Book Report--Dignity by Chris Arnade

It's not particularly difficult to look up at Dignity, South Dakota's most recent gigantic sculpture (a la Rushmore and Crazy Horse), and register more than a little downright snobby skepticism. Historically at least, white folks in the region haven't shown all that much respect to Native American women. If crime figures tell any kind of story, they still don't. Still, there the Indian princess stands, fifty feet high, far above Lake Oahe--what was once the Missouri River but is now one in a series of reservoirs that drowned aspects of Native history and culture forever under water.

There she stands in her diamond-studded raiment, regally, like the royalty Indian women never really were. She's beautiful as she stands up there receiving her star quilt. Night or day, she's impressive--she really is. Still, it's difficult to be totally enthralled. Dignity can perhaps too easily be seen as yet another iteration of the white man's desire to romanticize Native life. She's another "noble savage."

I couldn't help thinking of Dignity when I read Chris Arnade's Dignity, because Arnade does everything he can to feature fellow human beings (of all races, by the way) who seemingly least deserve the description, who least express what most of us believe to be dignity.  For two years Arnade hangs around in some of the seediest pockets of the nation--and, for a white man like him especially--some of its most dangerous. 

Arnade's Dignity is one of a shelf full of books that attempt to understand the cultic following of ex-President Donald Trump. J. D. Vance gave Arnade's book a blurb, which makes sense. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was maybe the first journalistic study to attempt to feature Trump's disciples in an attempt to understand how and why they could become so driven by a man as filthy rich and morally despicable as Trump was and still is.

Arnade is not only a journalist but a photographer, which means his Dignity is an album of photographs of the men and women he's interviewed, as well as the worlds from which they come. Aiming a camera at men and women that people his book--people with real issues, often at the bottom of the economic and social registers--is precarious work because the photographs can so easily feel like exploitation. Maybe that's just me--I don't know; but the gallery of shots included in Dignity only marginally benefit his really comprehensive and convincing survey. I listened to much of the book, and when I did, I honestly didn't miss the pictures. 

Evan Osnos's Wildland: the Making of America's Fury, the National Book Award winner, inhabits a similar genre, but is far more comprehensive, by design, than either Elegy or Dignity. Osnos creates an encyclopedia of the last five years--right up to and including January 6, 2020. If you're going to read one such book this year, I'd recommend Wildland.

But Arnade's Dignity does something no one else does: it features faith, the Christian faith, in ways neither Vance nor Osnos do. Faith is no small thing in the story of Donald Trump, of course. Yet today, he'd be nowhere without his vast evangelical following. What no one could ever have guessed--and what no one still quite fully understands--is how so many passionate evangelical Christian voters gave their hearts and souls away to a man who today wanders Lear-like through life with a moral compass that says only "out of order."

But they did follow him and they still do follow him, and it's almost impossible now to doubt that they will continue to follow him as slavishly as ever.

What I found most fascinating and blessed, really, in Arnade's Dignity is the very close attention he plays to faith in the lives of his subjects, not as an attribute of Trump's cultic following but for purposes of describing the vital and even redemptive role faith plays in the lives of people so immensely easy to despise--sex workers, drug addicts, and criminals, people literally and figuratively "on the street."

That feature I'd like to explore tomorrow.

(to be continued)