Inebriation has filtered throughout the city. Detroit is drunk.
But why the zeal? Why now, when the tigers have yet to capture the American League pennant and the World Series? Detroit has known for months that the Tigers would go at least this far. Tonight, nobody is surprised, but everyone is enjoying the manic celebration.
Detroit is normally a lifeless town with about 5 million people in the metropolitan area. We can't hide that were gruff, gritty, and wholly without class. At noontime, downtown workers here form a sea of polyester. And in the evening, Detroit evolves into a sea of nothingness.
It's abandoned after dark, without elegant restaurants or high society. Most of the shops are boarded up; the Renaissance Center has gone bankrupt. There are virtually no movie theaters here. Oh, there's the old Fox Theatre, with its cavernous, yet ornately designed interior, but it's gone triple-X-rated.
We have Greenfield Village, the Institute of Arts, and the River rouge Plant, but that's about all there is here for the visitor. Instead, Detroit is known by those who do and do not live here for its 17 percent unemployment, murders, and rampant poverty.
It gives its citizens almost nothing in which they can take pride. Absent are the Greenwich Villages, the movies, the Sunset Strips, the Lakeshore Drives, and the Faneuil Halls.
Detroit only has its sports teams. And it seems an eternity since we have received satisfaction even from them. So when they win, as the Tigers have done, the city forgets its troubles, and the lethargy which normally immobilizes people briefly ceases to exist. Not we have something which has galvanized us as a community to show the world.
Because there has been nothing else to which I have been able to devote myself, I have only dreamed with the Tigers. Now they're finally answering these calls. Doing it for Detroit and for all the other s who have not been able to find something more substantive to occupy their time and thoughts in the city then to listen to a beat-up, retrospective, and fairly insignificant recording of this community, it's my moment too. It's one of our few.