Editorial
Beth Macy, the longtime Roanoke Times reporter who in recent years has become a bestselling author of nonfiction books like “Factory Man” and “Dopesick,” has a new book out in which she reflects on her own life and the polarization of today’s politics, “Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In a Fractured America.”
The book is a powerful, first-person account of how the bitter divide in politics has led to broken relationships within Macy’s own family and between herself and her childhood friends in Urbanna, Ohio, a small factory town that has, like countless others around the country, been devastated by unfettered globalization. She writes about how the North America Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s led to the closings of factories in textiles and furniture industries, among others, causing unemployment and underemployment that has eviscerated the middle class.
The title comes from Macy being a paper girl in her youth in which she delivered her community newspaper. She later majored in journalism in college, attaining a degree that led to her being a reporter for The Roanoke Times, a job she held for 25 years. A parallel story within the book is how the dissemination of misinformation through social media has replaced community newspapers to the extent that a significant chunk of the population today gets its news from highly questionable sources. Unscrupulous politicians have exploited these trends so that they’re able to get elected and direct public policies toward their own selfish ends, to the detriment of the public good.
One of the targets of these policies has been higher education, which is being characterized by such politicians as institutions of liberal indoctrination. Colleges and universities are no longer viewed as a lifesaving means to lift people out of poverty and into the middle class. The disparagement of higher education, and accompanying budget cuts to programs that made college affordable and therefore accessible to the poor, is a very personal issue for Macy. She credits the federal Pell grant she received with making it possible for her to go to college and ascend to the middle class.
Having risen out of poverty with a college degree that allowed her to become a successful journalist and, later, a renowned author, Macy says she is today disparaged back home by family and friends alike as being part of the “elite” establishment with “woke” views that run counter to the traditional culture from which she came. She expresses astonishment at how she can be at such odds with the folks with whom she grew up. It’s like she and they are inhabiting two very different planets.
Although she is unabashedly liberal in her views, she is bipartisan in her critiques of prominent politicians who, in her view, contributed to today’s ills and the great divide. She traces the origins of misinformation being peddled as news to the end of the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine that occurred during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcast media to present both sides of partisan issues and prevented the rise of overtly partisan voices from dominating the airwaves.
As told by Macy, Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s ushered in the age of globalization with NAFTA that led to the demise of U.S. manufacturing. The decimation of the middle class started then and has continued under subsequent administrations, both Democrat and Republican, leading us to where we are today.
In the present era, we are at a point where the two major political parties are at loggerheads and their supporters seem unable to find common ground on nearly every major issue. Such disagreements recently led to the longest shutdown of the federal government in U.S. history. Going forward, the very survival of democracy itself seems to be in question.
Macy paints a bleak picture of what is now transpiring but she ultimately expresses optimism that the American people will come together in the end and work together to resolve these seemingly intractable differences.
She doesn’t address it in the book, but news reports in recent weeks suggest that she may enter politics herself in an effort to play a role in helping resolve this political quagmire. A Roanoke resident, she was expected to announce her candidacy this week for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge our incumbent congressman, Republican U.S. Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia’s Sixth District, which encompasses Rockbridge County, Buena Vista and Lexington.
