Very good. First Jacobin piece I've read in months that hasn't been offensively stupid or offensively conservative. Eric Beck
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Agreed. Another essay worth a brief read is The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk, Penny Lewis:
At lunchtime, an even smaller group of around two hundred construction workers arrived at the antiwar rally and angrily confronted the protesters. In the next few hours, backed by more construction workers from the World Trade Center site as well as Wall Street office employees, these counter-demonstrators raged through downtown Manhattan, assaulting antiwar protesters as well as people who looked like protesters (“longhairs” got special treatment),
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/09/the-myth-of-the-hardhat-hawk/
It breaks down the hard hats for Nixon image of a conservative working class in a believable way.
After getting out of grad school I did commercial construction and appeared to be one of those guys in 1969-70. It's very hard to capture just the sort of ambiguity and ambivalence that was the general sense of the matter on the job. Basically nobody wanted anything to do with Vietnam, but they could not articulate why beyond the obvious---who the fuck wants to get killed for that?---or figure a way out. It's probably hard to imagine just how much pressure from all sides there was to submit to the draft or enlist for a chance at a non-infantry classification in some support job.
I could see from the news video, the hard hat phenonmenon was political make-belief, and if there were anything serious about it, it was among an older generation at least over 35. Those were guys who went through the military before Vietnam and were still brain washed into the WWII and Cold War mind set. ...
CG
CG