The Packards racist signs on the skywalk over Grand Blvd.

[luckycar]

This sign is great satire...people need to calm down. Who could even hate Jews anymore? Is that a thing anymore? There isn't a Jew within 20 miles of that neighborhood.

I sleep 17.18 miles from that sign every night in my Jewish bed.And not so restful knowing there are hipster "artist" who think that they are being cool by ripping off the Nazis.

[Drexciya68]

I'm tired of people using The Packard Plant to get their 15 mins of fame or make some lame point. Seeing people picking that place to the bone offends me. I lived a block away from the Plant on East Grand when I was born. So in a way it's a part of my childhood. I also hope people realize that millions of NON-Jewish Polish citizens were murdered and put in ghettos by the Nazis. With Detroit's rich Polish history I would suspect that sign would be offensive. I have thick skin and won't give the clown who put it up any more attention.
Put down the spray cans, paint and signs and pick up a damn rake or invest in the City's future if you want to help. imo.

[princealbert]

I sleep 17.18 miles from that sign every night in my Jewish bed.And not so restful knowing there are hipster "artist" who think that they are being cool by ripping off the Nazis.

Don't loose any sleep. I bet there are people that sleep closer to the sign that are more unrestful than you, for a myriad other reasons.

[noise]

As others have pontificated, I highly doubt the statement was intended to offend Jews or "rip off Nazis". I'm not of a historically oppressed group, so I won't pretend to relate to a Jew offended by the statement.

Would it have been more "fitting" on a Ford plant?

[Bad Brains]

Trivializing the Holocaust is not going to get you anywhere with anybody.

I don't know about that. Whoever did the sign probably did so as an attempt to get in the papers, which they successfully did. That was probably their only goal. The pranksters might have been Jewish themselves for all we know.

[Detroitej72]

Curious quote.


I know a bunch of artists, and have casually watched the popular international scene for my entire lifetime.

I cannot recall a firm instance where any of them knew any better. Most of the edgy artists incite emotional response in ORDER to foment this sort of dialogue...and occasional action.

In this case, we had a mini-riot of one...at least someone was outraged enough to tear some shit up...amidst the wagging tongues and dancing fingertips.

I wonder how that would've been perceived if, say, a fundamentalist Christian had destroyed some of Maplethorpe's more controversial pieces...or pisses.

I'm just sayin'.

If artists know better, then they do it to us on purpose.

I agreed with you,
John

Up until you said "fundamental Christian".

I would also add to the "fundamental" category Muslim and Jewish religions, as all have bigoted factions...


Cheers,

Erik

[mauser]

Well maybe I am confused but when somebody says the above I take it not in the process aspect but in the current sense.

You are saying I misunderstand the foreclosure process and therefore have no right to remove a Nazi death camp sign from an abandoned building. This is something I call "forum logic".

Yep, I am no expert on the foreclosure process, and nobody else seems to be able to figure where the Packard is at with ownership either. Way to hyper focus on an irrelevant point, which you have restated several times now. Got it - move on.

[Gannon]

I agreed with you,
John

Up until you said "fundamental Christian".

I would also add to the "fundamental" category Muslim and Jewish religions, as all have bigoted factions...


Cheers,

Erik

Yet, I am unaware of Maplethorpe placing any Jewish or Islamic religious icons in buckets of his own piss and photographing them. The point wasn't who was the most over-sensitive against anyone who doubts their faith, it was about an artist who actually seemed to AIM at one of them with something that could NOT be deemed unoffensive by anyone.

Cheers

[mauser]

"Piss Christ" is by photographer Andres Serrano - 1987. It is often used in censorship/artistic expression arguments.

[Gannon]

Thanks for the correction, Mauser. Maplethorpe must've been part of something Serrano was involved with, because in my memory it was one thing. When I did a quick search to insure I'd spelled everything correctly, the preview showed both in the same comment, but separated by an ellipse. It must've been around the time of that public arts funding argument during the Clinton years, when both Maplethorpe and Serrano were being funded by various joints getting federal monies.

[Gannon]

Wouldn't it be a riot if this 'artist' turned out to be funded by one of the grants organizations...

[mauser]

Wouldn't it be a riot if this 'artist' turned out to be funded by one of the grants organizations...

Everyone should remember that "artist" is an assumption here. The sign maker is anonymous, so nobody can state that it was for sure an artwork. How can anybody be sure it wasn't meant to be a 100% antisemitic slur aimed at the Jewish population, and hung on the most famous building made by the Jewish architect Albert Kahn ?

I mean...if we are going to indulge in conspiracy theories about the sign maker - let's be a bit more creative.

Or if we should proceed in a more pragmatic and rational fashion, let me apply Occam's Razors here.

from Wiki:

"Occam's razor: when faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions"

Let us do that.

1.) Nazi death camp sign

2.) abandoned auto plant in Detroit

3.) famous for having been designed by Albert Kahn, a Jewish architect

We add these up and take the basic meaning and we get what ?

A slur against the auto industry, or a slur against Mr. Kahn.

If you get fancier than that folks, you have left Occam's Razor, and entered the Rorschach Test. This will end up with data that says more about you than about the sign. You will project all your political hoohaa onto the objects in question and come up with elaborate or even convoluted explanations and justifications for the sign.

In the famous words never actually spoken by Sergeant Joe Friday, let us stick to "Just the facts, ma'am.."

I also am reading one person after another calling the sign on the Packard "ironic"...Anyone want to tackle that definition and apply it to the sign? Any Grammar Nazis [[crap...sorry about that unintended pun) out there want to parse the use of the word ironic for everyone ? It is tricky, and often abused and misused. Most people confuse it with "coincidence".

For the sign on Packard, how exactly is this "ironic" ?

Please correct me if I am wrong because I am not positive either, but my understanding of the definition of "irony" is when the literal meaning and the implied meanings are opposites.

The sign on Packard is so unclear - what is it criticizing, if in fact it even is ?

Is it a comment on industry ? Then what is the relationship to death camps in the mind of the sign maker ? Is it a comment on Capitalism ? Again, what does the death camp have to do with Capitalism ?

And the sign was very carefully done to directly reference Auschwitz, as the Freep pointed out the font is indeed quite distinct and could never have been done coincidentally. So we can see the sign maker is in fact talking in part about the death camp.

Then there is the message. "Labor makes free".

I think this was the false promise to the people in the camps who were led to believe they would be released after the war if they worked hard for their captors. So now we transpose that message onto an abandoned factory whose original company has been gone since the late 1950's.

It is getting pretty murky now - where is sign maker going with this ?

What is the simplest meaning that can be derived from the message left for us ? Something about that building is bad - just as bad as the Nazi death camps.

Does anyone really believe there is some aspect of the Packard Plant's existence, or something which its abandonment represents that is as bad as the nazi death camps and the lies that were told to the inmates ?

Does anyone really think the sign maker went to that much trouble to say that to people, knowing full well how outraged the general public would be by the sign ?

[luckycar]

Hey why don't we all just show up on a nice spring day with sledge hammers and cranes and dumpsters and bobcats and dumptrucks ......and tear down this eyesore like the Berlin Wall came down.Who the hell would stop us?The fools from City Hall?If enough people showed up,Packard would be gone!

[Gannon]

Mauser,

All due respect, but you left the razor's edge the instant you assumed anyone knows or cares who the architect of any ruin really was...let alone which religion they might've been within. Sorry.

The indications are only that they know the position of this phrase, over an arch to a deathcamp from WWII...and the particular fashion of the Bauhaus B, but that in no way indicates that they've studied anything beyond a picture of the gate.

EVERYTHING beyond that is speculation. Everything. Including that which inflamed you enough to action. Sorry. It might be tough to see within the raw sensitivity, which MAY have caused a cascading series of over-reactions which indeed serve as a rolling Rorschach analysis.

For all of us.

Sincerely,
John

[Zacha341]

Yeah, not like there's not a precedent for that kind of thing!

Wouldn't it be a riot if this 'artist' turned out to be funded by one of the grants organizations...

[Zacha341]

Or at least questioning the tax payer funding for such....

"Piss Christ" is by photographer Andres Serrano - 1987. It is often used in censorship/artistic expression arguments.

[Zacha341]

Yep. Precisely.

Yet, I am unaware of Maplethorpe placing any Jewish or Islamic religious icons in buckets of his own piss and photographing them. The point wasn't who was the most over-sensitive against anyone who doubts their faith, it was about an artist who actually seemed to AIM at one of them with something that could NOT be deemed unoffensive by anyone.

Cheers

[mauser]

yeah, well Im searching and scratching here Gannon, because otherwise the only thing we see is a death camp sign. and i think that is the bottom line too.

no worries about your criticisms, because that just well be the case. i will stand by my actions as long as you stand with the death camp sign though. i admit it was an empathetic and then an emotional response, but not without complete full awareness of what i was doing and why. unlike the sign maker.

but perhaps like the sign maker, i was setting my sites on the ramifications of the sign further down the road. outside of our local Detroit bubble of concern. they are reading about this story in Israel, and i would bet both the sign maker and myself were both very aware of the ability of the sign to strike a reaction that far, that fast. i dont know the concerns of the sign maker, but one of my concerns is that the story of this sign not hit foreign news cycles, without the addemndum that the sign had propmtly been removed.

by two citizens, John, not just me. two different guys there to do the same thing at the same time - destroy the sign. unlike me, Roni is indeed Jewish.

the sign would have died at exactly 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, February 6th, 2013. because Roni was there with his claw hammer to do the deed.

is his reaction simply emotional ? did HE have a right, or more a right than myself, to destroy the sign ? or none ?

the best part about two people being there at exactly the same time is that you can remove me from this story and it we would still be where we are. what i added by participating in the dismantling of the Packard Nazi death camp sign was that i have the ability to quickly help distribute the story, and did. i am also willing to put myself out there and explain what i did to further the discussion, and i have.

john, you know how shy i actually am. so does Django, or any of my friends. i am not really an attention seeker, i like my work to get lots of attention, but not me. when i have to be a public figure it is indescribably uncomfortable for me. if i am doing it, it is because i think something is very very important.

[Gannon]

Of course, that isn't in question.

I didn't include the other fellow by mistake, he is still intangible to me...but you're right, in a way. Having the two of you there simultaneously does show that you've a similar sensitivity as the fellow of Jewish descent.

And the two of you might be over-sensitive to this together...as you've said, the Nazi stuff is nuclear though. So, while nobody expects anyone to grow skin thick enough to shield from the nuclear effects...perhaps we can at least begin to put some of those welder's glasses on, so our gaze can go towards this ugly, recurrent ideology, if only to insure it never rises again.

As we've seen through history, if a thing is IGNORED politely, it becomes legend others later seek to emulate. Say, like the Purple Gang's legacy in this town. Or the actual effects of gunfire, even unto automatic weapon use.

Unless the violence and horror humankind can produce are honestly faced, those who have the potential to perpetrate such may more easily continue.

Again, I thank you for bringing this to the fore and making it a 'teaching moment'. I merely think we've all got some facet of this which can reflect back enough for each to learn something good about ourselves.

Cheers

[East Detroit]

So many people downplaying this as artistic expression of the nth degree of cleverness. Is that because anti-semitism is so difficult to fathom, or because they don't care?

The "cleverness" was a complete failure because it just got a bunch of yapping monkeys typing on their keyboards with random thoughts on various websites. It didn't "teach" us anything or provoke thoughts about a useful message.

Although, nice segue to the Purple Gang... if I was a conspiracy theorist I would wonder why they were mentioned.

[Gannon]

So many people downplaying this as artistic expression of the nth degree of cleverness. Is that because anti-semitism is so difficult to fathom, or because they don't care?

The "cleverness" was a complete failure because it just got a bunch of yapping monkeys typing on their keyboards with random thoughts on various websites. It didn't "teach" us anything or provoke thoughts about a useful message.

Although, nice segue to the Purple Gang... if I was a conspiracy theorist I would wonder why they were mentioned.

If you were smart enough to follow the hints of conspiracy, you'd be able to follow plain language.

Sometimes folks are SO anti-"whatever", they can find it in everything.

I'm pretty sure that is at least part of what Rorschach tried to reveal with his inkblot testing.

Good Luck with that! Obsessions are blinders. If you keep 'em on, you might be convinced what you see is all there is.

[Gannon]

Here, I'll make it plain and simple for you, and anyone who might misunderstand.

If atrocities are kept quiet, their impact dilutes the further one gets from it...except for those directly affected by it, who largely never forget. How could they?

In our town, one of the best examples of this was just discussed on Craig Fahle's show last week...an author was going on about the scope of the reach of the Purple Gang's power. There was a bit about how the knowledge of the gang was largely through loose myths, since they were rarely spoken of publicly. Hell, the entire TOWN wanted for forget this sort of horror could exist. That was how they explained the mythology and how it allowed for some to glorify that whole criminal gang culture today.

The breakdown in the analogy is we don't have anyone directly affected by them tearing down any form of homage to them, or anything which hints at such.

Same with the weapons. People don't often see the results of their use against humans, which is one of the only ways they could be glorified, as far as anyone sane and/or logical could imagine. I only saw the tie-in with the Purple Gang in the re-read, since they were the ones to introduce automatic weapons to that marketplace during Prohibition.

I'm simply trying to say the longer the duration from the atrocity, and the further away geographically and generationally...for the bulk of the population history is ignored enough to actually repeated. Isn't that the general warning against those who ignore it?!

Sincerely,
John

[Gannon]

So even a person who is not from a family directly affected by the atrocities of Nazis in WWII can be driven to action against a perceived offense, and teach those around him why. Someone who paid attention to history enough to be sensitive to the point of being perceived as acting out-of-the-ordinary due it.

Simple as that. And I thanked him for it, too. Had some public dialogue that I'm sure we'd both rather have kept private, except everyone else might miss that facet of the learning moment.


Cheers!

[noise]

For the record, I perceived it as an artistic effort which was mildly thought-provoking.

But that's art. Some people find "Piss Christ" not artistic and others though The Beatles were just horrible noise.

As previously mentioned, however, I'm not of a historically oppressed group and I won't pretend to understand that level of offense. I'm fortunate for this, but I respect the offendeds' view.

[mauser]

Had some public dialogue that I'm sure we'd both rather have kept private, except everyone else might miss that facet of the learning moment.

Agreed, which is why John and I had this discussion here. I hope when "teachable moment" is mentioned, nobody takes that as me thinking Im here to teach everybody a lesson or whatever, because that is rediculous. No - Im learning along with everybody else and trying to understand and comprehend.

Unfortunately most of what I have learned through this has shocked me.