The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
I was a Jan. 6 juror. What I learned surprised me. Trump’s pardons of virtually all of the Jan. 6 rioters left me dejected. Am I safe? When the jury summons for federal criminal court arrived in my mailbox in November 2023, I knew I had to answer it. And not just because I had been deferring and deferring and now I was all out of deferments. I had to answer this one because in my gut I knew it wasn’t going to be just any old criminal case. I remember saying to my partner, “I bet you anything it’s a January 6 case.” Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter At that point, it had been more than two years since a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in the city that has been my home for 16 years. But criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were still making their way through the federal court in D.C. at a pretty steady clip. At the time my summons arrived, roughly 1,200 Jan. 6 cases had already been adjudicated, and there were still many mor...
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