A gonzo look at America, its culture of distraction

In my younger days, I had a love affair with punk rock. The music was raw, uneven and jagged as a broken beer bottle; it was exuberant, presuming to know the answers and that they could be found on the street, far from power — and along the way it told some necessary truths.

I was not quite midway through Charlie LeDuff ’s “S—show” when I realized it was all that — a punkrock look at modern America and the toxic media circus described by the title.

LeDuff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter, television journalist and author of “Detroit: An American Autopsy,” an investigation into the decline of his hometown. But “S—show!” is not the deep dive that “Detroit” was. Rather, LeDuff skips wide across America, and therein lies the book’s bounty and its burden.

He sets off in search of what is killing the American Dream with a visit to Roger Ailes, the late former head of Fox News. There, he proposes a TV show called “The Americans,” about the corroding American heart — this, by the way, is two years before Donald Trump glided down that escalator. Ailes, according to LeDuff, pauses only to wonder whether he can control this reporter before greenlighting his show.

So off Leduff goes, to slog through a country that is “bankrupt and on high boil,” believing that his reporting requires accuracy but also “style and presentation, hyperbole and humor, ostentation and outrage.”

LeDuff ’s gonzo reporting is nothing if not braggadocious, intent on establishing the author’s street-andbarroom cred. LeDuff faces off with rent-a-cops and real ones, eats wild-rabbit stew with Wonder Bread and margarine.

LeDuff ’s episodes range from brilliant to pointless. In one evocative scene, LeDuff warns a black rental-car clerk that his customers, a Ku Klux Klan leader and his assistant, are members of America’s oldest hate group. Later the assistant says of the clerk: “He was just an average guy doing his job. You can’t hate all the time.” In a less revelatory tale, LeDuff recounts his attempt to find the two protagonists in an iconic photo from the civil rights struggle in Alabama — a pursuit that ends fruitlessly.

LeDuff disrupts smugglers on the Rio Grande, visits Ferguson, Mo., and reports on Black Lives Matter. He encounters a working-class man in Alabama who has lost faith in unions. “The union might have had its purpose way back when, but so did he,” LeDuff writes. “Now he didn’t count.”

But LeDuff seems to spend little time with this fellow. We don’t even learn the guy’s name. Too often LeDuff is there and gone. So his book begins to feel thin, even when you’re pretty sure he’s nailing it. America has some deep stories to tell, but LeDuff ’s approach can feel as distracted as the Twitterverse.

In this, though, I feel for him. I can almost hear LeDuff asking, “How the hell am I going to tell this story to a country with a culture of distraction and a 140-character brain?”

“S—show!” can be exhilarating for the originality of its take on where we are, and then it can dump on us fluffy, pompous pronouncements that feel way too easy.

LeDuff blames international trade deals for job losses that began well before NAFTA and GATT. He visits Reynosa, Mexico, and discovers maquiladoras (assembly plants) of companies that once had factories in New York, Illinois and Michigan

The process he describes reflects the world coming to compete with us with cheap labor after languishing in either pre-industrial impoverishment or totalitarian straitjackets. Reynosa is one place to see that. The city’s first large maquiladora belonged to Zenith, which by the late 1970s was employing thousands of Mexicans making TVs that had once been assembled in Chicago — a harbinger of what was going to happen, international trade deals or no.

But if you’ve read this far, you know not to expect Brookings Institution nuance. This is kick-in-thecrotch storytelling, and a good part of the time it works.