Tgk1946's Blog

Rainbow Pie (Joe Bageant) pp83-92

The phrase, ‘the American people’, took on a new and more potent meaning after the war, and became the absolute stock feature of every speech by every president and politician afterward. Again, Harold Pinter:

Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to ‘take on behalf of the American people.’ It’s a scintillating stratagem. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.

Our national narrative of such things as the ‘Greatest Generation’ is full of holes, and the stuff of much hubris. My generation, ‘The Greatest Zygotes’, as it were, the progeny of the Greatest Generation, were brought up on post-war propaganda from the time we were in the womb. From the beginning, we were fed television shows such as Industry on Parade, which extolled the wonders of working in mind-numbing factories. These shows were indistinguishable from the Russian Glory of the Soviet Worker films of the same period. One episode so effectively sold us the virtues of an industrial soda pop bottling- works that, after watching it, my cousin and I wanted to work in a Coca Cola bottling plant when we grew up. But first we’d have to move to town, of course.

‘Organising for war’ had taught industrialists and government agencies the best ways of organising the American population and its resources toward heavier and more profitable production, both of which lay in worker aggregation and concentration. Consequently, the post-war migration was pushed by planning decisions made by the nation’s industrial and financial power-holders, and was made policy by the US government in the drive toward maintaining its status as a capitalist industrial super-state. Such policy also solved another problem. Historically, farmers tended to be some of the most hardcore populists, and had often sided with the Wobblies and other socialist movements during hard times.

In the winning of World War II, along with increased industrial capability and profits, US capitalism had accumulated an immense amount of another kind of capital with the American public – moral capital. The Soviet communists had gained the same in Russia. Both spent that capital industrialising their nations at the expense of traditional farmers, though to different degrees. Stalin starved and shot Kulaks who did not produce enough grain to finance his communist state’s industrial goals. We caused ours to move where they could be more directly manageable and profitable to the interests of a rapidly emerging corporate state.

The US post-war rural out-migration was initiated -though in a different way and for different reasons – by the same corporate-financial powers that caused the earlier tragic migration of workers in search of work during the Great Depression. Endless footage of the Dust Bowl has subsequently made it synonymous in American minds with the Great Depression, even though they were two separate events. The Dust Bowl affected only a portion of the country. But, according to the average American’s grasp of the history – to the degree that we have one at all – those ten million Americans ‘riding thumb’ and hopping rail cars all came out of Oklahoma, which had a population of about two million at the time. We never see documentaries or movies about the corporate malfeasance of unregulated stock markets and commodity speculation, banking, and other enterprises of the already rich that ruined more rural Americans and farmers than the Dust Bowl ever did. But we do see and read about those very few urban investors who jumped off the twentieth floor during the 1929 stock crash. The recklessness of the financial elites and the layer of speculators that cushioned them blew away millions of Americans – folks who never saw a stock certificate in their lives. As Depression-era migrant Grace Parnple told me in one of the most poetic summaries I have ever heard from the mouth of one of my own people, ‘It was the big-money men, it was them who made us to rise and blow across the land like the Russian thistle, like gypsies in the dust.’

Unlike the Depression and the Dust Bowl, the post- World War II rural out-migration was driven by a good economy – too good to give up, if you happened to be a wartime corporation. America emerged from the war with vastly increased manufacturing capability, and was the ‘last man standing’ after its traditional competitor, Europe, lay in smoking ruins. Super-expanded wartime corporations that had cranked out planes and tanks had become very rich, and were not about to downsize just because they’d run out of Dresdens to bomb. For instance, there were America’s gigantic munitions plants, making ammonium nitrate for explosives. How would they hang on to their massive profit-levels with no industrial-scale warfare to sustain them? In one of those brilliant industrial-economic decisions so often made by corporations and governments working together, it was decided that the stuff could be dumped on millions of acres of corn and other crops at a profit. After all, plants need nitrogen, right? Why not short-circuit the cumbersome processes of nitrogen fixing through photosynthesis and carbon exchange? Thus was set in motion the frying of the heartland’s soil, and the destruction of our waterways and estuaries through run-off, and the creation of acid rain through evaporation. In a similar move, agri-biz built a new industry called pesticides from the poison gases developed for the war. There was no use in wasting good killing power: bomb the bugs and weeds.

And so the military-industrial complex managed to keep up, even increase, its head of steam, despite the loss of that all-time champion booger-devil, Adolf Hitler. Such serviceable Great Satans just don’t come down the pike every day, and we’ve had to manufacture them ever since – the Soviet Union/the Cold War, the communist Chinese, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez – to maintain the complex that Dwight Eisenhower so presciently feared. Incidentally, Eisenhower included not only the military and defence-industry corporations in his definition, but also the news media and the research establishments, the public and private universities that had flourished in the fertile soil of the war’s technological drive.

Millions of decent, urban, blue-collar workers – people whose lives had hung on jobs, or the lack of them, since the destruction of the tradesman and craftsman culture at the turn of the century – still remembered the pre-war soup lines in the big cities. They were thrilled to participate in the wartime rise of corporate industrialism and the money it generated. Studs Terkel quotes a retired worker commenting on the wartime boom economy in The Good War: ‘The war was fun for America. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time That’s forgotten now.’

In any case, the trick at hand for post-World War II corporations was to keep American workers mobilised to produce goods at the same pious levels that had whipped Hitler and Hirohito, and then increase upon that. There would have to be mass production of hitherto unimagined , commodities, and legions of new customers to consume them. Not to mention a cheap labour force to produce them at maximum profitability. The answer lay out there in the sleepy hinterlands.

So here we are, a couple of generations since the last serious buckwheat crop was hauled in from the ridge fields of Morgan County – back when a man smelled like sweat at noon, Lava soap at dusk, and Old Spice aftershave when he was courting. The very mention of that life and aesthetic deems anyone who can remember it a nostalgic coot. So be it. Damned few of us grasp how the loss of traditional aesthetic and foundational values, the yeoman agrarian tradition, are connected with so much modern American tragedy.

We have been paid back for our disregard of that tradition and the uprooting of its souls in surprising and often chilling ways. Creating an underclass of throwaway labourers, and sub-prime mortgage and credit-card debt slaves has its blowback—in the form of inexplicable heartland school shootings, backwoods and trailer-court meth labs, or Timothy McVeigh’s Murrah Center bombing in Tulsa.

Timothy McVeigh as blowback? I’d say so. Having known a number of McVeigh types, I agree with Gore Vidal as to the democratic, agrarian roots of McVeigh’s misguided actions. Despite the horror he caused, unforgiveable by any standard, the Bronze Star-decorated Gulf War veteran acted out of an essentially rural Jeffersonian patriotism. Contrary to the media image of a psychotic misfit, McVeigh’s letters to Vidal reveal a literate, complex man who understood the Constitution much better than most US senators do – few if any of whom keep a copy of that document in their offices. McVeigh understood that whatever democracy once reigned has been subverted by corporations and bought politicians, and believed that America had become a corporate-backed police state consisting of only two classes – the elites and the rest of us – regardless of the party in power. If he was paranoid, he certainly was not alone. Millions of us wonder why the government funds the training of our local police force in armed tactical ‘emergency population control’, or why they are supplied with specialised equipment to collect data for federal intelligence agencies. Hesitant as we are to admit it, we have the same severe doubts as McVeigh did about things like Waco and the Branch Davidians.

McVeigh chose the second anniversary of the Waco Siege, in which the federal government killed 76 people, including twenty British nationals, twenty children, and two pregnant women. The officially manufactured version of both Murrah and Waco offers us a Great Satan, with McVeigh as a crazed redneck psychopath, and the Waco’s Branch Davidians as a cult led by a child molester. This was untrue in both cases, but the government versions have since displaced all other facts about these events.

Another disease currently eating the soul out of the heartland’s white working-class’s futureless young is the meth epidemic. This epidemic, with almost 120 million casual users and 1.5 million known addicts, is a profit centre – especially if its victims end up in places like Montana Correctional Enterprises [italics mine] in Deer Lodge, where they will be contracted out to the private sector as telemarketers at the minimum wage. The prison manager there says that the convicts constitute a dependable workforce: they never come in late, and they stay the full shift. They get to keep a little over one dollar an hour of their earnings, so a guy pulling five years in a lock-up can earn almost six thousand bucks for five years of labour. What’s not to like?

Statistically, nearly all of these imprisoned young men are but a generation or two removed from traditional farms or farm communities and their agrarian values. They are the white underclass’s good ole boys who landed in jail, mostly for committing non-violent offences – stupid offences like growing pot, screwing 18-year-old jailbait when they were drunk at the age of nineteen, writing bad cheques for child support, car theft, and thinking they could outrun the state cops and avoid a speeding ticket, three times. This is completely irresponsible, falling-down-stupid stuff, but not evil stuff like committing drive-by killings or rape. They are part of an America tradition that accounts for so many country songs about prison: Folsom Prison Blues, Mama Tried, Doin’ My Time, In The jailhouse Now, Tom Dooley, Draggin’ Shackles, I Heard that Lonesome Whistle Blow, Cold Cold Bars …

The tragedies of these whites are at least in part due to their marginalisation, displacement, and their underclass cultural ghettoising, just as are so many of the tragedies of African – Americans who went north only to be trapped in underclass ghettoes. Workplace throwaways on the trash heap of no-longer-useful or wanted Americans, they are reduced to inhabiting thin-walled mobile homes in trailer courts behind decaying strip malls, or sub-prime mortgaged paperbox modular homes. The result: graveyards of yokels and hicks stacked generations deep, with cowboy and combat boots sticking out of the grave still defiant, still ready to kick the Devil’s own arse.

The rural-urban divide is real, and rural defiance still simmers beneath the surface of American politics, morals, and values, although it can be hard to discern – what with all the materialism, cell phones, high~definition TVs, and the rest. The populations in our big urban commercial centres are still the drivers of demand and the transactional economy, and consequently they rule the fate of rural people they never see. We’ve been pretty well wiped out or captured. As David B. Danbom said in Born in the Country, the battle between city life and country life may have even been over before the war, ‘but the victorious cities continued to take prisoners’. Yet the libertarian, fiercely independent Jacksonian hog-and-hominy culture of the subsistence farms dies hard. Parts of it – some good, others not-so-good – endure in many forms.

One of them is conservatism. Another is stubbornness. In fact, because of the inherent toil and the years it took to build a good farm – one that would sustain generations – caution and stubborn endurance may be the chief hallmark of the culture. Redneck culture (the term ‘redneck’ is not a pejorative to us rednecks, just to urbanites who think we all chew tobacco at the dinner table and nurse our babies on cheap beer), western cattle-ranch culture, logging, even traditional West Virginia coal-mining, in some respects, all share the same characteristics. And if that culture happens to be at the core of your values, your inner identity, part of a chain of blood and heritage that is your cultural DNA, the result is alienation. If, when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness. And we wish for the return of at least some part of the material and psychic order of the world as our people have known it. The knowable one that sustained us. Even for subsequent generations raised in the cities, it lingers, however inchoate.