For the last couple of days, everyone was talking about Brooks Patterson and his wacky, offensive comments in the New Yorker.

Sigh.

The controversy over Patterson’s interview is another indication that metro Detroit, even when its news seems lively and controversial, never misses an opportunity to be predictable, boring, and woefully behind the arc of history.

For all the words spilled condemning and defending Patterson, the only person who got the story right was someone younger than Patterson’s political career, Curbed Detroit’s Paul Beshouri: “Surprise: Oakland County Senior Citizen Still Hates Detroit.”

That’s the gist of it, really. Whether or not Patterson’s remarks prove finally that us-vs-them local politics is a cancer to the region — what took so long? — misses the point.

Brooks Patterson doesn’t exist in a bubble. Our modern understanding of democracy holds to a delusion that the citizenry is never responsible for the people they elect to high office. However, the only difference between what Patterson told the New Yorker and what so many of his constituents say in private conversations at the Red Coat Tavern, Somerset Mall or the Maple Theater lobby is that Patterson’s words were amplified by a national publication. Brooks Patterson represents Oakland County for good reason. He is representative of much of Oakland County's population.

Metro Detroit: Where It's Always 1969

There would be no Brooks Patterson as we know him if his sentiments didn’t reflect widely held opinions in Detroit suburbs.

And, no dear reader, having progressive neighbors on one block in Pleasant Ridge doesn’t change that reality. In fact, that kind of feel-good myopia is really a big part of the problem.

Like so many politicians across this country before him, Patterson’s job has always been to keep the problems of the big city out of his suburban counties. “Problems of the big city” being a polite euphemism for black people, or at least non-middle class black people.

This isn’t a Detroit thing -- or, more accurately, it hasn’t always been exclusively a Detroit thing.

Politics in the northern Virginia suburbs, where Fairfax County is analogous to Oakland County in many ways, was once represented a Patterson-like figure named Joel Broyhill. As a long-time congressman, Broyhill fought anything (including integrated schools) to keep Washington, D.C., and its largely black population, on the other side of the Potomac River.

Broyhill, like Patterson, was also a remarkably skilled public administrator who excelled at constituent service.

The fundamental difference between Joel Broyhill and Brooks Patterson is this: Broyhill died in 2006, 32 years after he left office.

In the 1990s, as D.C. was going through an economic restructuring comparable to Detroit’s bankruptcy, northern Virginia’s top politician was Tom Davis. As chairman of the U.S. House’s D.C. subcommittee and previously head of Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors, Davis (a Republican like Broyhill and Patterson) won high marks for crafting the Control Board process and working well with D.C. leaders like Eleanor Holmes Norton.  

Davis was no great profile in courage. He was mostly a run-of-the-mill politician, but his district had moved on from the politics of resentment. In fact, most metropolises across the country largely have settled the petty city-suburb fights decades ago. Metro Detroit didn’t, much to our detriment.

Never Miss An Opportunity To Miss An Opportunity

Brooks Patterson reflects our region’s intractable and obsolete views on race and geography. However, to focus on Patterson, to suggest portentously that it’s “time for him to go,” without looking inward at the entrenched attitudes of Detroit’s suburban culture is to miss the point entirely.

Missing the point is something we seem to be really good at in metro Detroit.