On Sunday, November 17th, our family group chat pinged with a message from my eldest child, who is in college in Connecticut. “They wrote about us again” read the text. The “us” is Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and the “they” is The New York Times. We’ve been written about before, lately in the context of trying to understand why historically blue areas are turning red, but also in the context of opioid abuse, of downtown revivals of cities that are struggling, of the outward migration of younger populations, etcetera. This particular piece, a beautifully melancholic photo essay by Philip Montgomery and Michael Sokolov that appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, carried the following headline: “County Line: A Pennsylvania County and the Political Tensions in America.” Its cover photo is stark black and white, capturing the moment a Trump supporter in a diner stands and points a finger at a patron who doubtfully congratulated a group of men on the results of the presidential election. It suggested violence. It was a troubling portrait of troubled people.
The next day, in the classroom where I teach English at our local college prep school, I went through the entire essay twice with my sections of AP English Language and Composition, and we discussed the powerful visual rhetoric. We all marveled at the photos, so familiar to us and so far away from many of the readers of the Times. I asked my international students if they, too, recognized the places in the photographs. “Sure,” they said, “it looks like it does right outside our school.” Another student chimed in excitedly, “I know that place! It’s right behind the abandoned school and that empty field next to the warehouse!” I paused for effect and replied, “you’ve just described about a hundred places around here.” We all laughed. And then the mood grew serious. Someone ventured: “Don’t you think there are other places that look like this–maybe in Ohio?” Of course, I replied, and explained that we are emblematic of a problem that Democrats, and especially Democrats in wealthier places, cannot figure out: Why are people drawn to Trump?
“What is the argument here?” I asked my students. It didn’t take very long for them to see it. The piece tells the story of mostly downtrodden people in a depressing place. These people roughly fall into three categories, according to the storytelling: MAGA-motorcycle-Trumpers; white, middle-aged women who certainly aren’t rich by New York City standards, but who have the time and money to ruin the world one phone call at a time (with a cosmopolitan in hand); and poor people who are trying to survive–and just don’t know any better than to believe a guy like Donald Trump. This is the same old story that has been circulating for some time, but this time it’s turned actual people into a caricature: Trump voters who are either idiots, evil, or ignorant.
I sincerely wonder what the Times was trying to do with this piece. What’s the message? The quotes chosen were, of course, quite deliberately chosen, and they include some real hum-dingers, showcasing logic that ranges from a strange moral equivalency of why it’s okay to take away your daughters’ abortion rights as long as your sons don’t have to go to war (What?!), to Trump always having “God in his mouth.” It’s sensational. It induces hand-wringing and head-shaking and all those emotions that will allow many of your readers to feel better about themselves.
We know, because we read the comments. We understand how we are seen when we are portrayed in pieces like this, and we wonder, quite frankly, if there is any real attempt to understand, at all, the people who live here. Is the purpose of the piece supposed to somehow make others feel better that they don’t live here?
The photos do look familiar to me. I feel like I have been standing in the vantage point of every single one of them. The black and white tells a story, but it’s not the real one. Hardly anything is black or white, and where we live, there is a lot of gray–in the winter sky, in the often pothole-laden streets, and, hopefully, in our judgment of one another. Because very rarely are people or places perfect. And if we can embrace that reality, then maybe we can add a little color to this story and find out what’s really going on behind the pictures and the quotations. Beyond the houses that are pictured is also a beautiful landscape–our county is a place of hills and vales, waterfalls, streams, rivers, meadows and trees. Behind the dead-eyed diners are colorful stories that I am sure your readers would enjoy. It serves no one to make a caricature of a county just to confirm what your readers already thought about it. I didn’t vote for Trump, but many of my neighbors did. I don’t want to hate anyone for the way they vote, and I wish that no one would vote based on hate. But I believe the only way we solve that problem is to get to know one another, and I hope The New York Times will make a better effort to get to know us. Maybe you’ll find some of the answers you’ve been looking for.