Janet Reitman produced a blockbuster piece of close-focus
reporting on some people from and around Lima, Ohio who have had
some hard times, made some bad choices, used welfare, complained
about others using welfare, and had kids, and for some reason
framed it as being about the “Tea Party”‘s dire effects on
America.
The Tea Party hook, in the story’s title and cover (“Where
the Tea Party Rules”) and cover headline, comes strictly from
the fact that Lima’s congressman, Republican Jim Jordan, is by her
telling a serious Tea Party small government ideologue. (One
of Ohio’s Senators, Sherrod Brown, in a Democrat.)
As Reitman writes of Jordan, he has a record of:
opposing virtually any government-spending proposal: the TARP
stimulus package, the auto bailout, the repeal of the Bush tax
cuts, raising the debt ceiling, even emergency aid to the victims
of Hurricane Sandy. He has voted to defund the Affordable Care Act
52 times
His office
She lays out some of the overarching facts about Lima herself.
Average home price $39,000, 34 percent of citizens below
the poverty line with an average household income in Lima of
$28,000 (much lower than $53,000 national average) and an
unemployment rate of 6 percent (pretty much the national
average).
She explains that state-level budget balancing has left
cities with less money for services, though the overarching sadness
of crummy towns with opportunities drying up is not easily solvable
by slightly richer city government’s, nor does she try to claim it
is.
Reitman does find, and tell, a handful of stories of people
disappointed in their income, mortgages, or job prospects, and they
are well told enough, and they are a bit depressing. If you wanted
to scan them for times when maybe it was choices and not just
malign fate that made things harder on them, you could do that.
Turns out leaving your six-figure oil industry job for reasons
of scruples to teach college chemistry teaching might leave you
less well off later on than you want to be. And while you can
retrain yourself for new careers, like in wind turbines, if you get
a good job in that field out of state but then leave it rather than
relocate your family, you might end up working a maintenance job.
Turns out if you run a “specialty wine and beer shop” in this
desolate sad wasteland, some customers might make you feel
uncomfortable for being Democrats by things they say.
Lots of women have kids young, even though abortion is
theoretically legal though hard to get in this state, and the
uncharitable might get the sneaky feeling that Reitman is sorta
implying some of Lima’s current infant class would have been better
off never having been born.
An unredacted excerpt:
Most of the young middle- and working-class women I meet in Lima
had children very young, many before they were 18; Allen County has
one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Ohio. And yet, Ohio has
been at the forefront of recent attacks on reproductive rights. The
state has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the
country, and its most recent budget placed $1.4 million in funding
for Planned Parenthood at risk, while allocating money to
Christian-based ”crisis pregnancy centers.” Lima’s one
family-planning clinic offering limited abortion services recently
closed down; today, a search for abortion clinics in Lima will turn
up a pro-life organization called Heartbeat of Lima. Though the
county health department offers free birth control, a woman wanting
an abortion must travel more than an hour to Toledo, to a clinic
that, thanks to restrictions that have closed almost half of Ohio’s
abortion clinics in the past year, may soon be forced to shut its
doors. ”People don’t talk about abortion in Lima,” says
Carissa.
She’s just sayin’,perhaps, but it’s kind of a weird way to lead
into your sheerly disinterested discussion of the availability of
abortion in grim Lima.
You will learn the basics of the politics of these people she
profiles struggling through hard times, and they will be neither
surprising nor interesting, except maybe for the woman who wrote in
“Mickey Mouse” for president, or the “What’s the Matter with
Kansas?” 33-year old “aspiring writer who blogs in verse and
writes reviews for a small culture website, -TheCultDen.com, [and]
has spent much of his adult life in the service industry”
(currently working a tech support call center), carless and
spending half his meager income on child support.
He calls himself an anarchist disgusted with politics
and:
he insists the system is being manipulated. His divorced father
worked sporadically during McKenzie’s childhood, and since 2009 he
has received disability, which McKenzie thinks he doesn’t need. ”I
love my father, he is one of my best friends, but he is lazy. He
gets disability, food stamps, and he has a plasma TV with all the
HD channels.” Several of McKenzie’s relatives are also on
disability, which he blames on the welfare system itself. ”They’ve
all been ushered through the process of how to get it, and so they
take advantage. It’s become the American dream to get everything
for free without having to do a lot of work.”
Reportorially, despite some diligent work in painting its
sad picture, this is the kind of story that troubles to repeat that
a “Lima Democrat” referred to the way state Republicans
gerrymandered the state to lock the Democrats into only four
statewide House seats as leading to a district that
”kind of looks like a deformed salamander.”
If you wanted to question whether the very fact of living in
American modernity is as dispirting and awful as she wants to make
you feel, you could do that. Reitman’s sad, sad Lima features:
gigantic homes on lots with their own private ponds, each of
them a near-mirror image of one another. Out on the broad, open
streets, the faceless strip malls, chain hotels and smaller one-
and two-story houses fade into a seamless tableau. Even in Lima’s
urban neighborhoods, where, [retired nursing instructor, and pal of
Reitman’s mom, Sandie] Kinkle tells me, some of her friends from
the country club refuse to go, there is a strange
homogeneity.
Grossed out yet? How about seeing:
Rent-a-Center, a Dollar Tree, an American Budget Co. and a Check
Into Cash, as well as the requisite nail salon and pet-supply
shops. There is also a gigantic Walmart Supercenter fronting an
empty lot.
If you wonder what the Tea Party has to do with any of
these people’s lives or samey houses or faceless strip malls or
chain hotels or strange homogeneity or dollar stores, you won’t
learn much. Longterm well paying jobs with great benefits have been
replaced in many cases by temp work; it’s harder to make ends meet
for many residents of Lima; welcome to the 21st century, or at
least one small part of it.
If inclined to blame all bad aspects of anyone’s lives on
political parties or movements, ponder that of the eight Ohio
cities known as the “big
8” of deindustrialization, Columbus, Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, Canton, and Youngstown–at least
four of them (Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland and Akron) are
represented in whole
or in part by Democrats.
Could it be that framing this story about general
diminution of industrial presence and union power in one American
city (though it is true of other cities as well, to be sure) as a
“Tea Party” story is merely based in an unlovely desire to demonize
a political Other rather than reason or evidence?
Reason on how
to save Ohio’s jewel, Cleveland.
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