Street roots., November 07, 2014, Page 8, Image 8

street roots
8
Nov. 7, 2014
The
Divided
States of
America
In “The Unwinding, ” George Packer
tells the story o f a country fractured by
economic inequality, where the forces
that held us together are com ing apart
BY ROSETTE ROYAL
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
t ’s hard to say just when it began, the
unravelling of the American Dream. Did
it start in the ’70s, with the slow
dismantling of industrial jobs in the
Midwest? Can it be traced to the era of
Reaganomics, that time period in the ’80s of
reduced government spending ott social
programs, slashed income taxes (for the
rich, anyway) and increased deregulation of
the financial industry? Maybe the ’90s rise
of Silicon Valley played a role or the.
Walmart-ification of the U.S.? Or was it the
new millennium fervor for flipping homes?
If you read George Packer’s “The
Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $16),
you’ll get a sense that all these factors and
more contributed to the unravelling. The
moment when some of our county’s core
tenets — that anyone can make it if she
works hard enough, thateach future
generation will fare better than the one that
preceded it — began to crumble isn’t easy to
pinpoint Yet crumble they did. And since
then, our country has been altered, and
continues to be in ways that are stark and
profound.
Assembling all this into one narrative,
making a fabric from threads that stretch
back decades, seems an impossible task. Yet
Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker,
does it with grace. Part of tins comes from
the way he explains the unwinding: Instead
of focusing on statistics about the loss of
factory jobs, he uses the power of human
stories. He relates the experience of a black
woman named Tammy Thomas who
watched her Ohio hometown collapse after
steel mills closed. He introduces us to Usha
Patel, an Indian immigrant fighting to keep
her motel in the face of the foreclosure
crisis. Interspersed with tales of these and
other ordinary, working-class people are
stories of today’s icons of power and wealth:
Oprah Winfrey, hip-hop mogul Jay Z, high-
end restaurateur Alice Waters and good of
Midwestern boy Sam Walton. Their stories,
interwoven, depict how our country is
coming p a rt For his effort, Packer won last
year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction.
I
Rosette Royal: The unwinding: Where
does that term come from?
George Packer: It was used by one of
the people in the book who was describing
his vision that Big Oil was going to decline,
and instead, we would have all these
alternative energy sources like biodiesel,
which was his thing. There Would be a
return to something more localized and
decentralized, where everyone made their
own fuel and their own food. That was his
ILLUSTRATION BY JON WILLIAMS
picture of rural North Carolina. And he
called it an unwinding. So that phrase, I’d
never really heard anyone use it before. It
Stuck in my head. I thought it would be a
good title because it doesn’t tell you exactly
what to think.
R.R.: In this book, things are unwinding
over several decades. But was there a moment
when you realized there were connections
between so many disparate events?
G.P.: There was no moment But once I
began to find out who I was writing about —
Dean Price in North Carolina, Tammy
Thomas in Youngstown, Ohio, this guy Jeff
Connaughton in Washington — something
recurring started to come up: (The)
institutional glue was dissolving. The things
that held together important institutions
blue-collar work or newspapers or small­
town life — everywhere I went, I just saw
things coming undone. In many cases, they
seemed to go back to the same period of
time — the ’70s - that at the time, might
not have been so obvious. But now we can
see them, like the end of the industrial era.
The steel industry began to die in the ’70s.
A lot of the rust belt started to lose its jobs,
and at the same time, the information age
started taking off. So you can sort of
pinpoint (that) one kind of society was
changing. To say this is when it happened,
we always have to find some time frame to
start and end with. So I thought I would
start in ’78.
R.R.: A while ago in The New Yorker, you
wrote a piece about people in Silicon Valley
becoming more involved in political causes,
sort of supporting issues that were important
to people outside of Silicon Valley.
G.P.: There was a little movement in that
direction. (Facebook co-founder) Mark
Zuckerberg founded a nonprofit set up to
support immigration reform, so that was the
main example. But what I really found was a
phenomenal level of isolation and
obliviousness tohow most of America was
doing. I mean, a question I asked all these
tech people out there was: Why has the
period of growing inequality over the last 30
years coincided with the tech revolution?
Why hasn’t the tech revolution made life
more equal rather than less so? I got
different answers, but thé main impression I
got was that no one had thought about this
because it - Silicon Valley - has become
this splendid kingdom where miracles
happen, and it just doesn’t have a
connection .to the rest of the country. It also
is changing life in the Bay Area
phenomenally. I think probably the same
thing is happening here (in Seattle):
Housing prices are out of control; families
that have lived there for generations can no
longer afford i t San Francisco no longer has
a middle or a working class. Old working-
class neighborhoods are now tech
neighborhoods, so people are moving south
and east, and it’s changed the character of
the city profoundly. Some people were
wringing their hands about it, but most
people were unaware. The Google bus was
the symbol of this, where you get in your
bus, you have WiFi, you don’t have to look
at anything, the bus takes you straight from
your apartment in San Francisco to the
Google campus in Mountain View and back.
You can hardly blame them for wanting the
convenience, but it kind of shows how cut
off they are from the community they’re in.
See Divided States, page 9