A guide to the white trash planet for urban liberals
By Joe Bageant
If you are reading this, it is very likely you are a liberal, maybe even an outright screaming burn-down-the-goddam-country commie --- in which case I say, "Come sit by me comrade! (Especially if you are a blonde.) Like most lefties you probably live in an urban area, or someplace with reasonable cultural diversity. More than likely you are educated and can read this without moving your lips. Maybe you even live in the freethinking People's Republic of Berkeley, or bustle along under the fabled lights of Manhattan where you can see independent films and buy such things as leeks and soy milk at your grocery store.
I, however, live in a town where it is easier to find chitterlings, ponhaus and souse in the grocery store than a leek
and where Smokey and the Bandit still plays to packed movie houses year after year. My hometown's claim to fame is the 1983 "Rhinehart Tire Fire" in which five million discarded tires burned for nine months, gaining Winchester, Virginia, national news coverage and EPA superfund cleanup status. The smoke plume was visible in satellite earth photos, the cleanup took 18 years and the fire stands as my hometown's biggest event of the Twentieth Century. As for intellectual life, this is a town where damned few residents ever heard of say, Susan Sontag. Even though our local newspaper editor did manage a post mortem editorial on her, which basically said: Goodbye you piece-of-New- York-Jewish-commie-shit! Most townspeople reading the paper at their breakfast tables were asking themselves, "Who the hell is Susan Sontag?" They would ask the same thing about Daniel Barenboim or Hunter S. Thompson because they've never been on Oprah, either. Our general ambience was well summed up by a visiting Atlanta lawyer who looked around town and observed: "Dumb lordee, I reckon!" This, from a guy who's seen a lot of dumb crackers. Laugh if you want, but this is the red state American heartland everybody is talking about these days.
Is it possible for a higher class of person to live in American places like Winchester, Virginia? Not really. Only the local old family business elite and well-paid plant managers transferred here find such a place livable---the former for their social status and the latter in the safe knowledge they will be transferred out someday.
Most of the rest of us stuck in Winchester are what used to be called the traditional working class. These days, when we are called anything at all, it is White Trash. Poor working whites, people with only a high school diploma, if that. Nationally we are at least a quarter of white U.S. workers, thirty five million in all by the government's own shaved- down numbers. Nobody knows for sure in a nation that calls millions of $7 and hour janitors and marginal contract labor people with no insurance or benefits "independent businesspersons" and "entrepreneurs." Small independent business people are, we are told, "the backbone of America's economy." If that is true, then it's a sorry- assed thing because we are talking about citizens who bring down maybe 25-30K a year before taxes. With both spouses working. I told my freelance janitor friend Gator that he was the backbone of the American economy; he said he felt more like its asshole.
In any case, my people are not the people in the cubicle next to you at work (though they might well be cleaning it at nights when you are sleeping.) Mine are not people complaining about paying off their college loans, or who got the best parking spot at their office campus complex. They have different problems entirely, mostly related to truck payments. They are people like my old tree service boss Danny, who cut off a finger working with a chain saw, wrapped it in a MacDonald's foil wrapper and ran to the hospital to get it sewn back on. Or any of the thousands of people in this town who smash apples into apple sauce or boil them into vinegar at National Fruit Products, performing soul-grinding shift work year after year with no opportunity ever to be promoted, or of getting health care. All they get is the seasonal layoff when all the apples are smashed and the millions of gallons of vinegar bottled - working class people going nowhere in a town that smells of vinegar.
One of the problems we working class Southerners have is that educated progressive Americans see us as a bunch of obese, heavily- armed nose pickers. This problem is compounded by the fact that so many of us are pretty much that. Call it the "Dumb-crackers-lordee-I- reckon" syndrome. But liberals err in thinking this armed and drunken laboring species is an exclusively Southern breed. No matter where you live in this nation you will find us. We are the folks in front of you at the Wal-Mart checkout lugging a case of motor oil while having a nicotine fit. But even in such democratic venues as shopping, our encounters are limited because we do not buy designer beer and you do not buy ammo or motor oil by the case.
And if we aren't in the checkout line, then we are probably waiting on you as clerks. With our bright red regulated vests and nametags we do not look poor or desperate. But I can tell you that Roy, the smiling, wise old guy in an orange vest in the plumbing department of the local Home Depot - the guy who knows everything there ever was to know about plumbing, is limping around at 67 on bad knees with two bone-grafted discs from life as a construction laborer is working solely so that he can have health insurance. Not insurance from Home Depot, mind you, but so his entire paycheck can pay the private insurance he must have if he doesn't want to lose the rundown bungalow he and his wife bought right after the Korean War to medical bills. And that bungalow is now in such a bad neighborhood that only the slumlords who dominate our city council ever make an offer, and even then not much. He's been losing ground for 25 years, not that any of the tanned middle class suburban customers here or anywhere else give a good goddam.
This is solidly red state neo-con Virginia, where people have a ready explanation for Roy's condition in life: As Jimbo the newsstand owner here says, "They are losers who can't cut it in the greatest society on earth. Darwin was right. Gandhi was wrong. Tough shit!" Jimbo is the same guy who once advised me to "Always kick a man when he is down; it gives him incentive to get up." I sometimes think it was the meanest thing in hell that made America's little working class towns such as Winchester.
Paw, am I a paradox?
To be poor and white is a paradox in America. Whites, especially males, are supposed to have an advantage they exploit mercilessly. Yet most of the poor people in the United States are white (51%,) outnumbering blacks two to one and all other minority poverty groups combined. America is permeated with cultural myths about white skin's association with power, education and opportunity. Capitalist society teaches that we all get what we deserve, so if a white man does not succeed, it can only be due to laziness. But just like black and Latino ghetto dwellers, poor laboring whites live within a dead end social construction that all but guarantees failure. If your high school dropout daddy busted his ass for small bucks and never read a book in his life and your mama was a textile mill worker, chances are you are not going to be recruited by Yale Skull and Bones and grow up to be president of the United States, regardless of our national mythology to that effect. You are going to be pulling an eight-buck-an- hour shift someplace and praying for enough overtime to make the heating bill. A worker.