Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Makers and Takers in Southwestern Virginia

It's bad, bad, bad politics to support something a Vice-President (or vice-presidential candidate) has said more than you support what the President (or presidential candidate) has said. Not unprecedented--plenty of people chuckled sympathetically at Jim Lehrer's comment, during a Gore/Bush debate, about flipping both tickets--but such bad politics. So, will someone please send me a link to Mitt Romney saying something I can support (beyond "God Bless America"?), because I have to say this: I could hardly agree with Paul Ryan more.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/paul-ryan-in-2011-clip-70-of-americans-want-the-american-dream-30-want-the-welfare-state/

It literally hits close to home.

For some years now I've pondered the problem of saying something that some people are going to misinterpret...because they want to misinterpret it. I don't think people of good will are likely to be confused.

My home town, Gate City, Virginia, is about an hour's drive away from a town of similar size called Appalachia, Virginia. I have to mention this actual place called Appalachia because, when I was growing up here, most of the drivel I read about "Appalachia" was so irrelevant to my home and family--which were allegedly in "Appalachia"--as to make me say, "There's no such place." Well, there is; I'm even related to someone who married someone who was born there; I've actually been in Appalachia, by now. It's scenic, and the people I met are charming, though not touristy. So for the purposes of this web site we make a sharp distinction between Appalachia, the real place, and AppaLAYshia, the morbid fantasy projected out of Eleanor Roosevelt's guilt-ridden mind.

(In Appalachia, the real place, the mnemonic is "Some of those coal miners have rough manners, and if you mispronounce the name of their town they might even throw an apple at ya." I know some dictionaries show a long A as in "lay" in there somewhere. Those dictionaries were written by people who'd never been in Appalachia, or in Gate City, or for that matter in Berea, Kentucky, where one of the professors used to say that "AppaLAYshia" was a linguistic counterpart to "Oriental.")

Recent gerrymandering has unfortunately generated a fresh wave of confusion...but let's start with the ideas, before bringing people into this line of thought.

Gate City is a farm-and-market town. Most people here are landowners. Many also work in stores and offices. Social life is shaped by family ties and personal relationships as much as money, because people's cash flow naturally varies. Someone who becomes or remains rich is likely to have done good work and handled money wisely, but someone who becomes poor does not automatically have to plop down into the down-and-out welfare class. The Democratic Party has been able to appeal to some people's sense either of justice or of personal interest. The majority have generally favored Republicans because we see ourselves basically as property owners--not necessarily rich, but in a position from which we can reasonably hope to achieve financial comfort. Our elected officials have been among the most "conservative" members of either party, in many ways. That's what we've elected them for...to protect the rights of landowners, rather than promulgate more handouts to welfare recipients. We don't hate welfare recipients, but unless they are extremely old or horribly disabled we like to see them get to work. I think it's fair to say that, of the ones I know personally, even the people who depend on Social Security, Veterans Administration, disability, or Aid to Dependent Children funding would prefer to be financially independent.

Except for Oogesti. Oogesti is a distant relative of mine but he is not a Gate City man, and he fits what I'm about to say about gerrymandering. Oogesti thinks that "work" means that some designated "employer" orders you about for a designated number of hours, for money. Since there's no real satisfaction in this kind of "work" it's not unreasonable that, upon reaching age 62, anyone who has been "working" should want to retire and never do anything that's called "work" again. Also, "work" is a process by which members of a group that includes Oogesti, who can be described as workers and as have-less, collect money from members of a group that does not include Oogesti, who can be described as employers, as government, as capitalists, and/or as have-more. (So, among other things, although Oogesti's retirement pension allows him to hire the help he needs, he does not see himself as
an "employer," does not hire help, and tries to depend on personal friends and relatives to do things for him without payment.)

There are members of Paul Ryan's 70% category in Appalachia, too. I know that firsthand. However, Appalachia is primarily a coal mining town. Many people there are, or know, people who don't own and have never owned their homes, are not and have never been self-employed, and think of "work" in the way Oogesti does. The Democratic Party have been very successful in appealing to their sense of personal interest, because people who think this way find it natural to expect that Big Government should need to oversee them and take care of them throughout their lives. They see little difference between being dependent on a corporation and being dependent on a government budget.

"Slaves, as distinct from free people" is hardly an overstatement of my opinion about this way of thinking. I don't suppose people can be blamed for having learned to think like slaves. I feel sorry for them, though, and hope that at least a few of them can learn to think like free people. And yes, the existence of people like Oogesti does make it possible for me to believe the Children of the Confederacy rhetoric about how some slaves loved their lives on the old plantation and didn't want to leave, although as a matter of historical fact I suspect that factors other than fear of change were operating in the late 1860s.

Gerrymandering, the redefinition of political districts in order to alter a politician's ability to represent his or her community, has been applied to southwestern Virginia. People who have done a good job representing a basically Republican electorate have been told that, willy-nilly, they suddenly have to start representing a Democratic bloc somewhere else, too. It's not fair to focus blame, in our case, on Appalachia. Other coal towns with Democratic majorities have been unfairly lumped into our district as well.

I have nothing against coal miners--some of whom, I've seen firsthand, have learned to think like free men, and better than many. If I were going to blame any sector of our local economy for the amount of slave thinking that goes on, I'd blame social workers and government employees, and yes, some of them live in Gate City; one of the best known, for many years, was related to me. I'm not sure that blaming anybody is going to help anything, actually. What I do think needs to happen is that we Gate City landowners, and our elected officials, need to stand firm and commit ourselves to thinking and acting as free people rather than slaves. Those in the habit of slave thinking need education.

Our federal budget is on the verge of a crisis. Corporations have already been forced to reconsider the question of whether anyone has a right to be a taker rather than a maker of money, to lay off masses of people in feel-good, low-productivity jobs. Our government is going to have to reconsider this question too, and the process is going to hurt.

We are going to need to understand, and respect, and carry on a national dialogue with, the slave thinkers--the "takers." Like the dialogue with the Nazis, or with those who threatened little Ruby Bridges, this dialogue is going to have to be stern and uncompromising, but it is going to have to be conducted with malice toward none and charity toward all. We are going to need to teach and sell these people about the idea of, well, freedom.

It looks to me, reading a summary of his speech, as if Paul Ryan is leading us in the right direction.

1 comment:

  1. Today's Romney quote, "Corporations are people," is sooo not what I was looking for.

    ReplyDelete