“It's a strange feeling: to be ashamed and embarrassed of who you used to be. Even with the excuses of youth, inexperience, and influence- her church, her parents, her older brothers, her friends, almost everyone she knew- it still made her deeply uncomfortable to think of herself back then, who she might have hurt without knowing it.” Growing UpRealization Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he'd spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.” LifeDeathTimeHopeRegretCynicismNihilismAspirations Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.” WarAmericaLandscapeCornSoyAmerican LandscapeAgriculturesBig Ag Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“Like MacMillan and the clique of teachers and the coaches who all went to the same church and barbecued at one another's houses, much of the country's small-bore civil servants were itching to do some repressing of their own. Millions of Dick Cheney wannabes swelling the ranks, enjoying their little authoritarian fiefdoms.” PatriotismConformityCensorshipRepressionAuthoritarianismJingoismConformismCliques Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.” UsuryIndustrialismLoansEconomic DepressionHome EquityMortgagesSubprime Mortgage CrisisForeclosuresConsumer CreditSurburbs Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.” ImmigrationRuinsCorporationsPatriotismNationalismImmigrantsCorporate GreedIndustrialismJingoismCities Spaces Places Book:Ohio Source: Ohio
“Yeah, well, time marches on. Getting caught up in causes don’t interest me. Not anymore. Especially when you see the scope of what this is.” He took the Heinz ketchup bottle from the condiment holder. “That’s the thing: Most people don’t understand this. The ingredients, what it goes on, where the energy comes from to create it, the ways the world’s gotta be directed and coaxed and violated and controlled to get this one little fucked bottle. And once you see how ketchup relates to imperial maintenance it’s tough to not get an overwhelmed quality to your thinking. Like one of them Magic Eye thingamajobs—hard the first time, but once you get it, you’ll never unsee it.” CapitalismClimate ChangePlasticImperialismClimate CrisisPetroleum IndustryPetroleum PoliticsPetrostate Book:The Deluge Source: The Deluge
“You make someone your devil for long enough, and you want to hold onto that. There's something rapturous about hating another person, especially if you have a goddamned good reason.” HateGrowing UpHolding On To Grudges Book:Ohio Source: Ohio