Frontline, a show on PBS, aired an episode entitled “Left Behind America” on September 11th. Frontline sent Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter, to Dayton, Ohio, to “go inside one American city’s struggle to recover.”
The opening credits play over a long shot of houses taken from a car driving down West Third by Roosevelt High School. It is winter. Driveways are empty. A few houses have boards over their windows. One house has a collapsed front porch. A radio crackles to life in the background. It flips through the channels of an all too familiar rhetoric. Radio hosts and T.V. anchors deliver the news: people are being laid-off, businesses are leaving the area, Dayton has become “ground-zero for America’s opioid crisis,” unemployment reaches double digits.
The opening clips push one narrative – that Dayton is bad off. President Trump claims that America is at the crest of economic recovery but it looks like Dayton was left behind. It is as if all of America outside the Rust Belt was rapt up to heaven, leaving poor Dayton behind, unable to afford the bus fair to heaven.
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The show cuts to a shot of Alec MacGillis with a furled brow, packing his papers and laptop, headed to Dayton to investigate. MacGillis saddles up with his film crew and arrives in Dayton. The film crew goes straight to a food pantry. It is obvious what Dayton is supposed to mean in the show. Dayton is a political billboard for wealth inequality; Dayton is the poster child for poverty.
This is the point Mayor Nan Whaley, interviewed in the episode, was making when she said in a recent Dayton Daily News article that the episode was truthful but not fair.
It was truthful. We all know people who used to work at GM, NCR, Delphi, Frigidaire. These people are our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, our family. We know that Dayton is the perfect sociological case study of economic collapse. We lived it. We were hit hard by businesses packing up and leaving and by the Great Recession. We were the Heartland, now we are the Rust Belt. Maybe we are still both, depending on who you ask.
But, the episode was also unfair. Wealth is coming back to the city. Holly Allen and the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce published a public letter in the Dayton Daily News agreeing with Mayor Whaley, saying, “You can show video of a couple of impoverished streets on repeat and you can fly your drone over downtown Dayton during the least busy times to make your story appear more dramatic but we know the truth.
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“We know that Dayton is experiencing a renaissance that hasn’t been realized before and the investment, growth and pride in our community is at a high,” she wrote. She cites businesses coming into the area: CareSource, the Omega Community Development Corporation, the business and housing on Water Street, new businesses in the Fire Blocks, the Oregon District, the list goes on.
But, haven’t we learned that these economic booms are not enough to sustain a city? These businesses, monoliths in our cultural memory, have come and gone. We as a community are still here. Also, how can Dayton be “left behind” if we, as a country, are always worried that we are headed in the wrong direction? Moreover, where has the cultural significance of the word “renaissance” gone?
Both Mayor Whaley and Holly Allen are reacting to the narrative established by PBS. They are playing on their turf, by their rules. They answer the narrative about economic collapse with economic renaissance. What would a cultural renaissance in Dayton look like? Is it already happening?
Take a look a Dayton’s Cultural barometer. If we look at it from the perspective of national discourse, Dayton is a cultural vacuum. People are popping pills, shooting up, snorting, smoking, doing everything in arms reach to escape, to speed-up to reality-escape velocity.
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Their reality is Dayton, Ohio, and these people are so impoverished, so stripped of economic agency, that literal escape is impossible so they turn to chemical escape. Looking at Dayton on the national level is dismal, bleak and tragic. It seems to suggest that after the economic floor fell out in Dayton, we did not have a cultural safety net to catch us.
Now, however, it looks like we are starting to bounce back. We are starting to see small up-ticks, signs that things are looking up. We are wary and apprehensive, no doubt. 2008 taught us that. It taught us that along with the adage “high tides raise all ships,” we should add “but low tides sink them too.”
When the country was at the peak of production, Dayton was the birthplace of aviation, a great hub for innovation. In 2018, when things do not seem so productive, Dayton has been “left behind.” What can Dayton do to gain more narrative autonomy? Maybe the answer is in trying to piece together a stronger cultural safety net, turning away from reactionary criticism of distant, national narrative and turning towards forging our own positive, local narratives.
