Not Walking Chicago
In which Chris Arnade weaves together the history of Chicago as an industrial city, a city of stock brokering and financialization, with real people’s lives in a Northwest Indiana McDonald’s.
“I took that old Bible in to get my driver’s license because I lost my birth certificate to show them I was born here, because it’s got all the births in my family written down in it, one after the other, like a family tree. … I figured they could use that to give me a driver’s license but they didn’t, so that’s why Scott drives us.”
I like the first, second, third nature model of understanding the long-running national march away from the practical and toward the abstract, and the psychic consequences of that:
Once you move on from creating a second nature (infrastructure and all that follows) to a third nature (financial abstractions), which has fewer visible ties to first nature (the natural world around you) other than blips on a screen, then a lack of grounding shouldn’t be surprising. In that way Chicago can be partly blamed, since it created the monster that came back to eventually consume it.