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George Packer does a fine job of charting US decline. But where’s the anger?
History of disassemblage’: The US flag fades along with a wall in Calvert, Texas. Photograph: Jill Stephenson /Alamy guaranteed rental schemes
One of the odd things about American news programmes is how little American news they feature. Typhoons and hurricanes, crazies and lone gunmen, Barack Obama staging a press conference, 10 seconds about the Middle East, a famous actor doing something scandalous, back to the weather: all this giddy fragmentation is further punctuated by so many commercial breaks or mentions of what’s coming up after those breaks that it can be hard to tell the difference between reportage and retail. America itself – its landscapes, rhythms, textures – is more invoked than evoked. A mere brand or sign. A tool to manufacture a togetherness that doesn’t exist.
George Packer’s new book is about this missing America. Spanning three decades, it’s a history of disassemblage, a chronicle of a nation where the “structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape – the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools”. It’s also a threnody, a lamentation about the silence, at least in political circles, around those collapsing structures: “An old city can lose its industrial foundation and two-thirds of its people, while all its mainstays – churches, government, business, charities, unions – fall like building flats in a strong wind, hardly making a sound.”
Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of The Assassins’ Gate, a 2005 study of the US war in Iraq, is also a novelist. The Unwinding is strongly influenced by the USA trilogy (1930-36) of John Dos Passos, a political radical in his early days and a literary modernist, who famously claimed that “Mostly USA is the speech of the people”.
Like him, Packer constructs his factual narrative from the stories of a broad range of characters: Madison-raised Dean Price is hauled out of his mixed high school by his racist father, weans himself on self-help books and opens up a slew of truck stops, convenience stores and burger joints before becoming an evangelist for biofuel. He is equal parts dreamer, indomitable entrepreneur, utopian Del Boy.
Then there’s Jeff Connaughton, an idealistic lobbyist, White House lawyer and former aide to Joe Biden who recalls in savage detail how his initial admiration for Obama’s vice-president turned to disgust, not just because of Biden’s foibles (cribbing from a Neil Kinnock speech, mistreating people close to him) but more importantly because of his absolute failure to push through legislation that would have broken up those national banks whose greed and corruption brought America to the brink of economic meltdown. Packer has a great deal of time for these men, and for Tammy Thomas, a black American woman from Ohio who grew up taking care of an alcoholic mother who was in and out of jail for drugs, fraud and robberies. Somehow, in spite of the steel mills in her home town closing down and having to raise her children in a gang-colonised neighbourhood, she becomes a community organiser. Less warmly – though by no means acerbically – portrayed is Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and libertarian co-fou
nder of PayPal, who finances projects involving seasteading and reversing human ageing.guaranteed rental schemes
Like Dos Passos, Packer interlaces these stories, themselves recounted in small sections, with “newsreels” in which the mood of a particular year – or rather the hysterical sound-and-fury of its public discourse to which his own subsequent stories offer a more considered, infrasonic counterpoint – is jerry-built from newspaper headlines, tweets, television listings and pop lyrics. Also, again like Dos Passos, he includes potted and sometimes vinegary biographies of various American public figures including Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart and, a little puzzlingly, the writer Raymond Carver. These can be damning. Of Newt Gingrich, married to Jackie though widely known to be a philanderer, he writes: “He tried to keep it to oral sex so he could claim literal fidelity if anyone asked but within two years the marriage was over, another adoring woman about to become the next Mrs Gingrich, the advocate of civilisation standing at Jackie’s hospital bed as she lay recovering
from uterine cancer, a yellow legal pad with divorce terms in his hand.” Mostly, though, they feel like material worked up from magazine profiles or overambitious efforts to anatomise a nation through its celebrities.
Packer isn’t too clear about when “The Unwinding” took place. At one point he asks if it began with the end of the Reagan recession in 1982 and the bubbles – bond, tech, stock, housing markets – that followed. Was it caused by the deindustrialisation of the 1970s? Many of the factories that disappeared for ever were “hot, filthy, body-and soul-crushing” but they offered decent wages and a sense of belonging – to a community, a class, a nation – since extirpated. Or were its seeds planted in the 1950s – a decade of unrivalled middle-class prosperity – with the rise in car ownership and shopping malls, developments that would contribute to the decline of Main Street as both a real and symbolic common space?
Packer sometimes channels and sometimes overlays the voices of his confidants to point the finger at various modern criminals: lobbyists, Wall Street bankers, cynical politicians. But though he talks about how Washington was “captured” and ventriloquises Connaughton’s growing disenchantment by talking about how “everything he had learned in law school… was bullshit”, he doesn’t name names and, like the sonorous and stylistically adept New Yorker writer he is, mostly keeps his anger in check.
Yet the subtitle of The Unwinding – An Inner History of the New America – brings to mind JG Ballard’s notion of “inner space”. Deploying delirially anti-humanistic prose, Ballard drew on his fascination with America’s dark psycho-interiorities to produce extraordinarily prophetic publications such as Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan as early as 1968. Equally, The Unwinding could have learned from the roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi who likened Goldman Sachs to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
Packer’s book – so decent, meticulous, concerned – reads like both a shrine to and the embodiment of a form of civics that barely exists in America these days. Is lambent lamentation enough?
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