Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDonn

Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Shelly WuDunn, are mostly known today for being international correspondents, for Kristof’s New York Times column, and for their work on global poverty and women’s rights issues in books like Half the Sky. But Kristof grew up in Yamhill, OR, where his family still owns and runs a farm. And after hearing of too many neighbors and family friends falling prey to the ‘deaths of despair’ that are a silent epidemic in the United States today, Kristof and WuDunn decided to write about the problems here in our own backyards. 25% of the people who rode the school bus with Kristof decades ago are now dead—from drugs, alcohol, suicide, reckless accidents, or complications from obesity and ill health.

Tightrope is a complicated book. First, I want to highlight that this was an excellent and, well, enjoyable isn’t exactly the right word, but interesting read. Kristof and WuDunn, talented reporters, have written a very readable book, far more so than other books on the topics of inequality or despair in the United States. I often found myself surprised by how much I had read in one sitting, as the book flew by and yet still was full of information. And Kristof’s ties to the community gave him access to tell people’s stories in a very clear way, showing how people had spiraled downwards after showing possible promise, highlighting both their own poor choices and the ways our country and our policies have failed them. And they do an exceptional job of pointing out that while many people in this book have made bad choices, when so many Americans have started making so many bad choices, we might need to look at external factors. When American children are 55% more likely to die than in any other industrialized country, when we have a higher poverty rate than almost any other industrialized country, when our expectancy is actually dropping, we either need to saw that Americans are lazier, less intelligent, and more unhealthy genetically than most other countries or there’s some sort of policy and economic problem here.

And Kristof and WuDunn stay focused on this aspect of social and systemic problems, and the need for social and systemic change. Personal failures are due to poor choices, yes, but also policy failures. Those who have still managed to succeed and excel did so through their work and choices, yes, but also luck that we can’t count on to save everyone. Telling the heartwarming stories of exceptional people who have broken through might tug at heart strings but it doesn’t get us close to solving the problem. In recounting the tale of Tanitoluwa Adewumi, an 8 year old Nigerian refugee in a homeless shelter who won a chess championship and saw offers of help pour in, Kristof points out that yes, this is a heartwarming tale and people were generous, “But the solution to child homelessness is not winning the state chess championship. That’s not scalable.” (pg. 139)

What really stood out to me in this book, though, is how multifaceted our problems are. While Kristof and WuDunn focus on a message of hope and policies we can institute that can begin to fix this, including small scale examples, it left me feeling overwhelmed. Partly because they insist on saying that these aren’t partisan suggestions, but in today’s world everything is partisan. In the rural, white, America, we see highlighted here they are going to firmly reject any of the policies the authors suggest as socialism. This reality is never confronted, and that absence smacks of either naivete or an alternative reality where Trump didn’t happen and the Proud Boys don’t exist. More than that, though, there are so many themes Kristof and WuDunn barely touch on in this book that affect and impact the failure of rural, white America. Lines that are asides could be, and sometimes have been, expanded to a whole book in and of themselves of What Is Wrong With America Today.

In one way, this is the story of growing inequality that has been told in Capital in the 21^st Century, in Robert Reich’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, and other recent books and articles. Kristof and WuDunn emphasize that they are not romanticizing the past, recounting the story of a family from the 70s where a woman whose husband regularly beat and shot at her was told by the police that it was a family matter, and sharing that only a few decades ago Kristof and WuDunn’s own marriage would have been illegal. But it is true that 50 years ago there was more hope in rural, white America: jobs that paid a living wage were still to be found, social mobility was possible, and we were investing in social services. Now we’re in an economy where Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet have as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. (pg. 17) Where the Wall Street Bonus Pool at the end of each year exceeds combined annual earnings of all Americans making minimum wage. (pg. 33). Where any jobs at all, let alone jobs that pay a living wage, are so thin on the ground that many people have dropped out of the legitimate labor force entirely—it’s estimated that for every man on unemployment there are 3 who have stopped looking for work altogether.

And this growing inequality has many effects. As is emphasized in Reich’s book, as the wealthy become more wealthy, they invest that wealth in capital for themselves and their families, yes, but also in keeping their wealth and their power. Meaning that they are going to lobby for policies that entrench their power and their wealth in a vicious circle, and (more on this later) in persuading Americans that corporate wealth and subsidies aren’t really the same as welfare. Which is how we get to a point where Oregon gives Nike $2 billion in subsidies for 500 jobs ($4 billion per job) or Louisiana pays Valero Energy $15 million per job for 15 jobs. (pg. 47), and our way of addressing affordable housing is giving low-interest loans to private-equity firms who then raise rents on their properties. (pg. 166) Which has the effect of transferring wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy– $50 trillion from 90% to the 1% according to a recent study—and also starving government of funds which could genuinely help others.

In a related way, Tightrope is a tale of the decades long right-wing strategy that all that lobbying money has been funding. While Kristof and WuDunn don’t explicitly explore this, they mention in passing the fact that there is a rural advantage in the constitution. It gives more power to the Senate and the Electoral college. He uses this for a very short explanation of why it is a danger to ignore an angry (white) rural America that feels neglected. But he doesn’t follow that thread—if they have this unbalanced power in American government, why is (white) rural America neglected and angry? Why haven’t they used this power to improve their own lives and protect their communities? We saw this in the recent elections, where those who voted for Trump and think the election was stolen are also voting explicitly against the policies that would help their communities and see them as socialism. West Virginia just reelected a coal mine owner, the wealthiest man in the state, for goodness sake. And again, while this isn’t specifically answered in the book, the truth is that there has been a concerted effort from wealthy lobbying money to stoke culture wars and support right wing policies.

It is this effort to repaint welfare as socialism and tyranny that allows those corporate subsidies to continue. It’s why, “Everybody knows about the cost of food stamps for the poor, but few people are aware that the median taxpayer is also subsidizing the corporate executives whose elegant French dinner is tax deductible.” (pg. 45-6). It’s why we have people so concerned about welfare for low-income housing when Section 8 costs $30 billion annually, and the mortgage interest and property ownership tax breaks are $71 billion annually (pg. 166).  Why there is still a lawsuit to destroy the Affordable Care Act and we can’t have socialized medicine when we have the highest rate of child mortality in the Global North. It’s also this strategy that has spread out to stoke culture wars and simultaneously encouraged rural white Americans to buy completely into personal accountability for everything from their health to climate change to whether or not they have a job and simultaneously blame immigrants, blame liberal elitists, blame gays and lesbians, lame no prayer in Church, blame everything except the policies and politicians that are destroying their own communities.

Kristof and WuDunn discuss one former friend, Kevin Green, who had spent much of his time unemployed or in jail, and died young. “Kevin himself never wanted to be remembered simply as a victim of large, impersonal forces, and he readily acknowledged that he had screwed up at times. He never liked to be pigeonholed as ‘poor’ or ‘disadvantaged’, and neither do most others in low-income communities.” (pg. 39) That’s all well and good, and many of the people in this book have made terrible life choices. But this narrative that tells people that it’s all on them, and that they shouldn’t have a victim mentality, is very useful because they never look at the policy choices that have limited their personal choices. You don’t have to wallow in self-pity to recognize that there is something wrong. In order to fight for change, you need to recognize first that there should be change and there has been a longstanding American effort to make people not see that.

In yet another way, this is the story of toxic masculinity and the toll it has placed on American society—not far removed from the pride at the heart of personal accountability. While Tightrope shows both men and women who have been left behind by our current system, many of the women have tried and made amends and lapsed again due to addiction or circumstances. The men are far more likely to give up. And that’s not just the impression from these anecdotes. In general, when men lose their jobs, they are likely to use that time to sit around and mope. One study showed that when a man loses his job, he will spend an average extra 9 minutes a day caring for children or the elderly, and an extra five hours a day watching television. No calculation was given for women. (pg. 40) What is amazing is that this is simply dropped into a larger discussion of how unemployment makes men feel worthless and contributes to a number of bad outcomes, including the ‘deaths of despair’ that are so prevalent in rural white America. And yes, unemployment is devastating, but surely there is something deeply wrong with our society when an unemployed man is spending only 9 minutes more a day on the women’s work of child care, and could apparently take no pride in such work, and instead spends the day watching TV.

From another angle, this is one of the best articulated arguments for defund the police—or at least defund the prisons, which would be my top priority. Over and over again we see the cost of the war on drugs and criminalizing so many aspects of society, both in human cost and directly in how much we spend on incarcerating people. There is, of course, a direct cost—housing an inmate costs an average of $33,274 per year per inmate depending on the state. And it does little to actually stop crime. Kristof details a program, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, that focuses instead on getting people treatment, connection with a social worker, and ways to avoid prison, and led to a 60% drop in recidivism in Seattle. (pg. 92) And even once people go into our system, we don’t need to use prisons. We have a far higher crime rate and imprisonment rate than any other country. In Germany, only 6% of criminal punishments include jail. In the United States it is 70%. (pg. 178) This is a truly staggering difference. We are spending money on incarcerating people, taking them out of the labor market, and destroying communities.

And for what? The war on drugs and criminalization of vices causes far more destruction than the vice itself. One argument made in the book is that the war on drugs meant people could no longer be the equivalent of ‘functional alcoholics’. Not great for them, but still part of their family, part of their workforce, part of society. Over and over they detail the stories of people who were trying to rebuild their lives but slipped and then ended up in jail. Lost their job because of a conviction and jail time. Lost a job because they lost a driver’s license after not paying fines. Lost their home, or kids, or car, because of the arrest. In these cases, over and over, it’s not that drinking too much or doing drugs was good for them. But the worst consequences they suffered were due to the criminalization, not the drugs.

And lastly, there is the topic most notable in its absence. Kristof and WuDunn barely touch on immigration and racism, and yet so many of the politics he covers are the same as Jonathan Metzl discusses in Dying of Whiteness. White rural America is dying, primarily from deaths of despair. Low income American men have the same life expectancy as men in Sudan or Pakistan (pg. 112) and the death rates are increasing largely from obesity related illnesses, overdoses, alcohol related deaths, and outright suicides. Between 2006 and 2016 cirrhosis related deaths in the United States rose by 65% and liver cancer deaths doubled. Rural white Americans need expanded access to health care; they need an increased minimum wage; they need social workers and social services; they need higher taxes on the wealthy, lower corporate subsidies, and more investment in their communities. But again and again they will vote for the party that fights against all of these, and turn violently, angrily, against the party that would make their lives better. Kristof and WuDunn say over and over that this shouldn’t be partisan, and maybe they’re right, but let us admit honestly that right now, today, it is very partisan.

Coming full circle to the right-wing political efforts mentioned above, rural America feels neglected even though there is a built in Senate and Electoral (and even House—Wyoming’s 1 representative represents 578,759 people. Each California representative represents 745,513 people). So why does rural America feel neglected? Part of it is a long-term strategy to support culture wars, and to create these views of welfare vs. taxpayers in rural America. But that wouldn’t work without the straight-up racism; without people who would hear about a black welfare queen or young bucks buying t-bone steaks and forget that food stamps helped white people, too. People who would never vote for a black man or a black man’s health care plan. Who are going to vote against what they need if it means someone else with darker skin also won’t get it. Who are going to support the laws that led to the war on drugs and the ridiculous current prison system because they still think of black men with crack in the inner cities.  When a Trump voter said, “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting,” they were just saying the real part out loud: punish the liberals, the (brown-skinned) immigrants, and blacks, and it doesn’t matter if you help us. And when I thought the dog-whistle-cum-bullhorn couldn’t get any louder, the Proud Boys marched through DC this past weekend in support of the Republican president.

Up against all of this—and I didn’t even get into the whole section on the way the Sackler’s are some of the worst mass-murderers of the 20^th century—change feels impossible. Even Kristof and WuDunn’s list of policy proposals feels hollow. It’s a great list, don’t get me wrong, some very innovative items and for a couple this was the first place I’ve seen them. Just that it seems that even that list is written for a very different world. We can’t get to that part of policy proposals until we address these deep seated issues of racism, toxic masculinity, and destructive inequality, that has brought our democracy to the point that it’s at now. I hope we can get there, I truly do, and hopefully this book can move us towards that path. But to really get to the change we need we need to address the root problems, and this only discusses our symptoms, not the disease.

The Last Day

The Last Day, Andrew Hunter Murray

These are some of the pictures of the West Coast of the United States during the record wildfire that burned 10 million acres in 2020 so far, and destroyed whole cities in Oregon and California.

And when I say the West Coast, I mean the full West coast–coworkers and friends from the Bay Area of California up through Seattle were sharing pictures and stories all summer. In August,* Los Angeles was in the same situation.

All of which is to say that this was a great time to identify with The Last Day, a book where a passing white dwarf star has caused the Earth’s rotation to slow and sync up with our orbit, keeping almost half of the Earth in perpetual daylight and the other in perpetual night. The most habitable parts of the Earth are cast in an eternal unreal twilight. They are are towards the edge of the daylight/nighttime division, but far enough north that they aren’t uninhabitably warm.

This post-apocalyptic tale comes from Andrew Hunter Murray, a writer for QI and a co-host of the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. The Last Day is very much a story of its time. Great Britain ends up being one of the remaining livable worlds, albeit with many people scraping along. Britain has mostly closed its borders to the desperate crowds, although there is a small contingent of Americans who have been given a semi-autonomous region in a few southern counties. While refugees were streaming in from the Hot Zone, in the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, a power-hungry nationalist was elected in Britain, and sealed off Britain from the rest of Europe, going so far as to sink refugee ships. The country has now become essentially a fascist government, kept fed by a captive workforce in northern Europe. There are rebellions from the countryside, the north, and the Scottish highlands. And in the middle of all of this our hero, Ellie Hopper, is contacted by her former mentor with a secret that can provide hope for the future and upend the government.

I liked this book, even if at some points the story and science got a bit iffy. Rather than everything screeching to a halt, the Earth has become stuck in its position by a white dwarf star. The first sign was GPS and other services failing as one day started to grow longer by a few seconds. The Slow gave the world time to panic and try to plan for this; the Stop has shown individuals trying to rebuild, at least in Britain where it’s possible, with a much changed life. Hopper, our protagonist, is working on a rig studying ocean currents, trying to figure out what the new weather patterns, algae, and fish stocks will eventually look like. She’s an orphan, both of her parents having died trying to save people and refugees right after the Stop, and her brother is working for the government security. After her mentor, who had had a falling out with the oppressive current government, summoned her back to the mainland with a secret he dies before passing on, it’s up to Hopper to seek out the truth in a standard spy type novel.

The story itself is a fairly standard novel of someone thrown in over their head conspiracy-wise. I appreciated that Hopper didn’t turn out to be a spying and fighting savant, instead blundering through and getting by as much by luck as anything else. The relationships tie up a little too neatly, including a potential love triangle that is quickly resolved. There’s a Streetlight Manifesto song “We Are the Few” with the lines, “If you want the truth: I was hoping one of us would/pass away ‘cause it would be much easier then/we could all get together and talk about when”. It’s not quite the same, but the feeling of how to make it easy to write off some characters definitely showed through.

But neither dystopian sci-fi nor spy thrillers are known for their deep character studies, and that’s not really the point. Instead, this is about the world we want. Hunter Murray is interested in presenting an apocalyptic future where the horrors seem to come less from the earth stopping it’s rotation than from the extremes of what the growing isolationist and right-wing parties from Britain, the US, Hungary, and elsewhere want to see. In the Britain he has created, sunken ships form a barrier surrounding Britain, stopping any desperate individuals from getting close. The few refugees who are left, as well as anyone who questions the government are shipped overseas to Breadbaskets, the farms in Northern Europe to slave and to starve. The police have almost total power. The media is tightly controlled.  A small, illegal museum in the heart of London is dedicated to giving the few remnants of other civilizations a chance to practice old traditions or speak an old language. 

The Last Day works as a story, but far more than that it works to ask what we want to see and why. How would we react in a crisis, and what would we like to think of ourselves and our country. It may be set against an apocalyptic backdrop, but the challenge to our lives today is clear.

*I think? It’s hard to say, since time has no meaning now. I think it was August, or approximately 1000 years ago.