I’ve watched this twice now, and both times it made me tear up a little. (I’m a sap, and I know the song is trite beyond description, but I know all the words). The thing that’s actually sad isn’t the tragic death of the Big Bopper in a plane crash, but the fact that the initial impetus to make this video is a sad truth: Grand Rapids is a dying city in a dying state in a dying empire.
Although the production is excellent (what are they blowing up on that bridge?), I fail to see what you’re supposed to experience about Grand Rapids. Unless you know the city well already, who would even guess that was where this was shot until the camera whizzes up into the stratosphere at the very end? I didn’t.
Michigan, where people get arrested for growing vegetable gardens, is one of two states to have lost population in the 2000s. The auto industry might have been spared a gruesome death, but you can’t arrest a half-century of deindustrialization with a tough union contract and a bailout. They’re in trouble.
I have no doubt that quality of life is higher there than in a lot of places, and that the eager participants in the video were genuinely happy to be part of this, but the fact that they need to do it at all says everything. I would never want to live in China, and I wouldn’t want to live under a banner that says something like “Civilize Our City, and Make Yourself a Citizen” or whatever their propaganda du jour might be, but I doubt you’d ever see something like this there.
It would be nice for a mid-size Midwestern city to become a tech haven for wind turbines that float on the ocean and harness wave power, with their rotors bejewelled in photovoltaic cells. They could de-acifidify seawater so the corals don’t bleach and, WALL-E like, condense the garbage in the North Pacific Gyre and they would never need replacement, ever.
Suck the Rainbow 