When the Magic wears off

There is a story, prob­a­bly, though not def­i­nitely, apoc­ryphal. It involves a guy who was charged with sell­ing guns to Indi­ans. His guilt should be less­ened, he argued, because while he sold them Henry repeat­ing rifles he hadn’t clued them in to the fact that to keep the rifles fir­ing at some point they had to be reloaded, that the sim­ple act of cock­ing the lever wasn’t mag­i­cally renew­ing their power.

Imag­ine! You have just been given the tool to stop the takeover of your home­land by the hated invaders. You just need to keep cock­ing this lever. And you do. But sud­denly some­thing is wrong with your lever. The magic has worn off. But the levers of your enemy aren’t affected. Their levers still work!

The spir­i­tual descen­dants of that rifle sales­man are still around. Some, in fact, are gov­er­nors of states.

In one gen­er­a­tion Michi­gan and its biggest metrop­o­lis have changed from the envy of the coun­try to a place that keeps run­ning out of one-​​way U-​​hauls because peo­ple are leav­ing so fast.

There are wild ani­mals frol­ick­ing in the streets of what once was the Motor City. Well, not frol­ick­ing, exactly. Prowl­ing. And not just small ones. If you have a gun you might get to dine on bear.

Now the gov­er­nor is telling peo­ple that a stronger dose of the pol­i­tics that brought their state and their finest city to this last stop between decline and decay will renew the old magic.

It’s a charm­ing tale, one where the magic gov­er­nor waves her magic wand and sud­denly com­pa­nies around the world are going to say

Yes. We want to make our car in a state with high taxes, a rot­ten pub­lic school sys­tem, unions with 4,000 pages of work rules in their con­tracts, where every­thing we do, like mak­ing half our prod­uct line appeal to no one who can afford it, has to be approved by some gov­ern­ment offi­cial! Yes, oh Yes!

But, hmmm. And then, again …

and con­sumers around the world are going to say

Yes! We want to buy a car that costs much more than its com­pe­ti­tion because it was made in Michi­gan. We like pay­ing more than we have to for a car because those other cars were made in some­place for­eign like Ten­nessee or Louisiana by work­ers who weren’t con­tribut­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in union dues that the unions could use to buy politi­cians as they have in places like Michi­gan. Oh, yes!

But, hmmm. And then, again …

And then, again …

And you vot­ers out there, you just keep a-​​cockin’ those rifles, because that renews the magic and they will keep fir­ing as long as you keep cocking.

Tags: Detroit, Jennifer Granholm, Wild Kingdom