Homeland Elegies(75)

Recruiting black lawyers to serve in the cause of deregulation had become a top priority, and Bork, according to Mike, had identified Mike’s father as a perfect candidate. Jerry Jacobs would be offered a job at the Federal Trade Commission in 1986, but by then, after having flirted with Reaganites for more than a year, he’d figured out what they were up to. The way Jerry saw it, they had no illusions about the future; they saw the rising tide of racial diversity and its economic and political consequences; they were plotting their response—a reassertion of white property rights, an accumulation of power in corporate hands to ensure that whites remained in charge.

Spotts Robinson patiently watched as his young clerk was slowly disabused of his illusions around these modern heirs to the party of Lincoln. Honest Abe was probably rolling over in his grave, Spotts would say; he’d risked so much to free American blacks from slavery, and here, folks like Baker and Bork and Atwater were using his party’s great name to slip them right back into chains, albeit financial ones. When I first knew Mike, he had tried his hand at a screenplay, and that night in Harlem I finally understood where the inspiration for it came from. The screenplay told the story of a young black lawyer lured by the promise of influence and wealth, tempted into a self-enriching cause that leads to his betrayal of a beloved paternal mentor—a thin, stately, self-effacing attorney from the Old South in the mold of Spottswood Robinson. Far more than its plotting—which, I thought, owed too much to any number of John Grisham thrillers—the moral of the story was complicated and appeared indebted to what Mike’s father learned about himself during his DC years, perhaps to what Mike felt his father still hadn’t fully learned as well: point of view is always shaped by desire; if some part of you doesn’t trust your desire, then you better not trust the picture of the world it’s giving you.

Eventually, Mike came to see his father’s decision to leave the nation’s capital and come home to Alabama as marred by sentimentality. It was all well and good to want to do right by those you loved. But as Mike saw it, you better have a real idea of what that might actually entail. His father had certainly seen what was starting to happen in America, but Mike wasn’t sure he’d understood just how little a person could do about it from a law office on Main Street in Opelika or even from the statehouse in Montgomery. The new political order was mercantile at its root, shaped and paid for by the cash accumulated in the coffers of bigger and bigger business—and what it was doing to black businesses it was doing to everyone. Chains and conglomerates weren’t shuttering more black concerns than they were white ones. The mistake his father made, Mike started to understand, was to see all this solely through the lens of race. Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People—black, white, or brown—couldn’t live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes—but so did the tax base. There’d never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn’t object to making a pittance. Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big-box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. The twenty-year downward slope of opportunity and morale in places like Opelika and Wichita and Grand Rapids and Scranton—and just about everywhere else across middle America—defined a descent from which, increasingly, there appeared to be no recourse. Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger.

And all this was before the financial crisis.

What Mike said to me that night in Harlem six months before Trump’s election was that he had started to see what was happening not just to the black community but also to the very notion of American community itself. His father’s ideas, his own life in Opelika—these had prepared him to understand the implications of what he was learning in courses such as Corporate Tax Theory and Topics on American Property Law. Like Riaz, Mike started to see that there was no way to turn back the tide of what had begun in the ’80s. Our ideas had changed. Yes, money had always been central to notions of American vitality, but now it reigned as our supreme defining value. It was no longer just the purpose of our toil but also our sport and our pastime. We discussed a movie’s weekend gross before its plotline, an outfielder’s signing bonus before his batting average. The market had seeped into our language; we sought upside and minimized our exposure and worried about the best investment of our sweat equity. Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one’s capacity to write a check. We were now customers first and foremost, not citizens, and to buy was our privileged act. No longer ruled by a personified abstraction, Zeus or Yahweh, we now appeased a material one: the Economy. We feared its humors; we were grateful for its dispensations; we tended to its imagined well-being with our ritual purchases. When the Economy was well, we were a happy people; when the Economy faltered, premonitions of doom were never far.

Unlike his father, Mike would leave Alabama for good. He would go first to New York, where I met him, then to the West Coast. He’d met and married a woman from Michigan, which, he said, gave him a Yankee perspective on the looting of American life he’d seen back home: his wife, Morgan, had grown up in Flint.3 That night at Red Rooster, Mike said something that reminded me of Mary Moroni’s lecture remarks almost a quarter century earlier, about American self-pillage and plunder, but in a more despairing key: