Atlantic City, 2017 — © Brian Rose

It does not take much imagination to see Atlantic City with its extreme juxtaposition of wealth and poverty as a metaphor for much of what is going on in the country as a whole. The casino hotels rise up above wooden row houses and churches like the old steel mills of the nation’s heartland. Where the factories of the past once forged the raw goods that fed the might and power of a great nation, the massive casinos of Atlantic City represent the industrialization of tourism and the exploitation of the shrinking hopes and dreams of the American middle class.