Don't laugh, you're next!
Middle class liberals, or affluent conservatives for that matter, are hard put to understand poor white working class culture. With our guns, God and coarse noisy aesthetic, (let's face it, NASCAR and Shania Twain?) we look like a lower species, a beery subset of some sort. The truth is that poor white working culture is not a subset of any other American class. It does not operate below the middle and upper classes, but parallel to them. Just as there are few ways out of it, there are few ways in. Its inhabitants are born here. The educated left cannot easily get inside. When it comes to access, liberal social academics are camels passing through the needle's eye, though I've never met one who would admit it, or even knew that observing is not necessarily understanding. Consequently we find many books/studies focusing on ethnic minorities, but few credible ones about our defiant native homegrown poor. To my mind, it is impossible to be tenured and have street cred, but then I am just a prejudiced redneck prick from Winchester, Virginia, otherwise referred to as "Dickville."
Yet this place from which and about which I write, could be any of thousands of communities across the U.S. It is a parallel world created by an American system where caste and self-identity are determined by what one consumes, or cannot afford to consume, education and of course, the class into which one is born. Like most things American, it was about money from the get-go. The difference is that some of us have known this truth from birth and on brutal terms. For instance, few middle class Americans today ever sold newspapers on the street corner at age twelve to pay for school clothes or carried coal to a dirty living room stove all winter. I did both. They never sat down to a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner. If this sounds like some Depression era sob story, let me say that it was in 1959-62. And right now I can find a hundred people in my neighborhood who did the same, or some kids still doing it (often Latino these days). My point is that there are and always have been a helluva lot of us know-nothing laboring sons out here, whether more fortunate Americans acknowledge our struggles or not. But they should. You see, it's like this:
When the heartless American system is done reducing us to slobbering beer soaked zombies in the American labor gulag, your sweet ass is next.
Everybody loves the Dalai Lama, but nobody loves po' me!
Ain't no wonder libs got no street cred. Ain't no wonder a dope- addicted
clown like Limbaugh can call libs elitists and make it stick.
>From where we stand, knee-deep in doctor's bills and hoping the
local Styrofoam peanut factory doesn't cut the second shift, you ARE elite.
Educated middle class liberals (and education is the main distinction between my marginal white people and, say, you) do not visit our kind of neighborhoods, even in their own towns. They drink at nicer bars, go to nicer churches and for the most part, live, as we said earlier, clustered in separate areas of the nation, mainly urban. Consequently, liberals are much more familiar with the social causes of immigrants, or even the plight of Tibet, than the bumper crop of homegrown native working folks who make up towns like Winchester. Liberal America loves the Dalai Lama but is revolted by life here in the land of the pot gut and the plumber's butt.
Can't say as I blame them entirely, but then, that is why God created beer. To make ordinary life more attractive, or at least stomachable.
Whatever the case, helping the working poor does not mean writing another scholarly paper about them funded by grant money. That is simply taking care of one's middle class university educated self. Yet the cause of dick-in-the-dirt poor working white America is spoken for exclusively by educated middle class people who grew up on the green suburban lawns of America. However learned and good intentioned, they are not equipped to grasp the full implications of the new American labor gulag---or the old one for that matter. They cannot understand a career limited to yanking guts out through a chicken's ass for the rest of one's life down at the local poultry plant (Assuming it does not move offshore.) Being born working class carries moral and spiritual implications understood only through experiencing them. It comes back to street cred.
The census bureau keeps numbers on the working poor. Universities conduct studies and economists rattle off statistics. If studies and numbers alone could solve the problem of working poverty, then rip- off check cashing would not be one of the hottest franchises in the country and Manpower would not be our largest employer. Yes, and if a bullfrog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass. Reason and social science are not cutting it, and numbers cannot describe the soul and character of a people. Those same ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting and praise Jesus for every goddam wretched little daily non-miracle. (If that last part does not make sense to you it simply proves my point about the secular liberal disconnect.)
A good start on healing this rift might be this: the next time those on the left encounter these seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God- obsessed folks, maybe they can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, step forward and say, "Brother can I lend you a hand?"
Surely it would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Franklin Roosevelt and Mohandas Gandhi smile.
More crap about values
Before I am asked the more specific question, "What the fuck do you think middle class liberals should do then?" I'm gonna answer it. ORGANIZE! Quit voting for that pack of undead hacks called the Democratic Party and
ORGANIZE! Howard Dean is just another millionaire Yale frat boy---(Daddy was a Dean in Dean Whitter) ORGANIZE! Quit kidding yourself that the Empire will protect professionals and semi-professionals such as yourself and
ORGANIZE! Spend time on a Pentecostal church pew or in a blue- collar beer
joint and ORGANIZE! Join the Elks Club and ORGANIZE! Realize that there is no party whatsoever in the United States that represents anything but corporate interests and ORGANIZE! Start in your own honky wimp-assed white bread neighborhood group and ORGANIZE! Knock on doors and ORGANIZE! Move heaven and earth and hearts and minds and ORGANIZE! And if enough people do it, it will scare the living piss out of the political elite and the corporations and they will come to club you down like they did in Miami and
Seattle. But at least you will have been among the noble ones when the history is written.
There now. I've got it out of my system.
Given that every damned utterance or word published about America these days has to have political implications and relevancy to the crooked 2004 elections, let's talk about the much discussed political anger and "values issues' of hitherto faceless self-screwing working class folks. Tell ya what. I have both prayed and been shit-faced six ways to hell with these people and I am NOT seeing the much bally- hooed anger about the values
most often cited, such as gun control, abortion or gay marriage
True, these
are the issues of the hard-line Bible thumpers and fundamentalist
leadership that has harped on them for decades. And the politicians love
that crap. And apparently so do the media pundits.
But here in this particular heartland, once I step away from the
fundamentalist crazies, I am simply not seeing the homophobia so widely
proclaimed by the liberal establishment. Hell, we've got three gay guys and
at least one lesbian who hang out at my local redneck tavern and they all
are right in there drinking and teasing and jiving with everyone else. As
my hirsute 300-pound friend Pootie says: "Heck, I have a lot in common with
lesbians!" (I would concede however, that homosexual marriage, was just a
bit too much for some of the working class to accept in the 2004 elections.
It was the visuals.)
The working class people in my town are angry, but not especially angry at
Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, or unseen fetuses. I think working class
anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and
status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult
working class people suffer from employers, government both national, state
and local, and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors,
lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working
people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about
some other things too:
It is about the indignities suffered at the hands of managers and
bosses---being degraded to a working, faceless production unit in our
glorious new global economy.
It is about being ignored by the educated classes and the other similar
professional, political and business elites that America does not
acknowledge as elites.
It is about one's priorities being closer to home and more ordinary than
those of the powerful people who determine our lives.
It is about suffering the everyday lack of human respect from the
government, and every other institutional body except the church.
It is about working at Wal-Mart or Home Depot or Arby's wearing a nametag
on which you do not even rate a last name. You are just Melanie or Bobby,
there to kiss the manager's ass or find another gig.
It is about trying to live your life the only way you know how because you
were raised that way. But somehow the rules changed under you.
It is about trying to maintain some semblance of outward dignity to your
neighbors, when both you and the neighbors are living payday to payday,
though no one admits it.
It is about media-fabled things you've never seen in your own family:
college funds set aside for the kids, stock portfolios, vacation homes...
It is about the unacknowledged stress of both spouses working longer,
producing more for a paycheck that has been dwindling in purchasing power
since 1976.
Yes, it is about values. It is about the values we have forsaken as a
people---such as dignity, education and opportunity for everyone. And it is
about the misdirected anger of the working classes toward those they least
understand. You. And me.
By the way, the working people I am talking about are not entirely unhappy
with life, just angry to a certain degree at this point (and bound to be
angrier when the Bush regime finally runs the nation's economy off the
cliff.) They simply resist change because for decades change has always
spelled something bad---9/11, terrorism, job outsourcing
always something
bad headed toward worse.
Arise oh pissy liberals! It is one helluva comment on the American class
system that I get paid to speak, write about and generally expose to
liberal groups the existence of some 250 million working Americans who have
been fixing America's cars and paving its streets and waiting on its tables
from day one. As a noble and decent liberal New York City book editor told
me, "Seen from up here it is if your people were some sort of exotic, as if
you were from Yemen or something."
Jeesh!
This is not to berate educated liberal America---well, OK, a little. But if
liberal America has been somewhat too smug, my working class brethren have
been downright water-on-the-brain stupid to be misled so easily by the
likes of Karl Rove and the phony piety of George Bush. (And god dammit
Pootie, Saddam did NOT attack the World Trade Center!) However, liberals
and working people do need each other to survive what is surely coming,
that thing being delivered to us by the regime which promised us they would
"run this country like a business." Oh hell, yes, they are going to do it.
So the left must genuinely connect face to face with Americans who do not
necessarily share all of our priorities, if it is ever to be relevant again.
Once we begin to look at the human faces of this declining republic's many
moving parts, the inexplicable self-screwing working class voter is not so
inexplicable after all. God, gays and guns alone do not explain the
conservative populism of the 2004 elections. College educated liberals and
blue-collar working people need to start separating substantive policy
issues from the symbolic ones. Fight on the substance, the real ground zero
stuff that ordinary working people can feel and see---make real pledges
about real things. Like absolutely guaranteed health care and a decent
living wage. And mean it and deliver it.
Whoa ho! It ain't gonna be easy, because poor working class Americans, like
the rest of us, have become fearful, numb, authority worshipping fools
reluctant to give up the mindless heroin of cheap consumerism
just like
you
just like me. They'll never come to us, so we must go to them. Which
means working the churches and the wards and the watering holes, the
Kiwanis Pancake Breakfasts, our workplaces, and lo! Even the beeriest
underbelly of the America
where nice liberal middle class people do not
let their kids go for fear it will damage their precious little SAT scores.
Again, nobody said it would be easy.
Brotherhood. Solidarity. Compassion. Too idealistic? Futile? Maybe. But if
these are not worthy goals, then nothing is.
Delivering on all this in a peaceful orderly fashion will be a bitch. So
hard in fact that I do not much intend to participate. Fuck it. I've wanted
an out and outright armed revolution ever since the November elections. But
that's another matter and the guy listening in from Homeland Security right
now can go take a flying fuck. Write to me in Gitmo, y'all! Just address it
to "Joe from Yemen."
Joe Bageant is a magazine editor and writer living in Winchester Virginia.
He may be contacted at bageantjb at netscape.net. <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism> > Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant.