(The above, in case you're wondering, is a QR [as in Quick Response] Code for mobile phones equipped with the Kaywa QR Code Reader, so allowing you to read The Exaggerator on mobile phones enabled to access the Information Stuporbahn. It's free to download. Now you know.)
Have you considered subscribing to the RSS feed for this weblog?
You can do so right here, come to think of it--by way of e-mail, RSS feed readers, social-networking sites, what have you:
(Remember that you can always cancel your subscription @ any time. I won't hold it against you.)
(part 1):
Because the Social Security and SSI benefits Your Correspondent gets (remember, he's so emotionally disabled that he can't work) can only go so far, he'd appreciate it greatly (as would this blog) if you'd be kind enough to make a donation (not tax-deductible, sadly) to the (fully-secure and encrypted, know) Virtual Tip Jar:
You're also invited to check out my e-boutique, The Exaggerator Collection by name and stylee ... and/or, for that matter, these fine e-tailers that this blog is affiliate with:
(part 2):
If you're a blogger or webmaster looking to add value for money to your blog/website, please take a look @ these worthwhile options:
And why not take a moment to look @ PayPal as a way to add online shopping to your website, or otherwise raise funds.
IN ANY CASE, MAY IS ABOUT TO SEGUE INTO JUNE--or, put another way, National Tavern Month is about to give way on this the World Health Organisation's World No-Smoking Day to June Dairy Month.
Climatically speaking, the Minnwissippi did see some rumbles of the old thunder-and-lightning last evening with a little rain; fortunately, though, no real serious damage as opposed to areas of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois and Oklahoma as were afflicted by tornadoes in the last fortnight or so.
=============
AND SPEAKING OF WORLD NO-SMOKING DAY, it may be worth noting that the Nigerian Government has decreed the entire Abuja region (as in the Nigerian Federal Capital Area) to be a Smoke-Free Zone in its entire.
Not to mention the aforementioned WHO calling for a global blanket ban on all tobacco product advertising and marketing, especially so the old cancers. Which, no doubt, Neoconservative Zealots and True Believers in the "culural heritage" arena in our supposedly "morally superior" United States would disapprove of as "incompatible with free-market systems and paradigms."
*************
DEFENCE SECRETARY GATES HAS GONE ON RECORD TAKING THE MYANMARI REGIME TO TASK FOR WHAT BORDERS ON GENOCIDE when it comes to:
refusing to accept foreign planes and ships carrying relief supplies for those afflicted by the recent Cyclone Nargis;
refusing to accept said relief supplies; and
resorting to all manner of sick tricks and strategems to prevent cyclone victims from receiving any type of assistance, thereby making matters worse and further worsening the death toll from disease and malnutrition triggered by lack of access to relief.
Perhaps it was time that we "morally superior" Americans start thinking twice about again adopting the same xenophobically isolationist stance as Myanmar has when it comes to major disaster relief (cf. that afflicting New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005)--especially when the lion's share of victims are the marginalised and vulnerable of Society.
MINNESOTA GOVERNOR PAWLENTY HAS NOW BECOME THE LEAGUE CHAMPION IN TERMS OF LEGISLATIVE VETOES OVER A LEGISLATIVE SESSION--34 for the one just concluded, as a matter of fact.
Excused all the while as "protecting taxpayer interests"--but is it really the influence of the so-called "Club For Growth" whispering in Palwenty's ears when he least suspects it, and all the while expected to lie low about any interconnexion political?
(Remember, Governor Pawlenty: That Grand Delusion you and the C4G share about "low taxes=jobs=social stability" has been discredited, and then some. So why keep pushing it in the face of facts?)
*************
AS IF THE WHOLESALE DEVASTATION ACROSS CHINA'S SICHWUAN PROVINCE FROM THE LATE EARTHQUAKES WASN'T AWFUL ENOUGH (an estimated 65,000 now officially known dead), a dam created by earthquake debris shows signs of weakness to the point where the ensuing impoundment may flood several villages downstream within due course.
Hence, the evacuation of some 120,000 people in close proximity.
*************
RECOMMENDED AND @ ONCE TIMELY READING FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST: Bruce Wilson's warning about the presence of a "Christian" manga-stylee comic on sale @ mainstream booksellers(!), which (in Mr. Wilson's words) amounts to nothing short of a "training manual for the next pogrom against Jews" for children.
And excused all along as one with the defence of White Christian American Honour and Integrity, in effect trying to buy time for G-d to "maintain His Special Grace and Favour" upon America.
Honestly, our children deserve better than such "patriotic" hate.
As well, Your Correspondent has taken the liberty of referring this item to the Anti-Defamation League for their timely attention.
*************
NO WONDER THE POST-BA'ATHIST IRAQIS ARE GETTING SICK AND TIRED OF THE AMERICAN COLONIAL OCCUPATION IN THE "OFFICIAL" GUISE of an ur-RAHOWA Against International Terrorism: Demonstrations by Muqtada al-Sadr-affiliated movements were held today in five Iraqi cities calling for a national plebiscite on whether Iraq should proceed with a proposed Joint Iraqi-American Security Accord.
And in Iran--which His Fraudulency, perhaps under Al Cohol's ensnarement all the while, wants attacked "for electoral reasons" ahead of Indecision 2008, never mind the emerging opposition to the idea--religious leaders have endorsed a "trial balloon" of a programme as would have vending machines set up in community health clinics dispensing clean and disposable syringes to heroin addicts @ the equivalent of 5˘ each. (Ironically, Afghanistan--another theatre of operations in the ur-RAHOWA-turning-into-misadventure--supplies Iran with the bulk of its heroin and opiate requirements. Which, it just so happens, profits the Taleban in no small measure.)
*************
AND ONE THING MORE, COME TO THINK OF IT:
Mein Innkeeper Friend has long been of the opine that much of the behaviours as are the targets of homophobic attack and paranoia by Those Who Should Know Better are probably the byproduct of confusion with transvestism, transsexualism and/or hermaphroditism.
To which could be added (if I may coin a word here) klismaphilism.
As in an erotic attraction to enemas, and so receiving such--preferably on a regular basis. (On the other hand, being sexually aroused by habitual enemas is known medically and psychologically as klismaphilia; Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek Sanitarium fame has been described as a likely klismaphile, what with his fondness for regular enemas after breakfast and his belief in sexual chastity.)
Go shopping @ Exaggermall!--online shop of this blog!
FLASHBACK TO COMMENTS MADE BY BILL "NO-SPIN ZONE" O'REILLY from the Kulturkrieg segment of his 24 October 2007 broadcast, as transcribed by Media Matters for America (emphasis supplied):
But it seems to me, and the studies indicate, that most teachers--high school and college in the United States--are left-wingers. That they bring in a anti-American viewpoint to the sense that they don't preach about the nobility of America, they teach about the deficits.
Now, I think you have to teach both. OK, you don't have to--you can't whitewash, OK? But when the balance goes to, it's a bad country--and there's no question that's going on in the university system. I don't know about high school, but I suspect it is as well. Then the kid gets an attitude like, you're -- he says something to you, "What have you done for me? You know, look at this. Look at Bush."
And the kids who are loyal and try to be patriotic are geeks--are considered geeks because of it....
In other words, methinks "nobility of America," for the sake of this reductio ad absurdum (itself based on "studies" as are purely the creation of Mr. O'Reilly, aided and abetted by Al Cohol), requires nothing short of a sugar-coated, hagiographically glowing depiction of America and things American.
Think, readers, Cavalcade of America, the DuPont-sponsored anthology drama series as aired on NBC Radio between 1935 and 1953, carrying over to television (again, on NBC) between 1952 and 1957, as devoted itself to presenting positive and "pro-social" stories drawn from American history in dramatised form. And to imagine the whole being an exercise in Corporate Responsibility in the wake of the Nye Commission's revelations that DuPont, for one, profited handsomely from the manufacture and sale of explosive black powder for warfare during World War I, leaving the company with a nasty reputation which they needed to repair, particularly among the general public.
But then again, Mr. "No-Spin Zone" and his ilk would likely think twice about using Cavalcade of America as a study tool in American History classes and homeschooling curriculĉ considering where, according to Wikipedia's entry on the show:
Ironically, DuPont's image problems led the company to promote some pacifist and socialist ideals. DuPont stipulated several topics which would be taboo on the show such as gunfire of any kind, which attracted writers such as Norman Rosten and Arthur Miller, who had signed the Oxford Pledge while at the University of Michigan. For scripts the program was also able to attract such prominent writers as Maxwell Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Carl Sandburg and Robert Sherwood. Although Yale University historian Frank Monaghan signed on as an advisor to ensure historical accuracy of the scripts, listeners were quick to point out that trains did not use air brakes in 1860 and Washington's troops could not have sung "Tannenbaum" while crossing the Delaware since it was written two months after that event.
Still, though, you have to wonder if, on balance, the Zealots and True Believers of the America Is The World mentality would recognise Cavalcade's presentation of sugar-coated American idealism as acceptable for serving their desire to advance a True Patriot Love in All Thy Sons Command.
INTERESTING ITEM FROM NEWSHOUNDS, BRAVE NEW FILMS' FOX PROLEFEED-MONITORING BLOG, about how Fox Prolefeed proper, the professed defender of conservative articles of faith in cable news, actually perverts the conservative agenda--read it and weep, boys and girls:
Laura Ingraham's Talking Points Memo on the Factor last Monday night [19th May--Your Correspondent] has haunted [Chrish, who wrote this item for NewsHounds]. In it she twisted Barack Obama's words from a speech in Oregon:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,"
into an accusation that he would submit American sovereignty to foreign approval.
"Barack Obama wants you to give up your SUV!" she began. Her hyperbole included "In an Obama presidency, we have to check with the European Union before we hop in our Chevy Suburbans, eat that extra slice of pizza, or crank up our air conditioning this summer?" and "For liberals like Obama, climate change represents their chance to effectively outlaw the American way of life, that's right, something that they've wanted to do for decades." She employed all the right-wing emotions-indignation, xenophobia, self-righteousness, personal entitlement, native superiority-to turn listeners against Obama and taking action to curb global warming. In essence she said that Americans don't need to reign in our consumption in cooperation with the rest of the world; that would be a sign of weakness, beneath us.
Later in the week I came across a personal story, "No sugar, no butter, and bare ladies' legs." The author reminisces about the sacrifices Americans were called on to make during World War II, which were made gladly and in solidarity. Where's that spirit today?
The commander in chief has only asked that we go about our daily lives and keep the oil-dependent consumption-economy going. That includes buying and driving fuel-guzzling land-yachts, and toodling them to the store to buy a gas-guzzling riding mower for your patch of paradise, which you'll promptly encourage to grow more by saturating with oil-based fertilizers. You can admire the greenery from the chilly confines of your home as you scarf a meat-lovers with cheesy crust and quickly surf past the liberal channels bringing unsettling news of global food shortages and weather-related disasters. When did America get so self-absorbed? When did self-indulgence become our most cherished right?
On this Memorial Day maybe Ms. Ingraham and others who share her views will reflect on the gruesome carnage being carried out so that they can transport their families in utter luxury from one climate-controlled environment to another without breaking a sweat or a fingernail. Maybe they'll rethink their attitude of superiority and realize that patriotism doesn't mean arrogance, and humility is actually a more "Christian" posture (I only bring it up because of her ever-present prominent cross). Perhaps, as a new mom, she'll start thinking in terms of generations to come and what the planet should look like for them. Maybe they'll realize we're all in this together, a simpler life can still be a very good life, and they ought to put the "conserve" back into "conservatism" and the "Christ" back in "Christian." Maybe Bill O'Reilly, who longs for the good old days of his youth, will start encouraging the folks to ride their bicycles or take the bus, grow some vegetables, string up a clothesline, and turn off the air conditioner.
The American way of life our soldiers have died and are dying for is not the grotesque caricature of glutonny and selfishness that is the new "happiness," at least I don't think so. They fight for something far more noble, the notion that we can all live freely, without government interference, to pursue happiness that doesn't come from a corporation. Then we can enjoy the righteousness born of doing the right thing for all our fellow (wo)men, not just those made in the USA.
As if that weren't enough, might I also recommend, for the sake of promoting a classical conservatism (as opposed to the travesty and perversion promoted by Fox Prolefeed and their droogs in the Dark Satanic Mills of conservative propaganda), promotion of mutual self-help initiatives as might seriously empower the same Lower Classes which these pseudoconservatives claim have somehow been "conditioned into accepting Socialist thought" as an indirect byproduct of State welfare within the same free-market parameters they claim to champion and uphold.
As in:
friendly societies (as a form of quasi-denationalised Social Security, which would provide social insurance and health benefits in exchange for a modest weekly contribution);
building societies (as in providing affordable home mortgage loans);
mutual savings banks (to promote thrift and sobriety);
savings and credit unions (to provide affordable consumer credit serving useful ends); and
cooperative retail societies (as would actually provide common-sense consumption goods emphasising practicality and utility as opposed to Wally World's wasteful and frivolous perversion and travesty).
(Unless, however, there is factual evidence abroad as suggests where mutually-based business models are "promoting dependency" contrary to the conservatives' belief in self-reliance based on personal responsibility, epitomised, for one, by the Morris Plan loan companies.
(Basically put, Morris Plan was an early form of microfinance which required would-be borrowers, usually working-class such, to have two co-signers vouch for the borrower's creditworthiness and to purchase Installment Thrift Certificates equal to the face value of the loan, payable weekly.)
No wonder Fox Prolefeed relishes perverting conservatism as they do while claiming to uphold its articles of faith--is this not doublethink in and of itself?
Is this any way to expect the Lower Classes to "know their place"?
TO HEAR THE ZEALOTS AND TRUE BELIEVERS OF NEOCONSERVATISM PUT IT, THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE NO RESPECT FOR INDUSTRY, SELF-RELIANCE, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, or even thrift based upon cash economy.
Never mind the old adage that "the poor pay more," especially given their want of access to decent channels of consumer credit apart from payday lenders, pawnshops, Morris Plan and the weird and unwholesome element's loan-sharking activities. That, and their only shopping options being "liberal credit" catalogue cards, dollar stores, convenience stores and Wally World.
To which Neoconservatives will likely reply, "they deserve to pay more" because of their "unwillingness to embrace thrift based on cash economy," which, even then, makes access to consumer credit all the more difficult.
Their preferred approach to help "develop healthy respect for thrift based on cash economy"?
Simple:
Have them sign over their welfare benefit emouluments, preferably through trick or deception, to the County Guardian of the Poor as Representative Payee, never mind the aforementioned Guardian's likely being an irresponsible spendthrift using funds so entrusted for "loans" with no realistic likelihood for timely repayment (as in diversion to the personal use of the Guardian under false pretenses).
Vendor-paying rent or mortgage (as the case may be) and essential utilities.
"Loading" any ensuing residue (if any) on what turns out being a special-issue Wally World debit card ISSUED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, or so labelled; the "educational purposes" being, as it turns out, expecting the Lower Classes to:
recognise free-market capitalism with American characteristics as being essential to the "defence of [America's] antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity;
"do their fair share" of unwise or otherwise imprudent consumer spending "for the greater good of the economy;" and
have no due regard for the consequences of their "imprudent" consumer spending as time wears on.
Never mind where it turns out that the Lower Classes wind up getting overpriced, second-quality merchandise prone to breakdown within measurable distance, and likewise expecting same to jump through hoops to request service under factory warranties--preferably by resorting to obnoxious extremes bordering on nuisance, whining, caterwauling and direct threats (cf. old-school TV advertisements targeting children until around the early 1970's, when consumer pressure forced an end to such tactics).
Notwithstanding where Neoconservatism's articles of faith expect the Lower Classes to except the failings of the products or services they buy "with meekness and humility," as in keeping quiet all the more under threat of their benefits being arbitrarily cancelled or suspended.
Meaning, in the end, expecting them to find work--even if it means "graciously submitting" to "work-from-home" offers (envelope-stuffing, product assembly and suchlike "make-work/fake-work" more than anything) as are unlikely to produce significant material benefit by deliberate design and "fatal flaws" scripted into the whole.
NEVER MIND WHERE THINGS HERE IN THE MINNWISSIPPI ARE CLOUDY TO THE POINT OF OVERCAST, WITH THE ODD PEEP OF SUNSHINE OR TWO, as I present this exugenesis of my own comments, but still, The Exaggerator needs to speak its mind.
After all, "don't read the headlines; read The Exaggerator: Smartness, with just a hint of pretension."
Or, as they'd say in Bloemfontein, "nie lees van hoofopskrifte; lees Die Oordryfte--smartness, met 'n wenk van pretension."
*************
THOSE WHO PUSH THAT PATHETIC-SOUNDING SINGSONG MEME OF "CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION! CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION!!" CERTAINLY GOT THEIR COMEUPPANCE with the Texas Supreme Court's ruling that child-welfare agencies must timely return to the so-called "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" the 420-plus children removed from their Yearning for Zion compound nearly two month back, citing the incredibility of the rationale of "imminent harm" used by the State to justify removal thereof.
And will no doubt be dancing in the streets of Branson this weekend.
=============
MEANWHILE, THE "CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION!" CROWD, WHAT WITH THEIR ASSOCIATIONS TO THE RELIGIOPOLITICAL RIGHT, need to recognise where one of their own leaders--as in Tony Perkins of the so-called "Family Research Council"--has let slip his associations with the so-called "Phineas Priesthood," a loose-knit band of Archie Bunker/Alf Garnett types who would love to invoke the Biblical account of Phineas (see Numbers 25) as a defence to hate-crimes charges involving the old ultraviolence against real or suspected "homosexuals," "race-defilers" (interracial couples, Loving v. Virginia notwithstanding) and others deemed "undesirable" because of colour, race, beliefs or sexual orientation.
Several as have been convicted of hate crimes, in fact, have been using the "Phineas Priest" device of late as an ex post facto defence, particularly for the sake of appeals to avoid enhanced terms of penal servitude ... or, for that matter, as a criminal defence in forthcoming trials.
Next thing you know, the Elmer Gantry Institute for Advanced Religiopolitical Theology will want to be recommending the "Phineas Priest" defence vis-a-vis hate crimes which heretofore would have been excused as one with "protecting racial and familial honour, purity and integrity." As for the courts, don't expect them to buy into it; on the contrary, expect them to disallow the "Phineas Priest" defence to hate crimes.
(As reminder, Mein Innkeeper Friend is of the view that what many homophobes--especially such invoking the G-d, Country and Family defence and banner--see as homosexuality may actually be confused with transvestism, transsexualism and/or hermaphroditism. Has anybody considered this prospect?)
=============
A NEW PILL FOR "CHRISTIAN PATRIOT" HOMOPHOBES, GENERAL XENOPHOBIC FEELINGS AMONG THE ELEMENT NOTWITHSTANDING: A Turkish district court in Istanbul, Not Constantinople has ordered the country's only gay/lesbian rights group, Lambda Istanbul, dissolved on the grounds that its activities contravene Turkish laws on "violating morality" and "protection of the family."
Never mind where homosexuality is not specifically proscribed under Turkish law, nonetheless Human Rights Watch has gone on record with a recent report revealing blatant and wholesale dicrimmination against the epicene across Turkey.
Never mind, too, that Turkey's Constitution calls for its being a republic along Secular-Progressive models, nonetheless the militant Muslim element could easily be some of the worst ringleaders in said homophobic feelings.
Now how will the Religiopolitical Right respond to this news?
*************
THANKS TO HIGH JET FUEL PRICES AND A SOURING SOCIOECONOMIC SITUATION AS IS PARTLY THE BLAME OF HIS FRAUDULENCY'S GREAT WITHIN, British business-class international airline Silverjet has announced where it's suspended operations.
This notwithstanding the just-launched US-EU Open Skies Agreement.
=============
AND SPEAKING OF FUEL PRICES, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced where it had quietly been conducting enquiries into the clear and present likelihood of speculative price manipulation on the futures markets for crude oil, natural gas, propane and refined petroleum products since the start of the year.
As in speculative to the point where crude oil prices on the spot markets reached a record $135/bbl. just about a fortnight ago, translating into a 1,350% increase in the cost of a barrel of oil over the last decade.
The CFTC may want to consider among Likely Suspects the likes of His Fraudulency's Great Within, especially so the "inside of the inside," secretly and yet discreetly engaging in Hunt Brothers-stylee behaviours tending towards outright domination of crude-oil and refined products futures since well before the Unfortunate Events of 9/11, and hoping for a substantial cashin once His Fraudulency leaves office.
Unaware all the while of the likelihood for where the Great Within could be facing significant and measurable margin calls which they may be unable to meet, in turn translating into wholesale collapse of the markets in question, within measurable distance.
*************
AND YOU CAN PROBABLY START BLAMING THE NATIVISTS AND WORKFARE'S ZEALOTS AND TRUE BELIEVERS for the summer guest-worker scheme (as in having foreigners from Eastern Europe in particular on J2 visas employed in summer positions) being diluted to the point where Wisconsin Dells especially won't be seeing too many among the Russo-Slavic element working summers there.
In effect, forcing the shoobie trade to turn to workfare programmes to find what it could get for summer help among "chronic and habitually-dependent" welfare "basket cases" as but the first step towards weaning what Neoconservatives want to see as the first generation since the "failed and failing" Great Society to simply say No to State welfare and Yes to Industry, Self-Reliance, Personal Responsibility, Thrift based on Cash Economy and a Wholesome and Simple Home Life.
Likely to be further reinforced by expecting such summer help from among these "welfare basket cases" to consider private-sector retirement savings schemes instead of the "failed and failing" State system of Social Security; said private funds all the likely investing in dubious microcaps, "junk bonds" and Real Estate Investment Trusts unlikely to turn a profit by deliberate design tending to manipulation--all the while really little more than thinly-veiled "High-Yield Investment Programmes" (HYIP's) as are based offshore "for tax reasons," or so the line hath it.
And the connexions of K Street's biggest fans for denationalised State Social Security in all of this subplot downplayed, and deliberately.
It's no wonder "white trash" is @ risk of exploitation all the more
ON SEVERAL RECENT OCCASIONS, YOUR CORRESPONDENT HAS TAKEN TO USING COLUMNS BY MIAMI HERALD COLUMNIST LEONARD PITTS, JNR., to bring up some rather points which he has to offer when it comes to issues like race and its effect upon the public good.
This time, Mr. Pitts (himself of colour) has some worthwhile observations about the "how and why" of "poor white trash" being all the more vulnerable to the point of their exploitation being all the more pronounced as it is:
I keep thinking I should be mad at West Virginia.
Not because Barack Obama was recently beaten like a red-headed stepchild--to use my father's expression--in that state's primary. No, I'm thinking I should be upset about why he was beaten. According to exit polls, two out of every 10 voters said race was a major factor in how they cast their ballots.
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show ran a clip of a white woman who explained her refusal to vote for Obama thusly: ''I guess because he is another race. I'm sort of scared of the other race 'cause we have so much conflict with 'em.'' She spoke in the vaguely shamefaced, what're-you-gonna-do? voice of someone who knows she should stick to her diet or stop smoking, but just can't help herself.
You'd think this would have me in a state of high dudgeon, fingers blazing the keyboard in righteous rebuke of attitudes so atavistic and wrong. But I can't. Oh, it's disappointing to see bigotry in Appalachia so vividly displayed. Yet I find it doesn't make me angry.
It just makes me sad.
I feel sorry for them. If that sounds patronizing, I apologize. That's not how it's meant.
It's just that, if the headline here is that Obama was rejected by whites on the basis of race, I submit that's not the whole truth. Pollsters say he was actually rejected on the basis of race by whites who lack college degrees and whose household income is less than $50,000 a year. In other words, he was rejected by the poor and the less educated.
Which is a desription that fits many in Appalachia--and also a vast swath of African America. So for me, the story here isn't simply the old, familiar tale of the nation's stark racial divide, but also another tale, just as old, less often remarked, of how the white poor and the black poor have long been kept at one another's throats as a means of keeping them from looking too closely or clearly at the ways both are maniuplated by the forces of money and power.
And here, let me tell you what I am not saying. I'm not saying all bigots are poor or all the poor are bigots. I'm not saying everyone in Appalachia is poor, or less educated, or atavistic about race.
But I am saying this: The white poor have been victims of a con job going back at least as far as the Civil War, when poor white men were used as cannon fodder for the right of rich white men--I repeat: rich white men--to keep slaves. They were told they fought for state's rights.
From then till now, the white poor have often been the front line of white supremacy. You think people with college degrees and six-figure salaries are out there marching around under pointy white hoods, burning crosses? Hardly.
My point is that race has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more.
But the one thing they did have--or so the con went--was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.
This, even though they did menial work under menial conditions, earned menial pay, sent their kids to menial schools, were subject to menial indignities, made do with menial health care and lived menial lives hemmed in by want, ignorance and hunger.
Exactly like those they had been taught they were better than. Exactly like those they had been taught to look down upon.
There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people's lives. But they can't and won't so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.
Those are differences that too often obscure commonalities--of need, of hope and of cause. Over the years, many of us have figured that out.
In West Virginia, at least, two in 10 of us have not.
Is it any wonder, then, that working-class "poor white trash" are all the easier prey for the Producerist movement and its articles of faith, heavy as they are with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, nativism, racism and anti-Government sentiment targeting especially immigrants and welfare "basket cases"?
And haven't they heard about cooperativism as a tool towards their own empowerment out of the desperate quagmire they've been reduced to all this time, and the stereotypes that feed their so remaining?
Suck it, Bill "Boycott France" O'Reilly; or, When will me "morally superior" Americans ever learn?!
SO MUCH FOR BOYCOTTING FRANCE IN THE NAME OF G-D, COUNTRY AND THE USE OF UR-RAHOWA TO MAINTAIN AN OUTDATED CONCEPT such as "the White Male Christian Power Structure," the unswerving defence of which Fox Prolefeed forever contends is necessary to that of "our antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" as a nation--see for yourself what the French could be teaching us "morally superior" Americans, as in the new wheel-on-rail world speed record of 578 km/hr (358 mph) set by a TGV test bed just last summer:
(Come to think of it, perhaps it was time to start asking the Presidential candidates of the several qualified parties what their agenda would be towards transportation policy in general and Amtrak in particular.)
And speaking of Bill O'Reilly's "Boycott France" campaign, and the lies such are built on, consider this video:
No wonder I could just imagine The O'Reilly Factor being especially deserving of being "drowned out" by a lusty rendition of "La Marsellaise," the French National Hymn whose lyrics any French schoolchild can sing @ the drop of a hat....