Packer George - The unwinding: an inner history of the new America

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FOR LAURA, CHARLIE, AND JULIA

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

No one can say when the unwinding beganwhen the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless waysand at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different.

If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscapethe farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognitionways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

The unwinding is nothing new. There have been unwindings every generation or two: the fall to earth of the Founders heavenly Republic in a noisy marketplace of quarrelsome factions; the war that tore the United States apart and turned them from plural to singular; the crash that laid waste to the business of America, making way for a democracy of bureaucrats and everymen. Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.

The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever beforefreedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it, fail abjectly and try again. And with freedom the unwinding brings its illusions, for all these pursuits are as fragile as thought balloons popping against circumstances. Winning and losing are all-American games, and in the unwinding winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.

This much freedom leaves you on your own. More Americans than ever before live alone, but even a family can exist in isolation, just managing to survive in the shadow of a huge military base without a soul to lend a hand. A shiny new community can spring up overnight miles from anywhere, then fade away just as fast. An old city can lose its industrial foundation and two-thirds of its people, while all its mainstayschurches, government, businesses, charities, unionsfall like building flats in a strong wind, hardly making a sound.

Alone on a landscape without solid structures, Americans have to improvise their own destinies, plot their own stories of success and salvation. A North Carolina boy clutching a Bible in the sunlight grows up to receive a new vision of how the countryside could be resurrected. A young man goes to Washington and spends the rest of his career trying to recall the idea that drew him there in the first place. An Ohio girl has to hold her life together as everything around her falls apart, until, in middle age, she finally seizes the chance to do more than survive.

As these obscure Americans find their way in the unwinding, they pass alongside new monuments where the old institutions once stoodthe outsized lives of their most famous countrymen, celebrities who only grow more exalted as other things recede. These icons sometimes occupy the personal place of household gods, and they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how to live a good or better life.

In the unwinding, everything changes and nothing lasts, except for the voices, American voices, open, sentimental, angry, matter-of-fact; inflected with borrowed ideas, God, TV, and the dimly remembered pasttelling a joke above the noise of the assembly line, complaining behind window shades drawn against the world, thundering justice to a crowded park or an empty chamber, closing a deal on the phone, dreaming aloud late at night on a front porch as trucks rush by in the darkness.

PART I

1978

I want to have a frank talk with you tonight about our most serious domestic problem. That problem is inflation. twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go / I wanna be sedated We must face a time of national austerity. Hard choices are necessary if we want to avoid consequences that are even worse. I intend to make those hard choices. nothin to do nowhere to go-o-o / I wanna be sedated Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fucking Peace Corps. CARTER DEALT MAJOR DEFEAT ON CONSUMER BILLS I dont know if the people of Mahoning Valley realize that the closing of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Campbell Works not only affects the steelworkers and their families, but the community THE LURE OF OUR MANY CULTS The communards, most of them over the age of fifty, subsisted on a meager diet of rice and beans. They worked the fields from dawn to dusk while Jones harangued them with lectures and sermons over a public address system. What man could afford to pay for all the things a wife does, when shes a cook, a mistress, a chauffeur, a nurse, a babysitter? But because of all this, I feel women ought to have equal rights. Unfortunately, most low tar cigarettes tasted like nothing. Then I tried Vantage. Vantage gives me the taste I enjoy. And the low tar Ive been looking for. FILIBUSTER DEFEATS UNION ORGANIZING BILL The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress. ELVIS LOVE LETTERS Fans pour out their hearts; Plus Super Color Special: The day Elviss home became a shrine Noise pollution in a New York slum! People are being mugged right and left, children are being bitten by rats, junkies are ripping out the plumbing of decaying tenementsand the EPA is worried about noise pollution! These same EPA officials, of course, go home at night and tranquilly observe their children doing homework to the accompaniment of thumping, blaring CALIFORNIA VOTERS APPROVE A PLAN TO CUT PROPERTY TAX $7 BILLION The hell with county employees, said one man as he left a precinct polling place in a Los Angeles suburb.

DEAN PRICE

At the turn of the millennium, when he was in his late thirties, Dean Price had a dream. He was walking to his ministers house on a hard-surface road, and it veered off and became a dirt road, and that road veered off again and became another dirt road, with tracks where wagon wheels had worn it bare, but the grass between the tracks grew chest high, as if it had been a long time since anybody had gone down the road. Dean walked along one of the wagon tracks holding his arms out spread-eagle and felt the grass on either side hitting the underneath of his arms. Then he heard a voiceit came from within, like a thought: I want you to go back home, and I want you to get your tractor, and I want you to come back here and bush-hog this road, so that others can follow where its been traveled down before. You will show others the way. But it needs to be cleared again. Dean woke up in tears. All his life he had wondered what he was put on earth for, while going in circles like a rudderless ship. He didnt know what the dream meant, but he believed that it contained his calling, his destiny.