Methland is an exceptional piece of thoughtful journalism, the likes of which comes around only once in a great while. Mr. Reding brings together the micro and the macro views of his subject, linking one, small, Iowan town's struggles with Crystal Meth's impact on its economy and its citizens to the broader, socioeconomic changes in America since the 1980s. And he accomplishes this infusion without overly editorializing, or inserting himself into the narrative. Either this is a credit to the compelling nature of Methland's subject matter or Mr. Reding's own ethics is unclear, but this forceful work is better for letting the powerful pictures Mr. Reding paints speak for themselves.
For nearly 30 years, the landscape of Middle America has been changing for the worse. Since Ronald Reagan's implementation of Trickle-down economics necessitated the weakening of big unions, jobs have been disappearing from small and midtown America, relocating to big cities where city-halls eager to be a destination for jobs and the taxes their holders provide, offered big business tax incentives they couldn't refuse. What jobs remained were bought up and new corporate policies implemented which can be boiled down to, "do this job for crap pay, or we'll bring in illegals to do it for you, or, better yet, we'll just move the factory to Mexico." Under conditions like these, it doesn't take long for poverty to set in as wages decline and jobs evaporate, and where there is poverty there will always be drugs.
This is the grim portrait Mr. Reding paints. But though it's a bleak future for the heartland of America, there is some reason for optimism. In hard times, we fall back upon good people to do good work, to make the hard calls. These are the people Mr. Reding focuses on in his study of Oelwein and the Meth trade: the mayor trying to save his town by revolutionizing it, the prosecutor trying to protect his town by coming after its leeches, and the man of god trying to uplift his town by soothing it. Prosperity eventually begets stagnation. Poverty, for all its ugliness, begets opportunity.
It may be that Mr. Reding's snapshot in Methland is a little too neat for some. It may be that readers will disagree with where he has laid the blame for the current mess. What cannot be disputed, though, is the extent to which poverty drives people to desperation. The casualties of the Meth trade chronicled here have shattered their lives in the pursuit of a drug that literally destroys the ability of their brains to experience pleasure. That is simply not something anyone would volunteer to do, no matter how potent the drug. The violence of the trade and the harm that it does are risks taken when people feel as though their backs are to the wall. And so it's little wonder that Mr. Reding's list of culprits for the current state of disrepair includes everyone from the politicians unwilling to legislate, to the big business willing to take its ball home and refuse to play unless it can play by its own rules. And those left to be squeezed between? Souls who could've made lives for themselves if things had just been a little bit easier.
This is a moving read which travels from the desolate streets of smalltown America to the vibrancy of the halls of power, comfortable here, there and everywhere in between. (5/5 Stars)
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