Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 08:50:57 -0800 From: Sam Pawlett <rsp at uniserve.com>
The comments by A Cockburn made me think of the late Ace Hayes and Jim Goad (now ensconced in a federal prison.)
-------
The Redneck Manifesto (book review) by Ace R. Hayes
The Redneck Manifesto (1997, Simon & Schuster) is crude, rude and right on. Every American should read this book. Jim Goad cuts to the chase with his cogent arguments and evidence that class rather than race is the key to American history.
We, the people, get treated like mushrooms by the elite media and academia in the incessant crap that we have to fight each other over scraps from the imperial table. When 20% of the people take 80% of the national income and the bottom 80% of the people are set up to fight each other over the 20% left over, we become our own worst enemy, if we fall for his idiocy.
Once in a while a book and writer comes along that just flat cuts to the bone. Goad lays the historical crimes of British North American Imperialism on the doorstep of the real villains, the British aristocracy, and then the American plutocracy. Most whites and blacks were shipped to America for the same purpose: to make a few rich people even richer.
Race was a footnote and class was the text of all that has twisted the people of America into loving their oppressors and hating their natural allies.
These excerpts, from Chapter 5, "Workin' Hard," are some samples of his truth-telling:
"The working class doesn't write a lot of history books. The working class doesn't produce many movies or radio shows. The working class doesn't tend to hire media consultants or theatrical agents. The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its popular image.
"That's because the working class was too busy working.
"The working class has plenty of reasons to be angry. Unfortunately, only the working class realizes it.
"Riddle me this, Candy Pants - what portion of lowbrow white rage has NOTHING to do with n-word hatred and instead bubbles up from the accumulated traumas of being a historically shit-upon laboring class? Is it thinkable that these so-called Angry White Males may be more furious with their white bosses than with their black coworkers? What degree of their white-knuckled hatred might conceivably arise from generations of being annihilated on the front lines of war, shot down by company police, and chewed up like sausage by industrial accidents? Might redneck hostility be explicable not through bigotry, but from hundreds of years of sinking slowly into a demoralizing turd-heap of debt, overwork, and broken promises? . . .
"While today's young'uns are bound to know a lot about racism, they probably couldn't tell you a thing about American labor history. And it's too bad, because they're being fattened for slaughter just like their ancestors were. Ever notice that the white working class really isn't much of a cinematic theme anymore? It's all race, no class. You'll see plenty of To Kill a Mockingbirds, but fewer and fewer On the Waterfronts. We continue to flog ourselves over cowboys and Injuns, but we feel no guilt over what railroad companies did to rail workers. A second won't pass when someone doesn't reloop film reels of white cops clubbing black guys, but you'll never see footage of Pinkerton guards machine-gunning coal miners.
"The hugest story in America isn't racism, it's downsizing. But the major media pip-squeaks emit nary a chirp about our widening economic apartheid. Most corpo-media bootlickers, whether flavored 'establishment' or 'alternative,' seem vastly removed from the average white douchebag worker's experience. Their stock in trade is either status quo ass-kissing or shameless slumming - establishment reporters praise greed yuppie sharks, while alternative writers tearfully lionize crack whores. If you aren't a white millionaire or a black derelict, no one wants to know you. It's noteworthy that both types of writer - establishment apologists and alternative excuse-makers - are typically drawn from Whiteydom's middle and upper classes. Working-class white knuckle-heads can rarely afford the time and grueling rejection required to develop a writing career. So it's understandable that the preps and trust-fund brats would get the working-class story all wrong. Understandable, if unforgivable.
"Of all the hating I've done in my life - and I've done my share - ninety-nine percent of it was directed at rich white people, most of them my bosses. . . .
"Some nincompoops think that if racism disappeared, injustice would, too. They appear to believe that the underclass would vanish if people stopped discriminating on the basis of race or gender. As with all wishful thinkers, they're tragically wrong. Getting rid of discrimination won't eliminate unemployment. It won't dismantle the class system. It won't wipe away the line between those who sweat and those who don't. Quite simply - too simple for the simpletons to get it - social equality is impossible in a world composed of bosses and workers. . . .
"Boom! Three hundred sixty-one blasted to death in Monongah, West Virginia, in 1907. POW! One hundred eighty-three exploding bodies in Eccles, West Virginia, seven years later. Crunch! One hundred twelve West Virginia miners killed in one shot at Layland in 1915. BAM! On hundred nineteen slaughtered in Benwood, West Virginia, in 1924. Even though World War I left ten million corpses in its wake, American soldiers were statistically safer on Europe's battlefields than coal miners were in West Virginia during the same period (footnote: Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, p. 1415). Appalachian miners had the industrial world's steepest death rate. Bodies were being hauled out of the mines with the same casual indifference as if they were lumps of coal, only the coal was worth more.
"So many dead flies along the windowsill. Shove another body under the pile driver and watch it get crushed. Mounds of dead workers. Their blood soaks through work shirts into the soil, fertilizing the economy. They enter the fun house young and healthy; they are shit out the other end hobbled, deformed, and cancer-stained. All those eviscerated coal-miner corpses were nothing unique to the world of free labor. The crude machinery of the old British workhouses had always served as accidental torture racks, shredding the fingers and limbs of adults or children so deadly tired they didn't realize they were leaning too close into the churning metal. American railroad workers dropped dead at the clip of around two thousand yearly throughout the 1890s. Another two hundred thousand rail workers were maimed and injured during that decade (footnote: Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 272). In the year 1914 alone, an estimated thirty-five thousand American lost their lives while working (footnote: Ibid., p. 320). Throughout the 1920s, roughly a quarter-million Americans were killed on the job, and an additional million were crippled for life (footnote: Ibid., p. 373). During the Vietnam War, there wasn't one year in which soldiers' casualties outnumbered those killed in American workplaces (footnote: Appy, Working-Class War, p. 7). And that statistic only counts death by accident, not all the fatal work-related illnesses such as black lung, blood poisoning, nerve damage, and any one of countless types of cancer. Even in the brotherly 1990s, the American workplace murders around fourteen thousand bodies yearly, not counting deaths linked to work-related illnesses (footnote: Parenti, 'Hidden Holocaust, USA'). Long-haul truckers, those archetypal redneck workers, wind up as roadkill every year. In 1992, six hundred one trucker deaths were traced directly to falling asleep from overwork (footnote: Trucking '95, 3/95, p. 24). . . .
"Those who complained about the new conditions were handed pink slips. Those who tried to unionize and counter the bosses' power were attacked by hired armies of club-swinging company police who left miners crawling on the ground, bleeding from cracked-open skulls. Although the coal companies were downsizing, they had enough money to hire armed guards and private detectives and masked goons to smash the fledgling unions through terrorist violence. Execution-style slayings of union organizers were common. And beyond these privately owned militias, the Big Bosses had enough political sway to call in the state militia or National Guard when it appeared that the miners weren't being beaten down easily enough.
"The majority of the nineteen miners killed by company police in Pennsylvania's Lattimer Massacre of 1897 had been shot in the back. So had all ten strikers murdered by police during Chicago's 1937 Republic Steel Strike. The names given to some of the era's company/union clashes - "Bloody Harlan," "Bloody Mingo," and "The Matewan Massacre" - show that it was a thunderously violent period. Typical of the antiunion hatred endemic to police was the late-1930s boast of Dadeville, Alabama, Sheriff Cliff Corprew to striking workers: 'We're going to use machine guns and we're going to mow every God damn one of you down' (footnote: Kelly, Hammer and Hoe, p. 174).
"Machine guns - specifically, Gatling guns - were what the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency fired on striking miners during 1914s Ludlow Massacre in southern Colorado. Sixty-six people were murdered by Rockefeller-hired police. Eleven of the victims were women and children. Who had been burned into human toast when guards set fire to the strikers' tent camp. Megakaskrillionaire John Davison Rockefeller, concerned that his public image had been damaged, posed for several photographs of himself giving dimes to needy children."
If you would like to see Mr. Goad's Web site, the address is:
<http://www.teleport.com/~goad>