perhaps you could pinpoint the place where someone argued that drinking nasty coffee would help workers?
>On the subject of hicks & inbreds, I have a certain degree of experience,
>having grown up among the men who farm (and occasionally, fuck) sheep, high
>up in the Welsh mountains where it is quite certain that no edible arable
>crop will ever grow. RS Thomas, who is regarded in the Principality as a
>greater poet than either Yeats or Dylan Thomas, wrote a number of poems
>which sum up the genuine tension between respect for a way of life and
>horror at the kind of individuals which it typically produces, three of
>which I reproduce below (the third, "Welsh Landscape", is the most famous).
>
>dd
and anyone with half a brain could write poetry about the urban, cosmopolitan professional classes that indicates both a respect for and horror at the individuals it typically produces.
etc.
the complaint is that many lefties--lifestyle or not--would never be caught dead mentioning that they would flee from living in the cultural tundra of the south bronx. that is a recognizably racist desire and urban flight has been a frequent focus of left critique. further, most self-respecting lefties wouldn't blame urban blight on the character or nature of people by reducing the issue to one in which their living conditions are a result of something that has to do with their skin color. when it comes to the rural poor, however, many lefties, lifestyle or not, wouldn't blink when describing people who live in the "backwaters" as "inbred". it is part of a hidden process of racialization: it finds their cultural practices to be a result of some sort of congenital condition.
the last thing i would ever argue for is an uncritical valorization of the lives of the rural poor/working class. what i will argue for is a more nuanced, sophisticated class analysis that recognizes that the attitudes many on the left harbor toward these folks is a major stumbling block to building any sort of left movement in the US. carrol will complain to say that it's not attitudes that create these problems, but the structural conditions of capitalism. nonsense. the two are related. consider, for example, that a more widespread feminist movement hasn't taken off because the structural conditions of capitalism have not been ripe for such a movement. that shouldn't stop us from, for instance, explaining to Ian that we ought to think of abortion in a certain kind of way or that we ought to do what we can to educate one another about our implicit sexist assumptions.
kelley