In his book Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, Ze’ev Chafets likens Detroit to a third world nation, portraying the city as crude in terms of its quality of life and paralyzed by the struggle with issues of self-determination. While Chafet’s sound-byte adequately summons images of squalor and desperation, the cultural reality of the third world—the politics of moving from a “lesser-developed” to a consumer economy—is quite unlike the dilemma facing Detroit, a city that has become derelict as a result of postindustrial disinvestment. It would be more apt to compare Detroit’s condition