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....
