The Unwinding by George Packer

This is a book that tries to see beneath the surface of things. Subtitled “An Inner History of the New America,” it, largely through a series of biographical vignettes, attempts to demonstrate if not describe the evolutionary change that came over the United States of America in the last portion of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, and the culminated in the financial crisis of 2008-09.

It is largely a depressing tale.

Some of the biographical subjects are one-offs and others are recurring characters in the vignettes. Among these recurring characters is Dean Price, a convenient store entrepreneur in North Carolina, who tries and fails multiple times to capitalize on the promise of a new energy economy. His disillusionment over the real engine of America is starkly palpable in passages like this:

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses -- always under the cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking -- chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk -- and he thought how these same chickens might return from their destinations as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens.

Another recurring character is the city of Tampa, Florida, home to thousands of real estate developers and millions of property owners. The excesses of the housing boom and the subprime mortgage crisis are on full display there, but so are the social and cultural conditions that allowed them to happen.

Usha Patel’s Comfort Inn earned a million dollars in her first year, eight hundred thousand her second. She found Americans to be hopeless employees. They lived day to day, collecting their paychecks on Friday, clubbing and partying even if they had kids, skipping work Monday, showing up late Tuesday, refusing some tasks because their pay was too low, always full of complaints and excuses -- “My son took my keys.” They might give her a week of hard work and then demand a vacation. Or a cigarette break every ten minutes, even if they didn’t smoke. When Usha talked about American workers, her nose scrunched up and her mouth turned down and her eyes narrowed as if the subject was physically unpleasant. They were spoiled, as she had once been spoiled, and it was by all the foreigners doing cheap labor. The only good people she ever hired were immigrants like her, who were trustworthy and willing to work hard for low pay -- a night manager from the Islands, a guy from India, the Spanish housekeepers.

A class of hopeless American employees. And, in the eyes of real estate attorney Matthew Weidner, a corporate/political elite, merrily draining the remaining economic vibrancy of the country into their bank accounts.

Weidner’s head was always about to explode. His mind filled with visions of a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties -- America’s masses fed on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card, low-skill workers structurally unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren’t coming back, the banks in Gotham leeching the last drops of wealth out of the country, corporations unrestrained by any notion of national interest, the system of property law in shambles, the world drowning in debt. He was an NRA member with a concealed weapons permit, and he kept a Smith & Wesson AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with three forty-round clips at his bedside, but it didn’t make him feel safer, in fact it scared the shit out of him, because he saw the orgies of collectors at gun shows and knew how many of his fellow Floridians were armed: constitutional patriots like himself, military vets and sportsmen in camo, and tattooed kids from the cities, who looked like the start of militias. The whole thing went crazy when Obama took over -- there was a run on ammunition, and gun dealers starting selling T-shirts that said “WARNING: I AM A VETERAN. Department of Homeland Security has determined that I may be radicalized and a threat to national security. Approach at your own risk. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!” So what would happen if the Tampa power grid went down? Chaos. That was the future -- civil unrest, social disintegration.

Needless to say, it’s a gloomy book. And yet, at the time of this writing, in late 2018, the picture it paints feels very much like it is in the rearview mirror. Is the United States building another bubble, bound to burst in bouts of human misery and poverty? Undoubtedly, but where and when? Like the housing bubble and the tech bubble before it, the prophets of doom are few and seldom heeded. In the end, Packer’s book demonstrates it is only in the cold analysis of retrospection that such lines can be drawn and such dots connected.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.