Can we quit talking and start walking?
-- Joe Bageant -- World News Trust --
May 10, 2007 -- Well,
lo and beshit! I never thought I’d ever see the day. But even in my hardcore
Republican run hometown, many conservatives are quietly sneaking away from the
sing-along around the campfire of George Bush’s war-crazed hootenanny. Most of
them are ordinary bona fide conservatives. But others slipping off under cover
of darkness are among our richest Republicans who profiteered mightily in the
security, construction and service businesses that sprouted like mushrooms from
every aspect of the Iraq War. Either they have suddenly developed a streak of
conscience, or they simply don’t want to be associated with the trail of crime,
blood and feces Bush and his cronies have obviously tracked across the carpet
of American history. My bet is on the latter.
But
even the little fish who voted for Bush are starting to squirm. My neighbor, Big
Larry, who is usually ecstatic here at the beginning of baseball season, and
never gives politics the slightest thought except on Election Day, is rather
glum now and starting to grumble about the state of the republic. This time
last year he was pulling down good dough “driving truck” for Toll Brothers,
complaining about his ‘roids a bit, but was otherwise the same sort of more or
less unquestioning and nonpolitical working guy one finds just about anywhere
in America. Now his driving hours are half of what he was getting last year and
look to get slimmer yet, even as unemployed carpenters and electricians,
casualties of the collapsing housing construction bubble, come knocking at our
doors looking for handyman work. How can it be that the newspapers say the
economy is booming?
And
so now, after the deepest sort of political meditation, Larry has concluded
that “This Iraq War thing just might spell trouble for us in the long run.”
Not, mind you, because of the war’s sheer bloody folly, but because “It has run
up the price of concrete and plywood so much that people can’t afford to build
houses anymore.” Some people will add two plus two and get five every time. So
when it comes to Larry, it’s pretty easy to resist a discussion of the subprime
mortgage rate implosion.
And
it’s not only Big Larry, who actually made some good bucks these last few
years, but a lot of working class grunts who never made any dough and never complain
much at all -- certainly not of the kind who are complaining about paying off
their college loans (which is admittedly a banking racket) or about who got the
nicest parking spot at their office campus complex. They do not complain about
their troubles and risks in life, such things as getting a hand cut off in a
bark chipping machine, or not having health care, or soul grinding shift work
year after year with little opportunity to ever be promoted, much less become management.
Not
that promotion and advancement doesn’t happen for working puds. The manager at
one of our fast food franchise joints is nineteen years old, owns a sports car
and feels pretty successful. The owner is a millionaire small businessman with
a little political influence who issues his employees only one shirt per year. I
know for a fact that he grew up taking stale cornbread and cold pinto beans to
school in a molasses can lunch box. And wore his daddy’s shoes to school when
his pop was sleeping off his nightly drunk. So I don’t fault they guy for
having a tough view of the world.
On
the other hand, sixty-six- year-old Thelma has worked there three years and
works solely to pay for her diabetic, COPD husband’s health care. She’d had
three fifteen-cent- per-hour raises in those three years, last time I talked to
her. The kid, the owner and Thelma have remained hard right-wingers, though for
different reasons, all of them having to do with American toughness.
In
any case, they are doing their part for god and a free market economy, as are
their relatives in the area’s 3 116th National Guard unit
preparing for its third deployment in Iraq to defend our right to gobble Big
Macs from the safety of our usury-financed Ford Super Duty trucks to the
accompaniment of quadraphonic pop country music.
But
now even they are starting to edge around the topic saying things such as, “Well,
I know we cain’t cut and run, but I dunno about this Iraq war thing. There’s lots of stuff
right here in this country we could’ve used the money to fix.” And by that they
mean paving more of the county connector roads so they could get to work faster -- which
is leads to more development out their way, higher taxes and even slower
traffic, but they cannot make the connection.
Thanks to the housing and unacknowledged economic bust, they’ll never
get their wish. The rest of us liberals may be suffering from rage fatigue, but
this is about as close as my people get to political dissent. Mumbling, and
then backing off.
But
they do know there are two political parties in America and tend to put all the
blame for anything that goes wrong in a big way on one party. I’m pretty sure that attitudes extend into
the voting booth. Here in Virginia
there is evidence that a populist can reach them if he can get their attention.
Jim Webb did it. He may be a little patriotic for most Yankee liberals, but at
least a thin margin of folks down here support him because, even though he might be a
military brat (and we’ve seen plenty of ’em being this close to the Pentagon),
he at least went to Nam and knows how to sound like he’s caught a few catfish,
even if he never held a pole or cut bait in his life. And wearing his son’s
Iraq War army boots in a meeting with the president went a long way, believe
me. It’s that Scots Irish warrior spirit thing. We don’t mourn our own killed
in battle nearly so much as Yankees think and our own press describes -- we’ve
been in every war the republic ever fought and know that somebody you know is gonna
die. But we do pay great homage to the symbols of the warrior spirit, be it a
300-year-old Scottish dirk or a pair of desert combat boots worn by one of our
own in the latest slaughter the royalty has managed instigate. “Bring’em on.”
And we mean it.
We
mean it because we know life is struggle and that “Bring ’em on” is the cry and
attitude of a true survivor. The rest is just politics and rich people. Now
lordee knows I’m no political strategist. But I’ve been all over heartland America and I know that Missouri,
Kansas, Minnesota
and Ohio, Michigan
and Minnesota ain’t all that different than Virginia when it comes
to working people’s sentiments.
If
the Westchester Country Club posing as the Democratic Party would get it into
their heads that they could elect a smart man or woman who has actually changed
a tire or gotten behind in a house payment, instead if the mocha rich boy or
the woman who wants to prove she has more balls than any man, they could bring
home a populist vote they don’t even know exists. But then, from the third hole
at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club, you cannot see Thelma when she goes
home and night and soaks her feet in hot Epson salts water. And you cannot see
into the warrior hearts of a people ever kept blind by a hopeless class system,
but would understand true populism if they were shown it just once in their
lives.
Meanwhile,
Hillary and Obama, Biden and McCain all shake the hands of pharmaceutical, Citibank,
and energy lobbyists, totally unaware that Big Larry, who simply trusted that
the government was being run by better men than he, had his house go into foreclosure
last week. The announcement was among an ever increasing number of others in
big outlined boxes on the back page of the local paper.
No
matter what liberals may think, it’s no crime to be dumb and unaware in this
world. Otherwise most of this country
would be in prison. So when I saw Big Larry mowing his lawn yesterday, probably
for the last time, I just waved and pretended that everything was hunky dory. Both
of us knew everybody in town saw that foreclosure block ad on the back of the
paper. We have come to watch for them of late, like the obits, to see if anyone
we know has been axed by fate. But sometimes you show a working man respect by giving
the A-OK sign -- a sign that, bad as it may be now my brother, you’ll be back to
fight again for the feudalistic delusions and promises America has ever offered
to working class suckers like us, because there has never been any other
choice. There have just been the good times and the bad times allowed us,
according to the American financial syndicate’s needs at the time.
Sure,
they may kick a lot of Republicans asses out of office next election. Big friggin deal! For my people, the same feudalist
deal is on the table as ever: work hard, kill when you are told to, trust your
betters, and everything will be all right. Plenty of highly politicized
leftists and their meeker kin, the last hopeful Democrats, came up as hard as
anyone I’ve described here. The Democratic Party definitely doesn’t want them showing
up like bikers at a cocktail party and talking real populism. Because there
ain’t no big money campaign contributions behind populism.
Look
at it this way: Black America suffered lynchings, police dogs and fire bombings
just to shit on the same toilet seats as white Americans like you and me, and ultimately
waste their lives in front of computer monitors next to us on the same
electronic plantation of the gulag global economy swallowing America and the
rest of the world.
And
so, still I ask (and who am I to ask anything?): Are there any progressives or
leftists willing to come out here into the hinterlands and offer the first
step. True populist hope? Spell it out in “see-spot-run” language? Talk about our
bad teeth and why our elderly parents are rotting in pisshole nursing homes
owned by ex-car dealers and attended by imported Asian physicians who barely
speak English? Or the dynamics of
hopelessness that drive the meth epidemic out here?
It
will take an entire lifetime of commitment amid a crumbling world. And it will
continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be not one ounce of glory
or acknowledgement or public reward. But it lies there before us, the first
fearful and questioning stone on the pathway to the liberation of mankind.
True
populist politics could give us a quarter turn in the right direction. Genuine
socialism could put us on the approximate path to justice. Eco-politics cannot
save us from the inevitable, but at lest it can teach us to deal with our
limitations as a species upon this earth. But one begins the journey at the
start if the path, not the promised land at its end.
Can
we quit talking and start walking?
***
Joe
Bageant is the author of the book, Deer
Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, to be released
June 19, 2007 by Random House Crown, about working class America. A
complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working
Americans on the subject of class may be found at: http://www.joebageant.com. Feel free to
contact him at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Copyright 2007 by Joe Bageant