It was as if I could forget what my Slovak friend, Pavel Vilikovský, had observed – as if one could go home again, thus innocently to a preserved version of one's boyhood.
Nature had preserved another gift I'd forgotten: the great hardwoods a hundred feet tall and more towering into canopies webbed high above rooftops of all the old towns. Maples, beeches, oaks, and surviving elms were not merely decorative in their awesome heights. They had work to do, more now
than ever, as miasmas of poisons oozed, cloyed, and congealed more than ever from the scurrying fleets of tin rodents that still drove the masses of obediently lemming souls more than ever addicted to them. Lucky for them – for all of us – our yet-surviving arboreal skein. Lucky that nature, simply protecting herself, yet had photosynthesis to
create fresh oxygen again out of our heedless recklessness of mercury, zinc, polymers, and carbons dioxide and monoxide. Things reverberated. When I was a boy in the 1950s, Michigan knew
prosperity. Boyhood was, for all my friends, summers of Vaselining and rubber banding baseball mitts every night for city ball fields next day. Through summers all we kids could laze about with comic books or library books on neatly mown lawns, or idyll our days at the numerous city park pools – one of them large and round with a concrete
island and its diving boards centering the deep part. Every town in Michigan, big and small, was growing with new schools, new supermarkets, tract homes, sod farms, orchards, nurseries, neighborhoods tinkling with milk men, bread men, and ice cream men announcing deliveries by truck bells. With morning newspapers delivered to our homes by the
time we'd gotten up, first thing we could check the new stats for all the players on the Detroit Tigers, and those for all eight of the American League teams, whose players we knew additionally by the bubble gum cards we all collected and traded. Our dads worked mostly for the car companies in Dearborn and the Detroit area, where all boys
competed, too, for the insignia, emblems, and other regalia of the annually changing tail fins, grilles, side panel and bumper chrome. All of these things added up for a thorough-going confidence all imbued. The Soupy Sales show on local Detroit television thread all suburban kids with local magic, as did the Mickey Mouse Club show and Walt
Disney on national TV. Elvis came. Within a year of that, too, Davy Crockett. Airwaves filled with doo-wap and the harmonizing of well-dressed Drifters, Platters, Coasters, Chantels, Flamingos, Crests, and more. Big water and sweeper trucks whooshed off our streets while we slept, baseball mitts with fresh Vaseline under the pillows buoying
our close-barbered heads. If I had learned to be a poet from the time of my boyhood – an American poet – I might have come to see all the goodness of that innocent prosperity as something
that added up – as a City on the Hill system of some sort or another where details supported and webbed each other. I learned poetry's wisdom, however, not in American terms, but from those of central Europe, a place where only at one's imaginative risk could one ever separate Old World elegance from its viral nationalisms, wars, and
genocides. As an American, of course, I had learned beliefs in systems – trust capacities like those people normally join the world over, regardless of how we good Americans imagine our systems free of their evils. But when I'd learned to see evil in central Europe, I'd learned it seldom looks the way one expects it to look.
Evil almost never wears the black hats of American B-western films, or any other obviously menacing dress. It often nicely lies. The intrigues, self-rewarding, betrayals, and complicities in evil too often come from the nicest of people. And they lie most when they look good, when their details promise to add up, round off, and conclude
nicely. Our most conventional, institutional, and bureaucratic souls love their marchings to closure – and it's all the same whether their coherently packaged styles are those of marketers dividing us by demographics, university professors isolating us by specialization, or our ever-predictable nationalists and religious leaders rearranging
our borders. Flags, costumes, rites, and rituals don't express individuals in their humanity so much as they do component units of collective dreams. When our arts come from marketers, specialists, and demagogues, we end up expressing the collective lies. Evil may pipe to us in tinkling bells or trumpets, hip hop formulae or corporate
textbook modular units. But evil requires arts to deliver its clichés, and its arts invariably join large promises – those of addition and closure. And the other arts? Those that will never lie to us or otherwise fit us to ulterior purposes and collective goals? One poet originally of eastern Europe said how we might recognize them. In a
George Kline translation, Joseph Brodsky wrote: It seems that what art strives for is to be
precise and not to tell
us lies, because
its fundamental law undoubtedly
asserts the independence of details.
By the time I got to Michigan in summer of 1998, I had developed my program, Essaying Differences, so students and teachers could see how we end up bounded by lies – ethnic, nationalist, racial, gender, class, departmental, and other – not merely by economics, but also by the arts by
which we express ourselves. We think we're enlarging and expressing ourselves by arts which in fact may be more largely reducing and lying to us. And we could tell the difference if we started Essaying Differences.
I decided Detroit, urban center of my boyhood, would be a good place to start. The city itself by 1998 had become more African-American than anything
else. In the greater metro area, however, Detroit's blacks fairly equaled the population of Appalachian-origin whites, most of them in Trenton, Wyandotte, and other southern factory suburbs. Each of these two groups had similar numbers, too, as the Hispanics (documented and not) scattered about city and suburbs. And a fourth group, Middle
Eastern, counted, too: Lebanese in east Dearborn, and Chaldean Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Indians in the newer and more affluent sprawl of northern and western suburbs. The last group, whites like myself and my '50s boyhood friends, dispersed throughout the region, variously in touch with or amnesiac about our ever-distancing European forebears. As luck would have it, a Detroit-area organization had already begun a cross-cultural project aiming to connect dozens of ethnically different area high schools with each other. So on a hot August day I found myself heading
downtown. There, on East Jefferson Boulevard, across from the Detroit river, the National Conference on Community and Justice (NCCJ) had its Detroit headquarters, newly located in a Federalist-style renovated townhouse, historic plaque on its red brick front wall.
I'd started my rounds that day not knowing about the NCCJ. I'd made my first calls, around Wayne State and the cultural center farther up Woodward, in cut-offs, sandals, and open neck shirt befitting the 90-degree heat and drowsiness of much institutional life: summer vacation period was nearing
its end, with the region's schools closed for another two weeks. Thus informally attired, I only had to wait a bit before Daniel Kirchbaum, NCCJ executive director, returned to the building from an early afternoon meeting elsewhere. In slacks, shirt sleeves, and tie, and standing just inside the foyer, he liked enough of what I said about
Essaying Differences to invite me into a back room, where platters of fruit lay set out. With this refreshment, and coffee, he heard me out for a bit, then called in his staff person, Deborah Williamson. A white woman my age, and with a grown son about the age of my own, she and her husband lived out in Oak Park, one of the
northern suburbs. I had had debate club and model United Nations dealings with Oak Park kids when I attended high school in Livonia up to '65. I liked the connection now – not only with this old, affluent suburb of brick ranch and colonial houses, but with all the other suburbs now tinged for me with thirty and forty years memory. Deborah
would be organizing the coming year's NCCJ high school exchange and conferencing program.
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