One time when I was in college I was traveling in Tennessee on I-75 when traffic came to complete standstill somewhere north of Knoxville. As it happened, I came to a stop a few yards from an exit. So, I pulled out my trusty Rand McNally atlas and discovered that I could follow some serpentine county road that would dump me back on I-75 ten or fifteen miles down the line, and hopefully beyond the source of the traffic jam. Thus, I had my introduction to the people of the Cumberland Mountains. As I wound my way along the county road, I saw some truly shocking poverty. People were living in shacks and homes that looked uninhabitable. Garbage was strewn across people’s unkempt yards. Rusted out cars sat on cinder blocks and hound dogs lazed on porches that sometimes came up to within a few feet of the road. Many people who looked like they came straight of the movie Deliverance sat on those porches on disgusting weathered couches sipping lemonade or iced tea in the heat of the working day. It didn’t look like too many of those people had jobs. And, if they did, they didn’t pay much. Almost of all them had to be on government assistance of some sort or another. And, yet, most of these shacks and ramshackle homes were equipped with satellite dishes. And not the small ones we have now, but gigantic ones the size of a VW Bus. I remember thinking to myself that it was messed up that all these welfare recipients who couldn’t spare a dime for keeping up their homes had found several hundreds of dollars to buy access to television. And, I guess I haven’t mentioned it, but all these people were white.
They were white but they pretty much exactly fit the description that conservatives reserve for blacks who they term “welfare queens” who just “want free stuff” while they tool around in their Escalades sporting their gold teeth. Republicans love to criticize anyone who receives government assistance if they also have a cell phone or granite countertops or anything nice. It’s an annoying trait.
In any case, I was reminded of this by reading this piece at Gateway Pundit and, especially, the comment thread that followed. The basic complaint is simple. The government is taking money they didn’t need to use for keeping people from freezing to death last winter and using it buy air conditioners for people at risk of dying of heat stroke or respiratory failure this summer.
Free air conditioners for the poor!! What’s next? Free cars?
The article features a photograph of an overweight black woman in a wheelchair. Her name is Rhoda Lee, and she is not a recipient of a free air conditioner. She is a board member of the Lorain County Community Action Agency, which is implementing the program. Nonetheless, the comment thread is dedicated to abusing her for being an overweight “portch” monkey. And, of course, there are more comments directed at blacks in general and also Latinos. For example:
One of our friends works as a teacher in primarily a hispanic/black neighborhood. ALL the children are on the free lunch program. Most of the parents drive luxury
SUV’s.
Yes, that HAS to be true because we all know that all blacks and hispanics are drug dealers, right?
But it’s not just the casual uncontested racism that is noteworthy about these right-wing sites and their commenters. It’s their uniform disdain for common sense things like using available money in the budget to help people stay alive in 100-plus degree heat.
The only sense of community these people have is for the community of people who resent being part of a community and reject the idea that that places any obligations on them.
But if they want to see some truly lazy-ass people who are literally living off the government teat while lazing around on couches sipping iced tea and watching Oprah, they should go visit the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. They’ll find a lot more of them there than they will in our inner cities.
“But if they want to see some truly lazy-ass people who are literally living off the government teat while lazing around on couches sipping iced tea and watching Oprah, they should go visit the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. They’ll find a lot more of them there than they will in our inner cities.”
If they do visit, I’m sure they’ll find plenty of racist kindred spirits, stewing in resentment. They can all sit around and do some hatin’ on “inner city” types”. And have some really good BBQ.
Try the moonshine! The good stuff, not the stuff that makes you go blind. You’ll figure which, by and by…
I think this post just gave sherifffruitfly an orgasm.
do fruit flies have those?
The same type of folks live where ever coal is mined. West Virginia, western Virginia, Kentucky, southern Illinois.
You are talking about Appalachia, where 5 & 6 year olds are having their permanent teeth rotted out because they have Mountain Dew in their bottles.
The thing is, I’m not looking to diss poor white folks. I’m just pointing out that these right-wing sites just equate free air conditioners for the poor with black folks driving Escalades while their kids get subsidized school lunches.
I know, I know. But when I lived in coal mining country, there were no people of color living there.
The point, to me, is that the right-wingers are racist and would never diss po’ white folk down on their luck.
However, in the next breath, they’ll call people lazy and no-account if they are out of work ‘cuz their job moved overseas.
Poverty isn’t rare. If some people are dependent on very modest government handouts, that hardly compares with the executive class treatment our betters perpetually receive from our government.
I hear this All.The.Time. where I work. It’s a women’s fitness club, mostly white, senior-aged church-going women, many of whom never worked at all, but live off their husband’s retirement and social security.
Just this morning one woman was complaining because some poor women came to get extra food from the food pantry where she goes to church because their power was out due to the winds we had. She said, “I don’t know why they should get extra food; the power was off and if their refrigerators went off, their Twinkies and Hoho’s wouldn’t have spoiled”.
jesus.
Visit Oui’s diary Romney Can’t Help It … for a nice film of young Mittens bragging that he knows how to get free stuff from the government.
I’d like to see it added to his warning to “Them” that booed him, as an election year advertisement.
.
I find it astonishing how detached Mitt Romney is from plain hard working American folks. He means it when he expresses himself to poor people: “I can help you.” Helping the federalist way by cutting funds for entitlement, comforting the rich and giving bull how his policy trickles down jobs to all Americans. “When you don’t live on government handouts you will go look for a job. “Thus I am helping you by cutting taxes and government spending.” Shame on the Mormon religion for preaching the wealth entitlement.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Boy-oh, BooMan, did you run off the rails on this one. Before you are tempted to write something like this again, read Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.
If you want to see real welfare queens, go to the suburbs around Washington, D.C. Or look at the House Republicans in Congress. Or the writers for the Wall Street media.
Don’t write your stereotypical narrative onto a community you haven’t lived in, profiling people you’ve not talked with. Things are not always what they seem on the surface. BTW, Deliverance was fiction but Sandusky’s crimes aren’t. Every community has its problems.
For example, when I lived in the North Carolina mountains working for a community action agency, there was a guy known to drive a recent model Cadillac to the Department of Social Services to pick up food stamps. And there were some folks who didn’t know him that thought he was one of those welfare cheats. What he was was a successful guy who was picking up food stamps for his aunt who lived up in a holler and had not transportation.
In isolated hollers, satellite dishes are the only way to get TV at all. You have no idea who purchased those that you saw (or rented them) or actually how many households were wired to the same dish.
Most mountain counties don’t have garbage pickup but do have dumpster sites, but independent-minded folks of all incomes and statuse still engage in illegal dumping. Garbage accumulates in the yard when there is no one with the transportation to dump it, or between trips to the dumpster or the nearest ravine.
There are in the mountains communities that through isolation and poverty and inter-linking family problems have become dysfunctional. They are the places that the folks who could have brought to reasonableness and income leave in order to be near their jobs or just to get out of a dysfunctional community. People in these communities don’t vote or don’t vote unless a candidate pays them.
If you think that 40-year-old with black lung and on SSI and other aid is a welfare queen, you have become part of the problem and not the solution.
These are the very kinds of reciprocal narratives that those in power use to divide people so that problems cannot actually be solved.
And to a great degree, Rush has insinuated himself into so many rural communities because he gives them something to talk about at church, at the barber shop, at the beer joint, or with neighbors.
The folks to watch in northeastern Tennessee are the small business owners who don’t like taxes, small town bank managers, and the folks whose community are the fundamentalist, Baptist, Pentecostal, and evangelical churches. It’s these respectable folk who are the backbone of the Republican Party and the racism in that area. When those folk change, the more hardscrabble folk will follow. I witnessed trends moving the other way shortly after Ronald Reagan gave folks permission to be blatant racists again.
The point, Tarheel, is not to disparage those hill people from 20 years ago, but to point out that there are a lot more white people who are on government assistance than black people, and that many of them fit the right’s stereotypes about black people.
A lot of those folks could use a free air conditioner. Should we begrudge them one just because they have satellite television?
The point is that the breed of politicians doing the disparaging are the real welfare queens, getting all of the salary and perks from the government they want to do nothing and bitching about people whose yearly take from government is a tenth or much less of these politicians’ pampered benefits.
It still chaps my butt that my tax money, what little I know pay, goes to gild the retirement W and his papa.
Totally agreed. I was nodding this in my head when I was at work today (don’t comment while at work lest they accuse me of engaging in partisan political activity).
I know Booman didn’t mean to convey this message, as he notes above, but it’s how it came off.
Hey, people just make stuff up.
Like think-tank “research fellows,” journalists, and politicians.
You know, like Romney’s claim to residency in Massachusetts.