And it’s not only Big Larry, who actually made some good bucks
these last few years, but a lot of working class grunts who never made
any dough and never complain much at all — certainly not of the kind
who are complaining about paying off their college loans (which is
admittedly a banking racket) or about who got the nicest parking spot
at their office campus complex. They do not complain about their
troubles and risks in life, such things as getting a hand cut off in a
bark chipping machine, or not having health care, or soul grinding
shift work year after year with little opportunity to ever be promoted,
much less become management.
Not that promotion and
advancement doesn’t happen for working puds. The manager at one of our
fast food franchise joints is nineteen years old, owns a sports car and
feels pretty successful. The owner is a millionaire small businessman
with a little political influence who issues his employees only one
shirt per year. I know for a fact that he grew up taking stale
cornbread and cold pinto beans to school in a molasses can lunch box.
And wore his daddy’s shoes to school when his pop was sleeping off his
nightly drunk. So I don’t fault they guy for having a tough view of the
world.
On the other hand, sixty-six year-old Thelma has worked
there three years and works solely to pay for her diabetic, COPD
husband’s health care. She’d had three fifteen cent per hour raises in
those three years, last time I talked to her. The kid, the owner and
Thelma have remained hard right-wingers, though for different reasons,
all of them having to do with American toughness.
In any case,
they are doing their part for god and a free market economy, as are
their relatives in the area’s 3 116th National Guard unit preparing for
its third deployment in Iraq to defend our right to gobble Big Macs
from the safety of our usury financed Ford Super Duty trucks to the
accompaniment of quadraphonic pop country music.
But now even
they are starting to edge around the topic saying things such as,
“Well, I know we cain’t cut and run, but I dunno about this Iraq war
thing. There’s lots of stuff right here in this country we could’ve
used the money to fix.” And by that they mean paving more of the county
connector roads so they could get to work faster — which is leads to
more development out their way, higher taxes and even slower traffic,
but they cannot make the connection. Thanks to the housing and
unacknowledged economic bust, they’ll never get their wish. The rest of
us liberals may be suffering from rage fatigue, but this is about as
close as my people get to political dissent. Mumbling, and then backing
off.
But they do know there are two political parties in America
and tend to put all the blame for anything that goes wrong in a big way
on one party. I’m pretty sure that attitudes extend into the voting
booth. Here in Virginia there is evidence that a populist can reach
them if he can get their attention. Jim Webb did it. He may be a little
patriotic for most Yankee liberals, but at least a thin margin of folks
down here because, even though he might be a military brat (and we’ve
seen plenty of’em being this close to the Pentagon), he at least went
to Nam and knows how to sound like he’s caught a few catfish, even if
he never held a pole or cut bait in his life. And wearing his son’s
Iraq War army boots in a meeting with the president went a long way,
believe me. It’s that Scots Irish warrior spirit thing. We don’t mourn
our own killed in battle nearly so much as Yankees think and out own
press describes — we’ve been in every war the republic ever fought and
know that somebody you know is gonna die. But we do pay great homage to
the symbols of the warrior spirit, be it a 300 year old Scottish dirk
or a pair of desert combat boots worn by one of our own in the latest
slaughter the royalty has managed instigate. “Bring’em on.” And we mean
it.
We mean it berceuse we know life is struggle and that
“Bring’em on” is the cry and attitude of a true survivor. The rest is
just politics and rich people. Now lordee knows I’m no political
strategist. But I’ve been all over heartland America and I know that
Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota and Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota ain’t all
that different than Virginia when it comes to working people’s
sentiments.
If the Westchester Country Club posing as the
Democratic Party would get it into their heads that they could elect a
smart man or woman who has actually changed a tire or gotten behind in
a house payment, instead if the mocha rich boy or the woman who wants
to prove she has more balls than any man, they could bring home a
populist vote they don’t even know exists. But then, from the third
hole at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club, you cannot see Thelma
when she goes home and night and soaks her feet in hot Epson salts
water. And you cannot see into the warrior hearts of a people ever kept
blind by a hopeless class system, but would understand true populism if
they were shown it just once in their lives.
Meanwhile,
Hillary and Obama, Biden and McCain all shake the hands of
pharmaceutical, Citibank, and energy lobbyists, totally unaware that
Big Larry, who simply trusted that the government was being ran by
better men than he, had his house go into foreclosure last week. The
announcement was among an ever increasing number of others in big
outlined boxes on the back page of the local paper.
No matter
what liberals may think, it’s no crime to be dumb and unaware in this
world. Otherwise most of this country would be in prison. So when I
saw Big Larry mowing his lawn yesterday, probably for the last time, I
just waved and pretended that everything was hunky dory. Both of us
knew everybody in town saw that foreclosure bock ad on the back of the
paper. We have come to watch for them of late, like the obits, to see
if anyone we know has been axed by fate. But sometimes you show a
working man respect by giving the A-OK sign — a sign that, bad as it
may be now my brother, you’ll be back to fight again for the
feudalistic delusions and promises America has ever offered to working
class suckers like us, because there has never been any other choice.
There have just been the good times and the bad times allowed us,
according to the American financial syndicate’s needs at the time.
Sure,
they may kick a lot of Republicans asses out of office next election.
Big friggin deal! For my people, the same feudalist deal is on the
table as ever: work hard, kill when you are told to, trust your
betters, and everything will be all right. Plenty of highly politicized
leftists and their meeker kin, the last hopeful Democrats, came up as
hard as anyone I’ve described here. The Democratic Party definitely
doesn’t want them showing up like bikers at a cocktail party and
talking real populism. Because there ain’t no big money campaign
contributions behind populism.
Look at it this way: Black
America suffered lynchings, police dogs and fire bombings just to shit
on the same toilet seats as white Americans like you and me, and
ultimately waste their lives in front of computer monitors next to us
on the same electronic plantation of the gulag global economy
swallowing America and the rest of the world. And so, still I ask (and
who am I to ask anything?): Are there any progressives or leftists
willing to come out here into the hinterlands and offer the first step.
True populist hope? Spell it out in “see-spot-run” language? Talk about
our bad teeth and why our elderly parents are rotting in pisshole
nursing homes owned by ex-car dealers and attended by imported Asian
physicians who barely speak English? Or the dynamics of hopelessness
that drive the meth epidemic out here?
It
will take an entire lifetime of commitment amid a crumbling world. And
it will continue to crumble around us even as we work. There will be
not one ounce of glory or acknowledgement or public reward. But it lies
there before us, the first fearful and questioning stone on the pathway
to the liberation of mankind.
True populist politics could give us a quarter turn in the right
direction. Genuine socialism could put us on the approximate path to
justice. Eco-politics cannot save us from the inevitable, but at lest
it can teach us to deal with our limitations as a species upon this
earth. But one begins the journey at the start if the path, not the
promised land at its end.
Can we quit talking and start walking?
Writings 
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