With the possible exception of Detroit, Cleveland, if you haven’t been, is the most tragic stage in the U.S. But in tragedy, you can usually find a lot of romance, and in Cleveland I think there are all sorts of love stories. That place, like my own Saint Louis, was not constructed: it was built. To borrow a bit of my father’s phrasing, the infrastructure there is breathtaking. Mile after mile after mile of sturdy, solid, utterly romantic, I think, homage to an age when things were actually made in this country. I don’t believe the politics of the industrial age were any more savory than the politics of today, but man, they sure knew a thing or two about cities. Big cities with big plans. Architecture and urban planning guided by what must have been a sense of optimism the likes of which I’ll never experience.
That’s because we traded it all in to save 49 cents on a box of laundry detergent at WalMart. With nary a question, as best I can tell, we bought the messaging provided by the marketing team about the superiority of cars and cul de sacs and houses with attached garages that can be opened and closed from within the car, making it easy to not know people. In the most astounding betrayal of our ancestors – talk about unpatriotic – we came to regard the ‘inner city’ as a place of danger and risks not worth taking. Riding the bus was for losers, as was sending children to the public school. So was shopping at stores where we knew the people who owned them. We got really, really afraid of black people.
Except, of course, for the ones in uniform. As a confirmed hater of professional sports and its devotees, yesterday was something of a bonanza. We’ve been betrayed, cried the people of Cleveland. He’s abandoned us in an undignified way. He’s turned his back on his people, and his city. He's a coward, bellowed the owner of the team. Oh, shut up. A society that sanctions outsourcing jobs anywhere it can while simultaneously cutting off unemployment benefits, a country that cannot seem to provide adequate healthcare to its poorest people, a country that clearly doesn’t prioritize public education, is at the same time a country that can cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to court – pardon the pun – a basketball player and fuel up a degree of media hype that surprised even a person who expects the worst of these people. Even Katie Couric had a bitchy remark about the whole thing, referring to it as “the audacity of hype.” Of course, given that she devoted a full and uninterrupted 12 minutes to the golfer’s press conference not long ago, she should know. My main gripe with the whole thing, though, has nothing to do with the basketball player. My problem is that a great city’s name is now synonymous with something that should be way beneath it on the scale of dignity. And the people of Cleveland, as has been the case so many times before, have nobody to blame but themselves.
