Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead reimagines David Copperfield for a modern era, offering a raw portrayal of the opioid crisis in southern Appalachia. Through the life of Demon Copperhead, a boy born into crushing poverty, Kingsolver lays bare the devastation wrought upon her hometown.

---

"First, I got myself born," begins the novel. Gen Z's protagonist is born in a single-wide trailer in Southern Appalachia to an overdosed mom. From the opening words to the last, a lot happens, but little changes--speaking to the limitations of a system designed to keep you dumb and drugged.

I was slow to catch on. The stepdads working through a six pack on the couch in their boxers appeared to me as dead beats. Then Kingsolver took me to school. One day in class, a debate over the town's main employer, the mining company, breaks out. On the pro side, the CEO's daughter and her posse. Con side, everyone else. After personal things were said and names were called, the teacher interjects:

"Wouldn't you think the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you've heard? Don't you think the mine companies knew that? What the companies did was put the shuthole on any choice other than going to the mines. Not just here, but also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to be all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only."

Entire counties were made reliant on coal, then became expendable. A new mining practice simply blows the tops of mountains clean off. No more need more for miners. Aside from the environmental degradation is the massive hit to jobs. Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Appalachia all use mountain top removal. Rubbing salt in the wound, coal got expensive.

Fracking made the US the top producer of natural gas in the world. Vast quantities of natural gas make coal relatively more expensive, so fewer will buy it. The Energy Information Administration reduced their forecast for coal production by 22% over the next two years. Coal producing towns already boast our nation's highest unemployment rates at 10-14%.

Being out of a job is tough, but losing all prospects of future employment is so much worse. Structural unemployment is when our economy has no place for you. It's being a factory worker after manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, or in Detroit after Ford left. In an instant the world moves on, but your bills still come due. Of the three types of unemployment, structural is by far the worst. It kills aspiration. Teen pregnancies rise, as does crime and the prevalence of the Department of Human Services.

When it's geographically concentrated, as it is in Appalachia, the problems become inter-generational. Even with a responsive government, there's no immediate solution. After the onset of structural unemployment, communities can still experience real wages well below national averages for decades. As if all of this isn't tough enough, the neighborhood doctor is now prescribing opioids. Good luck.

Big Pharma is personified in Aunt Jill's pill-pushing boyfriend with a big smile. Opioids coming to Virginia was no accident. Purdue targeted at risk communities. Areas of high unemployment and government subsidies made for ideal candidates. West Virginia used to supply our miners, now they rank first in deaths of despair, more than doubling the number of people lost to drugs or suicide in the last 8 years. Opioid deaths compare to those of the AIDS crisis. Unlike the AIDS crisis, today's was manufactured.

After dumping her boyfriend for seeing what opioids did to her town, Aunt Jill turns to Demon and tells him, "they did this to us." High on oxy, Demon can't comprehend the who or the what.

For the who, watch Netflix's Fall of the House of Usher, and for the what, read Demon Copperhead. Directors and authors alike have been beating this drum for a while. The message seams to fall on deaf ears.

From a policy perspective the rise of structural unemployment is mind boggling. The generation strain this will put on our welfare state and the snuffing out of human potential in such scale is tragic. But hey, out of sight, out of mind.

Structural unemployment isn't included in the official unemployment statistic. Only cyclical unemployment is reported. So, we may have tens of thousands of people between jobs at a time when millions will never be employed again and cheer low unemployment! This is like saying you're getting health because the cut on your hand is healing while your cancer spreads. At the very least, including the structurally unemployed in official statistics of employment would go a long way towards reorienting them into our national and political consciousness.

More than economics, Demon Copperhead is a story of perceptions. It's a point of view from the people we've decided not worth our time--the "deplorables". Demon recalls himself explaining this to his foster brother Tommy: "I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everyone needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at kid, kid finds and kicks the dog. We're the dog of America."

Sometimes, progress is simply removing our foot from the neck of whomever we've determined to be our dog. An entire generation is lost because we turned our back on them, got them addicted to drugs, then had the audacity to turn our noses up at them. Through our policy, rhetoric, and actions we need to tell them, "We see you and we need you."

Reconciliation's begun. Biden's Build Back Better agenda is sending large amounts of capital and industry to Appalachia. Unfortunately, saving us from a problem they created is another example of how the government plays both the arsonist and the firefighter--ultimately increasing it's power as we're left picking up the pieces.