Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

10/11/05

Michigan and the automobile industry were rocked when Delphi, which is the nation's largest auto parts supplier filed for bankruptcy. Could Delphi Corporation's crisis be the beginning of the end for the domestic auto industry?  What does this mean for Michigan's already battered economy?

Jack talks with Micheline Maynard, the Detroit Bureau Chief for the New York Times and Author "The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Market"; Paul Isley, Professor of Economics at Grand Vally State University; and Former UM President James Duderstadt, who has written a new report called "A Roadmap to Michigan's Future: Meeting the Challenge of a Global Knowledge Driven Economy."

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Jack's Essay: The Migrant Workers - 10/10/05

Bobby Kennedy didn’t start off caring much about migrant workers when he arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1965. True, he had been President Kennedy’s conscience when it came to the plight of the nation’s Negroes, as they then called themselves.

But there weren’t many migrants in Massachusetts or New York, and by and large they weren’t even citizens.

Kennedy might never have risen above that if he hadn’t been assigned a seat on the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. That wasn’t an assignment he wanted. It was the kind of thing a new senator gets stuck with. Early in 1966, labor activists forced him to go check out a farm workers strike in California.

He wasn’t thrilled about the idea. Then he met Cesar Chavez, who founded the union that became the United Farm Workers. Essentially, as the song goes, Cesar had Bobby at hello.
Bobby Kennedy took up the farmworkers’ cause.

Think of it. A mainstream politician with a chance to be president trying hard to help a minority so downtrodden most of its members weren’t even citizens.  That’s what Robert F. Kennedy did.

And those Mexican-Americans who could vote helped him win the California presidential primary the night he was killed.

Migrant workers haven’t had a major champion in Washington since.  Mostly we seem more concerned about deporting Mexican-Americans than helping them.

So here’s my suggestion. Take any migrant worker who wants to stay and let them stay. In Detroit, my home town. Detroit has lost a million people in the last fifty years. Wide sections are depopulated, and there is talk about reviving urban agriculture.

Hispanics have been increasing in Detroit for some time. Let’s make it easy for them to do so, big time. I know what condition Detroit is really in, and I can tell you frankly – we’d all be better off.

10/10/05

You might call them the invisible minority.  For decades, migrant workers have been an important part of Michigan's economy.  Few of us know very much about who Michigan's migrant workers are.  But some of them are now going on to become successful and influential members of our society.  What cultural shifts are you seeing where you live? 

Jack talks with Tom Thornburg, Co-Managing Attorney with Farmworker Legal Services in Bangor and Rene Rosenbaum, Professor and Researcher, Michigan State University's Julian Samora Research Institute

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10/7/05

Our needs change as we age, but do we ever outgrow our need for intimacy.  The Rolling Stones are still rocking in the 60's and aging Americans are finding they are still grappling with issues of sex and relationships.  What are your thoughts on how we deal with intimacy as well age?

Jack talks with Sallie Foley, who is a Psychotherapist at the UM Medical Center and the author of "Sex and Love for Grownups"; and Sylvia Hacker, who is a Professor Emerita at the UM School of Nursing and the author of "What Every Teenager Really Wants to Know About Sex."

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Jack's Essay: The Meaning of Intimacy - 10/7/05

There are a lot of jokes about old people and intimacy, most of them off-color, and none of which I intend to repeat here.

Except this one.  A 77-year-old man marries a shapely, 21-year-old supermodel, to the envy of all his old pals down at the bingo parlor. Six months later, he shows up again, alone and without his wedding ring. “What happened, Joe?” one of them said.
“I had to dump her,” he says.
You dumped her? his friend says. “What the hell for?”
“She didn’t know any of the right songs,” he growled.

Though a joke, that makes a certain amount of sense. Physical attraction is vitally important to the species, as is sex.

But higher levels of intimacy require something more – what I call “shared intellectual and emotional furniture.”  I once asked an attractive and lonely woman whether she ever considered dating younger men. She said she had a New Yorker cartoon on her bedroom mirror.
It said “Never go to bed with anyone who doesn’t know who Adlai Stevenson is.” At last report she was, however, considering crossing out Adlai and writing in “George McGovern.”
That doesn’t mean age differences or cultural barriers can’t be overcome; it just means it’s harder. Incidentally, sex is a good thing. I have reason to believe I wouldn’t be here without it.

But even fruit flies have sex, whereas intimacy is a priceless thing. Last night I had a marvelous long conversation about history and literature with a woman I consider an intimate friend.

She is the widow of a famous author, and is technically old enough to be my mother.

Like most humans, I have the normal fruit fly urges. But would I have traded that conversation for an hour at the strip bar?

Not on your life. But of course -- I am getting old.

Jack's Essay: In the Name Of Science - 10/6/05

When the federal government proclaimed that they intended to limit stem cell research for moral reasons, I thought of the usual stuff: The church’s hostility towards Copernicus and Galileo.

Joseph Stalin set Soviet biology back for decades by insisting that his scientists support the quack evolutionary theories of the scientific charlatan T. D. Lysenko.

But most of all, I thought of my hero: Ignaz Semmelweis. Never heard of him? Well, if your momma lived past childbirth, he is a big part of the reason why. He was a young doctor in an obstetrics ward in a Vienna hospital back in 1847, when he noticed something.

Mothers whose babies were delivered by midwives generally did fine. Mothers whose babies were delivered by doctors were dying like flies --more than ten percent of them died of infections. Why was this? Nobody knew about germs back then, but Semmelweis noticed that his fellow doctors would perform autopsies, wipe their hands on their aprons, or not at all, and then go examine new patients. Diseases spread like wildfire.

  Semmelweis ordered his doctors to start washing their hands with disinfectant. The mortality rate dropped to less than one percent. He should have been a hero.

  But he wasn’t. The other doctors bitterly resented being made to wash their hands. Some of them said they didn’t believe his theory, in spite of the evidence. They said God determined who lived and died. And he was fired from his job.

  The good doctor became so depressed he had a nervous breakdown, and was put in an insane asylum. He resisted, and the attendants beat him up so badly that he died.

  Now I have no idea how Ignaz Semmelweis would have felt about stem cell research. I can tell you this, though.

Those so-called doctors who destroyed him, and who fought this crazy idea that they should wash their hands?

  They would oppose it.   

10/6/05

Stem cell science is one of the most promising areas in science today.  It may also be the most controversial.  The University of Michigan has created a new center for stem cell research, despite the fact that the state has one of the strictest laws limiting what can be done.  What is the future of stem cell research in Michigan?  Where should the boundary be between exploration and ethics?

Jack talks with State Representative Andrew Meisner; Sean Morrison, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology; and Howard Brody, Professor of Ethics at Michigan State University.

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Jack's Essay: Shot In the Dark - 10/5/05

Michigan is now considering a new law that, as I understand it, would pretty much allow anyone who has a “reasonable fear” of being threatened at home to blow the intruder away.

To be fair, it does say you can’t shoot your children or grandchildren. Otherwise, presumably few of us would survive puberty. News of this law brought back memories of my first night as a homeowner. We had bought a ranch house in a typical subdivision.
We moved in, and I went off to my job on the graveyard shift of a newspaper. I had learned one way to find my house.

But when I came back at 2 a.m., the entrance to my subdivision was blocked by a fatal car accident. I blundered into another entrance, got lost, and finally found my flat castle.
I bounded up on the porch, fumbled with the key, which didn’t work, and finally noticed something. The mailbox was different.

Yep. Wrong house. Now had the proposed law been in effect, and had the homeowner armed, you might not be listening to me.

Over the years, I have handled many stories of people who keep guns in their homes for self-defense.

For every case of an evildoer sent to the underworld by a vigilant daddy, I’ll bet I’ve seen ten stories about a four-year-old who find Daddy’s loaded gun. You can guess the rest.

I think I have a way to settle the gun control debate, however. Those who want to outlaw guns need to concede that the Second Amendment does give us the right to keep and bear arms.

Eighteenth century arms, that is. Under my government every homeowner in America will have the right to hang a single-shot musket, accurate up to 50 feet, over his fireplace.

That might not be much help to the paranoid if the mythical black helicopters come to enslave us.  But if the redcoats ever dare to trouble Grand Rapids again, watch out.

10/5/05

Legislation has been introduced that would give people in Michigan the right to shoot and kill someone if they break into their house or car.  The 2nd Amendment gives American’s the right to bear arms, but where they thinking about machine pistols and AK-47?  And what use of arms did they have in mind? 

Jack talks with State Representative Rick Jones; Robert Spitzer, Author of "The Politics of Gun Control"; and Joyce Lee Malcolm, Author of "To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right." Spitzer is a Professor of Political Science at SUNY Cortland.  Malcolm is a Professor of History at Bentley University.

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Jack's Essay: This Land is Your Land - 10/4/05

The most bitterly controversial use of eminent domain in Michigan was, without doubt, the famous Poletown case. 

Back in 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court allowed the City of Detroit to tear down an entire neighborhood so that General Motors could build a new assembly plant. Most of the area was in Detroit, but a small part was in the ethnically Polish enclave town of Hamtramck. Churches, businesses and homes were bulldozed. I still remember the tearful, defiant residents. To many, including me at the time, it seemed a horrible abuse of state power.

Last year, our state’s highest court revisited the case. And said, whoops, we were wrong! “We overrule Poletown,” the unanimous decision said, “in order to vindicate our constitution,” and protect people’s property rights, said the mostly Republican judges.
Then this year, the U. S. Supreme Court, said taking private land for private use was fine and dandy.   

That made me wonder, whatever happened to poor Poletown? I called Greg Kowalski, an editor and historian who has written several books on Hamtramck. What he said startled me. “Without the Poletown decision, Hamtramck might not be here today. The bottom line was because of that, Hamtramck was able to replace the tax revenue it lost with the closing of Dodge Main.”

“As a rule, I strongly support property rights. As a historian I deeply regret the loss of the old Poletown neighborhood.

“But that project was the salvation of Hamtramck, even though that was not its intent,” said Kowalski, who has lived in Hamtramck his entire life. What’s the moral of this story? Simply this: It’s as H. L. Mencken used to say. For every complex problem, including that of eminent domain, there is a solution that is simple, easy . . .  and wrong.