Sarah Kendzior
Macmillan Books
ISBN: 9781250189981
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Pocket the keys, sign in, walk the length of the machines, 90 degree left turn into the lockers, open #35, another day, May 10th, 2018.
“Good morning, sir!” said the fully clothed late teen with a forced joviality, closing a locker.
“Morning,” I said with an easy gentleness.
He looked at me with a pause. “What time is it?” he asked.
“It’s five to five,” I said.
“Is it light out?”
“No,” I replied.
He nodded shortly, looking at his clothes. I tossed my gym bag into #35 and got on with my day.
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How could it ever be possible the United States of America, greatest Democracy and capitalist culture the world has ever seen, such a bastion of wealth, education and leadership, be presently led by a churlish idiot felon proto-fascist Russian plant President who can’t even spell his wife’s name?
How? How could this ever happen to us?
So much of that answer is right there in what happened May 10th, 0455 at the gym, although it may not seem immediately obvious. It would be to Sarah Kendzior, she would instantly see it.
Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist turned writer, she got a doctorate studying emerging repressing regimes in the southern former Soviet empire like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In that developing writing career she got hired by Al Jareeza English and wrote a series of essays in 2012-13 that were so good they got published into an E book. When this screaming horror show of a Trump Presidency got shackled upon us the book was re-published, that’s what The View from Flyover Country is, essay work from 5-6 years ago that’s so relevant it got re-published and thrives in 2018.
Why? What’s in those essays that could give so much of an answer that we got the horror of Trump?
Kendzior writes from St. Louis, a formerly great thriving city of rich abundant history with huge swathes currently run down, neglected and decaying from awful American policy choices, racism and attention neglect—writers at The Washington Post fly over St. Louis, it might as well be Uzbekistan for all they care.
There’s $13 billion dollars for a new aircraft carrier, $350 billion for a new tax cut, $500 billion for new nuclear weapons, but St. Louis schools barely limp along on scraps. Woe to you in St. Louis with a degree, energy and ambition, flyover St. Louis will do nothing but bleed your dreams into grinding debt and poverty.
For far too long we in the United States let immature greed and fear guide our choices—we were perfectly happy and thriving with unions, but damn it they took too much from profits so crushed they shall be.
Perhaps gross hostility toward environmentalism stems from cultural distaste for hippies, but oh my god it takes away profits and growth, crush it and keep those gas tanks filled up. We’re millionaires but we hate taxes anyway, cut them to give us all our money.
In those accumulations of lousy cruel childish choices we horribly let our young people down and made a sick joke of the American dream. Racism, too, has been horribly unchecked and vast swathes of American cities are a disgrace of poverty and exploitation.
When a country skimps on investment future, walls off huge proportions to poverty and is grossly indifferent to current cruelty and suffering it leaves itself wide open to being taken over by an authoritarian proto-fascist like Trump. That’s what’s in those essays, Kendzior brilliantly captured how so much of St. Louis is so diminished with neglect, how mean and cruel we have become to allow this to happen.
San Jose California is allegedly the shining nuclear beacon of capitalism success, Silicon Valley is six miles away, expensive cars choke the freeways in a furious rush to feed the software and networking gods.
Yet at my local 24 Hour Fitness homelessness and wretched poverty is so common. Humans sleep in their cars in the parking lot, often 2-3 a night, for the gym is always lit and attended, it’s safer. Follow some unspoken rules and you can use the bathroom and shower.
That’s what May 10th was about, that kid was homeless and had slept on shower tile. The horror of it, knowing this is where you ended up, waking up alone not knowing the time, nothing to eat, fear and furtiveness knifing your brain into an eventual oblivion of pain, an American life horribly wasted
I’m so sick of the cruelty of it, why can’t we see that could be any of us? That boy didn’t choose this, we’ve made it so hard to make it here—we just had to have tax cuts and aircraft carriers and unchecked racism and lousy employment, we had to have it, understand, liberal?
Yes, I see, I do understand. We abandoned our principles and people for far too long, it isn’t surprising at all Trump came along.