Taking a Stroll in Ghost-Town America

Across Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard

Like my ALTE co-editor Esther who’s in Tucson, AZ, I’m on the road, too — in the Confederacy, once again, visiting my 6-year-old grandson in South Carolina. En route this past Wednesday, we stopped the car to stretch our legs in a little town off Interstate 81 in eastern Pennsylvania. Since the day was blustery, we took our stretch in a shopping mall.

Like many shopping malls these days — including the one half an hour from my home in Ulster County, NY — this one was eerily deserted, with fewer than one out of ten of its stores occupied. Dimly lit, with barely any foot-traffic, the place felt post-apocalyptic, neutron-bombish — this less than three hours from the wealth and bustle of New York City.

The next day, after hours of driving, we stopped in Pulaski, Virginia, a town of about 9,000. Pulaski is named for a Polish nobleman who fought in the American Revolution and saved George Washington’s life in battle. I’ve never been in a more depressing, emptied-out town. Even the traffic lights were missing from their perches on most street corners, and there was hardly a car in motion. The main shopping drag was about three blocks long and included a theater that last held, in December, a performance of The Nutcracker and a concert by an Eagles cover band. There was a soft pretzel shop at which I seemed to have been the only customer for a week; a gun shop; a used computer games store; and an arts storefront that sold postcards and uninspired knickknacks. The proprietor, whom I guessed to be about 65, told us that the town had lost two factories twenty years earlier and never recovered. (I learned subsequently that the town had also been hit by two tornados in 2011, which destroyed 31 buildings and damaged scores of others.)

Pulaski — or was it the neighborhood of the Pennsylvania shopping mall? — is crisscrossed by an avenue named for Martin Luther King, Jr. There are close to 1,000 such streets in forty-one states in America, and of the twenty or thirty I’ve driven on, the great majority run through treeless, down-and-out neighborhoods. It is a bitter irony that our country’s great prophet is honored by streets that exemplify the vast unfinished business of the civil rights revolution.

But note: The population of Pulaski, VA is only 8 percent Black, and eastern Pennsylvania, apart from Philadelphia, has a similar demographic. Both areas are heavily into Trump. I cannot understand why — but I totally understand why. Hopelessness, among white Americans, breeds a sense of betrayal, vengefulness, and racial resentment. That’s Trump’s sweet spot.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: Opportunity deferred “has accumulated interest and its cost for . . . society will be substantial . . . [T]ime itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of . . . social destruction.”

Which is yet another of many many reasons why Joe Biden should not be aiding the demolition of the Gaza Strip, not when there are ghost towns right along the New York-Washington corridor. He needs to understand the truly powerful appeal of “America First” and totally co-opt the idea from the MAGAmen, in word and in actual deed.

Wake up, Joe, and put the guns away! Don’t just drone on about legislation that you’ve gotten through Congress — you need to do something original, old man! You need to turn yourself and Jill into media magnets as best you can — say, by organizing rallies in abandoned shopping malls across the land! Ask Willie Nelson, age 90, and Buddy Guy, age 87, to open for you. Ask Warren Buffet, age 93, and Gloria Steinem, age 89, to introduce you and the economic and social innovations you’re defending in America. Then talk about the shopping malls: This one to be converted into a housing development! This one to be a health center! This one to house daycare and senior care facilities! This one to be torn down and turned into a green park.

And then, Uncle Joe, I want to see you and Jill photographed by People magazine in Pulaski, Virginia, with a fat money roll in hand, which you’ll offer it to anyone who’ll open a factory there.