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Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Sarah Kendzior.
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Courtesy of Flatiron Books
Next Tuesday, St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior launches her book, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America, at Left Bank Books as part of the Maryville Talks Books series. Don Marsh, of St. Louis on the Air, will keep the conversation flowing. The event is free and open to the public, and starts at 7 p.m. She’ll sign copies purchased at Left Bank.
Kendzior spent time in academia studying authoritarian regimes and covered the Midwest for Al Jazeera for many years. She’s covered labor issues, gentrification, racism and bias. The book is a collection of her writing from 2012 and 2015, which had previously been released in e-book form. It contains some new content, situating her previous essays into the current context.
She’s widely credited with being one of the first journalists to publicly predict the victory of the current occupant of the White House. A fractured citizenry with media and politicians asleep at the wheel, she says, created the perfect storm. Kendzior draws comparisons with dictatorships arising across the globe to our current state of affairs.
“I started out writing about Central Asia but expanded into looking at American problems. There was overlap then, systemic corruption in industries including the media,” she says. “Now, of course, my dissertation topic ended up reflecting what’s happening here, instead of in Uzbekistan.”
She’s frequently asked what we’re supposed to do now.
“Well, what do we do? You fight for what’s right,” Kendzior says. “You fight against corruption. You look out for the most vulnerable people.”
But, she says, these actions needed to be underway long before 2016, and they weren’t.
“People didn’t take action. They treated Trump as a joke. They treated Russia as a crazy conspiracy,” she says. “I wish the media had taken him seriously from the start and recognized that our institutions were vulnerable. I wish the media had been more honest. I wish there had been more compassion for the people Trump had targeted.”
His calling Mexicans murderers and rapists, for example, should have ended his campaign, she says. But it didn’t.
Coastal media strongholds, she says, paint the rest of the country as a monolith of disillusioned factory-working whites who bought what Trump was selling.
“People who work in manufacturing or mining and are unable to find work—that’s been a problem since the Regan era,” Kendzior says. “This is like a John Cougar Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen song.”
Elite media, she says, loves those done-to-death stories of jobless white dudes in the heartland who voted for him. (They’re always set in Pennsylvania, she observes, because it’s an easy enough drive from New York City.) But the stories miss the point and misrepresent this country.
“There’s interest in white Trump voters, and not nonwhite people working in the service industry who have been involved in labor movements,” she says.
Kendzior says Trump is a symptom of bigger, systemic issues.
“It’s problems that already existed being exploited. Racism, segregation, poverty, the role of the media,” she says. “All these other sorts of things we’ve had to contend with, and yes, there is a hostile foreign state interfering with our political systems.”
She speaks of a misguided faith many Americans had, that checks and balances would come into play and that Trump would be constrained.
“The way Trump has been operating throughout his career, cheering destruction—he doesn’t have a normal perspective toward pain. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in American government.”
Here in the Midwest, many of us may feel a cozy isolation from coastal madness and political sturm und drang.
“A lot of people say ‘Oh, that could never happen in St. Louis.’ It’s already happened. It’s the result of apathy. I’ve run from teargas in this city. My state senator was teargassed.”
It’s on us not to get distracted by Twitter insanity or tawdry porn-star allegations about the President, and to keep focus on the real destruction being wrought.
“I just wish people would be honest about the severity of the problems we face,” she says. “Climate change, packing the courts with conservative judges—these are things that could restructure our lives for decades.”
Sarah Kenzior reads from and signs The View From Flyover Country on Tuesday, April 17 at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, at 7 p.m. For more information, go to left-bank.com. We profiled Kendzior as part of our "Generation Now," roundup in 2013; you can read our review of The View From Flyover Country here.
