Take this title, a
Basic Books one written by Jonathan Metzl, a medical doctor with home ties to
America’s Heartland, that is due to come out in the spring (2019).
(Fuhgeddabout the
fact that in 1990 I began – a since abandoned – book of essays on American
travel, with the working title, “Travels Across America’s Waistline.”)
If Metzl’s main
title isn’t shocking enough, get a load of the subtitle:
“How the Politics
of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heatland”
So many books, so
little time. And some, like Metzl’s I find myself reading the introduction and
the conclusion, in part because, well, of the first sentence of this paragraph …
Here’s the money
quote from this book, which if you may not have the heart and the stomach to read what
stands as a reasonable assessment about just how intractable the problems seem
now …
“Why would someone
reject their own health care, or keep guns unlocked when their children were
home? Yet because of the frames cast around these and other issues hued with
historically challenged assumptions about privilege, it became ever-more
difficult for many people with whom I spoke to imagine alternate realities or
to empathize with groups other than their own. Compromise, in many ways, coded
as treason.”
That last line
nails it. When next you wonder how we can be as deeply partisan as we are think
of this phrase: Leaders, thinkers on both sides of the spectrum see compromise
as treason.
Next: Running for Your Life: Straight Talk
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