And all because Obama mentioned something we've known for at least a
couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the
nation's heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.
To quote Obama:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small
towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and
nothing's replaced them.... And they fell through the Clinton
administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not."
So what the hell else is new?
Then Obama adds: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they
cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them
or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain
their frustrations."
While not precisely correct, it's a good enough generalization for
an American audience not really listening anyway. Obama's remarks were
not in the least controversial and just plain boring in terms of
content. Certainly not newsworthy.
Yet he had no sooner closed his mouth than this media manufactured
hell broke loose. "Oh my gawd," they screamed. This guy has the
unmitigated gall to suggest that their might be some bitterness out
here in the lily white realms of Grant Wood, grange halls and Methodist
church suppers! Right here in River City!" -- where the combination of
God rhetoric and Chamber of Commerce boosterism have managed to ban the
word from public discourse. Even the mention of it can be explosive,
simply because there is so much of it stuffed inside working folks,
inside the lockbox of denial that comes with being the citizen of a
culture in collapse.
Put more simply, the self-serving "blogger-reporters" and Hillary
Clinton media machine had managed to kick Obama in the balls from
behind.
Along with the bitterness charges came the guns and God stuff. Well,
we Red State rubes out here in the working world do own a lot of guns,
though very few of us "cling" to them in the desperate sense the speech
implied. As to what Obama described as our clinging to religion, we do
not so much cling to it as it clings to us -- as a vestige of our
heritage. It's neither a good nor bad thing in and of itself, but
mighty damned useful to fear mongering politicians and the screen
writers of television crime shows. Hell, even I made a few bucks
writing about its nastier side in my book Deer Hunting With Jesus.
For me, listening to politicians talk, then listening to the media
talk about politicians talking, rates right up there with swapping spit
with a gingivitis victim. I do not like nor trust nor much listen to
Hillary, McCain or Obama. And I wouldn't vote for any of the three even
if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a
bottle of Jack Daniels.
However, after hearing Obama's March "race speech," in Philadelphia,
I can understand the Obama cult a little better. Although his speech
was full of national clichés and meaningless soaring rhetoric, somehow
it was still a goddamned good one, and right on in my opinion. Maybe I
liked it because, like the poverty victim he brought forth in typical
Democratic Pity Party fashion, I too have eaten mustard and relish
sandwiches growing up (or when lacking those condiments, plain sugar on
white bread.) I loved the speech. But I still ain't drinking the
Kool-Aid.
In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word
bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American
culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be
angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the
white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence,
never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness
has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is
the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or
pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in
the class that benefits from our classist society.
I'm from Winchester, Virginia, the very kind of place and people
Obama was talking about when the rotten tomatoes started hailing down.
So allow me to say this: we white members of the sweating class have
been working alongside laboring immigrants, legal and illegal, for
decades and have not been killing them with our personal arms in a rage
of antipathy, in so far as I know. The reason, near as I can tell, is
that we do not give a happy shit one way or another because most of us
do not have interest or knowledge enough to fester on the topic. Nor
the time. When we fester on stuff, it's about making car payments and
trying not to default on our mortgages. Working two and sometimes three
jobs per household does not leave much time to develop political
opinions, much less informed ones. I'd be willing to bet there is not a
working class person within four blocks of where I now sit who has even
heard of this media manufactured Obama fracas. Yesterday Smokey, the
apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing
machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama
thing.
"Huh?" he said.
He spoke for millions.
Nobody out here that I know particularly "hates niggers," blames
Mexicans or is willing to use their personal firearms against any of
those people, unless they find one of them crack crazed and coming in
through a bedroom window at 2 a.m., in which case there will be a loud
boom, and the perp is gonna look like a pizza splattered up against the
wall. Otherwise we just stand before the incompressible system that
fucks us blind. And in that there is certain bitterness.
Let's get to the nub of this thing here: Obama, Hillary and McCain
are farting through silk while playing out their roles in our
theatrical state's false drama called presidential elections, while
smug and media sanctioned pundits snark from the edge of the proscenium
arc of politics, each hoping to draw enough attention to have his or
her own proscenium in that national cathedral of the American
consciousness -- television.
Before too long this earth shaking "incident" will be drowned out by
the escalating noise of the election year. Then even the election's
hoopla will all be wiped away when Oprah Winfrey, in one of her ever
grander spectacles of televised largess, gives away the city of Detroit
to the sixth grade author of the most heart rending essay on black
poverty.
November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand,
much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in
it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in
shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn't
know any other way of life.
One of these days, when it comes to such things as the thundering
non-controversy of Obama's remarks, the blogosphere and the media may
start asking the right kinds of questions. The kind Smokey asked me
after I explained the Obama controversy to him:
"Who the fuck cares?"
LINK: JoeBageant.com