In a recent post supposedly about the McAuliffe election in Virginia titled Get a Brain, Morans, Booman assiduously climbs to new depths of middle class, leftiness, suburbanist entitlement bullshit.
—snip—
I keep hearing that the people of Appalachia prize self-reliance and personal liberty, but I also keep seeing statistics that they have a level of reliance on federal anti-poverty programs that is comparable to our country’s worst ghettoes.
It’s like a whole region has been conditioned to say “Keep your government hands off my Medicare, I need this scooter to get my food stamps.”
I’m tired of listening to their hypocritical bullshit. It’s long past time that these morans get a brain.
The 22 or so comments that follow mostly take the same tone.
Why those lowlife, welfare-sucking, redneck moron assholes!!! Why on earth would they not vote for Terry McAuliffe!!! How dare they!!!
Entitlement to the max!!! Use the “moron” epithet carefully, fools. Ask not for whom the word tolls. It tolls for thee, motherfuckers!!!
Read on.
Go read Joe Bageant if you really want to understand what happened in Appalachia. Who’s he? You willfully ignorant, self-indulgent middle class assholes!!! It’s not as if he was hard to find on the net. For years.
Bageant was originally raised in Winchester, Virginia. He left Winchester and worked as a journalist and editor. In 2001, Bageant moved back to Winchester.[1]
In “Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War” Bageant discusses how Democrats have lost the political support of poor rural whites and how the Republican Party has convinced these individuals to “vote against their own economic self-interest.” The book is mainly centered on his hometown, Winchester.
In 2010, Bageant published a similarly themed book, “Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.” Bageant used his extended family’s post WW II years experience to describe the social hierarchy in the United States of America. The book examines the post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became, the author argues, the foundation of a permanent white underclass and comprise much of today’s heartland “red state” voters.
—snip—
During the last years of his life, Bageant lived in Mexico. He had been living in Ajijic, Mexico where he wrote “Rainbow Pie,” when he learned that he had a fast growing and inoperable cancer.[2] On January 4, 2011, Bageant announced on his web site that he had been “struck down by an extremely serious form of cancer” which was inoperable and was unable to engage in correspondence or his usual work, but hoped to be able to resume them in the future.[3]
After Joe died, his Australian publisher asked Bageant’s literary executor, Ken Smith, to select and edit about 80,000 words worth of Joe’s essays. This book was published in November 2011 as “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant”. Upon its original publication, this posthumous collection was only available in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa where, according to Smith, it sold reasonably well.[2] According to Smith: “no American publisher is yet interested in a book by a redneck socialist — and that says a lot about American culture and the US book business.”[2]
I repeat: “…no American publisher is yet interested in a book by a redneck socialist — and that says a lot about American culture and the US book business.” It says a great deal about the aims of the Permanent Government and its media satraps as well.
Joe…he was a friend of mine…treated these broken people as human beings. He didn’t call them schoolyard bully names…”You morons!!!” He understood that they had been taken off by the same monstrous Permanent Government that has waged war on most of the rest of humanity for 50+ years,. The Kissingers, the Bushes, the Reagans and Romneys of this world. And yes, the Clintons and Obamas too.
These white rural people want to work, just like inner city minority people want to work. In the ’80s and ’90s the Permanent Government sold American labor down the river to minimum wage foreign workers because the profit margins were higher. Way higher. Ross Perot had it right all the way back in 1992.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided i was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
Ross Perot, 3-way debate w/Clinton and Bush, 1992
Perot was demonized by the Government Media Complex just as the Paulists are being demonized now, but his point stands for anyone with an ounce of common sense left.
Wake the fuck up.
The so-called “white conservative working class right” is just another bunch of ripped-off motherfuckers who are panicking and thus blindly lashing out at completely misunderstood groups of so-called “enemies.” Everybody is “the enemy” when you don’t have a decent education and you can’t get a job that will put sufficient food on the table for your children.
“A giant sucking sound…” The sound of their dreams and the dreams of their forebears vacating the premises.
Don’t call them “morons.” They are not high IQ clones…neither are most of us and neither were most of our ancestors…but they are some of the same people who built this country by the sweat of their brow for 300+ years. They are also potential allies if you know what you are doing.
Which you most obviously don’t.
There is an alliance coming though, Booman.
Watch.
An alliance between the disenfranchised of all races and cultures here in America.
Watch.
When it really finds its legs it is going to change everything!!!
Watch.
Meanwhile…wake the fuck up!!!
You’re next.
We are all “next.”
Bet on that as well.
AG
P.S. Rural Virginia people? They see through a glitz-encrusted suckup to power like McAuliffe in a country minute. They’ve been dealing with mortgage gougers and revenuers for generations. It’s the media-blinded middle class that’s voted him in. Shame on all of you. Shame!!!
