> issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
> Patriotism - the usual fallback in a failed war.
> "Reform" - an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out
> corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who
> doesn't fit your ideology.
>
> Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has
> been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that
> minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American
> types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and
> globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the
> banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it
> is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a
> reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her
> resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The
> irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side
> of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own
> good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising
> shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and
> narrow-mindedness.
>
> Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum.
> The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives
> possess a shadow - we all do. So what comes next is a contest between
> the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or
> has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best
> thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which
> makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another
> Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary
> forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We
> deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.
>

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