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"Methland" is What Comes of a Nation that Lets Corporations Run Its Government
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Sarah Palin's beloved Wasilla Valley is known as the meth capital of Alaska. Indeed, meth has been largely a rural phenomenon related to joblessness caused by local economies being hijacked by big corporations.
So "Methland" offers a fascinating counterpoint to the Neo-Confederacy, Disneyesque desires of right wing shills like Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck to restore America to the way it used to be. It's not a loss of morality, or a growth in minorities that has disrupted their fantasies; it's local economies that have been decimated by corporate America -- the very companies that pay the salaries of the right wing "white people are victims" shills.
From the Washington Post about "Methland":
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin created a small scandal when she told a North Carolina crowd, "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America." Apart from whatever political hay the left made of rhetoric elevating small-town Americans over their more urban counterparts, Palin's comments tapped into a central myth of our national culture -- that there is something fundamentally undiluted and authentic about small towns that is implicitly absent from larger cities. Small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America.
In his persuasive new book, Methland, journalist Nick Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in--and taken hold of--its soul. Over four years, Reding studied meth production and addiction in Oelwein, Iowa, a rural community about 300 miles from Chicago. With a population of just over 6,000, Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine.
There is no more horrifying example of the drug's ravages than Roland Jarvis, who began using meth as a way to keep up his energy through double shifts at a local meat-processing plant. Apparently doing so was nothing unusual, and until the early 1980's, an Oelwein physician would routinely prescribe methamphetamines for fatigued workers. When the plant where Jarvis worked was de-unionized and his wages slashed by two-thirds, Jarvis went from an occasional meth user to a habitual user and then a manufacturer. One night, in a fit of drug-induced paranoia, he attempted, disastrously, to dispose of his cooking chemicals. In the ensuing fire, he was so horribly burned that paramedics could only watch while the flesh literally melted from his body and Jarvis begged the police to kill him. Reding's description of Jarvis now, using his fingerless hands to lift a meth pipe to his noseless face, is among the most haunting images in the book.
From Booklist about "Methland":
Nathan Lein grew up on a family farm near Oelwein, Iowa, where stubbornness is just part of the landscape. Oelweins once-sturdy, farm-based economy has suffered, and from 1960 to 1990, its population fell 25 percent to about 6,000. Many family-owned farms disappeared, replaced by faceless corporate farms. Returning to Oelwein in his late twenties, in 2002 Lein became assistant county attorney with a mandate to clean up meth.
In the economic vacuum created by the demise of family farms and falling wages at major employers (at Tyson meatpacking plant, to barely a third of their 1992 levels), good jobs disappeared, and methamphetamine manufacture and distribution became the only booming local enterprise, attended by increased crime, domestic abuse, and other pathologies. The situation was spiraling out of control. Reding relates how Lein and a few other local heroes determinedly fought back and reclaimed the town locals were calling Methlehem. Oelweins story has implications for other rural areas, especially in the Midwest, West, and South, where Redings tale should be vital cautionary reading.
****
"Methland" is reality. What the right wing corporate media shills for entrenched wealth offer the economically fleeced working man is demagogic fiction.
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