Resuscitating the American Dream
From a mezzanine seat at the University of Pittsburgh’s basketball arena, I had a bird’s eye view of hundreds of student-fans from Butler High School, there to root their school team to victory.
Assigned a section behind one basket, the students spent most of the game on their feet, jumping up and down in one long spasm of excitement. They laughed, they cheered. They twisted and turned. Joyous themselves, they were a joy to behold.
Across the way, students from Mount Lebanon exhibited the same happily raucous behavior.
The students in the stands were as much of a show as the players on the court.
I thought of these students as I read one particular passage in Timothy P. Carney’s new book, “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.”
“Maybe the things we think accompany the American dream, ” Carney writes, “are the things that really are the American dream.
“What if the T-ball game, the standing-room-only high school Christmas concert, the parish potluck and decorating the community hall for a wedding – what if these activities are not the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they are the American Dream?”
This, of course, is the Small Ball version of the American Dream. The celebrated American Dream is about getting ahead, being successful, and doing better generation after generation.
Carney, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an editor and commentator at the Washington Examiner, visited Fayette County while reporting the book. He stopped at Smitty’s bar and restaurant in Uniontown and Vargo’s newsstand in Fayette City.
Fayette County plays a central role in “Alienated America.” It is one of Carney’s collapsed and alienated communities.
Aside from placing Uniontown in the Mon Valley and calling it a former steel town, Carney got it just about right.
We’re in terrible shape. In all kinds of ways.
Carney enumerates: 8.2 percent county unemployment (as of 2016), median household income in the county, $38,789; in Uniontown, $26,000, half the national median; and only 41 percent of working age adults in the county are actually employed (the national average is 58 percent).
The narratives he heard from patrons at Smitty’s capped off what must have seemed like a visit to the heart of darkness. These included images of street corners and school bus stops littered with syringes. One man at the bar lost his young adult son to death that very morning. After the man left, patrons speculated on the reason: opioids were suspected.
Carney discovered that Fayette City was neither a city nor a town, but a “former town,” a wasteland of crumbled buildings and deserted streets; an airless landscape of crushed hopes whose residents live in a world of nostalgia, regret, and anger.
Down the road from Fayette City, Carney bumped into Monessen, a true former steel town visited by candidate Donald Trump in 2016. It was Trump, in typical Trumpian fashion, who said, on the day he announced his candidacy for president, “Sadly, the American Dream is dead,” and later, at his inauguration, declared, “This American carnage stops right here, right now.”
Despite his conservative credentials, Carney appears to regret that Trump became president. He notes time and again that the president won those parts of the country that had become “unraveled”, a word he specifically assigned to Fayette County.
None of this implies that the author regards places like Uniontown and Monessen, along with cities like Detroit and towns scattered throughout the Midwest, unsympathetically.
What he does disdain are the interpretations spun by media outlets like Vox.com, which headlined a story: “It wasn’t the economy, but racism and xenophobia that explains Trump’s rise.”
Or this from The Nation, “Economic anxiety didn’t make people vote for Trump, racism did.”
Carney believes one of the defining features of communities that thrive is an underlining solidarity, an infrastructure of cohesion, a web of famly-next-door relationships, regardless of differences of color, income, sexual preferences, and nationality
He ends his book at his church parish in Glenmont, Maryland, a non-descript suburb of Washington, D.C.
His church – St. Andrew Apostle Catholic – is another matter. Once again playing small ball, Carney highlights “Friday Night on the Field … a T-ball and coach-pitch baseball and softball” league for youngsters but also a place for adults to socialize with one another.
“It’s fairly modest,” Carney explains, “a low key opportunity for sports … healthy competition, (and) getting the kids active….”
As I read this passage, I couldn’t help but think of the wasted space at Uniontown’s Bailey Park, and what it represents: an indifference to the welfare of children, a gaping generational hole in the social contract, an opportunity lost for adults to weave the town’s social fabric.
Uniontown and Fayette County need a soulful comeback as well as a economic one. The American Dream needs a relaunch.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.