Tgk1946's Blog

From Rainbow Pie (Joe Bageant, 2010 ) pp85-93

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 runoff, 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 prewar 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 subprime 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 driven 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 laid 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 Vlrginia 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 alonenese. 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.

STANDING BACK FROM THE SUBJECT FOR A MOMENT, here’s the backstory.

Given the 15,000-year-long history of agricultural practice, the destruction of America’s agrarian culture was so swift as to be virtually instantaneous. It was quick even by our national historical measure: beginning about 1937 under Roosevelt, it had been accomplished by the mid1960s. According to our national storyline, however, the death of our agrarian society was unavoidable – just part of our onrushing national vitality. In the official version taught in schoolrooms everywhere, America arrived at the industrial age by means of the raw strength of a younger nation endowed with can-do spirit and vigour; at the nuclear age by sheer brilliance; and at the consumer age because God wants his anointed people to own iPods, a DVD player in every room, and at least one salad shooter per family member. We became what we are as a result of the purest form of destiny – or, for the more articulate, by way of those ‘historical trends’ that pundits and ponderers of such things are always talking about.

Consequently, the migration of millions of American families during the post-war era was ‘part of a necessary economic trend’ away from the farms, villages, and small towns. After all, we could not remain a nation made up entirely of farm families and the small communities that served them in a symbiotic relationship. According to the American storyline, the malling of the countryside and the application of every American’s labour to the manufacture and distribution of commodities was in the ‘highest purpose use of labour’ and in ‘the people’s best interest’. And that’s true, if our best interest and highest purpose lies in employing every man or woman in the production of salad shooters – or, now, pizza delivery, since saladshooter production has moved to Taiwan. Now we are reduced to the service industries, fast food, finance, and debt collection.

What has been overlooked is that every human system begins somewhere in the earth’s soil or under it, and is either proven sustainable or not. We chose to abandon a proven system for a high-risk one – getting apples from China and hamburger steak from Argentina, feeding our crops petrochemicals, and frying the dirt for more profitable yields. The system of human proximity to the farms that produced the food, fibre, fuel, and medicines, and a host of other civilisation-sustaining commodities, had worked for 10,000 years. You’d have to call something like that a well-tested system. Especially considering that our venture in industrialising the earth in defiance of Mother Nature’s product specs (such as inventing space-saving square tomatoes that do not freeze in winter because of the whale blubber DNA that has been inserted in them) has led to the ecological catastrophe underway.