For weeks we've heard about "white working class voters" -- the voters in states like Kentucky and West Virginia who utterly refuse to vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances. They'd rather see their sons drafted, their jobs sent overseas, their Social Security and Medicare gutted, than take the chance on someone who might work to make their lives better, but who flies in the face of their lifelong fear and loathing of anything different.
I will forevermore have ringing in my words of my friend, a 60-plus-year-old grandmother who asked me, in all seriousness, if I really think Barack Obama is "loyal enough to our country" to be president. She hates what the Bush Administration has done, she hates John McCain and everything HE promises, but this fall she will either stay home or vote for McCain, because friends who send her e-mails have led her to believe, or at least to fear, that Barack Obama is somehow dangerous.
And she's not alone:
Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: "They think you are un-American," he said.
Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.
What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America.
[snip]
The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.
One features a made-up quote in which Obama "explains" why he purportedly doesn�t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.
"There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression," the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. "And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message."
Obama has never said such a thing.
Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.
He took the oath on the Bible.
Then there is perhaps the least subtle e-mail, "The Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama in Pictures," which includes numerous pictures of the candidate's dark-complexioned relatives on his father's side in native African garb.
The e-mailers aren't troubled by the dissonance between two lines of attack -- the assertion that he's a Muslim and the claim that he belongs to a radical black Christian church -- though one goes as far as to try to reconcile the apparent conflict by arguing that Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ is covertly Muslim, something that would come as a surprise to its parishioners.
These e-mails are racist, they are libelous, and they are lies. But they work.
Democrats have made the mistake year after year of insisting that "The American people are too smart to fall for this." Republicans, on the other hand, understand the power of fear and loathing. They know it works. They know that since they can't win people to their side with the doctrine of Stuff More Cash Into the Pockets Of The Wealthy, they'll win it through fear -- fear of Scary Negroes™ (sic). Fear of Scary Middle Eastern Men™. Fear of Scary Women Who Want To Cut Off Your Penis&trade. Funny how it's never about fear of Scary Corporate Executives Who Want To Send Your Job Overseas While Raking In a Nine-Figure Salary And Poisoning Your Water Supply™.
Lower Manhattanite also understands:
Rugged in its raw form, and rougher still through what has been done to it by man and moguls, this is a place where large corporations make mega-fortunes on ripping the very heart out of the earth and cleaving off its scalp. The coal mining industry, while not employing the huge numbers it once did, is still a major economic force in the area. With upwards of 600 open and active mines in the region, pulling out close to 300 million tons of coal every year, pitting and scarring the land as the dark manna is hauled out on the cheap, the region's workers average a paltry $25,000 per year in pay for this back-breaking hollowing out of the earth beneath them. You add in the mills that have taken up the slack, where every fiber-filled, right-to-work breath steals a little bit of a person every day, and then stir in the “legacy” economy that pays to keep alive the people who gave of their bodies for decades—pensions and stratospheric late-in-life health care costs, and you have a population dangling by its economic short and curlies. And the moguls who own and ioperate these cash-cow companies have a vested interest in keeping the area's population ill-educated (which lessens the opportunity to gain work beyond home), financially on eggshells and “American Dream”-starved. Were these folks to in large numbers move beyond the necessity to work in these life-stealing industiries, where-oh-where would the cheap labor come from? There simply isn't enough of an incentive for “illegals” to descend upon the mountains and snatch these jobs up. For that low level of pay (and it'd be lowered still for brown-skinned folks) and body-busting work, there would have to be more of a secondary, benign payoff than Appalachia-as-it-stands can provide. Things that many take for granted, like ease of inexpensive travel and access to the culturally familiar would work against a replacement, outsider workforce. So you have in effect, a group almost permanently chained to the corporations that call the shots in the area. That is what is called “a captive workforce”.
This is the main reason why the young leave there in droves—the limited opportunities for success compared to the rest of America. Sadly, Appalachia is not a place you think of when thoughts of making the most of the “American Dream” come to mind. And that's the way the region's controlling interests want it. Born poor, keep them poor, and said poverty keeps enough there to be used as fuel for the money machine. It's also why the voting populace skews so heavily older. These are the folks tied to home—be it by duty to family who needs them, or an inability to escape. They will be born there, live there, work there, and yes—die there.
Now, this is not to say that they are terminally morose, or constantly unhappy...or dare I say it—bitter. They most certainly are those things when times are at their hardest, as would anyone who feel the weight of clouds limiting their sight of prosperity's sky. But they get by. It doesn't consume them. They live their lives as fully as things allow. And they no doubt know that the country outside of where they are experiences life differently—maybe with the odds stacked in a less-high pile against them. It's only human for there to be some envy, and even some antagonism.
Here's where race creeps into the picture. When you take into account the relative scarcity of Black folk in the region, racism's spectre seems odd in that it would appear hard to hate people who aren't there to be hated. Racism though, is a chameleon, changing pattern and texture depending on environment and situational catalysts. It manifests itself in Appalachia as an outgrowth in large part from socio-economic pressures and good, old self-esteem issues. This is also in the interests of the “bosses” whose businesses so dominate the region, and further, the local politicians in their pockets. As a distracting straw man, they unsubtly perpetuate the dusky, but actualy unseen “other” as a factor in their doing so poorly. And since time immemorial, no group wants to be regarded as the low man on the totem pole (The irony of using a Native American metaphor should give us all pause.), and in America, regardless of social station, African Americans can never truly escape that position.
You may be bad off. You may be under-educated, or ill-housed...but as long as you ARE NOT a n*gg*r, you ARE NOT at the bottom.
For some people—for a LOT of people, that's more than enough to make them feel a little bit better about themselves. And anything that enables that is hunky dory when you're effectively parked in what America deems its sweaty regional armpit.
It should be easy to combat this; it really should. It shouldn't be so difficult to point out how Republican Parties serve to eliminate any dreams these people have for themselves, their neighbors, and their children. Barack Obama's name and skin pigmentation are just the latest manifestation of the Democrats' failure to reach these people for nearly four decades.
The war in Vietnam gave patriotism a bad name. Conservatives who supported the war changed the definition of patriotism from love of country to blind obedience to that country's leaders -- a definition that persists to this day and was exacerbated by tha 9/11 attacks. Of course the media help perpetuate this notion that patriotism = unquestioning jinjoism and boosterism, but we liberals have been astoundingly ineffective as framing what "love of country" means. Perhaps it's because our country has this bloody history of kicking indigenous people off their land, using slave labor to grow crops, and exploiting workers for the benefit of the filthy rich. It's hard to pull a patriotic message out of that. But we have to find a way to get out of the grievance politics that make us feel we have to self-flagellate in perpetuity for the heinous acts of those who built this country and create the compassionate nation of opportunity and welcome that can benefit all of us -- including the descendants of those who were the victims of these parts of our history.
If Barack Obama were a Republican, he could beat the drums of war and wave the flag and spout the standard right-wing horseshit, and maybe (like Alan Keyes) he might occasionally be granted the title of Honorary White Person when it behooves Republicans to do so. But the irony is that more than any presidential candidate in my lifetime, Obama most fully represents the true meaning of the country for which we're supposed to wave the flag -- E Pluribus Unum -- "out of many, one".
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