What is Detroit? sparked some comment on Facebook. Where did my vision of Detroit come from? Why do I get to have it and spread it?
The question, Whose Detroit is it? is also asking, Who gets to define anything? Who's in control of our myth-making?
To paraphrase A. J. Liebling, freedom of the press belongs to anyone who has a blogging account. In the last century, he couldn't imagine the multiplicity of voices. And if everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody.
Which sort of brings us to one of the best short stories about the suburbs, which is really about class and generation. It's The Man Who Loved Levittown, the title story in W. D. Weatherall's collection. The narrator is reasonable, irrational, unreflective, angry and compelling, and you can understand why he does what he does.
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O, and if you're looking for cancer? Scroll a little bit down.
