The view from the back row + The Real Obama

[rainbows_]

Journalist and photographer Chris Arnade discusses a country divided by meaning, morality, education, and economics.

In 2016, pundits speculated endlessly on that mysterious place called Trump Country. To many in the Beltway, much of America was a foreign country, to be analyzed statistically rather than in person. Chris Arnade, on the other hand

Comments

[tilmon]

This is a great pairing of articles. My family is working class, my dad white, Southern, and unskilled. In 2008, he was so excited about Obama. He was expecting great change, a real shake-up of the powerful interests that had brought the economy to its knees. That never happened. Dad still has some good feelings about Obama, but no excitement. He had gotten involved in the local campaign back in 2007. This time, he sat things out.

Me? I'm a leftist who never warmed up to Obama to start with, and am only disappointed in that I wasn't pleasantly surprised. To me, he was always a neoliberal with no real concern for the populace. I think he's personable in the same way that my institution's president is personable. And in just the same way, acts in ways that screw us rank-and-file people over because he relies on metrics that don't capture personal experience. At work, our performances are constantly surveyed and scrutinized while our working conditions and power over how we work are constantly reduced, always justified with some hideous feel-good "motivational" slogan whose real use is to generate guilt in the workers for lack of enthusiasm. Of course, the slogan generates a knee-jerk hatred every time it is employed, since its real meaning is our devaluation. And this which happens at my institution is essentially what has happened in the country at large. "Hope" and "change" are words associated with the Democrats, with Obama, and with painful experience.

(Yes, yes, there were good things that were done by the Obama administration. But they were piecemeal, forced, and merely window dressing, as can be seen with how easily the current White House occupant has changed the draperies.)

(I'm college-educated, multi-degreed, and stuck in a dead-end job because the economy was shit when I finished college. I had no connections to trade on. I'm neither back-row nor front-row, but in the middle seats. I've taught as an adjunct, and I can tell you, adjuncts are a lot closer to truck drivers than this guy thinks. Sometimes, they even are truck drivers.)

[blackjedii]

(I'm college-educated, multi-degreed, and stuck in a dead-end job because the economy was shit when I finished college. I had no connections to trade on. I'm neither back-row nor front-row, but in the middle seats. I've taught as an adjunct, and I can tell you, adjuncts are a lot closer to truck drivers than this guy thinks. Sometimes, they even are truck drivers.)

R u my twin

I live in SWVA and in general for the area, my family is bourgeoisie (aka not below the poverty line and have retirement plans and don't rely on food stamps or live paycheck to paycheck). But all that means now is that I'm not buried in college debt. In retrospect starting a job while in college just to help pay basic bills hurt me big time, even as I bought into the idea that working jobs and being responsible "looks great on resumes." What they really meant is suck it up, abandon all your college years to your corporate master, and your grades and networking opportunities can suck it.