Put Your Hands Up for the Prince of Detroit

Two things in the media have caught my eye today (and by "media" I mean they were mentioned on the Daily Show).  The first is, inevitably, the royal birth.  I'm not up on details but the royal family involved is the British one (is it bad that I can't remember either parents name?).  The media frenzy surrounding the birth peaked at 9.8 on the hyperbole scale.  To get much higher they would actually have to have footage of the queen training at an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan.  A number of less experienced commentators have had to be hospitalised with severe neural lacerations and at least one member of the CNN team probably wishes she was.

Frenzy notwithstanding the birth is fantastic news for Britain.  Just when things seemed economically at their worst the royal family stepped forward and gave one for the team.  Now Britain can look forward to a commemorative tea towel led economic recovery, or at least Bangladesh can.  Still, no doubt there will be few jobs in Britain unloading the things from ships.  Sounds like something they can get their army of illegal immigrants to do at cut price, cash in hand wages.

In case you think I'm being a little cynical I would like to point out that I do think the birth is good news.  Any time a birth is announced without somebody saying "and the baby was immediately transferred to a humidicrib" is good news if only for the parents.  Plus the economic benefits for Britain go far beyond my smartarse comments about tea towels.  Hordes of people with no discernible skills have found gainful employment speaking to cameras about the royal birth.  I predict a significant bounce for Britain's struggling professional make up and cocaine distribution industries.  Incidentally, I wonder if governments have realised that if they legalised drugs they could not only tax the profits but the incomes of the dealers and kick most of those selling the stuff off the dole?

Legalising drugs may also be the only recourse for the subject of the other news story that lodged in my frontal cortex this evening.  Detroit is bankrupt.  OK, that's not news.  Detroit has been bankrupt for years but now they have made it official.  The city of Detroit has declared bankruptcy with over twenty billion dollars in unfunded liabilities (or debt as I believe it used to be called).  Services are virtually non existent, graffiti is the only thing holding up most of the buildings and anybody capable of getting out has already left.

This is terrible news for Detroit of course and it is particularly terrible news for people who were relying on a city pension to help them get by in those years between retirement and death.  Whether it is bad news for anybody else is rather more problematic.  To begin with, cities don't actually have a god given right to exist.  People congregate in cities because they can get something they want (usually a job) in the city.  If that is no longer the case there is very little point in having the city.  America is littered with ghost towns (so is Australia for that matter), places that boomed when there was a reason to go there and died when there wasn't.  The people living in them didn't vanish off the face of the earth, for the most part they moved somewhere else and got on with their lives.

The people of Detroit shouldn't throw in the towel just yet though.  There is another reason cities last long after one might logically expect them to decay.  That is sentiment.  If a city has a colourful or glorious past then the current inhabitants can leverage that to extract money from passers by.  This has been pretty much the sole raison d'etre of Paris for the last three centuries.  Detroit does have such a history.  It was the "arsenal of democracy" in the second world war and "motor city" for decades afterwards while at the same time nurturing a burgeoning music scene.  Surely that's enough to be going on with.  I'm certain that plenty of people would like to come and see evidence of a time when America had a manufacturing base.  Mind you, there's no point in the people of Detroit being sentimental.  They've got to be hard nosed hustlers chivvying some dollars out of nostalgia addled tourists.

To make this work though Detroit needs a trump card.  There are fewer and fewer people out there who realise America used to have an auto industry.  Detroit needs something special to draw in those knowledge of Detroit is limited to reruns of Robocop (quite a prophetic movie now when I think about it).  I suggest a change of government.  Not a change of politicians but a complete reworking of how the place is run.  The world is littered with corruption riddled democracies but what if Detroit were to turn itself into an independent city-state.  There aren't too many of those hanging around (and most of them are quite successful).  Or even better it could become a principality.  That worked for Monaco and nothing appeals to sentiment quite like your very own royal family.  Fortunately I know of a family that has recently acquired a prince it doesn't really need.