The landscape Dean now lived in was a mix of old and new: old wooden signs, dilapidated tobacco barns, fast food restaurants, and new two-story houses in neat rows that made up a new development. Dean saw it as a sinful place but also a place that offered a redemption dream. Once, Dean drove by the Cleveland Country Baptist church that had broken his father’s will when it refused to hire him as a pastor around 1975. Now, right next door was a Bojangles restaurant, the same restaurant he thought represented everything that was wrong about how Americans lived and consumed food grown states away and produced by poor workers who hated their jobs. He was now seeing beyond his hometown to the hidden truths below the surfaces and noticing how Americans had grown dependent on corporations and would not survive.

Dean met a writer of a blog called Clusterfuck Nation, which predicted what the writer called “the long emergency,” America in the apocalypse caused by the age of oil scarcity and the breakdown of the suburban way of life and public order. Those who lived in small towns or off the land would be best equipped to survive, but southerners overall would fare worse in the long emergency.