A few months ago I wrote a post about an amusement park in New Orleans that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and then abandoned.
And I said it made me think about America. After the dream died.
Then a reader wrote to me and said he found the example of Detroit far more distressing, because it wasn't ruined by a flood, or a hurricane, or any other natural disaster.
And of course, he was right.
Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets.
"A place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible."
A city destroyed not by natural disaster, but by greed, racism, and an economic system that values profits over people.
But here's the thing eh? In a society so corrupted it accepts this as normal.
Where the rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer, and the suburbs decide the fate of the inner city...like they now do in Toronto.
Detroit may be the first ruined post industrial city in North America.
But it won't be the last one...
Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers.
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