American Poison by Eduardo Porter

Author:Eduardo Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Suffering of White America

The term “American dream” speaks to me of something specific: my grandparents’ house in Phoenix.

They were the kind of iconic working-class white Americans Norman Rockwell loved to paint: not extremely well educated; honest, by and large; hardworking. They had lived through the Great Depression in Chicago and moved southwest, where my grandfather got a job as an electrician on the Salt River Project and my grandmother worked as a librarian. Retired, on Social Security, they lived a frugal but hardly uncomfortable life.

They believed in family values. They put a lot of faith in God. And they were racist, in that vague, matter-of-fact way bred of custom rather than reflection. Though they loved my mother intensely, small and brown and Mexican though she was, a couple of times I heard my grandmother blurt out casually, “We just don’t like black people.”

Their house wasn’t big—two bedrooms and one bath; there was a date tree in the yard out front, a driveway with an awning in the back. It was on the wrong side of the tracks, south and west from the money in Scottsdale. But it was relentlessly air-conditioned, with plush green carpeting from wall to wall and a complicated, never-to-be-messed-with sound system. The huge TV in the den, the eight-track deck, the double-wide fridge, the pickup truck and the Pontiac in the back—all of it spoke of a prosperity that seemed at odds with my understanding of a working-class life.

Phoenix was booming then, powered by a burgeoning electronics industry with rich government contracts. Sun City had opened its doors on the west side of town a few years before I was born, drawing retirees from all over the country and fueling a long-lasting construction boom. The Vietnam War had fattened the metro area’s defense contractors working on government-funded projects.

I didn’t see my grandparents often. My parents moved to Mexico when I was six, to be near my mother’s family. But I visited most summers throughout my childhood. They would pack me off to Sunday school, where I once learned that the European Community—ten countries at the time and growing—somehow presaged the coming of the Antichrist. Then we would flee town to a trailer perennially parked at the Hawkeye trailer park in Sedona—not yet known for its chakras and spiritual vortices—in the heart of Red Rock country.

In Mexico, where I was growing up, retired electricians didn’t get this life. Tucked in at night, in a bed that doubled as the trailer’s dining room table, I couldn’t but marvel at my grandparents’ prosperity. This was not an America of broadly shared prosperity, I understand. Their standard of living was mostly unavailable to people of color. Yet from my perspective growing up in Mexico, surrounded by a sea of poverty, my grandparents’ America amounted to a fundamentally superior world.

The United States is still much richer than Mexico. America’s average GDP per head is three times as large as when I was born. It is more than five times Mexico’s.

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