In 2020, Joey Evans lost his job as a barman as Covid swept across America, as did his wife Nicole, a waitress. The two Texans decided they had little hope of returning to the workforce.
But they did have the house they’d owned for 20 years, which was worth four times what they’d paid for it. They decided to sell up and put the proceeds towards a road trip taking in all 50 US states.
They wouldn’t just hit the road, they’d capture their experience and put it on YouTube. Evans had some skills: he’d written and directed a series of risible horror films that had screened at fringe film festivals and even on Prime Video. He rebranded his existing “weird news” YouTube channel as Joe & Nic’s Road Trip and off they went. It didn’t go well. The first dozen or so videos made unremarkable travel fare and got little engagement. Then they went to Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital.
Their first video from Jackson, “A look at the second most dangerous city in America”, has been watched 750,000 times. (“You come here and it’s hard to believe that this is the United States,” Evans sighs to the camera in a forlorn, broken neighbourhood. “It’s just like it’s bein’ forgotten.”) Their most popular video, a roll through the urban ruins of Gary, Indiana, has had 11 million views.
It turned out what people on the internet wanted to see were the places no one goes. The channel became largely a chronicle of American decline.
I’ve been spending quite a lot of time recently with Joe & Nic. It’s kind of haunting, slow TV; a parade of broken roads and buildings surrendering to nature. Evans drives at low speed through towns in the South, the Rust Belt states, the Dakotas, hangs a wide-angle lens out the window and talks about what he’s seeing. His commentary can be artless at times, but he’s admirably consistent in his use of data. For every town, he has US Census data on population (almost invariably declining), demographics, crime rates, median income, cost of living, property values and poverty.
Evans is no urban liberal. He fumes about Oakland, California’s Democratic leadership on a drive through the backstreets, lined with immobile camper vans. He does set the record straight on Springfield, Ohio, the city where, according to Donald Trump, “they’re eating the dogs”. Springfield’s Haitian community was not forced on it by the government, he says, but converged there in the hope of a better life (local businesses and city leaders also encouraged migrants to address labour shortages).
Springfield looks better than most places. In most places, there are neighbourhoods where the lawns are mowed, or streets where well-kept homes hang on incongruously next to houses whose roofs have collapsed. The smallest scraps of ghost towns typically have low crime rates, as if nobody can muster the motivation to go out and offend. Evans’ background in zombie films often seems apposite.
Indeed the overwhelming question posed by his videos is: where is everyone? Even in the cities it’s as if Middle America has abandoned its main street. Whole videos pass without sight of human activity ‒ economic or social.
According to a Moody’s analysis this year, consumer spending – which accounts for 70% of American economic output – increasingly relies on the wealthiest 10% of Americans. That 10% now does nearly half the spending in the economy. The people in the places Evans visits are increasingly irrelevant.
Although the inhabitants’ voting preferences track more to race than anything else, you can see how some might choose electoral nihilism. Yet the accelerating enfeeblement of America at the hands of the White House, the creeping dissolution of democracy, even the war on its distant cities, seem unlikely to serve them well. It’s not a good dream.
