One Very Angry Nation

The way Gavin Esler sees it, Americans are angry.

They’re angry about politicians, lawyers and big government. They’re angry about race, abortion, crime and stagnant wages. They’re so angry, so polarized, that they no longer are sure if the American dream works.

What makes Esler’s perspective unique is this: He’s an outsider, the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Washington correspondent from 1989 to 1996.

Esler has attempted to document this rage in a book, “The United States of Anger: The People and the American Dream.” Esler broke free from Washington politics and traveled the country during his eight-year tour of America, discovering anger in nearly every corner of the country.

In Arkansas, he met “the country doctor of the 1990s, armed like a cop and drawing his gun like a cowboy.” In Minnesota, he attended an anti-abortion meeting where activists sold T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Intolerance Is a Beautiful Thing.”

He talked to a super-commuter who lived in Ohio and worked in Florida. He spent an evening with a laid-off worker, holding on to his home and slice of the American dream in a self-built cabin in a frozen New Hampshire forest. He listened as a Mississippi teacher anguished about trying to mold scarcely literate children for a computer age.

A trip to Oklahoma City found Esler interviewing Kathy and Glen Wilburn, determined grandparents “on an unending mission for the truth” about the terrorist blast that destroyed the federal building in April 1995, killing scores, including their own two grandchildren. The Wilburns tracked down hundreds of leads on the case. They also have carefully preserved their grandchildren’s possessions, including a soiled diaper. The Wilburns no longer trust their government.

Changes sweep America, Esler writes, “with a speed that leaves tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding taxpayers disgusted, angry and fearful that the most successful country in the history of the world is on the brink of cataclysmic failure.”

He writes that “belief untroubled by reason” lies at the heart of the angriest people in America, such as the anti-government militias. Others have been driven to despair by a rapidly changed economy and technological change.

He blames American lawyers for helping foster a culture of whining and anger. There are too many lawyers in America, he says, writing too many laws and filing too many frivolous lawsuits.

In 1989, the BBC sent Esler to Washington after stints covering stories in Russia, China and Northern Ireland.

He discovered a country in search of itself and its place in the world at the end of the Cold War. “I was amazed that there wasn’t a sense of celebration,” he says. “There was a sort of sense that things had gone wrong.”

Esler kept noticing weird things. Like violence. He figured out that statistically, he was safer in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the height of the terrorist “troubles” than in Washington.

Riots were different too. “Every riot I’d ever been to in Northern Ireland was a riot of purpose,” he says. “But the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King case were simply anarchy. People were trying to grab what they could. One person we got on film was arrested by the cops in Hollywood for stealing a bag of ice. This man was putting his life, his entire future on the line, for a bag of ice from a liquor store. This was not a rational act. This was just anger.”

He also covered the 1992 presidential race, in which George Bush was heavily favored after the Persian Gulf War victory. But while traveling in Iowa with Democratic candidate Paul Tsongas, Esler noticed that people weren’t talking about the war victory. They were furious about the economy.

“People were asking, ‘How come I don’t have any health care? How come I can’t plant crops this year because I don’t know if I’m going to go bust or not?’ ” Esler recalls.

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In his daily television reports from the United States, it was hard for Esler to tell this complicated American story to a British audience.

“Europeans have this bizarre view of the U.S,” he says. “We see booming stock markets, the triumph of the Cold War, a country winning every Olympic gold medal, television reruns of ‘Baywatch,’ ‘Dallas’ and ‘Superman.’ Europeans think they know the U.S. But what they don’t get, and what they don’t quite understand, is the degree to which American society is quite different to Hollywood’s portrayal of it.”

As a Briton, Esler is accustomed to voting in elections in which a turnout of less than 70% is cause for scandal. But in America, where the turnout doesn’t even reach 50%, he notes that “those who do not vote need take only a short step further towards failing to accept the moral authority of a government they did not endorse.”

In the end, Esler sees a country faced with unrest and violence, with cities that “perpetually hover one court case, one police beating, one shooting away” from a repeat of the riots that engulfed Los Angeles in 1992. Yet he remains confident that the center of American life will hold, aided by an adaptable economy.

“The good news about the United States is, it’s endlessly inventive,” he says. “In America, they’re always solving problems, always practical, always looking to do better.”