Someplace like America

In this article it seems that the author is giving an idea of what America is like through the eyes of other Americans. He feels that America is filled with lost dreams and hard lived lives. He gives descriptions of different place in America. "The Deep South: abandoned cotton gins and vine-covered shacks of tenant farmers. The Great Lakes Region: rusting stacks of ghost steel mills on forested river bars; the ruins of a Detroit hotel with a rotting piano collapsed on the floor of it ballroom, where one imagines giddy couples dancing away the nights after the men came home from World War II to an industrial America that promised a limitless tomorrow. All through the Midwest and the West: century-old grain silos; telegraph lines that now transmit only the sound of the wind; storm-ravaged homesteads with blown-out windows on the desolate prairie. California's central valley: forgotten backwaters where people who evoke the Joads still walk lonely the newly unemployed of 2010, in secret patches of dusty digger pine, just as their counterparts formed the Hoovervilles of the 1930's." The author also goes on and gives you stories through the eyes of Americans living a third world lives that he has visited or heard about through all is years. The one that was remembered the most was Michael: "The eyes of a woman who has fallen from upper-class privileged and is now standing in a charity food line are still proud and hurting a year after she lost her big home. a frugal white collar mom, raiding her children on her own, works two jobs year round, in some season, her eyes filled with tears as she talks about how she is barely surviving." As this story goes on it makes me think about how hard it is for the average person to survive in America. This article also shows how brutal America can be on people: "unbridled fear is in the eyes of a Latino man, a U.S. citizen, who is terrified of being stopped and once again bloodied by cops who assume that he's undocumented because of his brown skin. Tis article mainly shows how America is viewed and the opinions of other fellow Americans.

The second part of this article, "The Marching Phalanx" is an explanation on how this article came about. “Someplace Like America was conceived when I was at Yaddo, the artist' colony, in 2007." It tells the story of I guess what seems to be the influence of the book which is a man named Louis Academic. "In the colony library, I'd reread work by Louis Academic, who had been at Yaddo in 1931 and 1933. This Slovenian immigrant had faced hard times while he was emerged as a young writer. He traveled a hundred thousand miles around the country between 1931 and 1937 for his 1938 book My America." The author Dale Mahadrige took that as inspiration to write is own article, Someplace Like America. This section seems to be a mini biography about Dale and the research which led up to the writing of this article.

In conclusion the third and final section of this article, "Our Journeys”, is a conclusion of what route the author took with his photographer to get the facts and details of how Americans viewed the country they live in. "As Michael and I traveled over the years, we didn’t seek out individuals who offered polemics or who were absorbed in politics. We simply listened to Americans who were in trouble because of the economy. In our interviews with workers, some people appeared to be liberal, others conservative, but most were apparently in that amorphous "middle". He basically researched inside people’s lives and how they survived even if they didn’t make the most money or didn’t have all the privileges in living comfortably. This article is a great factual writing about hoe America is viewed and how people of different races and cultured survives in the hardest conditions possible, and still manage to put a smile on and keep striving to make it.