Our Bizarro Detroit

It seems that Kwame Kilpatrick just won't go away. In the past few weeks, the former mayor has garnered more ink in local news pages than the current mayor. And given that the city of Detroit is in multiple crises that Mayor Dave Bing is supposed to be pulling us out of, it seems strange.

In the old DC comic books, there was a recurring storyline about Bizarro World where everything is done opposite of the way things are done here on Earth. In fact, it was also known as Htrae — earth spelled backward. The Bizarro Superman flew backward and said goodbye when arriving. Doing things the "right" way is considered a crime on Htrae.

Things may be generally bizarre in Detroit, but I'm actually thinking about Bing and Kilpatrick as polar opposites when it comes to style. Kilpatrick loved media attention; the camera was his friend, and making a public show of almost anything that came out of the mayor's office seemed de rigueur.

And when things went bad, the media couldn't get enough of him. Even now, he's in the news regarding the missing computer from his old office, money paid to the former federal police monitor Sheryl Robinson Wood, and alleged bid-rigging with his old pal Bobby Ferguson.

Bing, on the other hand, seems to be the invisible man; there is little flash or sparkle in his demeanor or way of doing things. Lately, if not for Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley, who seems to be smitten with Bing, we'd hardly know he's mayor.

In the past month Bing went to Turin, Italy, to study how that city downsized itself when business for the car company Fiat, its major economic vehicle, went flat in 1980.

Other than the Turin trip, most of what we've heard of Bing is that he accepted a $2 million donation from General Motors for a community center, that he was at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and that he and City Council aren't talking to each other. Yes, he's putting together a strategic plan to revitalize the city, but he's not talking about that yet.

Outside of the Turin trip, mostly what he has had to say to the media is "no comment," at least that's what we hear from his spokesman Dan Lijana.

You decide which one is the Bizarro mayor.

"He has not been that sort of No. 1 citizen that people can rally around, that person who feels our pain and feels our joy," says Greg Bowens, a public relations professional and former mayor Dennis Archer's spokesman.

Kilpatrick certainly seemed to feel our pain although he eventually became the cause of it. And we haven't recovered from that yet.

I'm not turning against Bing's Detroit Works approach to setting a new course for the city. I believe the stated process of holding forums in the community to gather information and use it in creating a long-term plan is the right way to go.

However, I do find it amusing to ponder the contradictions of our body politic. For instance, the big knock against Ken Cockrel Jr.'s 2009 mayoral bid was that in about six months as interim mayor he had his chance and hadn't done anything significant — that he lacked urgency.

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