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Cake day: 2023年7月9日
  • Optional@lemmy.worldtoAttention USA@lemm.ee•"The America I loved is gone" - Stephen Marche - "It was a nation of dreams, built for the screen. Then it shattered" - Easter Sunday April 20, 2025 - ATTENTION USA
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    18 小时前

    The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to Rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.

    I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.

    On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.