The Power of the Visual

by Craig Ruff
May 16, 2010

Dear Reader: In my own selfish interest in escaping bodily harm, I wish to apologize in advance for failing to mention in this essay some of your favorite “big” Michigan places and visible phenomena. Space constraints and all that. But think about your favorites and their inestimable value and keep these pictures in your mind during the 2010 political season.

In the movie Sunset Boulevard, actor Bill Holden suddenly recognizes the woman played by his co-star, Gloria Swanson, as a silent film actress. “You used to be big,” he says. She sneers, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

In Michigan, it’s the attitude that got small. The pictures still are big.

Let’s start by envisioning the very shape of the state: it’s unique — even recognizable from outer space, for heaven’s sake!

We boast six great water crossings, each an engineering marvel: the Mackinac, Blue Water, Ambassador, and Sault Ste. Marie International bridges, the Canadian National Railway train tunnel under the St. Clair River at Port Huron and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

Another “big” is The Henry Ford; the museum and Greenfield Village rank at the very top of America’s historical attractions.

The Meijer, Cranbrook, and other gardens showcase the botanical and sculptural arts, and the landscaping of Michigan State University and Belle Isle meld the work of man to the glory of nature.

Such natural marvels as Isle Royale, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Saginaw and Traverse bays, the Great Lakes coastlines, our inland lakes and rivers, and the Irish Hills need not man to add to their wealth but rather man’s scrupulous attention to their care.

As for our cultural treasures, don’t get me going on the craven destruction of many of our beautiful, old movie theaters, but we did save the Fox in Detroit, the Temple in Saginaw, the State in Traverse City, the Michigan in Ann Arbor, and others. Moreover, a number of the state’s smaller municipalities have rescued their opera houses from neglect and given them new life; Calumet’s and Traverse City’s particularly shine today, and Howell’s will be a gem when restoration is complete.

We have performance halls unmatched anywhere, such as Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor and the Music Hall in Detroit. And the Detroit Institute of Art holds its own with the top art museums of the world.

Then there are our sports venues. Not for nothing is the University of Michigan football stadium known countrywide as “The Big House.”

We don’t take a back seat in architecture, either. Our stately, 19th century libraries, courthouses, churches, and homes stand beside more contemporary achievements such as Grand Valley’s downtown Grand Rapids campus, homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen, and commercial buildings created by Albert Kahn, Louis Kamper, and John Portman.

I posit that any vision for Michigan must include the visual. In part, that means protecting culture (man’s gift to man) and nature (God’s gift to man). It also means creating new works: things we can see, things we can visit.

To support my point, I suggest that people do not go places to see other people. The 45 million annual visitors to Paris are there to see the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysée, Arc de Triomphe, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Seine (not snotty maitre d’s at restaurants endowed with stars ranging from zero to four).

Michigan is not France. None of its cities is Paris. Nonetheless, pride in our place, to say nothing of tourist dollars, is essential to human wellbeing.

In a shocking rejection of the notion that the presence of poverty precludes accomplishing great things, Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, with the result that nearly every community in the country had a park, bridge, or school constructed through the agency, or an arts, drama, media, or literacy project funded by the WPA. Many are extant.

Compare this to the myopic and slavishly self-indulgent purposes of the current federal stimulus boondoggle. In Michigan and the United States, we’ve rejected trying to accomplish great things as incidental, even harmful, to lifting people out of poverty.

There is plenty of evidence (including the community conversations, conducted by the Center for Michigan, involving more than 10,000 Michiganians) that having pride in our place matters to us just as much pride in their place matters to the French and the Parisians. The Uniroyal giant tire is not the Eiffel Tower, but then the Eiffel is not everybody’s cup of tea. (The author of a book about the tower’s history and construction noted that she daily would see a Parisian sitting beneath the tower. After several days, she asked the man why he spent so much time lounging underneath it. He replied, “It’s the only goddamned place in Paris where you don’t have to see it!”)

We all know that any poll about the state’s problems will show that the populace is most concerned about jobs and the economy. But let’s probe a bit. To what end is a job? In this age most jobs have a shelf life of a few years at best. Are any of us creating something that will even be around, much less admired, in 25 years? 100? 1,000?

You will send this essay into the ether with a keystroke, but if I had been a steelworker on the Mighty Mac (fat chance, with my fear of heights), my soldering job would endure. It would contribute to the thrill you get when you catch sight of the bridge and to the support of your journey across it.

I wonder whether society can survive economically primarily on services. New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles apparently do, but exchanging services is a relatively new concept in economic growth. For thousands of years, the business of man has been goods — inventing them, producing them, and trading them.

It’s all well and good for people to philosophize or run workshops preaching that brainpower has displaced brawn. But it’s a mite shallow to think that what you do with a brain necessarily will outlast what someone else does with brawn. You can take the money and run if you create the iPod application that will cause a stampede at merchandisers’ doors this December. Or you can bend and fold metal, pour concrete, and weld in constructing something that will outlive you and this year’s gadget by a century or more.

Michigan needs a big attitude. It needs big projects. It needs vision beyond making next year’s budget balance. We need dreamers and builders to pull us out of our petty squabbles over less and less. Keep this in mind: Chicago is not called the “Windy City” because of high winds. It was so named by people on the east coast when the city’s zealous, civic hound dogs bloviated so much to win the World Exposition of 1893.

I don’t care whether a single, monumental project costs Michigan $10 billion or whether 100 or 1,000 smaller projects set us back the same amount. I look into the eyes of the fiscal pragmatists and ask where in the history books their names will be mentioned. You do not earn glory for pinching a penny. You earn it for commissioning a Michelangelo or building the Mighty Mac.

In our nearsightedness we have lost a decade. It looks as if we will lose another. Will the best that we can say in 2021 is that we added some private boxes to the Wolverines’ football stadium? Or built a superfluous bridge from Detroit to Windsor?

Michigan’s current state of mind is to hunker down. Our leaders have dumbed us down. They have deflated dreams. They pander to our anxiety. They would rather we build windmills than gifts to posterity.

In this political season, I — like everyone else — will fall in line with customary political gamesmanship. I’ll ask candidates if they support or oppose the supplemental business tax, right to work, higher standards for student achievement, and reining in prison costs.

What I’d really like to do is to grab candidates by the scruff of the neck, lead them to a big, blank piece of paper, and tell them to draw Michigan’s future. I say, if you can’t envision visually, you can’t lead. Who we are is not about what we eat, where we shop, or what we pay in taxes for a gallon of gas.

Who we are is all about what we build and preserve.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.