Third World America - Arianna Huffington [6]
Ricky Macoy of Quinlan, Texas, is a fifty-two-year-old electrician who found himself among the long-term unemployed. With little work since late 2008, he began pawning his possessions, including his tools, and holding yard sales to get enough money to feed his family. “The thing that hurt the most was we had to hock my son’s PlayStation 3, his Wii, his electric guitar,” Macoy says. “We lived a good life. Middle-income America, man. I’m used to construction, the booms and the busts … [but] I was not expecting to be laid off this long.”
Heather Tanner of Pacifica, California, put herself through law school, working during the day and attending classes at night—dreaming of one day being able to move her family out of their apartment and buy a house. In August, she was laid off from her $100,000-a-year job as an attorney—and then struggled to find a new position. “I applied for jobs at Target, Macy’s, as a camp counselor,” she says. “I’ve been on many interviews, but the comments I get at nonlegal jobs are, ‘Why do you need this kind of job?’ I mean, I have a family to support.” She and her husband cashed in their 401(k)s and used their savings to pay off bills. “The kids don’t understand,” she says, explaining that the thing that hurt the most was having to disappoint her children when it came to things such as birthday visits to Disneyland the family could no longer afford. “I’d love to make their dreams come true, but right now we just have to focus on getting by.”
There are, sadly, millions of these stories. Stories crying out to be told. Stories that, if told often enough, will bring the human element to the fore of the debate—and grab the public’s imagination.
In the last chapter of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, he speaks of conventional journalism’s inability to “reveal” the Vietnam War: “The press got all the facts (more or less).…20 But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about.” And Tom Wolfe, in “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’: Eyewitness Report,” discusses conventional journalism’s inability to capture the turbulence of the 1960s: “You can’t imagine what a positive word ‘understatement’ was among both journalists and literati.…21 The trouble was that by the early 1960s understatement had become an absolute pall.” Well, it’s happening again—we are failing to capture the turbulence of our times with narratives that allow the public, and force our leaders, to connect with the pain and suffering that should be fueling the fight to change direction while there’s still time.
WORKING-CLASS SUFFERING MEETS REALITY TV
Before becoming prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli wanted to issue a wake-up call about the horrible state of the British working class. So, in 1845, he wrote a novel, Sybil, which warned of the danger of England disintegrating into “two nations between whom there is no sympathy … as if they were inhabitants of different planets.”22 The book became a sensation, and the outrage it provoked propelled fundamental social reforms.
In the nineteenth century, one of the most effective ways to convey the quiet desperation of the working class to a wide audience was via a realistic novel. In 2010, it’s through reality TV.
Now, I realize that most of what we are served up under that rubric is actually the farthest thing from reality. The exploits of Snooki, Jake the Bachelor, and all those Real Housewives hardly reflect life as most of America knows it and lives it.
The real America is hurting—not jetting off to an exotic location for “fantasy suite” canoodling. But no matter how sobering the statistics we are getting on a regular basis (and I’ll offer up some bracing ones in a moment), the hardships and suffering tens of millions of Americans are experiencing are almost entirely absent from our popular culture. This