STILL FUCKED AT BIRTH

How America hasn’t changed in 35 years

In October 1995, the American writer Dale Maharidge — the co-author with the photo-journalist Michael Williamson of the 1985 book A Journey To Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass — got a call out of the blue from one of Bruce Springsteen’s people. It turned out that Springsteen had been so moved by A Journey to Nowhere that he had written two songs for his new album, The Ghost of Tom Joad about it: “Youngstown” and “New Timer”.

Appropriately enough, then, Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 working class hymn mourning the post-industrial fate of Youngstown was, itself, inspired by a ten year old description of the once proud Ohioan steel town. Springsteen’s work was a lament about the “sinkin’ down” of human agency. A song about how the once proud working-class people of Youngstown were fucked at birth.

Well my daddy come on the Ohio works
When he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble
He said “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.”
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for

35 years and several award-winning (including a Pulitzer) books after the publication of A Journey To Nowhere, Dale Maharidge is back with his 2020 saga of the not-so-new underclass — a travelogue of suffering entitled Fucked At Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s. Today, I had the honor of being the first person to interview Maharidge…