Doug Henwood wrote:
> [also bounced for HTML code - Sam, who's Ace Hayes? I love the idea
> of a blueblood like Alex "Ace" Cockburn putting someone in mind of a
> redneck]
>
> 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>
>
>