The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America - Softcover

Kendzior, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250189993 ISBN 13: 9781250189998

Verlag: Flatiron Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER

From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

"A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus

In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays.

A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion.

“Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire

“Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, and The New York Times.

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The View From Flyover Country

Dispatches From The Forgotten America

By Sarah Kendzior

Flatiron Books

Copyright © 2015 Sarah Kendzior
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-18999-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Introduction, 
PART I: FLYOVER COUNTRY, 
The View from Flyover Country, 
Expensive Cities Are Killing Creativity, 
The Peril of Hipster Economics, 
Mourn the Fall of the Mall, 
PART II: THE POST-EMPLOYMENT ECONOMY, 
Surviving the Post-Employment Economy, 
Meritocracy for Sale, 
Survival Is Not an Aspiration, 
Zero-Opportunity Employers, 
A Government Shutdown, a Social Breakdown, 
The Men Who Set Themselves on Fire, 
Charity Is Not a Substitute for Justice, 
The Unaffordable Baby Boomer Dream, 
The Millennial Parent, 
Mothers Are Not "Opting Out"-They Are Out of Options, 
PART III: RACE AND RELIGION, 
The Wrong Kind of Caucasian, 
The Fallacy of the Phrase "the Muslim World", 
In the Trial of Trayvon, the U.S. Is Guilty, 
St. Louis's Sons, Taken Too Soon, 
The Freedom to Criticize Free Speech, 
PART IV: HIGHER EDUCATION, 
The Closing of American Academia, 
Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish, 
Academia's Indentured Servants, 
The Political Consequences of Academic Paywalls, 
The Immorality of College Admissions, 
College Is a Promise the Economy Does Not Keep, 
PART V: MEDIA, 
Managed Expectations in the Post-Employment Economy, 
Who Is a "Journalist"? People Who Can Afford to Be, 
Blame It on the Internet, 
When the Mainstream Media Are the Lunatic Fringe, 
PART VI: BEYOND FLYOVER COUNTRY, 
U.S. Foreign Policy's Gender Gap, 
Snowden and the Paranoid State, 
Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality, 
Where Following the Law Is Radical, 
Water Is a Human Right, But Who Is Considered a Human Being?, 
The Telegenically Dead, 
CODA, 
In Defense of Complaining, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

PART I Flyover Country

The View from Flyover Country

In St. Louis, you can buy a mansion for $275,000. It has twelve bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a three-bedroom carriage house, and is surrounded by vacant lots. It was built in the late 1800s, a few decades before the 1904 World's Fair, when St. Louis was the pride of America. In 1904, everyone wanted to live in St. Louis. A century later, the people who live here die faster. A child born in Egypt, Iran, or Iraq will live longer than a child born in north St. Louis. Almost all the children born in north St. Louis are black.

In St. Louis, the museums are free. At the turn of the twentieth century, the city built a pavilion. They drained the wetlands and made a lake and planted thousands of trees and created a park. They built fountains at the base of a hillside and surrounded it with promenades, white and gleaming. Atop the hill is an art museum with an inscription cut in stone: "Dedicated to art and free to all." On Sundays, children do art projects in a gallery of Max Beckmann paintings. Admission is free, materials are free, because in St. Louis art is for everyone.

In St. Louis, you can walk twenty minutes from the mansions to the projects. In one neighborhood, the kids from the mansions and the kids from public housing go to the same public school. On the walls of the school cafeteria are portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, to remind the children what leaders look like.

In St. Louis, the murder rate is high and the mayor is named Slay but few think that is funny. In St. Louis, things are cheap but life stays hard. In St. Louis, an African-American man with gold teeth and a hoodie and baggy jeans rushed toward me in a mall, because I was pushing a baby carriage, and he wanted to hold the door open for me.

Ahead of Its Time

St. Louis is one of those cities that does not make it into the international news unless something awful happens, like it did last week in Cleveland, another American heartland city with a bad reputation and too many black people to meet the media comfort zone. The city is treated like a joke, and the people who live there and rescue women and make concise indictments of American race relations are turned into memes.

St. Louis is one of those cities where, if you are not from there, people ask why you live there. You tell them how it is a secret wonderland for children; how the zoo is free and the parks are beautiful; how people are more kind and generous than you would imagine; how it is not as dangerous as everyone says. They look at you skeptically and you know that they are thinking you cannot afford to move. They are right, but that is only part of it.

St. Louis is one of those cities that is always ahead of its time. In 1875, it was called the "Future Great City of the World." In the nineteenth century, it lured in traders and explorers and companies that funded the city's public works and continue to do so today. In the twentieth century, St. Louis showed the world ice cream and hamburgers and ragtime and blues and racism and sprawl and riots and poverty and sudden, devastating decay. In the twenty- first century, St. Louis is starting to look more like other American cities, because in the twenty-first century, America has started looking more like St. Louis.

This is the view from flyover country, where the rich are less rich and the poor are more poor and everyone has fewer things to lose.

St. Louis is a city where people are doing so much with so little that you start to wonder what they could do if they had more.

Rich Are Less Rich

In St. Louis, you reevaluate "fair." In St. Louis, you might have it bad, but someone's got it worse. This is the view from flyover country, where the rich are less rich and the poor are more poor, and everyone has fewer things to lose.

The symbol of St. Louis is both a gateway and a memorial. The Arch mirrors the sky and shadows the city. It is part of a complex that includes the courthouse where the Dred Scott case was settled, ruling that African Americans were not citizens and that slavery had no bounds.

On a St. Louis street corner, someone is wearing a sign that says, "I Am a Man." Like most in the crowd gathered outside a record store parking lot, he is African-American. He is a fast food worker and he is a protester. He needs to remind you he is a human being because it has been a long time since he was treated like one.

On May 8, 2013, dozens of fast food workers in St. Louis went on strike in pursuit of fairer wages and benefits. "We can't survive on 735!" they cried, referring to their wage of $7.35 an hour — a wage so low you can work forty hours a week and still fall below the poverty line. At a rally on May 9, workers from Hardee's and Church's Chicken talked about what they would do with $15 an hour: feed their families, pay their bills. "If we can make a living wage, we can give back to the community, and we are part of this community," a cashier from Chipotle said.

In St. Louis, possibilities are supposed to be in the past. It is the closest thing America has to a fallen imperial capital. This is where dystopian Hollywood fantasies are set and filmed. It is the gateway and the memorial of the American Dream.

But when the American Dream is dying for everyone, St. Louis might be the one to rise up. In St. Louis, people know what...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Flatiron Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250189993
• ISBN 13: 9781250189998
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 255
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar