By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
I write about politics and things related to politics,
which means that I write about a world in which people pretend to be driven by
values or ideology but
are mainly driven by the sometimes-furtive, sometimes-brazen quest for status,
and so I have come to appreciate the refreshing frankness of the travel
industry’s treatment of status: You know exactly what your status is with
American Airlines or Hilton, where you are on the upgrade list, what kind of
perks or accommodations you can expect, etc. A few years ago, when Rich Lowry
asked me to write a piece about poverty in Appalachia, I rented a car for the
trip, and there was a problem with my reservation — but I rented a lot of cars
at that time and had just mad status, so I ended up touring some of the poorest
places in America in a Cadillac Escalade in the color GM calls “diamond white.”
It didn’t exactly blend in, but I’ve never been particularly good at that or
had much interest in it.
I’ve been thinking about that trip.
There is a convention in the publishing world that new
books come out on Tuesday, and today marks the release of my new one, Big
White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank and
Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.” The title of the book comes from
that Cadillac-enabled report about poverty, which focuses mostly on Eastern
Kentucky. The book is a collection of long-form reports for National Review,
many revised and expanded, touching on subjects that seem to me to represent
certain forking paths in American culture: rural poverty, suburban addiction,
and urban crime; pornography; casino gambling; marijuana legalization; the
facts about the energy business and modern farming; the political violence on
the streets of Portland; municipal bankruptcy; the strange cultural and
political overlap between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. One of the great
things about doing the kind of work I do is that I get to go places I
ordinarily wouldn’t, places where I don’t belong: a flat-earther convention, a
homeless encampment, a conclave of white-power knuckleheads rallying around
Confederate monuments. The book is a collection of interesting stories, not a
collection of arguments or refinements of political ideology. I think you might
enjoy it.
I am not much of a salesman, but, obviously, I hope you
will buy it.
When Donald Trump was nominated in 2016, the shock of it
exnihilated into existence a whole genre of “white working class” reporting,
often with a Jane Goodall-ish feeling to it —“Lookit, Caitlyn, they seem
almost human!” — that was held in almost universally low regard.
Conservatives complained, not without good reason, that much of that reporting
was shallow and shaped by the unshakeable preconception that this is all
somehow about racism and Christian fanaticism; progressives complained, not
without good reason, that reporting about subjects such as poverty and
addiction has been noticeably more sympathetic when the stars of the show are
white, and especially white and middle-class. But I think that that kind of
reporting is well-intentioned and useful — it’s always good to get journalists
out of New York City and Washington, D.C. Much of that white-working-class
reportage hasn’t been very good, but the effort is worth something.
It’s worth something because that fault-line in American
cultural life is real. Increasingly, we act as though we inhabit
entirely separate realities. Some of the work I think of as a “skeleton key
for Trump country,” reports from on the ground in places and situations that
tend to be covered poorly by much of the press to the extent that they are
covered at all. But part of the story — a big part — is how people in those
communities perceive the outside world, which is why I’ve spent so much time
writing about crime in places such as Chicago and Philadelphia, and the rolling
crime wave that is leftist street violence in Portland. Most people can’t be
reached, of course, because you can’t reason someone out of a belief that he
wasn’t reasoned into. But the curious facts and arresting little details of
real life in the world as it actually is — as opposed to the world of our
political narratives and economic models — have a certain power. The people who
have the inclination to be moved or enlightened by such things are the people
for whom this book was written — the people for whom any book worth a damn is
written.
Book tours stopped being a big thing a long time ago,
though some very popular writers still do a version of the classical campaign.
In the age of COVID-19, such events are even less of a practical option than
they once were. That means I’ll be doing a lot of talk radio and other media in
the coming weeks — I think you might enjoy my C-SPAN conversation with Salena
Zito when it comes out, and I had a very fun talk with Ben Shapiro yesterday.
If you get sick of the sound of my voice, the irritation may be soothed at
least a little bit by the knowledge that I, too, get sick of the sound of my
voice.
It is a tremendous privilege to get to do what I do, for
which I am grateful to my colleagues at National Review and National Review
Institute, and to you who read and support that work. This kind of work is all
that I’ve ever really wanted to do, partly because I enjoy it but also because
I think it can do some good in the world, not by inspiring a mass movement or
rallying support behind this or that political candidate but by helping people
to know and understand a little bit more about the parts of the world with
which they do not have very much personal experience, and thereby to live lives
that are a little larger and a little richer.
And then there’s the fact that I like to drive . . .
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