Phil A. Neel

“In Nevada I could feel the Long Crisis with a terrifying intimacy, as if it was some sort of uncanny, bodily contact— like the feeling you get camped out in the swirling, galaxy-littered darkness of the open range when a reptile brushes up against your prostrate body. Except that the reptile at least shares with you some deep, serpentine connection, a lineage lost somewhere in the plummet of primeval time. The Crisis, on the other hand, is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space. It is a social terror made of masses of machinery and animals, yet not in any way kin to these components. And what we sense of it today is merely one of its many limbs extending backward from its true body writhing somewhere just out of sight, at home in our own incomprehensible future.”
― Phillip Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

“The feeling was much the same when urban liberals in America's coastal cities looked at the blood-red election map in November of 2016: their only possible response, who are these people? What is this place? The answer? This is the Hinterland. It is the sunken continent that stretches between the constellation of spectacular cities, the growing desert beyond the palace walls. These are the people who live there.”
― Phillip Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict