I have an affinity for Detroit, despite being accused of different in the podcast. It is true that I from time to time use the town as shorthand for social decay in America, but I am merely carrying on a longstanding comic tradition:

In my defense, Detroit as a punchline doesn’t even make sense any longer. The city is no longer simply going to pot; there are people working to push Detroit to make a comeback. Everybody knows Tempe’s Detroit now. Detroit’s just Detroit.

Furthermore, possibly my favorite website (you like the new AP style?), ForgottenDetroit.com, is an homage to the legacy of Detroit’s crumbled, yet still beautiful legacy. I lived an hour south of the city for the first 14 years of my life and have breached Detroit city limits a number of times and grew up a Tigers fan. In fact, I’ve often referred to my hometown of Toledo as “Little Detroit,” and even affectionately most times. The greatest name I’ve ever heard bestowed on a human child is Yeah Detroit. I slipped Detroit’s original Hell Night into and article I’ve wrote here at HowStuffWorks.com. Chuck and I talked on the old live webcast about the Loveland art district in the city, where land investors can purchase one square inch of property. I’m pretty sure I’ve done more than the average person to spread awareness of the singularity of Detroit.

But nothing serves as a better mouthpiece for Detroit than Detroit itself.

The city has proven itself impossible to kill, despite entire sections are left abandoned. This festering has infected other areas, and the mayor proposed a year or so ago that the city simply shed some parts, to amputate, if you will. This idea would reduce the size of this “largely vacant urban prairie,” lower the collective demand on the services it’s expected to provide, open blighted areas up to farmland or greenspace and generally give Detroit a chance to start over again. As far as I know the plan to shrink Detroit is still in progress.

A photo of the lobby of the abandoned Booker-Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit, from one of my favorite sites, ForgottenDetroit.com

The city also continues its role as cautionary tale for municipalities against putting all of their eggs in one basket. Detroit is so synonymous with car manufacturing in the U.S. that it remains the term for the American auto industry still, decades after the auto industry has left the city in sharp decline. It’s true that, unlike rural areas in the South where entire multi-county areas may depend on the assembly plant for a single auto manufacturer as their economic engine, Detroit at least diversified by serving as home to the Big Three rather than just one. But when an entire industry goes under at once, well-managed businesses have to make cuts as much as poorly run ones.

Detroit’s stood for decades as this appropriate allegory for industry in the U.S. as a whole from the 50s to the 80s: the decline of the union, the abuse of the worker by employers, the outsourcing of unskilled jobs, the disappearance of the pension, the loss of entire communities. The financial pestilence that has plagued other cities since sub-prime mortgages became a household word in the country is old hat to Detroit. “The world is just now reeling from economic chaos. In Detroit, that’s how we always roll,” said one of the city’s business leaders in 2009.

Yet, it also stands as a testament to the can-do spirit of America. At the risk of sounding like a PR flak for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce (which as far as you know I have no financial relationship with), the city is as resilient as the U.S. itself. And what shows American resiliency more than printing money in the midst of financial crisis?

Detroit, like a few other cities in trouble, has taken to printing its own currency, optimistically called Cheers. It’s perfectly legal; the Fed’s rules say states, regions and cities can print their own paper currency, so long as it doesn’t look like what the Treasury prints. Local currency, called scrip, goes back to long before the advent of the Fed, when any bank, railroad or top hat and monocle-type could print money, so long as it could back it up. The modern scrip some Detroit businesses are accepting is pre-tender; they’re sold for about 90 (federales) cents on the Cheer, though they’re worth their face value when used in a purchase. Not a bad ROI, to be sure, but Cheers are more symbolic than anything, even more so than mainstream paper currency.

I admire Detroit. I admire its toughness and the fact that it prints its own money. I admire that on the nights before Halloween abandoned parts of Detroit are subject to arson, though I fear for the town as more of it is up for the burning these days. Most of all I admire the people of Detroit for continuing to live in their city, as tenacious as any group of people ever clung to a boat they refused to let sink. Yeah Detroit.

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