Janesville: An American Story

Genre         Nonfiction (politics)

Pages       368

Published       2017

Rating       

Basically         Starting over is a bitch.

I was excited to read this book from the moment I heard about it. Both sides of my family have roots in the Janesville/Rock County area and it’s not often that a Wisconsin city (especially one that isn’t Madison or Milwaukee) is given the full book treatment by a Washington Post reporter.

“Janesville: An American Story” follows what happens when a city’s major employer, philanthropic partner, and cultural touchstone packs up and leaves. For generations, the people of Janesville had come to expect that not only would their local General Motors plant employ thousands of their residents at good, family-supporting wages, but that the ripple effect of such a large corporation’s presence would spur dozens of other businesses and cottage industries to open and thrive. GM was the bedrock of this city’s economy and as the recession loomed in 2008, the closure of Janesville’s plant brought the region to its knees and begat many unforeseen consequences in the lives of its former workers.

Some ex-GM-ers took the opportunity to go back to school, often at Blackhawk Technical College, which did its level best to welcome a veritable army of adult students. Many of them had not had any education post-high school and Blackhawk attempted to suss out where new jobs in the region might come from, so as to guide their new students to smart courses of study.

Others decided to stick with GM and transfer to plants in other cities while commuting home to Janesville on the weekends. A particularly heartrending story follows Matt, who transfers to a plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana but deeply misses his wife and daughters. He goes to great lengths to remind himself that Fort Wayne is not home; he keeps his car’s clock on Janesville time and spends every hour possible at the plant, trying to get overtime. When Friday afternoon comes, he and his fellow “Janesville gypsies” speed back to southern Wisconsin for a precious 48 hours of family, familiarity, and rest. Matt is still 8 years away from being eligible for his GM pension, and there are no jobs in Janesville that will pay anywhere close to what he makes in Fort Wayne, so this nomadic life must go on.

Just as interestingly, the book highlights residents who deal with the collateral damage of GM’s exit: principally, school social workers. A couple of high school teachers find ways to help students of laid-off parents get the necessities for school and life while maintaining their dignity. Many of those students are working one or two jobs themselves to help the family make ends meet, and are therefore missing out on a “normal” high school experience. The school’s social workers do their best to make sure the kids are at least kept in good clothes, groceries, and school supplies to try to ease their load a little.

I’ve lived in southern Wisconsin my whole life but never knew very much about Janesville’s GM plant, or what a catastrophe its closure really was for the community. Amy Goldstein does an incredible job of putting you in the shoes of those affected, from laid-off workers and their families, to local business leaders trying to marshal optimism and hope, to elected officials (most of whom prove to be essentially impotent as far as doing much of anything concrete to help Janesville get back on its feet). It’s not a completely healed city, by any means. Though improvements have been made and some jobs have returned, GM has still left a Buick-sized hole in Janesville’s economy and soul.

“Tender” – Or, “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate”

Genre         Contemporary fiction

P.O.V.        Third person omniscient

Pages          400

Basically    It’s never a good sign when Sylvia Plath and Ed Hughes serve as rhetorical proxies for the main characters.

 

Hey I’m back! Gonna try to get into this thing again. Mild spoilers ahead.

In “Tender”, our protagonist is Catherine Reilly, a young university student in Dublin. She comes from a rural area and isn’t what you’d call “worldly”. She meets James, who is quite her opposite – extroverted, wry, confident, gregarious. For some reason, they hit it off and become the very best of friends. I do mean the very best. James is gay, the first gay person Catherine has met, a fact that she clearly takes a lot of pride in. He’s like her Sassy Gay Friend circa 2012, except this story takes place in the late 1990s. James’s homosexuality is almost like a trophy for Catherine to proclaim her worldliness…and that’s when you know things are gonna get weird.

Catherine and James are bestest buddies, thick as thieves, two peas in a pod, inside jokes all day long. Their relationship, from the beginning, has a rather significant physical component; reading this as a Midwestern American, I wasn’t sure how much of that to attribute to the more demonstrative European culture, or how much of it was just the uniqueness of this extraordinarily close friendship. I mean, European people link arms and give cheek kisses all the time, right? It’s de rigeur, non? Nah, though…it becomes clear, about halfway through the book, that  these are no innocent, asexual cuddles – Catherine is in love with James and her realization of that sets in motion a slew of poor decisions, breathtakingly immature behavior, and of course, inevitably, heartbreak.

No question, it’s a compelling (if frequently annoying) relationship to witness. The reader can have little doubt that things will end badly for Catherine and James. Nonetheless, that lack of particular suspense didn’t bore me. In the end, when everything goes to shite (in Irish slang), neither of them are blameless and they’ve both acted atrociously. You might reasonably argue that they’re equally awful people who have no business even spending time together. But as their relationship unfolds, in dank Dublin pubs and Catherine’s cozy Baggot Street flat, I could relate to the portrayal of being utterly infatuated with a person, and how that infatuation in your memory will always be tied to those pubs and that flat and those streets and those poems and those songs. And by the time it does all go inevitably to shite, Catherine’s quick departure from reality seems a little less absurd and a little more desperately human.

My favorite part of the book is the last 50 pages or so, which jumps ahead about a decade and a half to find Catherine and James meeting again for the first time in as many years. Those pages are so beautifully poignant, and I thought McKeon ended it perfectly. Any other ending would have felt terribly false.

Favorite Lines

“Nothing that was not him was anything she could see.”

“He was not trying to comfort her, Catherine realized. He was not trying to take something painful away. It was as if he was trying to tell her that something painful had never been hers to hold on to at all.”

“She burst out laughing; he was laughing too. It was a performance, of course; a performance with which he could steer them out of dicey territory. It was what he had always done, and he was still doing it now, only now he was so much better at it – Catherine saw it, the smoothness, the quickness, the practice he had had. He stuck out his bottom lip now, in a mock sulk, and pretended to glower at her skin again, and she laughed again, like he wanted her to, like he needed her to do.”

Just Mercy

5 out of 5 stars

UPDATE!!:
Bryan Stevenson continues to do God’s work: on April 3, 2015, he won the release of a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit.

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the death penalty. Most people really don’t need to. Your position on it is usually pretty academic, made at significant remove from the reality of capital punishment in the United States. You’re for it: an eye for an eye, severe deterrent, et cetera. You’re against it: just doesn’t sit right, or you are uncomfortable with the finality of such a judgment when human error is also in play. 

There is a lot I want to say about “Just Mercy” that is clichéd. It will open your eyes to injustice in this country. It will make you hope for a more compassionate future for all. Those things are definitely true, but they don’t properly convey the power of this book.

Background: Bryan Stevenson is an attorney in what I think of as the “deep South” – Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana. His nonprofit, Equal Justice Initiative, represents individuals who are, for a wide variety of reasons, condemned to die either at the direct hand of the State, or at the end of a very long prison sentence. Stevenson’s clients all have one thing in common: they are extremely poor, and almost all of them have a history of abuse or trauma in their childhoods. Some of them are guilty, in the sense that they did commit the crime of which they are accused, and some of them are 100% innocent.

Many of Stevenson’s clients had tremendously ineffective counsel at their original trials, which is not really a surprise when you consider that Alabama has no statewide indigent defender system, and 70% of current death row inmates were convicted when their attorneys’ compensation for out of court work was capped at $1,000. (EJI Crisis of Counsel) How many attorneys do you know who would work on those terms?

One of the most chilling aspects of this book is the way that literally made-up stories can land a person at the mercy of the court, which all too often ignores flagrant irregularities and wants to simply get on with things. The less powerful of a citizen you are, the greater danger you are in if such a situation should woefully befall you. The heartbreaking story of Walter McMillian is weaved throughout the book and I honestly felt like I was reading a suspense novel, partly because the details were just so incredibly hard to swallow, and partly because Bryan Stevenson tells a damn good story.

The mountain of disadvantages that a child or adult of color has when brought in front of the justice system is simply staggering. Very often when one of Stevenson’s clients is guilty, there is a lot more to the story. Did this 15-year-old kid shoot his mom’s boyfriend? Yes, because the boyfriend had beaten the kid’s mom half to death one too many times. The kid had been powerless to stop the abuse and made an irreversible mistake. Did this middle-aged man assault some random law-abiding citizen? Yes, because the man has severe mental health issues that have gone untreated. He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing and has been bouncing in and out of prison his whole life because this country lacks adequate mental health services for anyone without just the right insurance plan. Prison basically is our solution to the problem of mentally ill people. Stevenson isn’t trying to make excuses for anyone, but he does want to bring context to the justice system where it currently lacks.

So many issues intersect in this book. Crime and punishment. Racial profiling. White paternalism. Lingering racism in the South. Child abuse. The foster care system. Drug and alcohol abuse. Rampant unemployment. Mental health treatment. Affordable health care in general. Pretty much every social problem you can think of makes an appearance in “Just Mercy”, and while that sounds pretty depressing, I think what I learned made it more than worth the melancholy.

I love books like this that make me examine an issue to which I’d previously given little thought. The unfortunate thing about “Just Mercy” is that most people who will pick it up already have some idea of the privilege that their skin color, or economic position, or gender confers upon them. The people who really need to be hit upside the head with that information will probably never read the book and that’s discouraging to me. But if people like Bryan Stevenson keep preaching, eventually, maybe, more than just the choir will hear it.

Suggested Additional Reading: “The New Jim Crow“, by Michelle Alexander

All The Truth Is Out

4 stars out of 5

I am a mid-80’s baby, and as such, I have no memory of the Gary Hart scandal. But everyone can see its consequences (whether they recognize the genesis or not). A media industry obsessed with “gotcha”, obsessed with sex, obsessed with building up and tearing down. Once, this way of doing business was mainly the province of Hollywood, but as it has been said: Washington, D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people, and the Gary Hart scandal set that in motion arguably more than any other event in the 1980s.

Matt Bai, over the course of probably hundreds of interviews with Hart himself and many other associated individuals, gives us a very complete portrait of the man. By the end of the book, you feel like you know Hart well – even if, at the end of the day, you can’t be totally positive that he actually slept with the woman he was alleged to have fooled around with. And that’s really how Hart wants it – because in his mind, it’s none of your business, or mine, what happened on that unfortunately-named boat (Monkey Business), or any details of Hart’s private life in general. Bai skillfully explains the political media climate of yore, when reporters following presidential or gubernatorial campaigns largely followed a “wink and nod” sort of approach when it came to extracurricular activities the candidate may be involved in. A very “Mad Men”-era attitude that served powerful men with non-monogamous tendencies very well. (Like my euphemisms?) Unless the candidate’s bedroom affairs became truly detrimental to his ability to serve in office, journalists basically left well enough alone.

That’s the environment that Gary Hart was familiar with, and after Watergate, it was just waiting to come crashing down. Every reporter wanted to be the next Woodward or Bernstein, so the pressure to find a juicy scoop kept ratcheting up. In some ways, Gary Hart and Donna Rice were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The central question of the book is basically this: How much should we care about a leader’s private life? Does it matter that Gary Hart was unfaithful to his wife? The man was (is – he’s not dead) incredibly brilliant and had some very prescient ideas that might’ve done the country a lot of good. Had he won the presidency, we could be living in a very different America – maybe a better America. But we passed on that opportunity for what was little more than a titillating piece of gossip that managed to survive for several news cycles. He slept with a beautiful woman who wasn’t his wife. Maybe. Probably. Does that make him unfit for the presidency? Does it say something about his “character” that makes him too impure for the sacred White House?

We’ve been asking ourselves those questions, as a country, before Gary Hart came along and still to this day. Matt Bai weaves a highly readable, detailed account of the scandal and its aftermath. Gary Hart is still around, albeit largely out of the public eye, although his staunchest supporters apparently still try to entreat him to run for president again. Maybe we haven’t heard the last of him.