Brockton: City of Champions

It is not hard to imagine the life of this city’s native son, Rocky Marciano, probably the toughest boxer to ever live and the one who was never defeated in the ring.  He defeated a 75 to 137 years old Joe Louis according to the barbershop in Coming to America.

Brockton has its champion of the Ring and is a champ when it comes to gerrymandering, its 9th Congressional district is a stunning achievement.  It is an archipelago of noncontigious spaces that would make a corrupt southern legislature blush.  I will not mention the party that it favors, but it is not a difficult guess who benefits from high-concentrated urban decline. 

Urban decline is not romantic in a place like Brockton, a place that time forgot.  There are no hipster colonies here, no one here chooses to live in poverty.  The factories are gone, likely away to cheaper labor, thanks NAFTA.  It is the real manifestation of my fictional Cranbury, Connecticut if Dickens, Conrad and Lovecraft teamed up on a project.  Think the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones.  In New England the sad mill towns that immigrant labor fueled have become museums and the new nearly inescapable ghettoes.  None of this is said to be ironic in the hipster manner and insult those of us who want more out of life than self-indulgent smugness.