Bummerland: Ruin and Restoration in Trump's New America
Autor Randolph Lewisen Limba Engleză Hardback – mar 2026
Wanting to decipher how things went sideways in such a hurry, Lewis drove all over the Sunbelt and beyond, trying to make sense of what was happening. He sojourns to an apocalyptic slab of the Mojave Desert; the rugged mountains under assault near Colorado Springs; the epic sprawl of Las Vegas, Austin, and Houston; the expat communities of central Mexico; the hotbeds of racism in the Deep South; and the fjords of Norway, from which, surreally, Lewis watched the unfolding news of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and decided to go there. In a register mournful, meditative, and darkly comic, Lewis offers a portrait of modern American life under a system whose democratic norms have been stretched to the limit.
Lewis, an American studies professor for three decades, examines the trajectories of cultural burnout that have ushered us into a new Gilded Age of fear, hustle, and hype. In this passionate critique of the anxious new world we inhabit, Lewis offers sketches of where we’ve ended up, why it feels so wrong, and how we might find our way out of Bummerland.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496244857
ISBN-10: 1496244850
Pagini: 272
Ilustrații: 17 photographs
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496244850
Pagini: 272
Ilustrații: 17 photographs
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Randolph Lewis is a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “Navajo Talking Picture”: Cinema on Native Ground (Nebraska, 2012), Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker (Nebraska, 2006), and Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America.
Extras
1 The Super-Hyped, Ultra-Rich Technopolis of Despair
Security just told me No photos of the sleek Apple campus in Austin,
Texas. No images of the pristine white hallways. No images of
the sterile landscaping between the glass and concrete buildings. No
images of the brightly lit cafeteria where I’m waiting for my wife to
return from the medical facility for Apple employees. Although she
only works part-time in the Apple store in the mall, she gets better
benefits than what I receive as a tenured professor—but
I’m not bitter. By the inedible standards of campus dining, I’m in a Michelin-starred
restaurant, and they have fancy everything, even gelato, at subsidized
prices for lucky Apple insiders.
There is only one exception to their prohibition against image
making: we are permitted to take selfies. Which seems weird but
fitting. The corporation that has made untold and allegedly untaxed
billions from the selfie craze that has turned a nation of supposedly
rugged individualists into a bunch of filler-injecting, self-promoting
narcissists is making sure I don’t point my iPhone at its makers and
marketers. I’m not even sure how they noticed me taking a quick pic,
but I apologize to the guard who gives me the “no second chances”
look and disappears into some hidden door like Houdini. Wearing a
difficult-to-get visitors badge, I’m not eager to get booted out because
this might be my only chance to see inside the kingdom that Mac
made. It’s fascinating here, even if it makes me feel a little bit like a
medieval heretic, dirty and bearded, who has snuck over the walls
of Vatican City to gawk at the papal riches and priestly rituals. And
make no mistake about it: Apple is the Catholic Church of the new
millennium—infinitely rich, aesthetically seductive, insidiously influential,
and absolutely sacred to the culture it both serves and devours.
Other aspects of the North Austin campus, one of only two in the
United States, feel more like the sci-fi version of the twenty-third
century. Surfaces are as white and perfect as a new set of dentures,
and everything feels precisely engineered in a way that is overpowering
(it’s beautiful but intimidating). When I was there just before
the pandemic, it was already a million square feet of real estate, but a
billion-dollar expansion of the Austin campus was soon in the works.
Even for a big corporation, a billion dollars might seem like a vast
sum, but in June 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, Apple
became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world,
with a market cap approaching two trillion dollars. It’s very hard to
imagine the enormity of a billion, let alone a trillion, dollars, so I won’t
even try to provide an analogy of its almighty Mother of God bigness.
On second thought, I’ll give it a shot. To a company that is worth as
much as the entire gdp of Russia, that has kept an astonishing two
hundred billion dollars in cash on hand for several years running, a
billion dollars is like a hundred dollars to a middle-class
person: you will miss it but not that much.
But down the road is something else, a place where a missing one
hundred dollars would be devastating, a place that wouldn’t even
exist if someone dropped a spare billion on it: it’s the other side of
our modern pseudo-abundance. I’m talking about the explosion of
little tent cities for Austin’s homeless—some just a few scattered urban
campsites, others with dozens or more—that have sprung up along the
major roads in one of the most prosperous and fastest-growing
cities in the United States. Inside the tents are the forgotten casualties of
neoliberalism, the winner-take-all ideology that exalts the individual at
the expense of any kind of social accountability or state intervention.
Neoliberalism is like a rich man who tells his poor cousins to work
harder and stop bellyaching. Writ large, it is a mindset of profound
political cynicism in which social safety nets are sliced into disrepair
and then mocked for their own deficiency: I told you government pro-
grams don’t work! If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s deep in the
withered heart and soul of modern Republicanism.
The whole thing works beautifully for the few and terribly for the
many, but nowadays radical disparity is accepted as the cost of doing
business even in cities with progressive reputations. Income inequality,
already severe in a nation inclined to worship wealth while ignoring
poverty, became even worse during the pandemic, resulting in a
covid recession that struck with disproportionate fury at the least
among us. Much of that suffering landed on people of color, which
is not surprising given that 37 percent of Black families have zero
or negative wealth, meaning that bankruptcy or homelessness are
never too far away. Living like this is bad for everyone, not just for
the poor: social psychologists have shown that inequality elevates
fear and anxiety among the rich and poor alike, although for different
reasons. The poor sense they are falling further behind in unequal
societies, while the rich see how far they might fall into precarity if
their wealth were threatened.
But Americans have always been people of paradox: we are a nation
that celebrates individualism and bootstrapping but practices conformism
and nepotism, that enshrines the separation of church and state
but allows the U.S. Senate to hire an official chaplain (all Christians
so far!), that maintains “Anyone can grow up to be president” even
though the presidential portraits almost all bear a striking resemblance
to one another in terms of race, gender, and religious background.
Which is to say, I’m not naive about our capacity for self-delusion,
and I am aware that cultural contradiction is as American as wearing
a greasy mullet to the state fair for some deep-fried
butter sticks. But when the gap between ideology and reality reaches a level that sends
the contradiction Geiger counter into click spasms, I wonder if we
are gearing up for the revolutions that we saw in 1917 or if we are just
becoming permanently stratified like Brazil or Russia.
Several thousand homeless people live on the humid streets of
Austin, which has long had a not-so-great reputation for its unhoused
population (one reliable estimate claims forty-five hundred, though
the city likes to say around twenty-five hundred). I’ve heard stories
that smaller cities in Texas cynically hand out bus tickets to Austin,
almost as punishment for its liberal reputation: Let the bleeding heart
liberals take care of this. Except we don’t, not really, and homelessness
in Austin remains unsolved, half-addressed, and controversial.
When I arrived, in 1985, the unenlightened discourse was about “drag
worms” bumming spare change and hassling people on the street
around the ut campus. Runaways hung out on sidewalks next to
people who had been pushed out of mental institutions in the Reagan
years. Today our vocabulary has improved but not the conditions on
the pavement, even though every new mayor claims that it’s near the
top of their agenda.
For a couple of years, at the start of the 2020s, the unhoused in
Austin had a kind of hypervisibility, with colorful tents filling the
flat space underneath freeway ramps and overpasses, creating temporary
neighborhoods of the dispossessed within a rapidly gentrifying
city. Because Austin relaxed its ban on public camping in 2019,
people stopped hiding from police citations in the dark alleys and
built somewhat safer and certainly more stable communities in plain
sight alongside the access roads of major freeways. For a few years we
could see what was hidden before: hunger, thirst, trauma, grief, pain,
loneliness, mental illness, addiction. These makeshift settlements of
large nylon tents, surrounded by broken bikes, trash bags, and plastic
coolers, were the floating campground of neoliberal shame.
What does it mean? It’s not that complicated really. Such profound
disparity of experience, from the glorious summit of techno-capitalist
opulence to the dirty off-ramps (literally) of despair and precarity,
all within a small radius, even on the same exact road, is a sign of
barbarism plain and simple.
But how can that happen in the allegedly progressive mecca of
Austin? After all, the city has been mocked as “the People’s Republic
of Austin” since the 1970s, when it was an overgrown college town
that the rest of the state loved to hate for its serape-wearing
guitarists and angry feminists (or was it angry guitarists and serape-wearing
feminists?). Back then it was an escape hatch for 80 percent of the
free spirits south of the Red River, a chill place where you could hide
out, feel safe, and build a good life when small-town Texas was too
constrained (although the you in that sentence never applied to people
of color as much as white Austin progressives assumed). Before
the great overbuild of the twenty-first century, when Austin got as
steroidally “swoll” as Lance Armstrong’s thighs, it was a pleasant city
with affordable tree-lined neighborhoods and more discount fun than
you could shake a stick at. Back then the city nurtured something
genuinely bohemian and wild: the first psychedelic rock band, the
13th Floor Elevators, started here in 1965; the outlaw country scene
of Jerry Jeff and Willie took shape here in the 1970s; the punk and
blues rock scene of the 1980s was equally influential. It was a place
where you could see an underground musician like Daniel Johnston
singing on the main drag for free and then disappear into an ocean of
stoned hippies celebrating the birthday of a minor Winnie the Pooh
character (sorry Eeyore!) with an annual orgy of bongo banging and
hacky sacking. Despite the challenges of being landlocked in a gigantic
red state, late-twentieth-century Austin was something like the San
Francisco of the Southwest, or at least that’s how it felt whenever I
drove back to town from anywhere else.
Security just told me No photos of the sleek Apple campus in Austin,
Texas. No images of the pristine white hallways. No images of
the sterile landscaping between the glass and concrete buildings. No
images of the brightly lit cafeteria where I’m waiting for my wife to
return from the medical facility for Apple employees. Although she
only works part-time in the Apple store in the mall, she gets better
benefits than what I receive as a tenured professor—but
I’m not bitter. By the inedible standards of campus dining, I’m in a Michelin-starred
restaurant, and they have fancy everything, even gelato, at subsidized
prices for lucky Apple insiders.
There is only one exception to their prohibition against image
making: we are permitted to take selfies. Which seems weird but
fitting. The corporation that has made untold and allegedly untaxed
billions from the selfie craze that has turned a nation of supposedly
rugged individualists into a bunch of filler-injecting, self-promoting
narcissists is making sure I don’t point my iPhone at its makers and
marketers. I’m not even sure how they noticed me taking a quick pic,
but I apologize to the guard who gives me the “no second chances”
look and disappears into some hidden door like Houdini. Wearing a
difficult-to-get visitors badge, I’m not eager to get booted out because
this might be my only chance to see inside the kingdom that Mac
made. It’s fascinating here, even if it makes me feel a little bit like a
medieval heretic, dirty and bearded, who has snuck over the walls
of Vatican City to gawk at the papal riches and priestly rituals. And
make no mistake about it: Apple is the Catholic Church of the new
millennium—infinitely rich, aesthetically seductive, insidiously influential,
and absolutely sacred to the culture it both serves and devours.
Other aspects of the North Austin campus, one of only two in the
United States, feel more like the sci-fi version of the twenty-third
century. Surfaces are as white and perfect as a new set of dentures,
and everything feels precisely engineered in a way that is overpowering
(it’s beautiful but intimidating). When I was there just before
the pandemic, it was already a million square feet of real estate, but a
billion-dollar expansion of the Austin campus was soon in the works.
Even for a big corporation, a billion dollars might seem like a vast
sum, but in June 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, Apple
became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world,
with a market cap approaching two trillion dollars. It’s very hard to
imagine the enormity of a billion, let alone a trillion, dollars, so I won’t
even try to provide an analogy of its almighty Mother of God bigness.
On second thought, I’ll give it a shot. To a company that is worth as
much as the entire gdp of Russia, that has kept an astonishing two
hundred billion dollars in cash on hand for several years running, a
billion dollars is like a hundred dollars to a middle-class
person: you will miss it but not that much.
But down the road is something else, a place where a missing one
hundred dollars would be devastating, a place that wouldn’t even
exist if someone dropped a spare billion on it: it’s the other side of
our modern pseudo-abundance. I’m talking about the explosion of
little tent cities for Austin’s homeless—some just a few scattered urban
campsites, others with dozens or more—that have sprung up along the
major roads in one of the most prosperous and fastest-growing
cities in the United States. Inside the tents are the forgotten casualties of
neoliberalism, the winner-take-all ideology that exalts the individual at
the expense of any kind of social accountability or state intervention.
Neoliberalism is like a rich man who tells his poor cousins to work
harder and stop bellyaching. Writ large, it is a mindset of profound
political cynicism in which social safety nets are sliced into disrepair
and then mocked for their own deficiency: I told you government pro-
grams don’t work! If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s deep in the
withered heart and soul of modern Republicanism.
The whole thing works beautifully for the few and terribly for the
many, but nowadays radical disparity is accepted as the cost of doing
business even in cities with progressive reputations. Income inequality,
already severe in a nation inclined to worship wealth while ignoring
poverty, became even worse during the pandemic, resulting in a
covid recession that struck with disproportionate fury at the least
among us. Much of that suffering landed on people of color, which
is not surprising given that 37 percent of Black families have zero
or negative wealth, meaning that bankruptcy or homelessness are
never too far away. Living like this is bad for everyone, not just for
the poor: social psychologists have shown that inequality elevates
fear and anxiety among the rich and poor alike, although for different
reasons. The poor sense they are falling further behind in unequal
societies, while the rich see how far they might fall into precarity if
their wealth were threatened.
But Americans have always been people of paradox: we are a nation
that celebrates individualism and bootstrapping but practices conformism
and nepotism, that enshrines the separation of church and state
but allows the U.S. Senate to hire an official chaplain (all Christians
so far!), that maintains “Anyone can grow up to be president” even
though the presidential portraits almost all bear a striking resemblance
to one another in terms of race, gender, and religious background.
Which is to say, I’m not naive about our capacity for self-delusion,
and I am aware that cultural contradiction is as American as wearing
a greasy mullet to the state fair for some deep-fried
butter sticks. But when the gap between ideology and reality reaches a level that sends
the contradiction Geiger counter into click spasms, I wonder if we
are gearing up for the revolutions that we saw in 1917 or if we are just
becoming permanently stratified like Brazil or Russia.
Several thousand homeless people live on the humid streets of
Austin, which has long had a not-so-great reputation for its unhoused
population (one reliable estimate claims forty-five hundred, though
the city likes to say around twenty-five hundred). I’ve heard stories
that smaller cities in Texas cynically hand out bus tickets to Austin,
almost as punishment for its liberal reputation: Let the bleeding heart
liberals take care of this. Except we don’t, not really, and homelessness
in Austin remains unsolved, half-addressed, and controversial.
When I arrived, in 1985, the unenlightened discourse was about “drag
worms” bumming spare change and hassling people on the street
around the ut campus. Runaways hung out on sidewalks next to
people who had been pushed out of mental institutions in the Reagan
years. Today our vocabulary has improved but not the conditions on
the pavement, even though every new mayor claims that it’s near the
top of their agenda.
For a couple of years, at the start of the 2020s, the unhoused in
Austin had a kind of hypervisibility, with colorful tents filling the
flat space underneath freeway ramps and overpasses, creating temporary
neighborhoods of the dispossessed within a rapidly gentrifying
city. Because Austin relaxed its ban on public camping in 2019,
people stopped hiding from police citations in the dark alleys and
built somewhat safer and certainly more stable communities in plain
sight alongside the access roads of major freeways. For a few years we
could see what was hidden before: hunger, thirst, trauma, grief, pain,
loneliness, mental illness, addiction. These makeshift settlements of
large nylon tents, surrounded by broken bikes, trash bags, and plastic
coolers, were the floating campground of neoliberal shame.
What does it mean? It’s not that complicated really. Such profound
disparity of experience, from the glorious summit of techno-capitalist
opulence to the dirty off-ramps (literally) of despair and precarity,
all within a small radius, even on the same exact road, is a sign of
barbarism plain and simple.
But how can that happen in the allegedly progressive mecca of
Austin? After all, the city has been mocked as “the People’s Republic
of Austin” since the 1970s, when it was an overgrown college town
that the rest of the state loved to hate for its serape-wearing
guitarists and angry feminists (or was it angry guitarists and serape-wearing
feminists?). Back then it was an escape hatch for 80 percent of the
free spirits south of the Red River, a chill place where you could hide
out, feel safe, and build a good life when small-town Texas was too
constrained (although the you in that sentence never applied to people
of color as much as white Austin progressives assumed). Before
the great overbuild of the twenty-first century, when Austin got as
steroidally “swoll” as Lance Armstrong’s thighs, it was a pleasant city
with affordable tree-lined neighborhoods and more discount fun than
you could shake a stick at. Back then the city nurtured something
genuinely bohemian and wild: the first psychedelic rock band, the
13th Floor Elevators, started here in 1965; the outlaw country scene
of Jerry Jeff and Willie took shape here in the 1970s; the punk and
blues rock scene of the 1980s was equally influential. It was a place
where you could see an underground musician like Daniel Johnston
singing on the main drag for free and then disappear into an ocean of
stoned hippies celebrating the birthday of a minor Winnie the Pooh
character (sorry Eeyore!) with an annual orgy of bongo banging and
hacky sacking. Despite the challenges of being landlocked in a gigantic
red state, late-twentieth-century Austin was something like the San
Francisco of the Southwest, or at least that’s how it felt whenever I
drove back to town from anywhere else.
Cuprins
Introduction
1. The Super-Hyped, Ultra-Rich Technopolis of Despair
2. Into the Wasteland
3. Waiting for Elon
4. Plastic Passion
5. Healing Inc.
6. Testosterone
7. White Lies
8. Jewel Thieves
9. Our Degraded Chaplin
10. The Aging Process
11. Subdivision
12. Selma
13. Pigeons
14. Sensitive Man
15. Killing Us Softly
16. Behind the Pine Curtain
17. Civil War
18. Big-Box Blues
19. Under the Violet Crown
20. Rage Lava
21. The F-Word
22. Naked Lunch 2020
23. Obscene Delirium
24. Animal People
25. Dreams Never End
26. Lowered Expectations
27. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Reflux
28. Sweatshop Barbie
29. Stress Test
30. Walmart Salvation 2021
31. Norway/Uvalde
32. Vegas Loopy
33. Exile
34. Sway
35. Unobtanium
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
1. The Super-Hyped, Ultra-Rich Technopolis of Despair
2. Into the Wasteland
3. Waiting for Elon
4. Plastic Passion
5. Healing Inc.
6. Testosterone
7. White Lies
8. Jewel Thieves
9. Our Degraded Chaplin
10. The Aging Process
11. Subdivision
12. Selma
13. Pigeons
14. Sensitive Man
15. Killing Us Softly
16. Behind the Pine Curtain
17. Civil War
18. Big-Box Blues
19. Under the Violet Crown
20. Rage Lava
21. The F-Word
22. Naked Lunch 2020
23. Obscene Delirium
24. Animal People
25. Dreams Never End
26. Lowered Expectations
27. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Reflux
28. Sweatshop Barbie
29. Stress Test
30. Walmart Salvation 2021
31. Norway/Uvalde
32. Vegas Loopy
33. Exile
34. Sway
35. Unobtanium
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recenzii
“A fine book to carry to the barricades.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Keenly observed, deeply felt, and beautifully written, Randolph Lewis’s Bummerland is the funniest, saddest, and wisest book you’ll read this year. You won’t find a better guide to the tragic America wrought by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”—Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, winner of the Bancroft Prize in History
“This acid-tongued, profoundly sad and hilarious, tragic-gonzo adventure trip through a seductively deranged country feels out the grim landscape of the great American derailing of the 2020s. It invents, with a growing number of other shining books, a passionate pragmatic genre to approach a soft revolution devoted to well-being, creativity, equity, sustainability, and solidarity.”—Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America
“A darkly comic, deeply personal meditation on how it feels to live through the violence, absurdity, and precarity of contemporary U.S. life. Randolph Lewis drives the reader through diverse landscapes, ranging from a nightmarish blending of Cormac McCarthy–esque horrors with large-scale Mad Max apocalyptic visions to ordinary scenes of anxious impotence and desperate yearning.”—Karen Engle, author of Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination
“Keenly observed, deeply felt, and beautifully written, Randolph Lewis’s Bummerland is the funniest, saddest, and wisest book you’ll read this year. You won’t find a better guide to the tragic America wrought by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”—Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, winner of the Bancroft Prize in History
“This acid-tongued, profoundly sad and hilarious, tragic-gonzo adventure trip through a seductively deranged country feels out the grim landscape of the great American derailing of the 2020s. It invents, with a growing number of other shining books, a passionate pragmatic genre to approach a soft revolution devoted to well-being, creativity, equity, sustainability, and solidarity.”—Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America
“A darkly comic, deeply personal meditation on how it feels to live through the violence, absurdity, and precarity of contemporary U.S. life. Randolph Lewis drives the reader through diverse landscapes, ranging from a nightmarish blending of Cormac McCarthy–esque horrors with large-scale Mad Max apocalyptic visions to ordinary scenes of anxious impotence and desperate yearning.”—Karen Engle, author of Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination
Descriere
Randolph Lewis scours the soul of the country during the first Trump administration and pandemic era with a sharp eye and keen wit, looking for glimmers of democratic hope and redemption in America.