First of all, if you don't understand why an American President saying "No human would want to live there" about an American city is insensitive and racist, I can't help you. Not sure I'd even want to, but I think it's outside my powers anyway. He's not pointing out flaws to be constructive or instructive...he's just not happy without some stupid slap-fight.
Longtime readers know how much of an influence David Simon is for me, both as a writer and a dabbler in the spoken expletive, but you may not know about the time that I tried to find a rich history in my own city that I might one day...help vocalize its underclass(besides me and my own stuff, which, because it's mine, I always discount.) So I go trooping to my public library to find that we were both the foremost place to catch and treat sexually transmitted infections in WWII. It was a leader in air-conditioning research(of all of it, this felt obvious) and it fought FDR tooth and toenail over putting in an airport cause they thought aviation was a fad.(FDR won, cause Phoenix was just starting to get hung up on highways.) In the early 2000s, we had the highest cable-tv penetration in the country. Maybe we just like TV, maybe it's because it's dead here.
It's not surprising then, that there are no ballads or tone-poems, urban or otherwise, about "my" city, which mostly seems like a place to be from till I want a taco. Whatever will power my art, it seems it won't be the power of place, unless it's the negative power of having to stay somewhere for the forseeable future when you've never been a part of it.
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