|
The
Invisible Working Class
Blogger
Bageant reveals the bleak prospects for
Virginia’s working class, using Winchester as
his laboratory. Why don’t elites care?
Besides
apples, Winchester in the extreme north of the Old
Dominion is known for producing eclectic
personalities who make an impact. One was Harry F.
Byrd, the orchard owner who turned state politics
into a tightly-wound, one-party system. Another
was Patsy Cline, the irrepressible bad girl whose
powerful voice defined country music in the late
1950s.
Now
there is Joe Bageant -- blogger, journalist and
socialist-leaning gadfly. A Winchester native,
Bageant grew up working class. His deer-hunting
dad changed oil at a gas station. But Bageant was
bored being home after the Navy during the Vietnam
years. So, he set off on a decades-long, Timothy
Leary-like hippie trip to the West, gaining a
reputation as a writer and social observer with a
Gonzo style similar to Hunter S. Thompson.
Years
later, in 2001, Bageant and his third wife
returned to apple country where he wrote extremely
candid blog entries about characters in his home
town. What he saw is deeply upsetting. The mostly
white, working-class stiffs in the area had
slipped badly in many ways – health care
coverage, wages and personal debt – although
they didn’t seem to realize it. They are fast
becoming an indentured servant class, 21st
Century-style, with no hope of advancement.
Bageant’s blogs caught on. “Someone called me up and
offered me six figures to put this all in a
book,” Bageant told me on the telephone. His
effort, “Deer
Hunting with Jesus, Dispatches From America’s
Class War,” was recently published by Crown
Publishers. I had seen the book at a store and was
caught by the cover flap calling for progressives
to understand “the great beery, NASCAR-loving,
church-going, gun-owning America that has never
set foot in a Starbucks.”
“Hot
Damn!,” I thought, “What a real-world antidote
to the Economics 4.0 mumbo jumbo I read in Bacons’
Rebellion, where the underclass doesn’t seem
to exist.”
Indeed,
many elite commentators on social issues certainly
ignore working or poor folk. When urban-guru
consultant James A. Crupi, for example, got
$150,000 for a report on Richmond, he barely noted
that about one-fourth of city residents live below
the poverty line. Hardly any poor people were
interviewed by Crupi, but the usual crowd of
rich-o West Enders sure were.
Virginia’s
elite is not alone in failing to see what the
potent cocktail of managed care, NAFTA, CEO hubris
and lots of other things has done to working
people, who arguably have done more to make this
nation a success than any other group. As Robert
B. Reich, the labor secretary in the Clinton
Administration, writes in his new book, “Supercapitalism,”
the wealth gap in the U.S. is now at its widest
part since 1929.
Meanwhile,
the rich get richer. In 1968, the CEO of General
Motors took home pay and benefits that were 66
times that of GM workers. By contrast, in 2005,
the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times to pay of the
average employee, Reich notes. For the working
class, it is death by a thousand slices of cuts in
benefits and pay rates that actually backslide
when inflation is factored in.
The
fact that Bageant is a son of blue collar
Winchester gives him credibility and the historic
perspective to compare. “Things were not as bad
in 1970,” Bageant told me. “A guy going to the
lumber mill could buy a small house and have
health insurance.”
Not
any more. The security blanket started to unravel
in the 1980s when corporate executives cut back on
medical benefits to save money. Managed care came
into its own with its ruthless billing systems
that drove poorer folk in to bankruptcy. For
proof, Bageant cites a 2005 Harvard study that
found that 50 percent of all bankruptcies were
wholly or in part the result of medical expenses.
That’s a 2,200 percent increase since 1981.
The
beauty of Bageant’s book is that he puts
human faces on forgotten people, albeit with a
droll humor that regularly goes over-the-top. One
of them is Dottie, a 59-year-old, 300-pound woman
who regularly belts out Patsy Cline songs at a
local karaoke bar. Dottie started working when she
was 13 and married at 15. She had to stop working
several years ago due to poor health.
He
writes: “True to our class, Dottie is disabled
by heart trouble, diabetes, and several other
diseases. Her blood pressure is so high the doctor
thought the pressure device was broken. And she is
slowly going blind to boot. Trouble is, insurance
costs her as much as rent. Her old man makes $8 an
hour washing cars at a dealership, and if
everything goes just right they have about $55 a
week left for groceries, gas and everything
else.” When she applies for public assistance,
the local social security workers deny her
application, saying she’s able to work.
In
example after example, Bageant finds more Dotties.
Some are the workers at the local Rubbermaid
plant, where Bageant once worked briefly in the
1960s. Rubbermaid used to be a highly-regarded
firm that paid a fair wage. But buyouts and the
global economy changed that, he writes.
Newell, Rubbermaid’s owner, almost shifted an
expansion to Mexico a few years ago until local
and state officials prevailed with baskets of
corporate goodies.
Bageant
writes: “Before NAFTA, we had a history of state
leadership hiking its skirts and winking at any
miserable Yankee sweatshop coming down the pike on
its way toward Alabama or Mississippi or Latin
America. So it was not too surprising in 2002 when
Governor Mark Warner proudly proclaimed that
Virginia had “Beat out Mexico,” in scoring 240
additional Rubbermaid jobs at the 900- employee
Newell Rubbermaid Winchester plant.”
Bageant
continues: “A Rubbermaid flak remarked on ‘Winchesterians’’
dependability and unquestionable work ethic
otherwise known as anti-unionism and the
willingness to take benefit cuts on the chin and
keep grinning.”
“So
Rubbermaid employees, in the true spirit of
southern Protestant self-worthlessness, being
‘grateful for the blessings God bestows every
day’ are grateful for Rubbermaid just being in
town,” he writes.
Why
is trashing the working class considered
acceptable? Bageant believes that it is because of
the intellectual conceits of today’s
conservative chattering classes and their
justifications for ending what they dub the
“Welfare Society” (or the “Liberal
Plantation,” if you read Bacons Rebellion).
Bageant
explains: “We first started hearing about the
average Joe needing to take complete
responsibility for his condition in life, with no
help from the government, during the seventies,
when Cold War conservatives Irving Kristol and
Norman Podhoretz dubbed themselves
‘neo-conservatives.’”
Abandoning
its working class roots, the Democratic Party has
become a party of elites in its own right.
Democrats' lack of understanding – or even
caring – means Republicans go unchallenged as
they spin social theory after theory justifying
why it is perfectly OK if the working class gets
shafted by phenomena completely beyond their
control, such as the global economy or managed
care. Universal, government health care, mind you,
is anathema. Don’t even bring it up.
To
be sure, Bageant is too savvy an observer to
simply blame ruling elites for everything. He
bemoans that some in the white working class are
simply too stupid to do much about their downward
trend. As their circumstances deteriorate, they
grasp fundamentalist religion, or, more
incomprehensibly, George W. Bush. Their political
discussions rarely get beyond a few code words.
They have little economic savvy.
Some
examples: Too many in the Winchester working class got
suckered in the now-popped mortgage bubble. Plenty threw caution to the wind. Sleazeball brokers
ignored their bad credit and sold them adjustable
mortgages they now can’t afford. Many are just a
pay check or two away from foreclosure. In one
case, Bageant writes, a couple took out a too big
mortgage for a too big house. Why? It was close to
their favorite taco stand.
Bageant
writes: “Nothing says high school – or
junior-college educated and earning in the
mid-thirties like a $16,000 GM Sierra in front of
the one car-garage. Poorish with seven credit
cards. And nothing says igner’nt and po’ like
a house trailer with a $39,000 dual-wheelie HP GM
classic version of the same damned GM Sierra
parked in the drive.”
Mindful
of zingers like that, I asked Bageant the obvious
question. Are you like Thomas Wolfe in “You
Can’t Go Home Again?” He laughed and said no,
he’s been writing frankly about local folk on
his blog for seven years. They are used to him
now.
--
November 26, 2007
|
