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Lädt ... Mill Town : Reckoning with What Remains (2020. Auflage)| 176 | 10 | 154,794 | 
(3.72) | 9 | "A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival? Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault's own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for that seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town's economic, moral, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname "Cancer Valley." In Mill Town, Arsenault undertakes an excavation of a collective past, sifting through historical archives and scientific reports, talking to family and neighbors, and examining her own childhood to present a portrait of a community that illuminates not only the ruin of her hometown and the collapse of the working-class of America, but also the hazards of both living in and leaving home, and the silences we are all afraid to violate. In exquisite prose, Arsenault explores the corruption of bodies: the human body, bodies of water, and governmental bodies, and what it's like to come from a place you love but doesn't always love you back"--… (mehr) |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. -Frederick Douglass, in a speech concerning West India Emancipation, delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857  | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. For John Freeman | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Preamble: Mexico, Maine is a small paper mill town that lies in a valley, or "River Valley" as we now call the area, because I suppose you can't have one without the other. Chapter 1, What Goes Around, Comes Around: From the porch steps of the house where I grew up, you'll see the end of the road. | |
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Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Our geologic past foretold everything about our future. But in this future, lives are un-lived, secrets never revealed, and stories remain unwritten about how much we all lose. In this future, I learn of asphalt lakes, people bulleted with disease, burning tires scarring the sky, the forsaken buried in unmarked graves, the evisceration and erasure of home. In this future, we pardon legislators who convince us nature will sort itself out. In this future, we will have forgotten everything that came before, and our only legacy for those who will supersede us is the promise of ruin. ...we have become inured to this kind of discourse, a gaslighting of sorts in which the definitions of words are as slippery as the sludge itself. If we aren’t sure what things mean, our circuits get scrambled and we lose the thread, then we lose control. And if we lose control, someone else takes over, and where are we then? Some worried a controversy would sully town pride. Millworkers didn’t want to lose their jobs. Other folks just didn’t want to die. Those who were already sick got mad. The mill kept reiterating there were no facts to back up such destructive claims and didn’t seem concerned the film’s claims might be true. ...we eschewed those smarter or more worldly than us because they made us feel small, whether or not that was their intent. I remember harboring resentments toward white-collar professionals who were full of blue-chip solutions and not blue-collar common sense. I used to think our lives orbited around love, for love was why we bothered to get up in the morning. But after talking to Dot, and considering my town, my family, my own stifled voice, life seems to revolve around the silences we’re afraid to violate. And as the studies show, this isn’t just a problem in Mexico, Maine. It’s a human problem. What’s in or what’s out by deed or command are decisions made by those with knowledge or prestige: historians, experts, even modest archivists at small town halls. We depend on experts to collate and curate the past so the future will know what went on. It’s a powerful profession, more powerful than we sometimes understand, because the facts they choose to memorialize or highlight can be corrupted by motives other than just their job. We are vulnerable, in a way, to their all-seeing eyes observing and recording history as it unfolds while most of us are just getting through our day. When International Paper of Jay, Maine, the Brown Company in New Hampshire, and the Oxford Paper Company in Rumford, Maine—who were responsible for the mess—ignored these recommendations, Maine attorney general Frank Cowan, in an unusual environmental action for 1942, filed a lawsuit against them. The case resulted in an order by the Maine Supreme Court demanding the mills reduce their discharges at once. Editors at the Lewiston Daily Sun wrote in response: “Only the foolhardy would desire clean water at the expense of slashed payrolls, lost industry and a ghost town.” It seems the less you have—in education, money, health insurance, or work, as the article cites—the more you are prepared to endure. And that signifies what’s out of balance in a world gone askew, in a world where the definition of “need” has transformed to “greed.” In Maine, we clear-cut our forests while tourists exalt them. Pollution bankrupts the fresh air we advertise. We let dioxins invade our environment, which end up in lobsters tourists eat. We celebrate Thoreau’s voice but drown it out with the growl of chain saws. What gives our town life could also be what’s killing it. As the folksy Maine saying goes, “You can’t get they-ahh from hee-yahh.” In other words, the way life should be, the idealized state of Thoreau and tourists, may have never actually existed except in the landscape of our minds. TRUMP TOWER AROSE as an edifice to signify its owner’s wealth, but it symbolized additional sins. The $100 million tower was built on the footprint of Bonwit Teller, an art deco luxury goods department store that had embraced an extravagance of its own: crafted from limestone, platinum, bronze, aluminum, nickel, and garlanded with ornate metalwork and original friezes, Bonwit Teller also sold expensive perfumes, furs, and ladies hats in pilastered and paneled rooms. Before its demolition by Trump, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered to rescue the friezes and other architectural remnants. But Trump had other plans. He envisioned a tall, “expensive-looking” building that showed off “real art, not like the junk … at the Bonwit Teller,” he told New York magazine. So under his direction, the friezes were jackhammered, the metalwork disappeared, and the building was ravaged then sighed to the ground. And some of the undocumented Polish workers who helped build Trump Tower under dangerous conditions went unpaid until they took Trump to court. “He will destroy the working man,” my father always said about Reagan; and he wasn’t wrong. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote that Reagan’s strike breaking was “an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employees got that message loud and clear.” My father’s hatred of Reagan consumed our family and we weren’t allowed to utter his name unless we called him “that fucking asshole,” as my father constantly did. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in favor of corporate personhood later confirmed that spending money is the same as and essential to protected speech, which allowed politicians to bankroll their interests as deep as their pockets would go. While spending money doesn’t guarantee political outcomes (people still need to vote), the Supreme Court arguably legitimized the idea that the more money you have and spend, the more say you have. Before the 1980s and ’90s rolled up their mats, Neutron Jack and many CEOs like him wiped their feet on the social contract between people and the places they worked, contributing to the decline of unions and obliterating the voice of the working-class all across the land. Janet’s comment—“don’t make us look like rednecks”—spoke to a dilemma I fight to resolve: what others think of the working-class versus how I perceive what it means to me. In the past, in a different system that no longer exists, the working-class were seen as honorable, hardworking, loyal people who made machines that made the machines that made the world go around. That’s the identity I’ve always worn. Somewhere along the way as manufacturing declined, so did the perceptions of who we are. Now there’s a sense Janet sensed: people see the working-class as rednecks who like their guns and bad food, don’t care about the planet, are racist or just plain dumb. While there are always those who may fit that node, the former definitions also still apply and neither perception is wholly true. In fact, the majority of humans don’t ever live up to clichés and can’t or shouldn’t be reduced and reduced and reduced to a single serving at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The meek will inherit the earth, Father Cyr told me many years ago. He just never said what condition it would be in when we finally assumed ownership. “Papermaking in the US, that probably won’t be around in twenty or so years,” he grimly begins our conversation. The United States, he says, was so successful in manufacturing things like textiles, paper, and shoes because we had virtually no environmental or workplace protection, no unions, allowed child labor, and had immigrants willing to do the work for a lot less money. “In other words,” he says, “industry in the US operated like a colonial enterprise. We were able to have an extraordinary amount of economic success that way. That’s no longer possible.” China’s indirect effect on US papermaking is that containerboard producers used to make boxes for nearly all US consumption of consumer goods, like sneakers and toys. Now that China supplies so much of our nondurable goods consumption, the boxes that protect them during shipment have to be made in China. “It takes fifty to sixty years to grow an oak. It takes five to grow a eucalyptus in South America. Eucalyptus trees are cloned, so all the fibers are the same, which makes for much more pulp consistency and more efficient papermaking. In Maine, the wood pulp is a different mix every time. So it’s cheaper to grow trees and manufacture paper in South America and ship it to the US than to make it in the US. In the lead-up to the election, it seemed Democrats had already accepted the deconstruction of the working-class and had moved on to more cerebral things. I remember their discourse about gender-neutral bathrooms, but those conversations didn’t pay the rent; it’s not that we were unsympathetic to such causes but we had nothing left to give. We already had enough to worry about, like the possibility of being crushed by a paper roller, getting cancer, or how to make ends meet. We also wanted to be reasonably sure that the whop-whop-whopping of helicopter blades was not because the town was under attack. Losing your mill job is like losing your identity (as the strikes of the 1980s had shown). Those are identity politics in a working-class town. In Mexico, voting for Trump was a backlash to all the prosperity out of reach, a backlash to the world going global while Rumford and Mexico just ran in place, a backlash to the working-class not having a loud enough voice. Such misdemeanors, like not living in Maine anymore or marrying someone from Massachusetts (from “away”), can lower your percentage of likability, your credibility, your authenticity. Flatlanders, I used to jokingly call them, which was anyone not born in Maine or those who moved away and are gone too long. Tick tock says the clock the minute you depart. If you lived on Maine’s southern coast you may be considered a flatlander because of your proximity to Massachusetts, whose residents we also called “Massholes,” a specific breed of know-it-alls on our ski slopes even though they never quite deciphered the ski codes or perhaps human etiquette; they’d barge down the hill in neon outerwear and spill all their beer before it reached their mouths. You’d be wrong if you think after a certain number of years of living in Maine you’ll be “from Maine” because it doesn’t work that way either. It’s not like it was in the good old days where college, hard work, hard knocks, and loyalty ratcheted us up and out of the stratum we were born into. Now, those in the middle with the middle skill sets were seeing the steepest earning declines. Globalization, with its open cultural and economic borders, couldn’t remove those kinds of barriers no matter how hard it tried. By leaving, I had put an end to the repetition of what small towns used to encourage: stay and open a store using your surname or pick up where your parents left off. I was the American Dream in ambition and scope while at the same time I was killing that dream with every step farther from home. But we can and probably should go back home to confront what made us leave, what made us fall in and out of love with the places that create us, or to see what we left behind. Because each time I go home, I face a referendum on the success or failure of my relationship with it, like a dialogue between two people in a deep and complicated relationship. The poverty level in Maine is increasing at more than twice the rate of neighboring states and eight times the rate of the rest of the nation. in classrooms, boardrooms, living rooms: even though we are generally alike in our desire to be fed, clothed, housed, loved, we zero in on differences—in political parties and at dinner parties—perpetuating a cycle of divisiveness that does nobody any good. Most humans are simply not privy to the political and financial worlds whose verdicts affect us. How men can be “induced” to working in less than great conditions is like the Hatter asking Alice in Wonderland, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” Sometimes there’s no clear answer to the riddle at all. | |
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▾Literaturhinweise Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen.  Wikipedia auf Englisch
Keine ▾Buchbeschreibungen "A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival? Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault's own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for that seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town's economic, moral, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname "Cancer Valley." In Mill Town, Arsenault undertakes an excavation of a collective past, sifting through historical archives and scientific reports, talking to family and neighbors, and examining her own childhood to present a portrait of a community that illuminates not only the ruin of her hometown and the collapse of the working-class of America, but also the hazards of both living in and leaving home, and the silences we are all afraid to violate. In exquisite prose, Arsenault explores the corruption of bodies: the human body, bodies of water, and governmental bodies, and what it's like to come from a place you love but doesn't always love you back"-- ▾Bibliotheksbeschreibungen Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. ▾Beschreibung von LibraryThing-Mitgliedern
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I found this to be a depressing but necessary read, especially being a Mainer. Now please excuse me while I go and Google dioxin... (