Paul Clemens is a writer whose first book “Made in Detroit” (2006) told the story of life in Detroit as the automotive industry was beginning to collapse. “Arkansas Boys” is an excerpt from his second book, “Punching out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant” (2011), which looks into the lives of a group of riggers taking down heavy equipment in an auto plant that’s closing. Paul Clemens answers the call to write at a young age as way to deal with his frustration, and contempt for suburban escapees. “Punching Out” defines the relationships among a community struggling to create a comfortable means of living; From the most resistant, sharp edges of the deindustrialization of America, and a lament for a working-class culture that once defined a prosperous America— that’s now crossing the threshold of economic despotism. Clemens observed the acquisition, dismemberment, and exit of the recently shut down Budd’s automotive manufacturing facility. The plant’s equipment from early June 2007 to late April 2008 was hauled as freight. Budd’s largest press line, was transported about 1,800 miles to a plant owned by Spanish auto supplier Gestamp in Mexico, where line workers earned some $290 a month to stamp out parts for Dodge manufacturers. Other presses migrated to Brazil, India, and China. “I felt as if I’d witnessed an execution,.” …show more content…
Mr. Clemens says. Clemens, whose own father worked for auto subcontractors, knows the Motor City well.
His 2005 memoir, “Made in Detroit,” turned a coming-of-age story into a portrayal of a city on shipping pallets. This time around, he turns his time spent inside Budd to offer a disconcerting perspective at the declination of the American working class. It’s a retrogression, the story of a “reverse lifecycle,” Paul says. “Rather than distinguish the coming into being of a butterfly,” he says, “I wanted to capture the primal qualities exposing what was left; A chrysalis, fractured and shorn of its
caterpillar.” Mr. Clemens outlined the history of the Budd plant, which manufactured parts for a variety of automotive brands, and had once employed nearly 10,000 people. He is a poetic, mournful observer of Detroit’s people. He pressures a grim reality: there is more money to be made in the destruction of Detroit, around 2011, than restoring the once suburban city-scape. He summarizes his book’s core values better than a panel of philosophers could: “The American working class, mopping up after itself.”
Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take the reader away from viewing into a hero’s looking glass— to set a foundation of a world where our morals become lost to our materialistic and inherent need of money (Wylie).
Roger Clemens is arguably one of the greatest pitchers ever in Major League Baseball history. Clemens has built an astounding and exciting career filled with impressive statistics that may rarely be duplicated. His career extends from the early 1980’s into the new millennium, and continues today. During this stretch, nicknamed “The Rocket”, he won more Cy Young awards, seven, than any other pitcher in MLB history. The Cy Young award is given annually to the League’s best pitcher. In 2003 he won the 300th game of his career. He is only one of four MLB pitchers in all time to pass the 4,000 strikeout mark.
In the infamous article “Batting Clean-up and Striking Out” by Dave Barry, the focus is on gender stereotypes, specifically the stereotypes such as women like to clean and men like sports. I can personally say I fit into this, because I enjoy cleaning, to an extent, but I think this stereotype can only go so far. I know my sister doesn’t like cleaning and my father outright hates sports, so they don’t fit into this. I find the generalizations highly annoying, because people sometimes expect me to just clean for them when I don’t want to; they use the stereotype as an excuse for me to do so. I know my father has encountered plenty of other men that have tried to persuade him to watch a football or other sports game with them and I can’t imagine
History textbooks seem to always focus on the advancements of civilization, often ignoring the humble beginnings in which these achievements derive. How the Other Half Lives by journalist-photographer Jacob A. Riis explores the streets of New York, using “muck-racking” to expose just how “the other half lives,” aside from the upbeat, rich, and flapper-girl filled nights so stereotypical to New York City in the 1800s. During this time, immigrants from all over the world flooded to the new-born city, bright-eyed and expecting new opportunities; little did they know, almost all of them will spend their lives in financial struggle, poverty, and crowded, disease-ridden tenements. Jacob A. Riis will photograph this poverty in How the Other Half Lives, hoping to bring awareness to the other half of New York.
In his 1991 memoir, Rivethead, Ben Hamper encounters challenges with the uniformity and monotony of his occupation at General Motors. Hamper narrates his biography from his youth in the mid-1960s to adulthood in the early 1990s, expressing his unchanging state of isolation, which is ultimately the result of failed attempts to dissent the mechanical system. Hamper consequentially becomes pulled into the very system he previously vowed to subvert and misinterprets his alienation from the world beyond General Motors as belongingness. Hamper’s failure to dissent the overarching system illustrates twentieth century notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts, in that those who
Taking place in the jungle of meat packing factories during the early 1900s in Chicago, a journalist by the name of Upton Sinclair dissects the savage inner workings of America’s working class factory lifestyle. Sinclair portrayed the grim circumstances that workers faced and the exploited lives of factory workers in Chicago. He became what was then called a mudrucker; a journalist who goes undercover to see first hand the conditions they were investigating. Being in poor fortune, Sinclair was able to blend into the surrounds of the factory life with his poor grimy clothing. The undercover journalist would walk into the factory with the rest of the men, examine its conditions, and record them when he returned home.
In his essay, “ Brooklyn Bridge,” the author explores the “appetite” of a particular New Yorker. This woman is described as staring,full of awe,at the New York Skyline from another borough. She is ambitious and sees New York as full of endless possibilities. Throughout the collection he portrays New York transplants or prospective residents as being driven by the longing to grab a piece of the city for themselves.This drive is a pattern that is repeated in these works of Whitehead. In his essay “Port Authority instead of focusing on the New York ideal of one individual Whitehead focuses on a body of people about to move to New York. Througout the collection Whitehead switches back and forth between focusing on an individual and focusing on a crowd. In this essay Whitehead also highlights the sameness within the people hustling and bustling in and out of Port Authority. He implies that the same quality of brokenness has led them all here, “They’re all broken somehow… Otherwise they would have come here differently,”(15). Even though they are all from different places and all have different destinations the essence of New York has drawn them all here. Colson’s account of the passengers shows that they are all feeling the same feelings of hope in regards to coming to New York. Although they all hope for different things the theme regarding the passengers is
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
Literary magazines were not remotely interested in publishing Gilb’s stories, which focus primarily on the professional and personal struggles of working-class Mexican Americans. But his unapologetic stories about working-class Mexican Americans have made him a voice of his people (Reid130). Gilb’s short stories are set vividly in cites of the desert Southwest and usually feature a Hispanic protagonist who is good-hearted but often irresponsible and is forever one pink slip or automotive breakdown away from disaster (Reid130).
Baldwin gives a vivid sketch of the depressing conditions he grew up on in Fifth Avenue, Uptown by using strong descriptive words. He makes use of such word choices in his beginning sentences when he reflects back to his house which is now replaced by housing projects and “one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our [his] doorway used to be” (Baldwin...
According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
It depicts how industrialization influenced the redefinition of the roles of American women within the larger society, alcohol use, and the rise of the middle class. The author seeks to enlighten the reader about the social stratification of that era; in addition, he makes reading history easy and enjoyable by writing in clear and lively prose. As a practitioner of micro-history, Johnson provides a window onto the early 19th century; in particular, the life of the American working class during that era. Since there is no much history on Sam Patch, Johnson uses his life to building an accessible and enjoyable narrative. The book served as a broader story to the rise of wage labor; the author explored the lives of entertainers, local politicians, and entrepreneurs. These aspects are developed throughout the book illustrating how it was now possible to rise to fame as a middle-class
In “On the Factory Floor”, a passage from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, through the use of repetition and specific diction Eugenides critiques the integration of the assembly line into factories, and investigates how this affects the American worker. This mechanomorphisation of the workers conveys how employers view their workers as less than human, comparing workers to the machines.
Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” criticizes America during the midst of the twentieth century in which society had acquired an attitude that heavily valued the materialistic aspects of life. In order to efficiently express the speaker’s discontent with society, he paints images by using vivid detail throughout the entire poem to allow the reader to experience what the speaker experiences himself. He begins by describing the setting on the streets of California, “I walked down the sidestreets under the trees…/… looking at the full moon” (2-3) and had thoughts of Walt Whitman, a nineteenth century poet whom Ginsberg deeply admired. The setting is essential as it describes the two worlds in which the speaker lives in; one represented by the metropolitan landscape of downtown California and another represented by nature, which the speaker longs to be a part of. The speaker describes himself as a lost soul in search of satisfaction in conventional America, a place where he does no...