Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Glimmers of Hope - 3.15.11

Many people have been disillusioned by our political polarization and lack of cooperation. But Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry sees some hope in those still too young to vote.

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I know we’re just a week or so away from the beginning of spring, but it’s hard right now to feel especially hopeful. It’s been a long and grinding winter, and we all know we haven’t seen the last of the snow and ice yet. And while unemployment is down, most of us know people who have been out of work, or still are.

But I can’t help but think of something inspiring that happened at the start of this winter. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan ran a high school essay contest.

Students were asked to read Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, the one that includes the famous line, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free.”

Then, they were to write about how their experiences as a part of this melting pot had defined their American identity.

The contest was sponsored by a friend of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, a humanist and community leader in the Detroit area who was tragically killed in a car accident in Morocco three years ago.

I was a friend of the rabbi, and since I supposedly know something about writing, I was asked to be the final judge. Frankly, I wasn’t too optimistic. This is a busy time of year, and for many students, reading and writing aren’t top priorities.

But I have to say, I was blown away. The ACLU asked me to pick the best two. But four were so good I insisted they honor all their authors. When I judged them, I didn’t know who the writers were. But when I met the students, I had a pleasant surprise.

The winners included a girl of Irish ancestry named Oona, and an African-American star basketball player. Plus a Muslim girl from Pakistan who intends to become a brain surgeon, and a Hindu girl who wants to be an attorney fighting for civil rights.

That young woman wrote “My differences have not made me feel like I don’t belong to this nation -- they have made me feel like an important addition to this melting pot. I think my differences make me feel even more American than I would feel if I were not an immigrant.”

Her Pakistani counterpart wrote about third grade classmates who told her September 11 “was caused by your kind.” Gradually, she realized that she could still be a proud and open Muslim because this was America: “Islam has made me who I am today, and the Bill of Rights helps protect that identity.”

The African-American young man wrote candidly that he still lives in a nation where all is still far from equal -- but added “my American identity is diverse, frustrated, proud -- and still evolving.

The most lyrical essay was that of the girl named Oona, who attends a high school with students whose native languages include Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and German.

She wrote: “We are America’s melting pot, the true national treasure. Who would have supposed this “wretched refuse would become the ones who would shape our past and dictate our future?”

“But they have.” This nation will belong to her generation before long. And I think that they just may do a better job with it than those of us who came before.

Essay: Saving Newspapers - 3.14.11

Newspapers across the nation have been losing money and circulation, in Detroit more than in other place. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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It’s hardly a secret that newspapers aren’t doing very well these days. Over the decades, they’ve been gradually replaced as the nation’s universal mass medium by television.

Newspaper’s biggest economic blow came, however, with the flight of advertising revenue to the Internet. This, combined with an ever-more busy public bombarded by more and more media choices, has badly wounded what was once a thriving industry.

And left us in danger of being dangerously uninformed as well. Ann Arbor, for example, no longer has a daily newspaper at all.

The problem is perhaps most acute in Detroit, where, twenty-five years ago, the Detroit News and Free Press sold a combined total of one point three million newspapers every day.

That number has declined ever since. Audited figures show that as of last September, they were down to a combined circulation of less than four hundred thousand, a number that has dropped further since then.

To save money two years ago, Detroit’s newspapers embarked on an experiment in which they would deliver the papers only three days a week, and asked consumers to read it them on line or go to the store and buy it the rest if the week. This really hasn’t worked.

After first saying they would not allow independent contractors to deliver the papers to people‘s homes on the other days, the newspapers are now tolerating, if not actively encouraging this.

But the circulation is still falling, and recently, the Detroit Media Partnership, the agency which runs the papers, made an astonishing announcement. They will pay $5,000 each for the two best ideas readers offer to help serve the community and increase readership.

Well, I don’t intend to compete for the prize money, but I do have an idea which I am willing to offer them, free of charge.

I have been a newspaper reader all my life, a writer for newspapers for most of it. I have been a newspaper editor, helped run a newspaper company, and teach the history of journalism. So here’s what I recommend to not only the Detroit Media Partnership, but newspapers everywhere. Go back to producing newspapers for intelligent, informed consumers who like to read.

For the last twenty-five years, newspapers in general, and the Gannett company in particular, have produced newspapers seemingly designed for people who don’t like reading and who would prefer to watch TV instead. Well, the returns are in, and it is very clear that people who want to watch television don’t want a newspaper that imitates TV, with splashy pictures and articles about Miley Cyrus.

They don’t want a newspaper at all. Meanwhile, those of us who do like to read and want to know what’s going on in Michigan have been disenfranchised. The auto companies got in trouble partly because they strayed from their core business,

Newspapers should return to doing what they do best, and produce well-written, incisive coverage of things that matter.

If they do that, they just might find a winning formula with a smaller, though loyal and consistent base of subscribers. I know lots of people would tell me this couldn’t possibly work.

But even so, it might be worth a try. After all, it could hardly fail worse than what the newspapers are doing now.

Essay: Wacky Weather - 3.11.11

This winter has been one to remember, and it isn’t over yet. But what causes extreme weather, and does this winter call the whole question of climate change into some doubt? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been doing some reading.

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You don’t need me to tell you this, but we’ve had a rough winter. Not nearly as tough as they’ve had in New York, or almost anywhere on the eastern seaboard. But it’s been cold and snowy.

How snowy? Well, in Detroit, we are already in the top dozen winters of all time, with more than sixty inches. Last month was the third snowiest February in recorded history.

But it could always be worse. If you have any interest in the weather, by the way, there’s a fascinating little book that just came out last year: Extreme Michigan Weather: The Wild World of the Great Lakes State, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Author Paul Gross is a longtime meterologist who now works for WDIV-TV in Detroit. His book looks at the strange and constantly changing weather we have in this state, or, as he puts it, everything from heat waves to bitter snows, ice storms to tornadoes to floods.

We don’t, however, have hurricanes, and his book will tell you why. (Not having any tropical ocean waters around here is a big part of it.) Ice we do have -- in abundance.

Ice and snow. But if you are feeling so tired of snow you can’t stand it, consider this. We lucked out today. Grand Rapids once got almost seven inches of snow on March 11. In Flint, it’s been as cold as seven below zero this day, which I found in Paul Gross’s book.

He includes all these tables for fun in Extreme Michigan Weather. So, just in case you were burning to know, it was once twenty below zero on this date in Ironwood.

I’m glad I wasn’t there -- though I wish today was going to match the seventy-two degrees we once hit on this date in Motown.

What has been happening is snowier winters. Five of the last nine winters have had at least sixty inches of snow. Prior to that, we had only ten such winters in more than a century. So the logical question is: Does that mean global warming is a bunch of hooey?

Not at all. I talked a few weeks ago to Professor Andrew Jorgensen at the University of Toledo. He is a chemist who has been studying climate change. He told me that one effect was hotter summers and colder winters. But with fifty years, if present trends continue, he expects our climate here to be somewhere between that of Kentucky’s and that of Arkansas.

We may feel nostalgic for winters like this if and when that happens, though this year I’ve had enough of walking a rambunctious puppy on icy sidewalks to last me a lifetime. Paul Gross’s book didn’t answer every question I’ve ever had about the weather, but he did clear up one mystery for me: What makes weather happen?

“There’s one main concept to remember,” he says. “Weather results from change and from rising air.” Works for me.

By the way, I read that sentence the other day while waiting for a meeting in Lansing, and I realized that if you substitute the word “politics” for “weather,” and make it “rising hot air”…. you’ve got a second handy definition that’s just as true as the first one.

Essay: Emergency Financial Managers - 3.10.11

A bitterly divided Michigan House and Senate have passed new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation. Michigan Radio‘s Jack Lessenberry has some non-partisan thoughts.

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Nobody in Lansing was neutral yesterday when the Michigan senate completed passage of new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation on a straight, party line vote.

State Senator Phil Pavlov said this is needed to maintain “vital services, such as public safety and education,” when a city or a school district is in desperate financial straits.

This reform, he said, is necessary to allow steps to be taken “to protect public interests and the public’s money and strengthen local control and accountability.” His fellow Republicans all agreed.

But if you talked to any of the Democrats, they sounded like this was the equivalent of Mussolini seizing power. “An unfair and unjustified power grab,“ Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer called it. One of her colleagues said it went way too far, “and was going to damage our communities and our schools.”

Well, you could say that it is nice to see that our time-honored tradition of bitter partisan divisions is alive and well, but I think the opposite. We’ve had four sterile years of that in Lansing. I think we’d all be better off if this could have been a bipartisan bill.

It’s also frustratingly clear that in the past, some emergency managers in places like Pontiac and Hamtramck could have used more authority. Robert Bobb needed to be able to tackle academic reform in the Detroit district; the courts said he couldn’t.

Now, his successor will have that power. Democrats are mainly afraid of provisions in the bill that would allow emergency managers to void contracts and ignore collective bargaining agreements if necessary. EFMs can even dissolve a municipal government.

Democrats rightly fear this could be the death knell for public employee unions in such cases. To be sure, the majority Republicans seemed uninterested in even attempting to compromise or win over Democrats. However, here’s something we might ask the indignant minority party: Where have you been for the last several years?

What’s clear is that a lot more school districts and municipalities are likely to have to endure emergency financial managers, or EFMs for short.

This has been clear to everyone for some time, and it has also been clear that the old law was inadequate. Did the Democrats propose changes last year, when they controlled the governorship and the state house? Did they suggest conducting a review of Detroit’s troubled finances?

They did not, clearly for political reasons. They did nothing, any more than they attempted to address the state’s deep-seated financial problems. Now, the balance of power has shifted.

What’s needed now is a little more common sense and a little less hysteria. As I read this law, EFMs will now be appointed by the state treasurer, not the governor. And the man now in that job, Andy Dillon, happens to be a Democrat. He also has the ability to grant local officials most of the powers emergency managers have.

If emergency managers are appointed who gleefully begin dissolving contracts for sheer ideological reasons, there’s bound to be plenty of public criticism, and a backlash, as witness Wisconsin.

What’s needed now is the means and goodwill to keep financially strapped governments functioning, and, especially, to educate kids, no matter what.

If everyone keeps that in mind, we’ll all be better off.

Essay: Funding Education - 3.9.11

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Mike Simeck, the superintendent of schools in Berkley, Michigan, has something in common with Governor Snyder - or at least, with the way the governor ran his businesses:

He believes in proven results. “I run an organization that is the largest employer in our city, where I would hear from our client base immediately if we begin to fail,” he told me last night at ten o’clock, after each of us had put in more than a full day.

“I run this thing based on empirical evidence, on data and results, and as a result, we’ve been successful."

That‘s no idle boast. Berkley is a small but diverse district with a little less than five thousand students. Roughly speaking, they are two-thirds white; one-quarter black, one eighth Hispanic and Asian.

He has affluent kids from Huntington Woods, working and middle class kids from Berkley, poor kids and Orthodox Jews from a slice of Oak Park. They run lean and mean and get results.

Want proof? More than four out of every five Berkley students who apply to the University of Michigan get in. Their ACT scores are way over the national average. Simeck, who’s been in his job for four years, says this is no accident. When other school districts outperform Berkley, they study them and make changes.

That’s helped lead to Berkley High being recognized by Newsweek as one of the nation’s “public elite” high schools.

Yet Simeck is deeply concerned that Governor Snyder’s budget is going to destroy all that. He’s been in Lansing, talking to new legislators and state officials. They tell him the governor’s budget is based on a hunch that if business taxes are dramatically lowered, it will bring new investment and prosperity flowing into the state.

Mike Simeck thinks it’s only reasonable to ask, “what data do you have supporting this plan?“ That’s what he would be asked if he wanted to make radical changes in his district.

And if the governor’s budget is adopted, it will indeed mean radical change -- and not change for the better. Berkley will face a deficit of $4.9 million dollars, well over a tenth of its entire budget. This is a district that cut its fat years ago.

They privatized food service. There’s no bus service, except for special education. The district has had vacancies for an art teacher and a social worker for six months, because Simeck has a policy of no placeholders, of not hiring anyone till they find the right person.

The governor’s budget would mean laying off teachers, increasing class size, and perhaps getting rid of all music, art, athletics and physical education. Whatever they do, “We cannot avoid impacting learning and achievement,” he told me.

Those two things, are of course, what Michigan’s kids and our state need if we are to have a future.

So Mike Simeck is going to do what he can to persuade our lawmakers to think again about cutting the school aid fund. He knows it won’t be easy. Most of the legislators are new. Many are still learning how education funding works.

But he thinks they should be able to grasp this:

You may be able to put off buying a new car. But Michigan only gets one chance at properly educating a child.

Essay: Taxing Credibility - 3.8.11

Lansing is seeing waves of protestors who are angry about the governor’s proposed budget cuts. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says they need to check their arithmetic.

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Two plus two equals four. Simple, right? That’s math even a journalist can understand. Unfortunately, the legislature and a large section of the general public doesn’t quite seem to get it.

State government is currently on course to run a huge deficit for the next fiscal year. State budget deficits are illegal, under Michigan’s Constitution. That budget has to be balanced by September 30.

Four months ago, we elected a ton of Republicans to the legislature who pledged they wouldn’t vote for any new taxes, no matter what. We elected a Republican governor who said he was going to deeply cut taxes on business, because he believed that was the only way to attract new jobs and industry to this state.

So we voted for no new taxes of any kind, less taxes on business, and we‘ve got a big budget deficit to start. And now we are shocked, shocked, that the governor is insisting on making huge cuts in state spending. Well, we shouldn‘t be.

We voted for this. And, we tolerated the last governor, and several different past legislatures, refusing to deal with our problems. We put things off till we couldn‘t do it any more.

And now, we have to fix it. What‘s worse, we have to do this when we are still mired in the effects of the worst recession since World War II. Yes, I know the recession is officially over.

The economists say so, anyway. But hard times are not even close to over in Michigan. The auto industry is never coming back the way it was, and we need a new economy.

That doesn‘t mean I approve of the governor‘s approach. But we voted for it, and now we are whining, Protestors are thronging the state capital every day protesting some cut or other.

They have a right to do that. But the first rule of Management 101 is that if you complain about a problem, you should have a proposed solution. Ask the people protesting the budget cuts what they would do instead, and you mainly get a blank stare.

That, or some other answer that betrays fundamental ignorance of fourth grade arithmetic. The governor’s most unpopular proposal is taxing pension income. The AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, is fighting this tooth and nail. They don’t think a retired teacher who gets combined social security and pension income of $90,000 a year should pay taxes on what she makes. However, they don’t have any problem with the single mother who works part -time in my local dry cleaners paying state taxes on her eight dollar an hour job.

Does that sound fair? Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville noted yesterday that if the proposal to tax pensions is defeated, they’ve got to come up with another nine hundred million more in budget cuts.

I could say show me the money, but there isn’t any, and that’s the problem. For the last decade, we’ve pretended that there was such a thing as a free lunch, and we could make it last forever.

Except that the bill is now due, and the policeman is on the next stool. Two plus two is still four. If you have a better way to add up the numbers, I‘m all ears.

Essay: Shared Sacrifice? - 3.7.11

Governor Rick Snyder’s proposed budget would eliminate a tax credit for the working poor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry went to see some people who worry about the consequences.

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If you want to see why this recession was different from others in recent history, spend a little time over at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries. They’ve been seeing and feeding people they’ve never seen before, people who never imagined they’d need help.

The other day, I went to see Dr. Chad Audi, the mission’s President and CEO. Not only is their caseload flooded, he said, “more and more we are seeing the working homeless.”

These are people who have jobs, but still have no place to live. The Rescue Mission does what it can to get them into housing, but the need is far greater than it used to be -- and for many, the ability to give is less. Incidentally, there are some who think of the mission as just a soup kitchen, possibly because of their mass appeals for help with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the homeless. A soup kitchen was pretty much what it the mission was when it was founded a century ago. Founder David Stucky kept people alive with food from his own pantry during the worst of the Great Depression.

But in modern times, the mission has added transitional and permanent housing as well as an array of programs designed to get people off drugs and alcohol, off Detroit’s mean streets and back into the workforce. They even have a ranch near Howell, where inner-city kids can spend a few days among woods and streams.

But the past few years have been especially grim. The number of people needing daily food assistance has increased by forty percent. Audi, who first came to the mission to take a temporary accounting position, told me about a middle-class looking man one volunteer noticed standing in line on one of the coldest days of the year, clutching the hands of his daughter and son.

They offered to take them inside immediately, but the man said he wanted to wait his turn. He had lost his job and his home, and was staying with relatives. He didn‘t think it was fair to ask them to feed his family too, so they came to the mission. Stories like that are why Chad Audi is in this job. He has a doctorate in business, and came back from his native Lebanon fourteen years ago to take a government job that paid three times as much as working at the mission. But this work called to him instead.

Now, he is worried about the future. The mission is non-profit, non-partisan, and gets no government support, aside from some federal housing money. However, if the governor’s plans to end the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor is approved, the Rescue Mission fears their caseload will skyrocket.

Projections estimate this could plunge tens of thousands of children alone into poverty. That would strain the mission’s resources. And what it would do to Michigan‘s future?

Times are tough for the state, and lots of people are going to have to make sacrifices. Yet it’s fair to ask whether cutting a program designed to allow the working poor to keep their heads above water is going to backfire on the rest of us.

Let’s hope the governor and the legislature carefully think this one through.

Essay: Primary Problem - 3.4.11

The presidential election is still more than a year and a half away, but once again, politicians are already talking about changing the date of the state’s primary election. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has some thoughts.

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If you haven’t been traumatized enough by this seemingly endless winter and the governor’s budget proposals, I’ve got something that may really give you nightmares.

It’s presidential election time again. Now, you may be saying wait a minute. Wasn’t the last congressional election only four months ago? Well, yes. But the presidential election is next year, and the candidates are already out campaigning, though none of them are calling it that. I am aware that people who don’t know each other yet will meet, fall in love, and have babies before we finally get around to voting a year from November.

But presidents have a far longer gestation period. And one sure sign that the election season is on is that the leaders of our two great political parties are once again attempting to screw up the Michigan primary. They’ve gotten pretty good at this, and last time, the Democrats managed to make themselves the laughingstock of the nation, by holding a primary that was both ruled illegal and invalid and which did not have a guy named Barack Obama on the ballot.

Early indications are that they’ve learned nothing from their mistakes. Here’s the problem. For many years, the election calendar has worked like this. Iowa goes first, with a set of caucuses which pick that state’s delegates in January. Then, New Hampshire follows with the nation’s first primary election.

Then a couple other small states follow in February, and after that, the other states can do whatever they want. This is a good system, because it allows candidates without much money to be seen and tested in small states where you don’t need millions.

Iowa and New Hampshire are also now swing states that switch sides frequently in November. But Michigan party leaders are jealous. They want to go first. Last time they broke party rules and held a January primary which was a farce.

Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary, as local leaders wanted and expected him to. They wanted to give the home boy a boost. But his candidacy was dead in two months, and Michigan was once again irrelevant. Worse than, in that the party penalized the state by taking away half its delegates, though they gave them back at the last minute. The Democrats were even worse. Jennifer Granholm and Mark Brewer figured Hillary Clinton was the certain nomination winner, and wanted to curry favor with her.

All the other major candidates kept their names off the ballot, however, and the party refused to seat any of Michigan’s delegates, till the very last minute when it didn’t matter.

Next year, the odds are that President Obama won’t be challenged for renomination, but there will be a big GOP field.

The party would be well advised to keep a cool head and stay within the rules. Later primaries have been decisive. Michigan’s primary in May, 1976 helped save that year’s nomination for Gerald Ford. Four years later, George Bush’s victory in a May Michigan primary was instrumental in gaining him the vice-presidential nomination. So going later isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Legally, we are supposed to hold next year’s primary on Feb. 28, which is still plenty early. Let’s do something amazingly wise for once, and leave it there.

Essay: Unpopular Stands - 3.3.11

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws restricting offensive protests at military funerals are unconstitutional. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about politicians and public opinion.

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Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively overturned a Michigan law -- and undoubtedly angered and outraged the vast majority of the nation’s citizens.

The nation’s highest court said that the obnoxious protests that members of the Westboro Baptist Church stage at military funerals are fully protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Chief Justice John Roberts decreed that our nation’s fundamental commitment to free speech requires full protection of, quote “even hurtful speech on public issues.”

Now if you need reminding, the Westboro Baptist Church is a small group from Topeka, Kansas that mainly consists of the members of one large extended family. They believe homosexuality is evil and America deserves divine punishment for tolerating it.

Accordingly, they’ve been traveling the country picketing at military funerals, waving signs that say things like “God Hates America,” “God Hates Fags,” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.”

Somehow, they believe our war casualties are fitting punishment for tolerance. Michigan passed a law five years ago that was squarely aimed at the Westboro group. It essentially prohibited any such conduct within five hundred feet of a funeral.

But the U.S. Supreme Court ruling essentially makes it all but certain that the Michigan law will be struck down as unconstitutional, if prosecutors attempt to use it. Now ever since the 1960s, conservatives have often complained that out-of-touch liberals on the nation‘s highest court were improperly distorting the Constitution.

They’ll have a hard time doing that here. The high court’s most conservative justices all signed on to protect free speech rights, including, in addition to the Chief Justice, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The so-called liberal justices agreed, including the three Jewish justices on the court.

That’s significant, because if there is a group the Westboro members hate more than gays, it is Jews, whom they believe killed Jesus and who they think also helped spread homosexuality.

The Chief Justice, in his majority opinion, noted that the outrageous comments of the Westboro group have inflicted great pain, and “fall short of refined social and political commentary.” But he added that “speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.”

Sometimes, life in America is about taking unpopular stands -- and defending the right of others to take them. Today, a new poll shows that a majority of Michiganders oppose nearly every one of the major initiatives in Governor Snyder’s budget.

That’s to be expected; they call for sacrifice. The poll, which is being touted as significant by the newspaper and the TV station that commissioned it, shows Snyder is also losing popularity.

That’s no surprise either; he is taking stands and making hard choices. That’s a lot easier to do on the Supreme Court, where the justices have jobs guaranteed for life. Politicians have to run for office again, which can be both good and bad.

Indications are, however, that this governor, like the Supreme Court justices, believes in doing what he thinks is right, regardless of the polls. Whether we agree with them or not, that is exactly the kind of attitude we should want our public servants to have.

Essay: Glenn Beck and Detroit - 3.2.11

Detroiters have been in an uproar this week over a commentary in which Glenn Beck compared their city to Hiroshima. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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Detroit was in an uproar yesterday, not because the schools are in crisis, or because the governor’s budget promises to make the city’s short-term fiscal problems even worse.

Nor were Detroit’s leaders openly concerned about the effect the political crisis sweeping the oil-rich Middle East is having on gasoline prices and the auto industry.

No, what had them upset was the latest rant by the entertainer Glenn Beck, who holds forth on the Fox network. On Monday, Beck, compared Detroit to Hiroshima, saying that today, Hiroshima is in far better shape. Beck said Detroit’s devastation is due to what he calls “progressive policies,” combined with corrupt government and labor unions. He said these forces combined to bail out the auto industry, which he thinks should have been allowed to die. I heard about this rant, and so reluctantly, I watched it, or most of it. It was, as I expected, classic Beck: Shallow, hate-filled, and full of half-truths.

Once upon a time, there was a rule about commentary. You could spout opinions, but your facts had to be accurate. Glenn Beck has never cared about facts, and the disgrace of Fox and whoever employs him is that nobody else requires him to do so, either.

Recently, Beck delivered another commentary about our government’s decision to buy Alaska in the 1950s. He might have asked his friend Sarah Palin about that one; we actually acquired Alaska in 1867. He also says he has learned a lot from reading Adolf Hitler, and believes Woodrow Wilson was an evil force who is responsible for much of what is wrong with America today.

This is not someone anchored in the reality-based universe. But what really disappointed me was the way Detroit’s leadership handled this, which was to treat Beck as deserving of respect. Mayor Dave Bing invited him to, quote “come see and experience Detroit for himself.” The Reverend Horace Sheffield, a prominent Baptist minister in the city, said he was reaching out to the commentator, and hoped to meet with him.

Forgive me, but these actions betray fundamental ignorance of what’s going on here. There is utterly no reason to try to engage Beck in serious discussion. He is a man in his mid-40s with barely a high school education, who by his own admission spent more than a decade drunk and on drugs before sobering up and discovering he could make millions with incendiary commentary. His remarks weren’t really aimed at the city itself, but was meant to persuade people that President Obama’s policies are designed to make all of America look like the worst parts of Detroit.

Well, Detroit has a lot of problems. I don’t know if Beck has ever been there or to Hiroshima, but I’ve spent time in both places.

Yes, Detroit has more urban blight, but the causes are complex, and stem, more than anything else, from federal policies in the 1950s that encouraged suburban sprawl and prevented annexation.

Figuring out how to make things better is a topic that deserves endless discussion, but attempting to negotiate with verbal terrorists is not how to do that. Detroiters and Michiganders should attempt, with dignity, to tell their story themselves, while working to make the next chapter better than the last few have been.