Bummerland: Ruin and Restoration in Trump’s New America, by Randolph Lewis
The book’s title gives away the gist of the story—almost. American studies professor Randolph Lewis (University of Texas at Austin) takes readers on a bumpy ride across an America whose best values are in ruins, potholed by corruption, and rutted by distracted indifference. “It’s beginning to look a lot like fascism,” he writes, conceding that we haven’t fallen o level of Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. Lewis has a lot to say about “Ruin” but fewer words to offer on “Restoration.”
Bummerland takes the form of a series of essays, most of which could stand alone outside the big tent of his jeremiad on “the chaotic wake of the forty-fifth/forty-seventh president, who has taken the worst elements of American capitalism, nationalism, and celebrity worship and elevated them into a rancorous political ideology of hate and neglect.”
Lewis views the carnage through the lens of Texas, where he’s lived most of his life, and Austin, where he works and formed a family. In his description of East Texas, he depicts a land where chainsaw massacres might be real, where it’s dangerous to be Black or different. He will win no awards from VisitAustin for his denunciation of how this counterculture oasis in a desert of oil, cattle and archconservatives has turned into a corporate destination of rising rents, unattainable real estate and franchises with a paint-on veneer of bohemianism. Austin isn’t weird anymore. Only the slogan remains. He adds that the city has been encircled by the gated affluence of “blandly grandiose” McMansions and resource-wasting McLawns.
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He traveled with his wife as the Covid lockdown loosened and found only empty storefronts and lapsed dreams. Even the natural beauty of one national park he visited was marred by more graffiti than a New York subway train could carry. The arc of progress? “We’ve been doing donuts in the Walmart parking lot of American politics since the sixties,” he opines.
Lewis is woke GenX with a punk rock background. Bummerland is as much memoir as manifesto as he zigzags across pop culture (appreciations of songwriter Bill Calahan and John C. Reilly’s Dr. Brule); his unhelpful treatment at the hands of medical practitioners both board-certified and “alternative”; the debilitation of high dose Delta products (legal or not); and the cult of Elon Musk. He grouses a lot about the humidity of Austin, a situation that predates climate change. Occasionally he sounds like a neurotic WASP Woody Allen.
What about that imploded American Dream? Can Desolation Row be restored to life? Lewis refuses to go nostalgic for a nation whose aspirations often outran its reality, whose racism was hard baked. What is to be done? “Love they neighbor,” he writes. Wield humor as a weapon. “Respect facts. Honor truth.” Call for decommercializing healthcare and demilitarizing the police. “Avoid violence but otherwise forget the high road.” And play Fugazi, Public Enemy and MIA—loudly! “Don’t go quietly into the dark authoritarian night. Political depressives of the world unite—you have nothing to lose but your meds!”
Can these ideals be translated into action? Maybe they already have—in Minneapolis.
