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| Home Front: Politix |
| From Saginasty to Saginawesome |
| 2018-02-01 |
| [Essays in Idleness] "If you’ve got rats, you call the guy to come in." I picked up this little gem of political analysis from this morning’s news-cruise on the Internet. It was on the Beeb website, of all unlikely places. Their correspondent was visiting Saginaw, Michigan, which he correctly identified as a proper noun in the lyrics of a pop song from fifty-two years ago. (BBC like to remind us how hip they are.) Perhaps gentle reader already understands this analysis, uttered by a retired nurse, who was not the only Saginawian who helped deliver the "blue wall" state of Michigan to Mr Trump, two Novembers ago. "You don’t care if his crack is showing, you don’t care if he swears, you don’t care if he got tobacco-stain teeth. You want the rats took out." ...The oddest thing about this story, which wanders off the Beeb’s anti-Trump narrative for a few paragraphs before returning to it, is that it tells us exactly why Mr Trump now has the Republican Party in his wee hands, and is beloved in "Middle America" ‐ including Saginaw, a failed rustbelt town, once heavily unionized and in the fief of the Democratic Party. Under their management, the population of Saginaw shrank to about half. But it don’t belong to them any more; and what is worse (if you’re a Democrat), it is coming back to life. This is a mystery, to the media, although not to me. Even a prominent local patch of graffiti has been altered from "Saginasty" to "Saginawesome" ‐ and little businesses are springing through the asphalt splits, including boutique shops, boutique breweries, boutique housebuilding, and boutique industrial workshops. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #5 Nothing says 'hip' like song lyrics from the time period when I was crapping in diapers. |
| Posted by: Raj 2018-02-01 16:31 |
| #4 boutique breweries you won't have to. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2018-02-01 09:11 |
| #3 I still won't drink Saginaw water when I visit. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2018-02-01 08:25 |
| #2 I have not viewed it, but in 1997 CSPAN did a video series on de Tocquevilles USA visit. Here is their segment on his visit to Saginaw. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2018-02-01 08:25 |
| #1 Alexis de Tocqueville, author of "Democracy in America", toured the United States in 1831. On July 23, 1831, he took what was perhaps the first Michigan "road trip" by renting horses in Detroit and, ignoring advice from locals not to do so, traveled by Indian trails to Pontiac, Flint and Saginaw. While on the trail he wrote that he believed he was as far from modern civilization as a person could then get. His chapters about this excursion, “Two Weeks in the Wilderness,” are excluded from some abridged versions of "Democracy in America". They are well worth reading. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2018-02-01 08:13 |