Book – An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country

Author: David FinkelPublisher: Scribe PublicationsReviewer: Dan O’Gorman

This publication is a work of non-fiction journalism by David Finkel, a Pulitzer prize-winning author. It discusses America today – an angry, violent and divided society – and it comments upon the very deep divisions that have opened in that society. It is largely based upon Finkel’s own personal observations of the key people reported upon in the book, all of whom knew he was a journalist and agreed to participate with the understanding that whatever he saw or heard was on the record.

Finkel spent some 14 years closely observing one of the book’s central characters, Brent Cummings including his family, community, and his work and thoughts. Cummings was one of the characters in Finkel’s earlier publication, The Good Soldiers.Cummings had spent 28 years in the U.S. Armyand was a veteran of the Iraq War. He had also spent 3 ½ years deployed away from his family training the Palestinian Authority Security Forces.

Cummings was raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty and respect but he was becoming increasingly surprised by the behaviour and belief of others and he became engulfed by the fear, anger and confusion that was sweeping his country as he attempted to hold onto his values and his hope for America’s future.

The US had a President who was tweeting about “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Hillary” and “the Lamestream Media” and “Democrat Witch Hunt!”. Cummings was in 2016 attempting to deal with the fact that the country he loves was fracturing and, by 2020, he had concluded the US was fractured and was reminiscent of the 1960s (a period which saw the arrival of division and tribalism resulting in the commencement of culture wars marked by race, religion and class) and that it might be heading towards something as bad as the events of 1968, the year he was born and about which he had heard much from his mother – there’d been the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy Jr, race riots in a hundred cities, violence against antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention, the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the deaths of some 17,000 American troops (nearly 50 per day), the deadliest year of that war.

Cummings worried about the 2020 versions of “the Tim McVeigh folks” (a reference to a soldier who, after leaving the Army, one day, loaded a rented truck with explosives, parked it outside a federal office in Oklahoma City and detonated it, killing 168 people, 19 of them children). The 2020 versions are enraged, grievance-filled, white supremist and domestic terrorist. At the same time, Cummings wondered if Trump understood he was encouraging violence of a kind that changes the soul of a person and of a country.

Another person written about is Cummings’ next door neighbour, Michael Owens, who had been in a wheelchair for 28 years, half his life, after being left paralysed with quadriplegia because of a fall of 60 feet from a tree. He was a self-declared “hard-core conservative and far right” who believes in the Bible and the US Constitution because “they were written” whose level enthusiasm for Trump was matched by his disdain for the Democratic Party; he had voted for the Republicans since 1984 when he first voted for President; and he planned to vote for President Trump in 2020.

Finkel writes about the unfolding stories of people such as Cummings and Owens, attempting to find answers to their own questions about what was happening in American society, today. He states that it was his wish to write a book about being an American in a country becoming ever more divided and combative, and believed the best way to do that would be to focus on the lives of a small group of interconnected people who span the political, racial and economic spectrums of America and were divided, in many ways, but were united in the belief that their beloved country was fracturing. To do so, he observed and documented them, particularly, in Georgia, from Election Day 2016 through to Election Day 2020.

This became the basis for An American Dreamer. He found that change can sometimes begin if those with fundamental differences can attempt to find common ground. An American Dreamer graphically illuminates the lives and feeling of many people in America, today, an America that is a truly divided country. Finkel has cleverly outlined Cummings’ experiences of confusion, frustration and optimism – and Cummings’ reminders how nice people could be, especially, if he did not think of them in political terms.

This publication is timely as the elections loom in America in early November 2024, particularly, the Presidential election which has the potential to be one of the most decisive in American history. Finkel outlines scenarios that provide examples of how some healing can be achieved where there is division but where there is also a willingness to attempt to genuinely understand how and why people with contrary views have arrived at those views.