The cover of This is Not America by journalist Alan Friedman features a bleak image of the Statue of Liberty trapped behind the red bars of the American flag. It is a metaphor for what Mr. Friedman hopes to convey in this book, which features reporting from several mid-western American states in the run up to the 2016 elections. The idea, he says, is to demystify the idea of the American Dream, to show that it doesn’t exist now and that, it was only partially true in the first place.
At an event in the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai on Thursday, Mr. Friedman was in conversation with Manjeet Kripalani, co-founder of the Mumbai-based think tank Gateway House, on the reasons for writing his book and his experience of revisiting America.
Rediscovering home
For several years prior to 2016, Mr. Friedman had lived outside America, working most prominently in Italy, and he had just completed a book and documentary about the controversial former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2015. “My publishers told me that I should now be working on a book about the death of Europe or about Asia,” he said, “but I said that there was something else that needed to be done first. I was an investigative journalist but I had never investigated my own country, America.”
It had been close to 30 years since he had lived in America, but he was eager to go back and report on what he thought the elite media was not reporting: the death of the ‘real’ America. “This is not Fifth Avenue in New York, not Hollywood, but travelling through highways in places like Mississippi, Colorado and South Carolina, and looking from the ground up at what people were thinking.”
The Trump appeal
What he found was a country deeply divided and wounded, and the conversations that he delved into were about income inequality, extreme poverty and an atmosphere of racism that has never disappeared.
It’s important to note that his reporting was done in the spring of 2016, ahead of the American presidential elections, because many of these issues became more apparent and received more focus in the American media after the Donald Trump’s shock win. Mr. Friedman said he wanted to investigate the real stories behind the border wall that Mr Trump was proposing, behind gun violence, and the debates around access to healthcare and education perhaps best exemplified by the deeply divisive issue of the so-called Obamacare plan. “I wanted to ask, how did we get to this place? And I found through my reporting that the America I was encountering was not the America of the American dream but a pretty different place.” His deciding to report ahead of the 2016 election was also to help him understand the rhetoric of candidate Trump, and why it seemed to be working. “There were so many people just looking for hope.’ And there were politicians who were able to catalyse that feeling and that fear.
Marginalised Americans
Much of the book deals with issues now being discussed in the US, about how sections of the media wilfully ignored the suffering of Americans living in extreme poverty, who felt disenfranchised and simply wanted to be heard. His account should also provide an insightful background to the current debates going on in US politics, particularly about issues like healthcare.
The numbers that Mr Friedman presents in his book represent a hidden America, an America that an international audience has very little idea about. At least 14.5% Americans live below the poverty line and 23% are what can be classified as the working poor. “All in all, about 102 million Americans, about one-third of the population, are either below the poverty line or even if they have jobs, cannot get by without food stamps or other social security. About four million families live on an income of less than two dollars a day.” The book also provides an overview of the state of the American economy, where he explains that only 20% of jobs are now in the manufacturing sector and 80% are in the service industry, with a large part of that including jobs in retail and the food industry.
It’s the economy
As an example, the book has a chapter on Walmart, the world’s largest corporation, and its treatment of employees.
“We followed the story of a single mother who was serving at the food counter and fell and had an accident. She went and got a doctor’s certificate but Walmart fired her from her job because they said that doctors’ certificates were not good enough. People think of America as a fair and just society but that’s just not true.” Mr. Friedman argues that corporations like Walmart are the worst examples of exploitative capitalism. When he went to visit the woman’s home, Mr. Friedman said, he felt that slums in Mumbai are cleaner than her neighbourhood, and probably had more sense of community.
“You can’t say this in Washington, but since we’re here we can talk about it,” he said. “The ‘American Dream’ probably never existed for black Americans, for several classes of women, and for poor whites. In the globalisation era, it’s actually been more propaganda than reality.”
