07
Bad Blood Michael Goodson Director of Exhibitions
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then [that] they get bitter—they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or toward anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” —Barack Obama, San Francisco, 2007 Witness above one of the most widely circulated subjects of willful miscontextualization in the last decade of American politics. Yet in most cases, those who have contested this quote are asleep and dreaming of the America that never was and never will be. When the quote is considered in its complete context, Obama is, of course, right. We—humans, generally, but most certainly Americans—are, by our nature, susceptible to the virulent pull of vitriol and ignorance. Todd Slaughter’s work in American Primitives explores the relationship between the American Transcendentalist movement’s declarations of self reliance and individualism and hate groups isolated within this country’s seemingly