Editor’s Corner
September 25, 2009
What Ails Us
By
Andrea Pitzer
In times of crisis, journalists work to understand what went wrong, to assemble a narrative of dysfunction or disaster that makes sense of events. If focusing on missteps comes across as doom and gloom to some readers, it also provides a way to understand the present and even to plan for the future.
The latest Notable Narrative, “End of the Line” by Charlie LeDuff looks at the decline of Janesville, Wis., after the closure of a General Motors plant that anchored the town for nearly 100 years. Using a narrative voice charged with cynicism (“I always smoke when I go to funerals”) and sorrow, LeDuff hypothesizes on the cause of GM’s failure and ends with the thought of a local immigrant who says that the U.S. won’t be able to compete with low-wage poverty economies until we ourselves become truly poor as well.
“Sick and Wrong” from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is another piece carried along by the power of the reporter's voice. Taibbi breaks down the ways he believes Congress managed to scupper meaningful health care reform, and comes to the conclusion that a single payer system is the best, perhaps the only, way to manage our medical system. With his zippy phrasing and caustic metaphors—the current system is “a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment”—Taibbi skirts true narrative but includes more literary devices and memorable images than most novels.
A collection of tick-tock accounts of the economic meltdown from various vantage points, Vanity Fair’s “Charting the Road to Ruin” employs less striking language. The articles as a group, however, provide insight into decisionmakers such as former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and a wealth of material on banks sponsoring star-studded golf tournaments and remodeling headquarters with funds from the taxpayers’ bailout. “The Deal of the Century” in Esquire mines similar territory, though reporter Tom Junod creates a greater sense of urgency by focusing on a single financial deal involving three companies.
Perhaps the oddest approach to helping readers make sense of recent crises belongs to Benjamin Schwarz, literary editor of The Atlantic. In “Life in (and After) Our Great Recession,” he flirts with the first person as he tells his readers that “mythology of the Depression is bleaker than the reality.” Pointing out that in the current recession, people may feel “for the first time in their lives they’re in the grip of history,” Schwarz delves into how fortunate middle class Americans still are but acknowledges that many will never recover what they have lost.
In the sweep of societal change or economic meltdown, the narrative aspects of these pieces provide structure and story, a way to take in big events, while the authors examine the specifics of what ails us.