Evan Osnos

This afternoon on the Internet I saw the launch of China’s second super aircraft carrier, a massive, beautiful beast. It put me in mind of the lessons of Great Leap Liu, a character in Evan Osnos’ book who built China’s massive high speed railways in record time before being fingered as one of China’s most corrupt public officials.

I look at the picture of that aircraft carrier and wonder what the size of the graft is that lurks beneath the hull of that mega-monster ship.

Because China today as when Evan Osnos wrote this book some years ago is still mired in the privilege of the elites and huge corruption even as its storied growth slows to mere epic levels.

Osnos’ book tries but in my opinion does not quite convey the entrepreneurial zest of 21st century China, nor the massive political capital the authoritarian regime has created in a mere two generations.

Rather he focuses on it’s soft underbelly and insecurities.

When I think of my own country Canada I see three centuries of scraping the countryside of its treasures and negligible influence on the world stage.

What few people will acknowledge today is that Mao’s slaughter of millions in China due to incompetent gov’t set the stage for a massive comeback using virtually slave labour to rob the West of its wealth under its own nose.

Nixon played the “China card” to push the Soviet Union into irrelevance not realizing that unleashing the Asian tiger would also be America’s undoing.

Osnos seems to think that the Chinese state needs a better rudder than the Communist Leadership can offer now or ever, and he may have a point.

When I think of a state with so many cities of 20 million or more souls, enormous environmental challenges, the aging workforce, the imperative for growth, I can barely comprehend the pressures on this government.… (more)

Wildland describes the many ways Americans lost faith in their government and society, becoming a tinderbox waiting for the arsonist Donald Trump. It begans with the attack on 9/11/2001 and continues to the insurrection on 1/6/2021, looking at the many changes that happened during those twenty years that made us all so mad at the world.

Osnos can claim both the and outsider perspective. He writes about places he lived and worked, but he spent twelve years working in China so many of the changes that may be imperceptible as they happened were jarring to come home to. He set out to find out how and why we changed so much and why so many of us have given up on the common good.

Drawing on his lived experience in Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois as well as interviews with people from there, he is able to go deeply into the emotional landscape while mapping the socioeconomic environmental changes. During this time, inequality increased. A few became incomprehensibly wealthy while nearly everyone else lost ground. The expectation that the next generation will do better than the last has been lost, not for one, but for two generations. People have a right to be angry.

While Wildland is fascinating, well-researched, and well-written, I think Evan Olnos misses the main driver of anger today. He mentions racism and even notes that the birthrate of nonwhite babies outpaces white babies by a bit. But perhaps because racism was there in 2001 and is still here in 2021, he underestimates its effect. Economic conditions do not explain why people without health insurance oppose reforms that would insure them and safeguard their health, but white supremacy is so powerful that people would rather be poor than equal.

It’s not that Olnos ignores racism but he consistently underestimates its power. The word racism appears only seventeen times in a 430-page book and eighteen for racist. And yes, all the other trends contibute to our problems, the loss of local news, the weakening of labor, the gloridication og greed to the point Gordan Gecko becomes the hero. But all of that would not be enough without racism. For Olnos, racism is primarily expressed through anti-immigrant sentiment easily exploited by Trump, but that is less enduring and less virulent than the anti-Black racism expressed through opposition to democracy itself. The claim that Biden lost is rooted in the deeply held belief that Black voters are not as legitimate as white voters. It is why we shrug at 12-hour lines to vote and why the GOP can sustain absolute oppositing to voting rights. White people believe in democracy so long as they make the decisions, the very thought of losing their absolute hegemony sends them into an insurrectionist rage.

Every point Olnos makes is valid, but he miss the point. Racism is the lever through which class oppression is able to move mountains. White people would rather be poor than equal. Class analysis will only take us so far, if we do not grapple with white supremacy first and foremost, there is no permanent progress. For that reason, although again and again, I was moved by and agreed with Olnos chapter by chapter, I was also infuriated by the absence of reckoning honestly with the power of white supremacy.

I received an e-galley of Wildland from the publisher through NetGalley

Wildland at Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Macmillan
Evan Osnos author site
Essay at Harvard Gazette

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/17/9780374286675/… (more)

The author of this interesting book is a writer for New Yorker magazine who lived overseas from 2001 to 2013. When he returned to the US, he found the country to be very different from the one he left, and wanted to know why. He chose three places he was intimately connected with, Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he began his journalism career, and Chicago, Illinois, where his family is from. Over the next several years, he visited these places many times and interviewed and got to know many people there. This book is the result of his reporting.

In Clarksburg, he found members of the white working class and poor. There, he investigated what was gained and what was lost, "when some of America's wealthiest people tapped the natural resources beneath the homes of some of America's poorest people."

In Chicago, he focused primarily on the black urban poor, "to understand the compounded effects of American segregation."

And in Greenwich, he found representatives of America's wealthiest--the top .001%, including many hedge fund managers. He sought "to learn how a gospel of economic liberty had altered beliefs among leaders of America's capitalism, and made anything possible, for the right price."

The book covers a lot of the defining events of the last 20 years or so through these lenses, and it goes a long way towards showing how the current deep divisions in our society developed and how deeply entrenched these divisions now are. He concludes that the time between 2001 and 1-6-2021, "was a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the union as larger than the sum of its parts."

The conclusion he draws is not good: "If America's history is a story of constant rebalancing--between greed and generosity, industry and nature, identity and assimilation--then the country had spun so far out of balance that it had lost its center of gravity."

There is a lot to think about in this book. It reminded me of The Unwinding by George Packer, still a worthwhile read, although several years old.

Recommended.
4 stars… (more)