Ian Frazier on the Meaning of "American carnage"

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

I’ve pretty much given up on political reporting as a source of inspired writing. But when I saw Ian Frazier’s name among the contributors to The New York Review of Book’s recent series “On the Election” (November 19, 2020), I thought to myself, This is one I’ve got to read. I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike most political writing, Frazier’s piece has the breath of life. It deals in particulars. Its words call up images. For example:

In 2017 I went to Washington to see the inauguration. I wandered around with no purpose and did not get very close to the Capitol steps, where the swearing-in ceremony appeared as a tiny cluster of people among a larger crowd. Fewer onlookers gathered in the vicinity of the Reflecting Pool, where the regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder outnumbered the humans, and a lone hawk watched from atop a tree. I was standing by a loudspeaker when I heard the phrase “American carnage.” In that relatively abandoned area, it came out of the loudspeaker during Trump’s speech and seemed to hang in the air in 3D.

That sentence about the “regiments of portable johns shoulder to shoulder” and the “lone hawk” is amazing! As is the description of Trump’s words (“American carnage”) seeming “to hang in the air in 3D.” 

“American carnage” has specific meaning for Frazier. Hearing it, he thinks about “small towns in Ohio, near where I’m from, that used to be flourishing and now are half-deserted and boarded up.” He says,

Today the emblematic image of the former small town is a pillar that once held an oval-shaped plastic sign for some local business like a muffler shop or a feed store, and the plastic is mostly broken and gone, and just the frame of the sign is still there.

Note Frazier’s use of definite, specific, concrete language. The whole piece is like that. Frazier concludes with a plea to Democrats to “start paying more attention, FDR-style, to the less populated places.” It’s a practical suggestion. I totally agree with it. I wish more writers would write this way about politics.