America on the road to perdition

James Doran drives from Wall Street to Detroit to discover how the American Dream turned into a nightmare

Our first pit stop in rural New Jersey, almost 100 miles from our starting point, is not the sort of restaurant you would find on Wall Street. Johnny’s Hot Dog is a few miles off I-80 in the unfortunately-named town of Buttzville. The roadside shack has been serving franks and fries since the Forties and always has a crowd at lunchtime.

Larry Holubesko, 66, has lived around Buttzville all his life. He is a security guard at a nearby Native American casino earning $800 a week. The trailer he lives in cost $32,000, which he paid in cash, and he has no debts. ‘To me, the American Dream should be: always live within your means. That’s the way we learned it growing up in the Fifties,’ he says. ‘I’m from the other side of the mountain and I remember rolling bales of hay, getting a glass of milk from the cow on the farm. We would go swimming in the river here for fun and if we were going to go out for something special my uncle would bring us for hotdogs here. Now people want too much out of life. They want what they can’t afford.’

Holubesko thinks he will get through the downturn but younger people and those with debts will not be so lucky. ‘We’re going to survive but your kids do not have a prayer,’ he adds. ‘There are not going to be good jobs for them in this country. They’re sending all the good jobs overseas. As for buying a house, forget about it. That market is dead and buried.’

Down the road are more signs of just how bad the economy has become in rural America. A Mexican man in his early forties lines up pumpkins by the side of the road. His name is Augustine and he has been in the US for just seven months, working on a smallholding during the autumn harvest. He says that the money is so bad he would be better off back in Mexico, where he will go if things do not pick up within a month. ‘I just can’t afford to live in this country,’ he says.