Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: To Dig or Not to Dig - 7/31/07

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is apparently prepared to risk contaminating streams, exterminating a subspecies of brook trout, and maybe even leaching sulfuric acid into Lake Superior. All for a hundred or so jobs that will last a few years.

And, of course, I suppose we would earn the eternal good will of the Kennecott Minerals Corporation, a subsidiary of the multinational Rio Tinto Group, based in London and Melbourne.

Does that decision surprise me? Not much. After all, we live in the age of instant gratification. Two months ago, your state legislature sold $900 million dollars in tobacco settlement money the state was to get over the next few years for $400 million now. They did this to avoid having to make hard decisions about the state’s fiscal affairs.

So, why not drill a sulfide mine? When I was in elementary school, I was taught that one of the most disgraceful episodes in Michigan history was when lumber barons and the copper interests had been allowed to rape and ruin the Upper Peninsula.

That, we were told, would never be allowed to happen in the modern era. This is what we thought, anyway, back in 1963.

Yeah, well, I never counted on them trying to do Vietnam a second time either, but you never can tell. Now I am not exactly a back-to-nature kind of guy. I wear suits and sleep indoors with the air-conditioning on.

However, I think it is nice that nature is still there, and I prefer my trout swimming in water, not sulfuric acid. And I know that if we do anything to permanently damage Lake Superior, where the water levels are already dangerously low, we will be toast. Here’s something that baffles me about this whole business. What does the state of Michigan get out of it? Yes, I know a few blokes will get jobs for a few years. Naturally, we don’t even know if local people will be hired or not. But what do we the people get?

Frankly, I think that Kennecott should be required to share a portion of its profits with the state treasury. They will be exploiting and taking away our precious resources. So we should benefit.

Next, I think they should set up a fund and otherwise guarantee to reimburse the state for any and all accidents or damage done in the course of building this mine.

Rio Tinto can afford that. They had an operating profit of $9 billion last year, which is considerably more than our poor state’s entire general fund, If they honestly believe this mine is safe, they should put their money where their press releases are.

You know, we’ve been pretty lucky so far in terms of environmental mishaps. But I think we ought to err on the side of prudence. Otherwise, well, Kurt Vonnegut once said he had the perfect epitaph ready for the human race:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Interview: Hugh McDiarmid Jr. - 7/31/07

A controversy is swirling around a proposal to drill a sulfide mine in the Western Upper Peninsula.  There are rich copper and nickel deposits there, but in order to get at them, the mine would be drilled through rock that, if mishandled, could release sulfuric acid into area streams. Yesterday, the state gave preliminary approval to the mine, shocking environmental groups.  Hugh McDiarmid Jr. is spokesman for the Michigan Environmental Council Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Primary Concerns - 7/30/07

If there is anything more screwed up than our state budget, it is the process by which we select candidates for president. The candidates have been campaigning furiously for months.

But here in Michigan, we have no idea whether we will get to vote in an open primary or in a party-run caucus. We don’t know whether it will happen in January or in February.

We don’t know if we will be a key part of the process or an afterthought. If that doesn’t make you frustrated, you clearly haven’t been paying attention. Maybe you have a life, or something.

I prefer open primaries. We are a swing state, full of voters who regard themselves as Republicans some years and Democrats in others. If both parties vote the same day, it cuts down the risk that any merry pranksters will try to mess up the other side’s process.

Voters should have as much freedom of choice as possible. Trouble is, our national presidential selection system is also broken.

The key state of Ohio decided the entire election last time. This year, Ohio voters don’t get to weigh in on a nominee till March 4.

By that time, everything is likely to be already decided.

Well, I have an idea for a better way. We divide the states into groups of four – East, West, Midwest and South. Then have a series of four regional bipartisan primaries, to be held the first Tuesdays in February, March, April and May. New Hampshire and Iowa, the great historic exceptions, could still function as an appetizer.

They could vote first, in January. But nobody else.

Every four years we rotate the order in which the sections vote. If the Midwest voted first in 2008, it would be last in 2012, and so on. This would give each state an approximately equal chance to affect things.  More importantly, it would give voters some perspective.

We would have a month in between each primary to study these candidates and assess how they had done so far. The way it is now, it seems that more than half the states will all vote Feb. 5.

That means everything is likely to be over soon thereafter.

But you never know. What if Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani each do almost equally well in piling up delegates? But John McCain wins just enough to make sure neither man has a majority.

What if the Republicans go to Minneapolis next summer without a certain nominee? What if, at the end of the first ballot, they are all still short? That could make for a kind of excitement we haven’t seen in a lifetime. In fact, the last time a convention went more than one ballot was 1952. That also happens to be the last time neither the sitting president nor the vice president was trying for the nomination.

The last time, that is …. until this year.  Maybe, just maybe, this election could be more exciting than any of us yet know.

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Interview: Bill Ballenger - 7/30/07

Next year’s presidential campaign has started earlier than ever and has excited more interest in both parties than ever before. But … when will Michigan voters get to register their choice of a nominee? Will we have a caucus or a primary? Will the two parties vote on the same day? Bill Ballenger has had his fingers on the pulse of Lansing longer than just about anyone. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Mighty Mac - 7/27/07

Twenty years ago, I once asked an eighty-year-old man if there were anything left that he wanted to accomplish with his life.

Indeed there was. He wanted “to see Big Mac in daylight.“ Alas, that never happened. By that time he was very ill with emphysema, and died about a year later.

But I think about him virtually every time I see Big Mac in daylight, and I wonder how many of us ten million Michiganders are in the same boat. How many of us, in other words, have never seen this amazing bridge, which is awesome just to look at.

I don’t think anyone knows the answer, but whatever it is, it’s a shame. Everyone should see this bridge. Pictures don’t do it justice. Big Mac may be the only bridge I have ever seen that is great just to stare at. I may be partial, but I think it is prettier than its main rivals, the Golden Gate or the Verrazano-Narrows bridges

Of course, you can’t see either of them while riding a bike around Mackinac Island.

Americans don’t seem to get excited about big construction projects any more, and that’s too bad. There was a time we found them romantic, starting with the Erie Canal.

The Mackinac Bridge was maybe the last of those. I was in kindergarten when it opened, and remember the teacher making a fuss about it. This month, Michigan History magazine’s entirely issue is a salute to “Mighty Mac at 50.”

I think anyone whose soul isn’t dead would find this issue nostalgic and fascinating. I’d say the magazine’s price is justified merely by the picture of eighty-three sparking white Oldsmobiles, one from every county, zooming across the day it was formally dedicated.

Building the bridge was a massive engineering feat to be sure, but also a massive political and financial one, filled with all sorts of gripping sub-plots. There were dreamers, intrigue, and crusty old moss- bound cynics in the legislature who thought this was going to be a bridge to nowhere. There was a young governor who tied his political fortunes to the bridge, five martyrs who fell to their deaths building it, and a relentless engineer named David Steinman who worked miracles of construction and got it done.

Gary Cooper should have played him in the movie.

Here’s one thing that may startle you. It cost the equivalent of about $25 in today’s money to drive across the bridge when it opened. That’s because the $100 million cost had to be paid back.

Today, with the bonds long since retired, it costs two dollars and fifty cents. Four million cars zip across the bridge a year, and every governor walks across it on Labor Day.

To some, the bridge has become one of Michigan’s enduring symbols. Perhaps our lawmakers ought to keep it mind as a symbol of the fact that we in Michigan can build bridges, and can get it done. When we want to, that is.   

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Interview: Roger Rosentreter - 7/29/07

The Mackinac Bridge opened to traffic fifty years ago this November, and that anniversary is being marked by celebrations this through the weekend.  Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with Roger Rosentreter.  He’s the editor of Michigan History magazine.  The magazine’s current issues is about the bridge.

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Essay: Sherwin Wine - 7/26/07

Prophets traditionally don’t get much respect on their home turf, especially when they are starting a new religion. Jesus knew something about that, and so did Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons.

Like Malcolm X, they were martyred for their beliefs. Sherwin Wine escaped that fate, though he was certainly a pariah to most of Detroit’s Jewish community in the early years of his movement.

It took a lot of chutzpah for a young rabbi to proclaim he was an atheist in 1964, less than twenty years after the holocaust.  It took even more brass to start first a new congregation, then a new branch of his faith – one that was based on not having faith.

Today the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews has congregations on every continent except Antarctica and Africa.

They train their own rabbis, and put on high-powered intellectual and theological colloquia every other year. The movement was written about in Time and the New York Times before the local paper, the Jewish News, reluctantly agreed to start covering Humanistic Judaism.

Incidentally, I am neither Jewish nor intellectually equipped to judge the merits of competing theologies. What I am, however, is a writer and a teacher, with a strong prejudice in favor of knowledge.

And it is as a teacher that I most admired Sherwin Wine. He spent a great deal of time giving lectures and organizing lecture series across southeastern Michigan. In fact, he started an organization to do just that, the Center for New Thinking. He reminded me of the days when learned men would travel the country, giving lecture series that were raptly attended by thousands of people hungry for knowledge.

Sherwin Wine was still doing that. I saw him as a throwback to the age of the enlightenment, where intellectuals held forth in salons on a variety of topics. I sometimes spoke at his invitation.

The people who came were mainly open-minded and curious. They were well-read. Many of them knew how to find information on their own. But they enjoyed coming together to learn with a teacher.

Wine wasn’t perfect. He did not suffer fools gladly. Actually, he barely tolerated them at all.  But he was able to speak on topics from evolutionary biology to the modern theater. He did movie reviews and explained the great sweep of history. Not everybody loved him. Even those who admired him sometimes disagreed with him.  One newspaper editor told me “You know he didn’t know everything, and he wasn’t always right.”

But, I said, he is trying to educate the public – and is your newspaper doing what newspapers did? Is it educating your community about itself and stimulating discussion of the major issues of the day? We both knew the answer was no.

The word rabbi means, literally, teacher, and Sherwin Wine was a one-man university, helping as many of us as he could to learn more about their world and themselves. I suspect it will be a long time before this community knows how much it lost in that car accident in Morocco.

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Interview: Adam Chalom - 7/26/07

Sherwin Wine shocked Michigan’s Jewish community in 1964 when he announced that he was an atheist.  He went on to found a new branch of his religion.  By the time Rabbi Wine died in a car crash on Saturday, there were Secular Humanistic Jewish congregations all across the nation and world.  Chicago area Rabbi Adam Chalom grew up in the humanistic tradition and was trained by Rabbi Wine.

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Essay: Northwest Clouds - 7/25/07

Back in the early 1980s, I had to fly somewhere nearly every week, sometimes more than once a week. I am not an aviation buff, but I never minded flying. The planes showed up pretty much on time. When a rare problem occurred, there were always other flights and other airlines to choose from.

Plus if you flew farther than to and from Toledo they fed you, and flying gave me a much-appreciated chance to read.

Now, I try to jump through hoops to avoid flying. Next month I am going to be in Illinois, Kansas and Missouri for a few days. Ten years ago, my wife and I might have flown there and rented a car.

This time, we both said, no way. We are driving. Detroit Metro’ s new McNamara terminal is nice, but not anyplace I want to spend two days dining on Cinnabons after my flight is canceled.

Besides, last time I flew they inexplicably let me keep my penknife. But they took away the plastic kindergarten scissors I use for cutting out newspaper articles.

Here’s what happened. The government stopped regulating the airlines in the early 1980s, thanks largely to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Shortly afterwards, the government also stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws. The end of deregulation was supposed to mean more competition, with all the benefits that would bring.

It also was supposed to mean cheaper prices, especially for the most traveled routes. What we got instead is a sort of nightmare. I am constantly getting letters from people about some failed government program. See, they say, this proves “socialism doesn’t work.”

Well, airline deregulation would seem to show that capitalism doesn’t work, at least predatory capitalism.

Economist Arthur Leahy’s 1992 book Flying Blind: The Failure of Airline Deregulation, says it all. He demonstrates that all the basic assumptions of deregulation were false. Those promoting it argued that destructive competition was unlikely, and that those sacred market forces would keep prices in check.

Boy, were they wrong. What we got instead was a new world of highly destructive competition, as airlines were bought and sold by corporate raiders who didn’t care about anything but a quick buck.

Remember Eastern? PanAm? TWA? Republic? Leahy shows conclusively how deregulation has led to discriminatory and higher pricing, service deterioration, and planes that aren’t as safe.

And his book came out fifteen years ago! The trends he identified then have only gotten worse. Today, much of Detroit’s transportation economy is being held hostage to a highly unpopular airline that has a workforce and clientèle which seems to hate it.

Northwest also has great difficulty serving its basic routes, yet it wants approval for more flights to China. The airline has already filed once for bankruptcy. And no one can even imagine the economic impact on Detroit if it were to go out of business.

You know, I think we’ve given unbridled capitalism a pretty good try. So doctor - please call in the socialists.

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Interview: Terry Trippler - 7/25/07

Northwest Airlines has been cancelling thousands of flights in recent months, including dozens this week. Terry Trippler is a longtime analyst of airline industry trends. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about why these cancellations are happening.

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