Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Quarter Pounder With Late Capitalism

An interview with Chris Arnade who documents the lives of people who hang out in McDonald's.  It's a lot more interesting than it sounds:
"To be blunt, I think the spaces where most reporters go are often not reflective of the broader community. They are where people who are of higher cultural and economic status go, and community leaders go. Now, those aren’t bad places to go; those are reasonable voices.
When I went to the GOP convention, I never set foot inside the convention or the neighborhood around it. I spent my week and a half in Cleveland bouncing between four McDonald’s. Two of them in a very poor African-American community, one in a wealthy neighborhood, and one in a white working-class neighborhood. In some sense it provided me with a balanced perspective of the differences in those communities. If I had gone down to the convention, spent time on the convention floor and around the convention, I would have seen people who wanted to be seen.
People focus so much on what happens in DC and on the inside-baseball part of politics, but politics is a sport where the fan decides who wins. The fans are the average guys hanging out in McDonald’s, at Walmart, at KFC, at Kroger. We tend to look at those spaces as the banal realities of life, but that’s life. Most of lower-income life plays out in those banal circumstances."
This reminds me a lot of my very pro-Trump, very Republican father.  He shops regularly at a Walmart which is famous for allowing people (let's face it, homeless people) to sleep in the parking lot overnight.

That's certainly a better option than most if you're living out of your car but, like, forcing mega-billion dollar companies to pay a living wage and improving the ACA to let poor people get affordable health care is a complete no-go.

All structural change is automatically Communist Islam Obama's fault.

Make America Great Again and all that.

No comments:

Post a Comment