Sunday, October 12, 2008

White Trash or Hardworking Americans? Hmmm...


Actually, the best part of this sign is the buck teefs. The artwork & the message conjures and embodies such wonderful history, quaint folk tradition. hehehehe Listen carefully fanboys & girls: whitefolks invented identity politics & tribal culture here in the USA. Not Jesse Jackson or som unnamed 60s radicals. Not Cesar Chavez. Indeed, this fact made many careers and destroyed many movements (the Populists for example). And I'm not talking about late 19th and 20th century blowhards. Neither George Wallace or even Rudi Giuliani (seriously I have a lot of respect for Rudi on other levels). Neither Ben Pitchfork Tillman nor Nathan Bedford Forrest. No, I'm talking about people like Thomas Jefferson, who, were it not for identity politics, would've just been some genius flake who diddled his 14 year old black slave. Or Andrew Jackson, who would've been just another redneck manic depressive. Or Woodrow Wilson. And Martin Scorsese wouldn't have had a script for Gangs of New York. Sarah Palin's the latest incarnation of this fact. Note the issues important to the sign painter. Banking and financial markets reform? Rehab of our critical infrastructure? Investing in new energy sources? Noooo. Think about this. Almost two hundred years ago did the average schlock who painted such a sign care about slavery, access to land, farm debt, Indian policy and funding for canals and turnpike roads? Unh-unh. It was Irish immigration (Catholicism) and temperance (booze). Slavery only inasmuch as it meant no free blacks would be taking "white" jobs. Indians only inasmuch as they'd been wiped out so there was land to be had on the frontier. What's changed?
I was curious about West Plains, Missouri. It's near the Arkansas border. What are the major industries there? Well, sewing machines, chemicals for Armstrong Flooring. There's the usual high cash industries such as meth-cooking/sales and convenience stores slinging beef jerky and Bud. Not as many mobile homes as you might think, but more than in Silver Spring Maryland. One thing's certain: the commercial legs of such a locale has one foot on outsourcing to Indonesia (hey...isn't that were Barack learned to be a raghead extremist) and the other on the Chapter 11 banana peel. Maybe your patriotism will be tested when your woorkplace's bought by yet another foreign company? Well, well.
Now let's check this place against the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps (which gave us the famous Blue-Red state division). Red. Pretty red, despite the selling down the river Red leaders have given them. And you note something else. Sublimely counter-intiutive. In addition to being depressed, scoring low on No Child Left Behind tests without the ability to blame it on minorities and illegals, these burghs and counties appear to be utterly dependent on...zounds...Uncle Sam. Farm subsidies, military (from bases to contractors to the employer of last resort for dullard children), pork procured from Congressmen and Senators who grandstand and posture aginst such liberal sloth when on Fox? Lot's of Medicare and Medicaid--dirty little secret. Okay, Medicaid's from the state not the feds, but it's still sissified Blue state entitlement socialism right? Well, only when it's not hard working white people getting it. Here's the rub: Blue burghs and counties generate $$$, don't depend on the government tit. Weird, huh?
So we come back to the bilboard. Is it a subconscious cry for help: "We are ashamed of our socialist need for government handouts?" Is it merely cathartic? Is it performance art? Give me some real nice spin other than "it's free speech." hehehehe
But do it soon--I got tickets to the West Plains Motorspeedway. Liberal pussy night, though: Go Karts rather than dirt racers. Still it's good fun. Especially if you've been laid off, foreclosed upon, obese with no health insurance (if you had any), and having to watch your nephew hobble around on that fake leg he got in Falujah. But as the billboard states--you know what's important! Pass me a Bud Lite....

8 comments:

Lisa said...

It is a story white people refuse to review because it forces them to "look in the mirror." The elite whites know this have been using these fools for centuries. Didn't Barack point this out and then Hillary jumped on him, and she's just another demagogue regardless of her political party.

Rich Fitzgerald said...

I ended up here from BD2Write

Since I live in Missouri, I get the point that the election is supposed to be "going through Missouri" - some of your readers might miss that point. I also get that the gun toting white folks in the boot hill (rural part of Missouri) will be inclined to eat the backwards thinking that the Republican party is peddling.

It's always interesting to me how politics fall along both racial and economic lines. Poor white folks could care less about not having jobs when a nigger might possibly get to be president. They would rather lose their houses, use their guns to shoot for food, pile up like Mexicans in the trailer park, and back a rich white hypocrite who could care less about their plight. To them, because they had little to begin with, race means everything. It's the pill they swallowed a long time ago and as much news and information that exists to the contrary, they refuse to look at it.

I'm spending my time trying to get brothers to stop sagging long enough to vote for the candidate that will make it better for our community.

I ain't tripping off the backwards thinking of brain-washed Americans.

Nevertheless, good post, just not sure most folks would get it.

Anonymous said...

The irony of the voting patterns always gets me. They ARE from districts swimming in strife and debt BUT FOR the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Yet liberals, blacks, gays, etc. are the ones somehow daining the nation dry and to blame for their troubles? I like the meth comment. Nice touch. Look, black have their own problems but we (we as in whites) can't toss stones. I grew up in a very upper middle class Republican household and attended prep school. I went to a prestigous university in the Midwest (yes, Nat Turner, we have them). What I noticed about guys who didn't have what I had was this weird fatalism that theoretically they could, and they'd defend to the death the system that makes that possible, yet they themselves acted as though they'd be hicks till they died, and their kids too. The girls might get a job at Applebees and then get married and pump out kids (not necessarily in that order), and the only opportunity to see the world was to join the military. Yes, to serve the nation, but mostly as an escape--your employer of last resort thesis--and a means of being a bad-ass. Here's the sick thing: my parents, their friends and colleagues were living in a dream world as well, but make no mistake they had at least some awareness that it was these type of white people who, by their worship or ignorance or inaction, kept them on top. This overrided the usual smarmy kinship they'd feel for the stray black doctor's or lawyer's (or rich athlete's) family which might move in.

I for one am glad this election is forcing some people to face this culture on both sides.

Knute Rife said...

First, I have to say that "hard-working" and "white trash" are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of shiftless PWT sorts who do nothing but bum off of various public and private sources, but there are plenty who work, too. Or they would work if there were a job other than meth cooking they could apply their skill sets to(Can't sympathize with them too much. Watched my classmates dink away 12 years of free education because they didn't need to know any of that to work on the farm or in the plant, or in the shop. But if things keep going the way they are, I figure I'll ditch this suit and tie routine soon and go back to the farm. Hmm, there are deer there now. Need a smokehouse. New machine shed and chicken coop. Orchard needs work. Fix the windmill. dig out the spring...but I digress.).

Tribal politics is not a creation of Honky Nation, Chris. We brought our version from Europe and found that it was already here in the Americas. Plenty of it in Asia and Africa too. It seems to be an inherent trait of primates in general.

Yes, public money generally flows from urban to rural. But private money flows the other way.

The irony of all this is how much rural and inner-city have in common. I've referred to the US as "Doughnut Nation" since law school. The inner city is the hole, where there's nothing. Rural areas are beyond the doughnut, and there's nothing. All the bread and sugar are in the suburban ring. Inner cities are overwhelmingly minority, and rural areas are overwhelmingly white, but what about everything else? Infrastructure: decaying. Emergency services: ineffective and declining. Health services: sparse and declining. Financial services: nonexistent. Businesses: owned by outsiders where they exist at all. Education: spinning in. Opportunities for getting out: sports and military. Both sides are being ripped off and played off each other by the same folks.

If you want insight into that sign, go rewatch another of Spike's films, Jungle Fever. The US is dating a black guy with a foreign name, and the folks down in the old neighborhood don't like it a bit.

Anonymous said...

This is a very strident post for you though it has the usual sarcasm. It seems to run against your post from a week ago, where you say it's liberals who live in the Matrix, not "Sarah Palin" voters.

Can you reconcile that for me?

Anonymous said...

You are all wet, Chambers, as I can show you progress on many levels:

First, the success of Craig Brewer's films like Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan

Second, "Junior" is a hip hop fan, a fan of the dirrtie South rappers like Missouri's own Nellie, and dedicated a race win to Left Eye when she was killed.

Third (related to the first two), the whole Whigger movement not just in the South and Midwest but all over the country, yo. The foul language, the clothing, the dancing, the drug violence. And end to the stigma interracial coupling--look at all the "mixed" kids being produced in these redneck and "bamma" communities.

Progress--yes sir. So stop being so grim!!

Anonymous said...

I caught that obesity and meth comment as well. How sadly true. But they run the country, recall. Deal with it.

Anonymous said...

Nice comments, everyone. The real problematic one is Oj's.

OJ, what you may or may not realize is that the "Whigger" mentality and lifestyle is reversible. A whigger can one day wake up and say "what the fuck am I doing?", get a haircut, decent clothes, shave, and put a long sleeved shirt on so no one would be the wiser. He can walk the clean white boy walk and talk the clean white boy talk and probably get a decent job in a week or 2.

The Nigger has it different. Yes, he can make the same changes as the Whigger. The problem is, after he does, in the mind of America, even in a suit, he still looks like that kat that they saw on "Cops", he still walks like the Black guy they clutch their purse at when walking by the liquor store, and he still sounds like that Black guy that beat their friends ass in the bathroom of a club 15 years ago.

So as a Whigger, there is always change. As a Nigger, the work is gonna be harder.