They say everyone of a certain social cadre is reading George Packer’s new book, “The Unwinding,” which is a fabric of stories about people struggling along without getting ahead, whatever that is. So I’m wondering whether I’m unwound, in knots, or just kinky. On the dentist’s sliding scale, I qualify for a discount because of my low income. But he says my teeth are not the worst that he’s seen -- thanks to having mostly jobs with dental insurance over the years. His assistant asked me lots of health questions (this dental practice is part of a “health consortium” that even includes counseling) which was boring since I don’t smoke, don’t chew (She DID ask! This is Montana.) And so on.
She didn’t ask whether I used illegal drugs (would I say so if I did?), whether I got enough exercise (NOT), or whether I looked at porn online (my lips are sealed), whether I had STD’s, TB, Hep C, HIV. (Do people actually admit it to a dental assistant?). I volunteered that I cuss quite a bit. But mostly she assumed that I was just like all the other tubby old ladies in Valier. Not. For instance, she assumed I banked in town but I wouldn’t bank at Wells Fargo if I had no other option, even stuffing money in my mattress. (Because of experience with that bank when I was the City of Portland permit cashier.) I volunteered about the diabetes since it’s relevant to teeth, but my biggie for teeth is Acid Reflux -- that wasn’t on the questionnaire either.
So -- I’m clearly ducking the original question. Am I unwinding in the unfortunate sense -- losing ground? If you ask me what I’m doing, I would have to say “digging.” Not unwinding. Getting to the bottom of things. Imagine a terrier throwing dirt out behind in search of something: rabbit or fox -- not sure what. The not-knowing is part of the digging. There ARE knotty places and kinky places.
I look back over the decades at my great-grandparents, who managed to survive largely on the basis of gardens and carpentry. The South Dakota side got a risky foot up from homesteading, though having started as teachers and superintendents. It wasn’t until my grandfather’s brother’s son was here in old age that I realized how poor that branch was. Bitterly, he told how as a small boy he was hired out to a neighbor, sent with no shoes and no lunch. Finally his father fell into a job as an ag agent and became an expert on grasses, which meant they finally had enough money -- but modestly and by that time he’d grown up. He’s made his living as a bookkeeper in strange places for resource extraction companies. His attempt at marriage failed. No children.
On the other side of my family the story is complicated because they were women who grew up poor but married money, not just ranches but timber. That meant there was enough to send the daughters to college where they found professional husbands. But one moneymaker died young, which presented a monetary crisis. And now the timber is gone.
So look at the family I married into, which included a millionaire in Minneapolis who was lucky enough to own corn fields where it was the city that grew. He took one of his brothers into the family business, but not my father-in-law who founded a reservation mercantile company. His one effort at branching out, a bank, was destroyed by a thief. One son inherited the store and kept it running (in spite of WWII PTSD), the other son became famous and accrued a legacy of sculpture. At his death, all money mysteriously disappeared and the sculpture was shipped to a warehouse. His children had already died. His alcoholic wife dispersed the legacy, left, then died. Unwound. One of the great-grandchildren is a world fencing champion. Rewind.
I have two friends with about the same talents and personalities. One swore as a young man (we were in the JFK era) that he would work to change the world. He made a LOT of money. His daughters married well. Too soon to tell about the grandchildren. He thinks only of his family. The other friend started life walking on the wild side -- the REALLY wild side -- now he does good in the whole world and so does his daughter. On the whole, he’s probably “made” more money than the other guy, but spent it all on kids who needed it desperately. This stuff can be loopy.
They tell us, “If you don’t have a high school diploma, you’ll be paralyzed.” Then we hear that a very young man who just pulled the rug out from the whole government spy apparatus was making piles of money, living in paradise with a glamorous pole-dancing mate, but had no degrees at all, though he’d attended classes. He was an obsessive computer freak, which they tell us will take us to hell. (They used to tell us comic books would do that, too, and look where comic book people are now.) But where did that kid's idealistic leap to revealing dangerous secrets come from? Comic books?
In the end a lot of this stuff about success and so on is just fuzz. Things happen. Reviewers are complaining that there is no coherent system and prescription to this book called “The Unwinding.” They want an economic theory, like -- um -- Marxism was for the generation now managing us. That is, of course, Marxism Lite -- not getting down to the proletariat revolutions. Maybe that’s a different book. What Packer evidently says is simply that present money systems, wherever they came from, have us all by the throat. Right.
Another complaint is that this book is all stories and no data or statistical markers. But we’re constantly bombarded with data with no idea about what it means. (Only 2 % of Catholic priests stay celibate; 30% of kids with heart transplants are not compliant, meaning they don’t reliably take their meds; 40% of the food in the US ends up in landfill ; one in six men is sexually molested or raped; only forty per cent of people with diabetes keep their blood sugar under control.) I haven’t read this book because it saves so much time to just react to reviews -- isn’t that what everyone else does? These statistics didn’t from his book.
But where is George Packer coming from? He’s a Yalie (school of CIA spies and the Bush legacy), born in 1960, parents both college professors at Stanford, maternal grandfather an Alabama Christian senator, paternal grandfather Jewish. Packer and his sister both write. He writes fiction, plays and journalism. Both win big prizes. Was in the Peace Corps. Now has access to high-level sophisticated politicians. He’s not some kid whistle-blower. But VERY well-connected.
What can he know about life in this village where I live? His field of expertise has been Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Well, maybe if he has some insight into them, he could understand some of our tribal and family dynamics, the problems of vast lands with troublesome infrastructure, the difficulty of dealing with faraway political decisions uninformed by what’s happening here. But why read such a book when the same vignettes are in the newspaper every day? Why do publishers keep investing in them? Why do we read them? Or do we just buy them at Target and leave them around?
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