COLEMAN A. YOUNG (1918 - 1997)
Incinerator lit a fuse for Detroit artists
by Desiree Cooper
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12/3/97You gotta suck Coleman's world through a Hydrogen chloride straw.
-- From the poem "Incinerator," by Ron Allen
"I've never had anyone come up to me after a reading and say, 'I didn't like that poem,' " says Detroiter Ron Allen, referring to "Incinerator," inspired by former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young.
When construction began on the incinerator in 1986, it was heralded as the largest such facility in the world. Each of its three boilers was capable of burning about 1,800 metric tons of garbage a day, nearly all of the 2,000 metric tons that Detroit produced daily.
Situated only four miles from the Canadian border, the Detroit incinerator ignited an international furor. The public was outraged to learn that U.S. officials had issued the permit for the incinerator in error, but could not revoke it. Lawsuits ensued as controversy over the safety of the incinerator continued into the '90s. In 1992 the incinerator underwent a $150 million retrofit to add filters and acid gas scrubbers to the boilers.
"Environment is so important," says Allen, as he sits among his poetry books and works of art in an attic loft at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Detroit. "It's where we get our ideas about who we are as people. The city is based on a sense of self-negation. We've become a physical town which negates the part of us that's spiritual and nurturing. I don't think Coleman Young started that, but he furthered it."
How? By shaping his leadership to assuage the Big Three and other corporate interests, says Allen. For him, the incinerator was representative of Young's loss of connection with his grassroots beginnings.
"Coleman was a mayor of contradictions," says Allen. "On one level, he was a grassroots organizer who carried those credentials into office. But I think at some point he had to make tough choices -- choices which were more supportive of the big money. He was a populist mayor who had a strong relationship with the power elite."
That's a charge that Young, at least once during his five terms as mayor, admitted to openly. In a quote attributed to him by the editors of Quotations, the former mayor responded to charges that he had been co-opted by big business: "If I was co-opted, I was certainly willing. It's like the gal who got chased by the guy until she let him catch up to her. I don't know which one of those roles I fit, but one of them."
When Allen stands to recite "Incinerator," his heft is surpassed only by his rapid-fire delivery of acerbic poetry:
Coleman's toy box has the malicious mechanized motion of lead.
It has split the saltpeter tongue with dioxin of bio-chemical air-zones of putrid organisms.
The stanzas go on, painting a picture of a citizenry choked by politics and pollution, ignored by those elected to represent their best interests.
"We never had the option of becoming a humane town," laments Allen. "Why not be the ecological center for the world? Coleman had a policy that everything in the city had to be tied to the Big Three, like they were our only options and that we could only ever be a factory town. Why couldn't we be so progressive in terms of holistic health that we were the paradigm for the whole country?"
Detroit playwright William Boyer agrees that the incinerator was symbolic of Young's growing detachment from his grass roots. At the time, he actively protested against the incinerator, using music and street theater to communicate his opposition.
"In 1986 I was a singer in a band called the Blanks. We were in the Penobscot Building and Coleman Young was going to the Caucus Club. I blurted out to him: 'It's not too late to stop the incinerator!' "
"He could have told me to shut up, or even just walked away." Instead, he turned to Boyer and said calmly, "It is too late. Recycling? Recycling is just a theory."
Later Boyer wrote a song inspired by the encounter called "Where There's Smoke."
"On the fade-out, we stuck something in there for the mayor," laughs Boyer. "At the end of the song, we say, 'Recycling's just another choice, it's up to now, it's not too late.'"
Desiree Cooper is the Metro Times Editor-at-Large.