Matt Taibbi interviewed Alex Moyer, whose documentary TFW No GF (The Feeling When No Girlfriend) looks at the alienation of young white men. In Taibbi's comments thread, I posted about Appalachia vs. Santa Cruz, where two young white males who drove over a Black Lives Matter sidewalk mural are being villified. This sparked a lively discussion about white trash racism, or liberal racism against what's perceived to be white trash. I discuss Naive Do-Gooders and their role enabling the Great Reset and Ukraine, including dispossession of Dutch farmers and a tragic story from my Appalachian town. I look at the practical objections in the last episode, The Economics of Anarchy, to giving students both free education and living stipends. And I end with the lyrics from Appalachia by Josiah & the Bonnevilles.
Here is my original post:
I've been thinking that what we're dealing with is white trash racism, by which I mean racism against what's seen by liberals as white trash. Coming from Appalachia, where I've been fixing up my childhood home, there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class, especially if you're white and male.
Meanwhile in the liberal bastion I call home now, they're throwing the book at two young kids who drove over and left tire marks on a Black Lives Matter mural (consisting only of those words) that stretches on pavement in front of city hall. Prosecutors want damages over $100K plus five years in prison. Black residents say that it's traumatized them so much and made them feel so unsafe, they can't go to work somedays.
The black population of my county is 1%. We're 33% Latino but they seem able to go to work. If these kids had felt that it was a statement their lives didn't matter, haven't we just proven them right? If it was a statue they felt demeaned their ancestors, we'd be celebrating them—if they were black. Instead, no one cares what led them to burn rubber on the city's declaration they don’t matter.
Here’s one response I got:
This contempt for the untouchable “white working class” is palpable. My own uncle serves it to me every time we discuss politics. I’m a married blue collar guy who owns a home. He’s an unemployed former book warehouse worker with a college degree so by his logic he’s the elite bourgeoisie and I’m the lumpen pleb.
I replied with this story:
One time I happened to run into Santa Cruz neighbors while I was at the Farmer's Market of my hometown, Cumberland. They were riding a bike trail that went through it. This was before Trump's election and they sneered at all the Trump signs as proof of our backwardness and degeneracy. They'd met another professor from a nearby college town who called it 'Scumberland,' which they thought appropriate and apparently thought I should too. They dismissed the town as racist (I have yet to meet a kid there who isn't biracial) and yet saw no contradiction in calling everyone who lived there scum.
A woman objected:
Sorry, but I still believe that most white people, who voted for Trump, twice, are racists. If not, then why do they support a racist? Who, by the way, betrayed all his promises and did zilch for the white working class. Unless you think putting three white nationalist extremist Christians on the Supreme Court is doing something for the working class.
And I answered:
Is Trump a racist? As his son said, the only color my dad sees is green. He's willing to make deals that enrich him with blacks, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans. That doesn't make him a good person but doesn't fit the definition of a racist--if words are held to have meaning and not just 'people we don't like.'
I don't vote so I didn't and would never have voted for Trump. But neither would I have ever voted for Hilary, based on her war crimes in Libya and Honduras.
And I've been wondering how people who voted for Biden feel now, with Hunter's laptop and Ashley's diary revealing him to be one of the most morally degenerate people who've ever lived. Caligula and Nero have nothing on him! But what he's done to his own family pales by comparison to what he's done to whole populations, like the people of Ukraine, and to us in the US.
You may not be feeling the effects of him selling off our oil reserves to China but my handyman's uncle in W. Va did. He took his life because he couldn't make a living as a trucker because of the cost of diesel. He was about to lose his house and left three grandchildren and a wife who were all financially dependent on him.
I'm sure you're a well-meaning person, but the knee-jerk liberalism that buys into political opposition as a moral position is killing people.
The topic turned to ‘real work’ and what it was. I wrote:
The late David Graeber has an excellent book called Bullshit Jobs. It shows how many white-collar jobs are entirely make-work and often recognized to be by those employed in them, who are desperate to keep up the facade that they're doing anything important. Graeber's point was made amply in the recent designation of 'essential workers.' Everyone else could be paid to sit on their hands and life went on.
A commenter named Trollificus (great pic, eh?) added this quote:
As Ed Abbey said:
"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream."
(solicited-but-rejected NYT editorial on the occasion of Earth Day 20)
And I added a quote in my book from Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land:
What one thinks of this disintegration and decline will depend on one's opinion of the US economy, and on one's confidence in it. If one believes that it is better to buy food than to grow it, then one is not going to worry about the decline of any particular farming community, especially if that community is based on subsistence farming.
... I am worried about the decline of farming communities of all kinds, because I think that among the practical consequences of that decline will sooner or later be hunger.
In some respects, the traditional subsistence agricultures are ... the best assurances of a continuous food supply, simply because they are not—or were not—dependent on outside sources that must be purchased. To exchange these locally self-sufficient subsistence agricultures for the 'good life' of a consumer economy is like climbing out of a lifeboat onto a sinking ship.
Ben Franklin, whose economic system for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is what my model is based on, said something similar. He felt that a self-managed means of employment was the goal of life and working for someone else was a phase, like being an apprentice while learning your trade. Wendell Berry describes the commonwealth as the "foundation and practical means" for most people to be self-employed most of the time. Through a character in Jayber Crow, he writes:
I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.
What Franklin, Abbey and Berry describe is what Appalachia used to be. There's an amazing historian named Steven Stoll who wrote Ramp Hollow: the Ordeal of Appalachia. He talks about Robert Morris 'owning' over 8M acres in Appalachia, much of it given to him by the legislature in return for nothing. Meanwhile settlers developed this land and wrote their own deeds to it.
Alexander Hamilton first tried to destroy agrarian sovereignty with the Whiskey Tax on rye, forcing people who didn't use currency into debt. But it was land titles and lawyers, a century later, that was used to claim the 200,000 acre coal bed. People were tricked by telling them the coal company was only buying what was under the land and they would own what was on top. Then they clear cut and strip mined it into an alien landscape.
A woman gave her personal account:
I grew up in WVa, near the Ohio border in a coal and steel town that is now mostly boarded up. I had to go back for awhile in the early 2000s to look after Mom. A lot of people were resentful I left and went to college and caused me a lot of trouble. But...all my liberal friends, here, in Philly, never stop going on about the repulsive 'deplorables' who all ought to be shot.
I saw a lot of tragedies in my town, but didn't see any obvious addicts, at lesst not then. Most of the people I knew from childhood had fallen on hard times, and seemed shell-shocked, no idea what to do. Our neighborhood of nice suburban houses was mostly abandoned, overgrown with weeds. There is no way to even leave without a car—no bus or train. The exterminator said the whole town was crawling with rats and roaches from all the abandoned buildings. Along the river, there were rusty trailers with hand painted signs of 'GIRLS'. Never saw that there before! There should have been some kind of help to transition after shutting the steelmill and mine. Instead, they were tossed like a used rag.
What I see both in Appalachia and in California is a waste of human life, potential and joy because our economic system, including academia, makes the rich richer. Ernest, who posts as the electric mule on my YT, sent a NY Times article that makes the point: "Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean."
I end the video by quoting the lyrics to Appalachia by Josiah & the Bonnevilles, and mostly get through without crying:
Far too many times I've held it in Appalachian rage in the northbound wind My mind is growing strong but my body's wearing thin I can’t turn this thing around But you might see it every now and then Appalachian sorrow running down my skin Thinkin' of tomorrow, somethings that might have been I'm just trying to live it down Oh, I'm just trying to live it down Wake up to find that I’ve outgrown my friends Our seeds grew side by side but my roots grew thin Then one day I blew away in Autumn's restless wind She has never set me down Alone I wing my way through winter storms Spring brought new life and summer down it was torn There was blood on my mama’s knees from talking to the Lord He won’t let me wash it out Oh, he won't let me wash it out When they lay my body in the green, green grass I will whisper secrets to the animals that pass Bout the times I walked away 'bout the times I ran back 'Cause inside I am Appalachia Oh, inside I am Appalachia
And I too am Appalachia.
Where do I send you from here? This is How Whites Were Trashed:
I respond to Russell Brand's interview of Tim Pool on critical race theory and Occupy Wall Street. I look at the history of Appalachia, where I was born and Tim has moved, as the trashing of "hillbillies and rednecks" to move them off mining and logging land. I answer Tim’s allegation that the US is slipping into civil war by seeing all wars as empire vs. sovereignty, citing the Spanish "civil war" in example. And I end by suggesting that we secede from the real government—Wall Street not DC.
and this is Animal Husbandry is the New Vegetarian, mentioned in the video:
I discuss food ethics and the shared values between animal husbandry and vegetarianism. I delve into regenerative ranching as the only way to reverse climate change and look at democratizing food production so that everyone can afford real food. I respond to Russell's interview of Tom Kerridge (UtS #197) and share his enthusiasm for feeding the masses--something I dabbled in with my microcharity Food in the Hood. And I discuss Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth.
and this is Wokeness vs the Void on Kehinde Andrews & Candace Owen:
Russell Brand has a vigorous debate with Candace Owens where they jest, they joust, they hold hands and they redesign the system on a yellow pad. Russell's next interview, Kehinde Andrews, calls Candace contradictory, wrapped around a bubble, an empty void, like talking down a hole, belongs on a plantation, crazy ideas, dangerous nonsense, irrational, ridiculously delusional, and a black face on white racism. Who's right? I present their positions and solutions, and then show how we could enable Kehindeville, Russelltopia and Candaceland, along with my own system of community reciprocity.
Appalachian Rage
I'm going to post this comment from Matt Taibbi's thread that I couldn't fit into the video. I thought it was significant, although I told him I couldn't bring myself to call him Turd, much as I respect good manure ;-)
Turd_Ferguson replied to your comment:
As someone who grew up in both a Trailer Park and a Levittown, I will say thank you. This is spot on. The problem with Democratic politics now in this day vs forever ago when I grew up is that the Democrats are now the elitists. Republicans used to be the local Chamber of Commerce, and for the most part they still are. They don't care as much about the small businesses that were the backbone of America, but at least they gave them lip service. The Democrats still claim to be the party of the Unions, but Unions in this country are now too corrupt and too blind to see they are being sold out by the Bankers party now. That's the modern leftist. Spewing nonsense about who is a fascist and who is stealing their money while rabidly supporting the group that actually is fascist and is stealing their money. The irony of our new world order is so fascinating as to be both a tragedy and a comedy at the same time. Shakespeare never had such material.
Great videos accompanying the stack. Much appreciated.👏