A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts of their deaths from COVID. Focusing specifically on the lives of the working-class, minorities, the disabled and the aged, Jones draws these stories from interviews with family members of the deceased. She then uses these tales to illustrate what she sees as the systemic failings of America’s economic, political and healthcare systems, as well as—for a couple pages, at least—capitalism itself.
In many ways, this is a noble and worthy conceit. Human life exists within political systems, and we all operate within larger forces outside of our immediate control. Sometimes lives that are often overlooked provide the strongest proof of the harsh realities of public policy. Dealt with sensitively with a strong eye for human contradictions and the ironies inherent in life, this can be a powerful storytelling device. As a liberal-leaning, working-class person who supplements my writing with trade and labor jobs and who counts Irish-descended country boys and Guyanese and Dominican immigrants as colleagues, I am hungry for stories that illuminate the lives of those I know and work with. I was excited to read Disposable.
Unfortunately, like so many similar articles and books written by well-intentioned white, white-collar liberals, Disposable reads like a diversity mad-lib. The lives of Americans in Disposable are almost uniformly reduced to racial and gender signifiers, vague allusions to victimhood, and cliches. While race and gender are obviously important in describing people, they are poor substitutions for the human details that conjure a life. In one chapter, indicative of the whole, we learn that Anna Mae Morris was a Choctaw and Otoe-Missouria woman who worked “a series of mostly low-wage jobs.” After explaining that Ms. Morris “suffered from alcoholism, and later survived an abusive relationship,”—a passive framing that does no justice to the complicated life of a proud woman—Jones spends three paragraphs graphically detailing her deterioration and death (complete with panic attacks, ripped out IVs and bed sores) before coming to the conclusion that, “As an Indigenous woman who’d experienced poverty and disability during her six decades on earth, Morris contended with racism and systemic exploitation.”
Most of the chapters in Disposable follow this formula: So and so had a gender, a race, a family and a job, they probably “suffered abuse,” and they died from Covid because of vaguely worded political pablum. The book lacks any personal touch. Never do we learn of the smell of a house, the feel of a handshake, the rustle of a jacket during a hug. If I were to find out that the author wrote this book without leaving her Brooklyn apartment, I would not be surprised. The characterizations of the working, disabled and aged people Jones claims to speak for read like summaries of phone calls.
The stories are also uniformly bummers. Jones sees no joy in the work of working-class people. There is no exploration of the fact that many working people prefer to do physical jobs, and that, for some of us, the opportunity to use our bodies or be outside all day is more important than a bigger paycheck. There is no acknowledgement that life is full of risks and that being an adult requires making trade-offs. Likewise, a sense of humor is barely allowed to permeate the lives of the disabled or elderly that Jones describes, and there is no feeling of joy that accompanies the gender and racial indicators to which she consistently returns. We learn nothing, for instance, of what it meant to Anna Mae Morris to be a Choctaw and Otoe-Missouria woman and nothing of the cultures from which she came. We know only that, as a white woman with an enviable media job in Brooklyn, Jones views Ms. Morris as oppressed and thinks her life was sad.
Disposable is a ruthlessly partisan document. Jones frames conservatives as the intellectual descendants of eugenicists and John Birchers. I’m not kidding. This is journalistic malfeasance. As a non-fiction writer, it would be inconceivable to me to move through life without developing relationships with people whose politics are contrary to my own. As a working-class person, it would make it impossible for me to get work. Yet, no one Jones interviews in this book does anything to complicate her own gender and race based political ideology. No black person she talks to likes Trump. No Latino she encounters says anything racist or sexist. No Native American she speaks with wants to tell her they think Obama sucks. In a book purportedly about the poor, there are almost no funny jokes, no coarse or salty language, and no one with a surprising political opinion.
Despite Disposable’s attempts at addressing the root causes of economic inequality in America, Jones almost completely neglects to criticize a Democrat. About half-way through, Bill Clinton’s gutting of welfare gets a couple pages of copy, but no time is spent discussing the crime bill passed under his presidency, the negative effects of NAFTA, or the repeal of Glass-Steagall. No consideration is made of Obama’s bank bail outs, the troop surge he oversaw in Iraq and Afghanistan—which most greatly affected rural Americans and minorities—or the failures at the FDA during his tenure that allowed Oxycontin to flood the market. As far as I can tell, in a book supposedly about the American healthcare system, the opioid epidemic isn’t even mentioned.
The main foil in Jones’ narrative is “John,” a Trump supporter. Jones tells us that John is a retired civil servant who lived in his parents’ basement well into his sixties, and that he “benefitted from significant material privileges throughout his entire life.” Unmarried, with no children, John “dwelled in the shadow of his father,” and “struggled to connect with others.” Despite this, Jones goes on to tell us that John "had every advantage. He was healthy. He was white.”
Jones makes a great deal of the fact that John may have been infected by COVID while joining the Stop the Steal rally on January 6th. Afterwards, John’s mother contracted the virus, possibly from John (although no one can actually say) and tragically she died. In one of the most ruthless passages of non-fiction that I can recall reading, Jones asserts that John’s mother paid “for her son’s radicalization with her life.” She calls this woman’s death a casualty “of her son’s right-wing ideology” and, in a blood-curdling sentence, asserts that John, whom she never quotes (it appears she only spoke with his niece) “sacrificed” his mother “for his newfound sense of purpose.” When writing about the George Floyd protests, however, where thousands of Americans like John took to the streets in political protest at the height of the pandemic, Jones doesn’t even touch upon the idea that these protestors may have unwittingly spread COVID to their families. Apparently, if Jones agrees with your politics, you are not responsible for killing your mother.
Disposable is a book pretending to be written about and for working people but meant exclusively to validate white-collar, liberal ideologues. It is condescending and full of a pity that, by the end, I found repulsive. In this way, it reveals the rotten core at the heart of a certain type of modern leftist illiberalism: a fetishization of race and gender that is ultimately racist and sexist, and a weaponization of the life stories of the indigent that flatten those lives while flattering wealthy urbanites.
If any of the working, disabled or aged people Jones interviews in this book have ideas about how to make America a more equitable place, the author is uninterested in conveying those ideas to the reader. Instead, she uses the lives of her subjects as examples of noble suffering to be interpreted and fretted over by policy wonks, academics and media people like herself. This book is stuffed full of quotes from obscure literary magazine writers, Harvard professors, and employees of vaguely titled non-profit entities. In this way, the book’s subtitle rings true: Disposable is an example of the contempt America feels for its underclass. It is an example of the contempt certain right and left wing media professionals feel for anyone who disagrees with their politics. It is an example of an illiberalism that has infected the left, and the ways in which left-leaning culture-makers put actual liberal working people in a bind. Am I supposed to defend this garbage because I also don’t like Trump? What working person has time to read this shit? If an author wants to write a book that helps the working-class, I suggest she write a book we might enjoy reading.
The best prose in Disposable comes from a quote from Studs Terkel’s oral history of the working-class, Working. Terkel, as quoted by Jones, writes that his book “is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all) about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.”
Terkel’s quote is vivid because it is imbued with love for working people because he hung out with them, ate with them, talked shit with them. He got the poetry of working people, and the jokes and rhythms of their speech. Terkel was unapologetically leftist, and he probably judged his friends for their votes like everyone tends to do. But he didn’t make a person’s vote the final judgement of their character. He saw everyday people as heroic because we are heroic. He saw himself as an everyday person because everyone, in the final estimation, is.
Terkel wrote for the people he wrote about. Anybody can pick up Working, flip to a page and find joy and rage, humiliation and rhapsody. Do it. Get a copy at the library, buy it from your local bookshop, order it online. Open it up and read a couple paragraphs out loud to your friends while you are slamming beers. Or do it on your lunch break. It’s hilarious and vital. They’ll love it.
Michael Patrick F. Smith is the author of The Good Hand (A Memoir of Work, Transformation, and Brotherhood in an American Boomtown) and The Borderlander newsletter. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
