The Dog of America
Updated: Sep 18
What we call deplorable, Kingsolver calls home.
Barbara Kingsolver writes the second act to Dickens's David Copperfield with her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Demon Copperhead. Like Dickens, Kingsolver's background makes her novel part fiction, part biographical. Dickens was that poor kid laboring away in Britain's warehouses during the Industrial Revolution while Kingsolver lived at ground zero of the opioid crisis, Southern Appalachia.
Both novels' protagonists are more memorable than the socio-economic systems that stripped them of their human potential from birth. That's intentional. Nearly a decade after the opioid crisis was declared a public health emergency, we still haven't reconciled ourselves to the fact that Appalachia's destruction and the rise of populism are the same story. But a baby born on the floor of a single-wide trailer to an overdosed teenager? That's memorable. And so begins the story of the Millennials' protagonist: "First, I got myself born."
I was slow to catch on. The stepdads crushing six-packs in their boxers looked like deadbeats to me. Then Kingsolver took me to school. During 5th period, Demon's classroom breaks into debate over whether the mining company has been good for the community. On one side, the CEO's daughter and her friends. On the other, everyone else. After choice words were said, the teacher--who Kingsolver uses as the voice of historical relevance--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."
Appalachia was always going to be a coal region. The Cumberland Mountains are rich with natural coal deposits that have been powering our electricity for generations¹. But the coal industry seems to have ensured it's the only opportunity. In doing so, they sealed the fate of all Appalachians.
The decline of coal is a three act play. The first is mountaintop removal. Rather than sending in workers to mine the mountains, we started blowing them up instead. Environment be damned. Less payroll is good for the bottom line. Natural resources never make for stable business. COVID was the most recent example, depressing global demand for coal. Then the final blow--natural gas.
Natural gas used to be fives times as expensive as coal. Now it's cheaper². Horizontal drilling and fracking delivered an energy revolution unlike we've ever seen. For the first time since 1953, the U.S. is energy independent. This is great news for all Americans, aside from those in the coal industry.
Coal fell off a cliff. Production fell 65% in Appalachia from 2005 to 2020³. It doesn't look like it's coming back either. Since so many service jobs relied on coal workers, the decline in coal employment had spillover effects for the rest of the region.
This is what structural unemployment looks like. Think food desert, but for jobs. Those step-dads were staying home because there was no opportunity to pursue. When structural unemployment is geographically concentrated like it is in Appalachia, the problems become inter-generational. Hope dies. Every bad stat you can think of goes up. The irony is that their unemployment isn't reflected in our official unemployment measure. Only cyclical unemployment--people actively looking for work in a healthy economy--is. We literally keep these people out of sight and out of mind.
Only Big Pharma saw them.
In the novel, Big Pharma is represented by Aunt Jill's pill-pushing boyfriend with a big smile. When she sees what opioids are doing to her town, she dumps him. Later, while driving back with Demon after rescuing her niece from certain death to drugs, Aunt Jill turns to Demon and says, "They did this to us." Kingsolver wants it known: her people are victims. She's right.
Purdue targeted economically distressed regions⁴. During the discovery process of the national opioid litigation — a multi-district case brought by nearly 1,300 counties and states against drug manufacturers and distributors, with Purdue Pharma among the defendants — The Washington Post fought a year-long legal battle and won court-ordered access to the DEA's ARCOS database in 2019, publishing what became known as "The Opioid Files." The data exposed the sheer scale of oversupply and distributors' failure to flag suspicious shipments. It also showed exactly who got hit hardest: Purdue and its peers had disproportionately flooded counties with high rates of physical labor and government subsidies. AKA Appalachia. Ranking counties by pills per capita, 19 of the top 20 were there. This is the Opioid Belt.
West Virginia used to lead the nation in coal production. Now they rank first in deaths to drug overdoses⁵. Despite the carnage Purdue Pharma wrought on its own fellow citizens, the Sackler's, who own Purdue, never set foot in jail. And we wonder why these same people voted for a big orange middle finger to the same politicians and systems that stood by and watched their demise. They voted for their lives and we called them deplorable for it.
Demon Copperhead is a story of perceptions. Demon's foster brother Tommy can't understand why every cartoon he sees on the internet has the dumb redneck as the butt of the joke. Demon responds: "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. Kingsolver doesn't want our pity. She doesn't make a policy plea. In fact, she shows reconciliation comes from within. It comes from reclaiming the slur we threw their way and turning it into hope.
The sheer amount of human potential we torched in Appalachia is incalculable, and we're not done. Auto towns bracing for the EV transition, gas counties one price swing from the same cliff — there are other Appalachias, waiting to find out if the rest of the country is watching this time.
JONES, JAMES B. “COAL MINING IN THE CUMBERLAND PLATEAU, 1880-1930.” Appalachian Cultural Resources Workshop Papers (Coal Mining in the Cumberland Plateau. 1880-1930), NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, npshistory.com/publications/appalachian/sec9.htm. Accessed 17 Sept. 2026.
“Annual Energy Outlook 2026 - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).” Annual Energy Outlook 2026 - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA),
Bowen, Eric. An Overview of Coal and the Economy in Appalachia Fourth Quarter 2020 Update, www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Coal-and-the-Economy-in-Appalachia_Q4_2020-Update.pdf. Accessed 17 Sept. 2026.
www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.
Carmichael, Tim. “This Is How Big Pharma Targeted Appalachia and Fueled America’s Deadliest Drug Crisis.” Echoes of Appalachia, 17 July 2025, appalachianmemories.org/2025/07/17/this-is-how-big-pharma-targeted-appalachia-and-fueled-americas-deadliest-drug-crisis/.
“CDC Wonder.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wonder.cdc.gov/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.
