What's the Diehl?

Raymond

Jesus comes back like he said he would: a stand-up kind of guy,
reticent to a fault but rock solid. The shy type everyone likes
but no one thinks much about one way or the other,
until one evening, during a storm, tooling down I-15
in his beat-up vw bug, he passes one of those awful
two-car wrecks &, pulling to the shoulder, hops out,
strolls past the paramedics & cops, & before they can
think to stop him, kneels into all that shattered glass
by the gurneys & sheets &, with a few incomprehensible words
in a language nobody's spoken in two thousand years,
coaxes the dead back to life. The little kid
gets back his severed leg, & all that blood on the road
disappears like a bottle of trick ink. Then everyone starts
waking up. Even the drunk in the Chevy, sober
for once & looking sheepish as hell. Thank God, he thinks,
no one was hurt. Outraged, the cops wrestle Jesus
to the mud, snap on the cuffs, & toss him in the back
of their squad car. But when they're done helping
the two ladies and the kid to their feet & walk back,
the cuffs are on the dashboard & their black K-9 Lab retriever
is curled in the guy's lap, Jesus scratching the fellow
behind the ears - something no one's thought to do
since he was a pup. Listen, you know as well as I
that none of this is true, just a story I made up
about the world we would like to have been born into,
the world where nothing that we love has to die.
But the Lab retriever I was thinking of was real:
our beloved Raymond, who's been gone now many years,
though I can still see his black tail twitching happily
in his sleep as he'd lie at the foot of our bed, the way he used to.

~ Steve Kowit

I really don’t know how Matty Moroun can sleep at night.

The 85-year-old Grosse Pointe billionaire and owner of the 7,500-foot-long Ambassador Bridge – the busiest international border crossing in North America – has been running disingenuous commercials ad nauseam to promote Proposal 6, a b*llsh*t ballot proposal that would amend the state constitution to require voter approval of any new bridge or tunnel from Michigan to Canada.

The main problem with this proposal is that only the anti-tax, anti-expenditure, anti-progress cretins could turn out to vote – “no” is the default position for this group – and we'd never see another new bridge or tunnel anywhere. A small, Tea Party-esque minority could be deciding policy questions for the majority. The campaign with the best get-out-the-vote component could make important infrastructure decisions and not engineers, transportation experts or elected officials. Some decisions shouldn’t be left to unqualified, emotional activists.

I’ve written about Mr. Moroun before (“Matty Moroun’s Miserable Machinations," June 4, 2011; “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” October 10, 2011; “I Hate It When I’m Right,” October 21, 2011; “Road to Redemption,” October 31, 2011; and “Matty Moroun’s ‘Get Out of Jail Free’Card,” January 16, 2012). It’s worth repeating, though, that the guy will apparently go to great lengths to protect his gravy train – the bridge is worth between $1.5 and $3 billion dollars – including inundating the airwaves with commercials that the Michigan Truth Squad, a project of the nonpartisan Center for Michigan, deems a “flagrant foul.”

An informative piece on Matty and this issue appeared in the Detroit Free Press last Sunday (“The Great Bridge Debate,” , September 23, 2012). Surely the man who bought the state legislature and then watched Governor Rick Snyder bypass it and sign an agreement with Canada knows that ominous threats and incendiary rhetoric resonate with an unsophisticated electorate. This is probably why his despicable commercials ask if we “want to pay more for gas?” and insist that “taxpayers will have to spend billions now and $100 million every year” and declare that “we don’t need it and we can’t afford it.” (Visit this link and this one and this one if you must.)

Don’t need it? More than 10,000 trucks and 4,000 cars cross the 83-year-old bridge each day, representing more than a quarter of all trade between the U.S. and Canada. Traffic congestion and resulting air pollution are documented problems. And the 6,000 new construction jobs and hundreds more to operate the new bridge are nothing to sneeze at either.

Can’t afford it? The agreement signed by Snyder and Canadian Transport Minister Denis Lebel this past summer states that our Canadian friends will pay for Michigan’s share of the project (about $550 million) and will recoup that money from future tolls. On the first page of the agreement, it says, “The Crossing Agreement provides a framework for a Crossing Authority established by Canada to design, construct, finance, operate and maintain a new International Crossing between Canada and Michigan…with funding approved by Canada, but with no funding by the Michigan Parties. The Michigan Parties are not obligated to pay any of the costs of the new International Crossing.” (Emphasis mine.) According to the Freep, legal experts who reviewed the agreement are convinced that Michigan taxpayers won’t have to cough up a dime for this. The truth doesn’t matter to Matty and his minions, however.

I wish it mattered to voters. Sadly, an EPIC-MRA poll of likely voters conducted earlier this month found that 47 percent supported Proposal 6, 44 percent opposed it and nine percent were undecided.

Guess who’s helping Matty, by the way? Americans for Prosperity, the far-right, multi-million dollar organization supported by the Koch Brothers which funds the Tea Party, opposes Obamacare, pooh-poohs climate change and engages in near-criminal behavior in order to achieve its goals. In June of 2011, the group placed fake eviction notices on people's doors in Detroit's Delray neighborhood. The organization's state director said they wanted to get people's attention and stir up opposition to a second bridge by claiming that their properties could be taken by the state to make way for the new project.

Matty Moroun

There's something wrong when someone with pockets as deep as Lake Superior can hide behind cleverly-named front groups like “The People Should Decide” and blatantly mislead voters with half-truths and distortions. It’s disturbing that people can say whatever they want, that there’s no requirement that advertising be factual, that honesty is neither demanded nor expected by the listener or viewer.

Since 40 percent of our registered voters don’t even vote in presidential elections, it’s no wonder that campaigns like Moroun’s – which rely on an ignorant subset of eligible voters – ultimately succeed. When the majority isn’t engaged in the process, that process is much easier to sully and stymie.

Maybe someday a majority of registered voters will turn out on Election Day and send a message to political consultants that deceptive commercials and bald-faced lies are unacceptable. Of course, voters would have to become more discerning.

I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.