The author seems to think that poverty is what made that little girl's death inevitable. But lots of people survive poverty. What made her death inevitable was not the poverty as such, but the near-total breakdown of civilization that has occurred there.

I also visited the "one block of abandoned houses" link that appeared on that page, which goes to a page on Mother Jones. I don't know what was sadder, the photos themselves, or the fact that when Mother Jones attempts to diagnose the root cause of all of those abandoned homes, they'll get it completely wrong.

I read the whole article twice, once this morning and again now after reading your comment. I don't see what you see, I guess.

It seemed to me that he was talking about the same thing you are, the near-total breakdown of civilization there.

I don't think the author was pinpointing poverty, unless it was moral poverty.

He asked her folks if they thought the life-style she was exposed to might have had something to do with it, and they didn't seem to understand him at all!

Anyway, I thought it was a decent quickie history lesson about Detroit. I'm from Michigan, and Detroit... well, it may have been Motor City once, but I don't drive and I never cared for the place. And these days I sometimes feel the arsonists have the right idea.

In this speech, a gifted author makes the point that most of the world's great old cities are great and old because they were put in the correct place to begin with... Or, as in so much of Japan, were populated with people of sufficient grit to overcome tragedy. Plenty of formerly great citidels are buried in sand and prehistory. Perhaps Detroit had neither an organic raison d'etre nor a strong sliver of the best American character... Most people who've owned an American car in the last 30 years would have doubts.

Anyone wanna bet that there'll still be a huge metropolis in Henderson in 300 years, after the Apocalypse?

(109 degrees in the summer, and those bastards don't even blink.)

PP, I'll go read it again. I kind of jumped on something the author said on the first page, and assumed he meant to carry that thought through the whole article.

Crid, interesting point about Henderson... hey, they survived the PEPCON explosion too!

> they survived the PEPCON explosion

Tru, tru...

We never save the best articles, right? But a few years ago I read an article about Cincinnati. Turns out, Cincinnati is a fucked-up city when compared to others in the neighborhood, like Columbus and Dayton and Toledo and maybe even Cleveland. And it's been fucked up for a very long time: If they'd played their cards right in the 19th century, Cincinnati would have been the rail-&-river hub for the entire western United States, and Chicago (whose name translates as "reeking onion field") could never have become the Second City. But civic pride got in the way... Just as it does today, as they genuflect for the National Football League and other debt-generating ephemera.

Seeing into the future is terribly difficult... But I'd guess that no matter what, there's going to be a great city on the south edge of the Golden Gate, even if the beloved bridge and Transamerica Pyramid are felled three times and rebuilt twice.

Otherwise, I dunno. Seattle may still be around... Kansas City, maybe....