2005-03-07
CASTE SYSTEMS
Poor, White and Pissed, A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals by Joe Bageant at Dissident Voice is an essay well worth reading | Forget about high-brow ponitfications from affluent lefties excoriating WalMart while buying their IAMS pet food there on sale | This is the real thing |
Bagent is one of the few I've read since Studs Terkel who speaks as if he actually knows working class folks | More of us need to speak directly about the read concerns and fears of ordinary people |
And we can't afford to wait until the bottom falls out of the market | Hell, the market's bottom fell out long ago if you just learned that the state won't fund your kids' health care because they are cutting HUSKY funds [we're not even thinking about adult heath care needs] or the fact that, as a newly disabled veteran home from Iraq that you'll have to pay $250 per year to get VA medical care and that your smartest kid can't be the first to go to college since the Pell Grants have been cut, the hypothetical status of the Market's Butt is inconsequential |
Gee Molly, we haven't even talked about the idea that it's the RENT on the double-wide we can't afford, to hell with talk about mortgage rates being anywhere near prime | Then again, there's the 29% ursury fee that banks graciously call "interest" that one pays on the credit card used to pay for stuff to run the househould |
Simply put, the tree-hugging soccer mom in her SUV, along with the hubby busy maneouvering his Social-Conscience Stock Portfolio to help finance the time share in Cancun, do not have a clue how the much larger proportionate half of the population lives, yet they have the potential clout to do something about it beyond wringing their hands while listening to Silvia Porgoley carefully cite foreign news bits on NPR |
No, the folks who shy away from taking BushCheney to task for whining about class wars are, sometimes, too close to the same caste as Dick and Dubya anyway | They don't want their sacred cows gored | And they don't socialize with the riff raff either |
Howard Dean has a point | The Dems are way past due for beginning to talk to the great unwashed | Maybe too far past due |
I only hope not | ¶ 01:59
Poor, White and Pissed, A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals by Joe Bageant at Dissident Voice is an essay well worth reading | Forget about high-brow ponitfications from affluent lefties excoriating WalMart while buying their IAMS pet food there on sale | This is the real thing |Bagent is one of the few I've read since Studs Terkel who speaks as if he actually knows working class folks | More of us need to speak directly about the read concerns and fears of ordinary people |
And we can't afford to wait until the bottom falls out of the market | Hell, the market's bottom fell out long ago if you just learned that the state won't fund your kids' health care because they are cutting HUSKY funds [we're not even thinking about adult heath care needs] or the fact that, as a newly disabled veteran home from Iraq that you'll have to pay $250 per year to get VA medical care and that your smartest kid can't be the first to go to college since the Pell Grants have been cut, the hypothetical status of the Market's Butt is inconsequential |
Gee Molly, we haven't even talked about the idea that it's the RENT on the double-wide we can't afford, to hell with talk about mortgage rates being anywhere near prime | Then again, there's the 29% ursury fee that banks graciously call "interest" that one pays on the credit card used to pay for stuff to run the househould |
Simply put, the tree-hugging soccer mom in her SUV, along with the hubby busy maneouvering his Social-Conscience Stock Portfolio to help finance the time share in Cancun, do not have a clue how the much larger proportionate half of the population lives, yet they have the potential clout to do something about it beyond wringing their hands while listening to Silvia Porgoley carefully cite foreign news bits on NPR |
No, the folks who shy away from taking BushCheney to task for whining about class wars are, sometimes, too close to the same caste as Dick and Dubya anyway | They don't want their sacred cows gored | And they don't socialize with the riff raff either |
Howard Dean has a point | The Dems are way past due for beginning to talk to the great unwashed | Maybe too far past due |
I only hope not | ¶ 01:59
