A-fucking-men

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Poor, White and Pissed

A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals

by Joe Bageant
February 18, 2005

If you are reading this it is very likely that 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
some 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
Sontag, which basically said: Goodbye you piece of New York Jewish
commie shit!, most people reading the paper at their breakfast tables
around town were asking themselves, “Who the hell is Susan Sontag?”
They would ask the same thing about Daniel Barenboim or Hunter S.
Thompson because those figures have never been on Oprah. 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 at least number 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-an-hour janitors and marginal people working “contract
labor”, 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 here 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 are people with different problems entirely. Mostly
related to truck payments. Or people like my old tree service boss
Danny, who cut off a finger working with a chain saw, wrapped it in a
McDonald’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
to ever be promoted, or obtaining health care at all. Just 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 like 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 nicotine fits. 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 the smiling, wise
old guy in the orange vest in the plumbing department of the local Home
Depot, Roy, the one who knows everything there ever was to know about
plumbing, is limping around on bad knees with two bone grafted discs
from a life as a construction laborer, and at age 67 is working solely
so he can have health insurance. Not for insurance from Home Depot mind
you, but so his entire paycheck can go to cover 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. The one that
is now in such a bad neighborhood 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 cannot cut it in the greatest society
on earth. Darwin was right. Gandhi was wrong. Tough shit!” This 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 white
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
work someplace and praying for enough overtime to make the heating
bill. A worker.

The political left once supported these workers, stood on the lines
taking its beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now, comfortably
ensconced in the middle class, the American left sees the same working
whites as warmongering bigots, happy pawns of the empire. That is
writing working folks off too cheaply, and it begs the question of how
they came to be that way -- if they truly are. To cast them as a source
of our deep national political problems is ridiculous. They are a
symptom of the problems, and they may be making it worse because they
are easily manipulated, or because they cannot tell an original idea
from a beer fart. But they are not the root cause by any means. The
left should take its cues from Malcolm X, who understood the need to
educate and inform the entire African-American society before tackling
the goal of unity. Same goes for white crackers. Nobody said it would
be easy.

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 being 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 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. ORGANIZE! Quit kidding yourself that the Empire will
protect professionals and semi-professionals such as you 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 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 ballyhooed
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, 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, however, 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
(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 1973.

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 as 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.

Who 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 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.”

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Joe Bageant is a magazine editor and writer living in Winchester
Virginia. He may be contacted at: bageantjb@netscape.net.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb05/Bageant0218.htm

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