****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Odd: I finished the book less than 15 minutes ago, and found when I booted up the Amazon site, that I'd bought a hard-cover book. I hadn't noticed at all. But while reading KANSAS I didn't notice much of anything else outside the experience. It was a good reading experience. This is a writer who entertains as he informs, but doesn't condescend. His descriptions of his home city and his memories of it from childhood to the present, are colorful and fairly easy. Not a happy group of pictures mostly; the area has suffered, shriveled. If he has ferocious angers, acid envies and hatreds within him, we don't really see or hear them. His coming of age was deftly told; that is, when he first understood that he would never be one of the elite, and accepted it.Lingering, the realization that this book was published five years ago, and now its as though I'm looking at its conclusions through the near-derelect strip-mall spaces of one of the suburbs and small towns he shows us. And Frank shows us with clarity the effects that the business failures of big corporations have had, through the people he describes and interviews; the Backlash Republican Radicals. Their willful disregard of the effects of the forces that move them is tragic. It is as though they, the underclass, know they will always be scorned by those of the upper class, the Limousine Republicans, and so they firmly grasp that contempt and turn it inward in an act of Sepuku as if to say, Your contempt for us is our self-destruction, but our glory as well! And, Frank describes it all without sentiment, so that even in their folly, their hippocracy or their delusion, they have dignity.Still, I'm haunted by the final chapter of the book in which he appears to propose that perhaps a preponderant share of the destructive collapse of Kansas' civic pride is due to the fatal neglect by the Democratic Party, of its principal support and client, Organized Labor. Isn't it obvious? Completely nuts. Here, they're designated Liberals. It is true that for a time the cocuntry got sucked into the Thatcher-Reagan vortex of Liberal vs. Conservative spin, forgetting that all we ever were was Republican and Democrat, caught up in one national economy, and that toxic foreign conceit led to a growing self-delusion that blinded us to our self-interest, as we deafened ourselves with rancor that grew in foolishness as it grew in volume. Worse we allowed our civic dialogue to be poisoned by the Occult; that is, the propaganda of those who have faith without knowledge.Yes, we are in a time of rabid Anti-intelectualism. But then what? Greed, no matter how you rationalize it is not an ideology, and morbid selfishness is no way to run a participatory democracy. Or, maybe that's the point. Democracy = the tyrany of the masses. Plutocracy = the tyrany of the rich. Slavery is easiest; you have your mind made up for you and you eat scraps.Frank appears to the reader as a self-identified Liberal, and a man of sincere, balanced conviction. My feeling is that he resisted the temptation to speak out with strength. His temperament, probably. I don't feel his hot breath on my cheek, and in a way that's a pity. Certainly propagandists and pamphleteers can be and often are boring. People who cannot empathize with others are. Probably he chose wisely to self-censor in order that many, or at least more, might read and think where others would curse and turn away. I don't know. He's revealed a lot of the economic vs. cultural mechanism of so-called conservatism, and his book has been a great success. He has nothing to complain of.MORAL: The USA is a commercial (bait-and-switch) enterprise and strip-mall faith is a bi-product. Get used to it because its going to get worse.
