The cover image on Chris Arnade's new book, Dignity. Credit: Chris Arnade
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To misquote Jesus: books about the poor will always be with us. But once in a while someone writes something that does more than drone on about inequality or consumerism. It takes us there, to where the poor live and love and occasionally laugh. It lets them look us in the eye.
Dignity: seeking respect in back row America is one of those books. It helps that it’s written by a photographer, Chris Arnade, so the people he talks to actually do stare out from the pages. It helps as well that its subject is small-town America, so every post-industrial vista is haunting but somehow – to most British eyes – intensely glamorous.
The backdrop for Dignity is a kind of film-set noir. Rotting buildings hide under huge skies. Everywhere there are empty roads, petrol stations and McDonald’s restaurants and sinister looking clapboard churches, and in amongst all this rotting infrastructure: broken people. Often sad, spaced out on cheap drugs, but afflicted too by fits of the giggles, by shyness, by coyness, by the ability to jump in the air to bring life to some desiccated corrugated-iron strewn yard; even sometimes a haughty hauteur that says, “fuck you, I’m gonna be ok.”
But they are not going to be ok. This is not a sentimental journey. It’s a deeply unsettling examination of the pathology of what Donald Trump referred to in his inauguration speech as ‘American carnage’.
At the time, that phrase seemed so coarse, so jarring. Didn’t even George W. Bush turn to Hillary Clinton and say, “that was some weird shit”? Didn’t everyone who smelled nice from sea to shining sea raise his or her eyes to the skies and wonder what The Donald was smoking?
Well: hello polite America. This is what he meant.
Not all of the poor in this book are his people – indeed, most of them have probably never voted – but plenty of them, particularly the white people, understand very clearly that Trump was talking to them. On the day of that speech, Chris Arnade is in a strip club in Ohio. There are no customers.
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SubscribeSomeone, some party, will have to yield and invoke that old commie word: working class. It’s the only word that will unite people who matter, people of all religions and color, of all sexual identities, under one banner that will take on the people who are stealing their countries from them. Yep, there is hope for socialism but it will not come from Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, two liberal wolves in working class clothing.