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ORIGINAL ESSAYS
White Trash
- over time, America has seen more downward than upward mobility, and migration often substitutes for actual class security.
- Americans continue to tell themselves they believe in social equality, but history tells a different story.
- "White Trash": The language used to describe classes and the poor can be traced back to the forceful imprint left by British colonization. Before it became that fabled "City upon a Hill," America was, in the eyes of 16th-century English adventurers, a foul, weedy wilderness — a "wasteland," they called it, where the Old World could unload the idle poor.
- Among the unheroic transplants were convicts, Irish rebels, known whores, ex-soldiers, adults in debt, and the children of beggars, all of whom either chose exile in place of a prison term (or hanging!) or else sold themselves into indentured servitude.
- The great majority of the early colonists were classified as a surplus population, as expendable "rubbish" — a rude rather than a robust population.
- These were America's "waste people," who, sometime around the 1820s, came to be called "white trash."
by Nancy Isenberg, June 21, 2016 4:44 PM
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Brexit and Trump-ism share common themes and causes focused on the growing disposability of American and European workers. This was a sensed phenomenon Pericles21 posted on this blog site about some time ago (Pericles21' post of February 6, 2009 -
"MBA Follies #1: The Public as Labor Pool [Or, MBA wet dreams gone bad)" was a growing but still, at that time, a somewhat contentious question of 'being' for the American worker - what or who exactly, was the American (and western powers) worker in the world of the now truly big, truly powerful multi-national corporations?
Were developed-nations' workers still, foremost, citizens or were they in the process, or well along the way, of becoming just a cost parameter, a cog, in the profit machine...without countervailing powers, losing respect from the national governance systems, and increasingly having their 'being-hood' (ascendancy as living persons) given to, or high-jacked by, the corporations (viz., the American Supreme Court's 2010 decision favoring virtually unlimited corporate election donations, '
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission'.
Continuing the list of erosions of hard-won benefits and powers suffered by American workers, there has been a ever closer examination by researchers on the decline of unions and real wages since the 1970's. This had resulted in a growing, 'itchy' sense in both researchers and workers that all was not 'ok' in the land of the free, and it's motherland of ideas, Great Britain...and likely including Spain, Greece, and several other nations at this point.
That question about the value and constitutional importance of workers, and the larger worker-middle class (80% of America) could be condensed into a broad question - 'exactly who is the American citizen, what place in American politics does a citizen have in today's America and especially in corporate-globalism, or global-corporatism (the two descriptors are now indistinct since the top-most power element after the 'Elite 1% is the corporate empire which is global and has come to control governments and global electoral processes...until BREXIT and Trump-ism..which caught the pundits, seated politicians and just about everyone else, including BREXIT and Trump supporters by surprise.
On BREXIT and Trump-ism: Not surprisingly, the very democratic principles that the corporate world had cleverly sought (successfully) to manipulate with the result of 'Citizens vs. United', also proved wonderfully robust enough to provide the victims of supposedly all-conquering corporatism with the supreme countervailing power, the referendum and (perhaps) the upcoming vote to elect the American President.
If Trump is not to be the next American President, at least the bells have been rung in this 2016 re-enactment of France's 1790s times of rolling Trumbrils and tumbling heads. Heads may not fall in America, hopefully at least not in reality, but again hopefully we will see balance created in the tug-of-war between the American citizen-worker and the corporate bloc.
Now the question is, 'are there ANY rights left to the worker-citizen?
'Brexit' (and Trumpism) seems to answer for the common folk in both countries, 'Well, one can't be certain where the citizen fits in these days but the common folk have shouted out they do not want to continue to lie in this bed of gross economic inequality.
The ground theme behind Brexit and Trumpism is a combination of lingering, media-romanticized feudalism, dog-whistle racism and habitual knee-bending worship of nobility and its modern equivalent, the corporate and wealthy elites. But why haven't Trumpism and BREXIT exploded before now?
First, Pericles21 challenges the idea that Trumpism and Brexit are original ideas and movements - Trump and Brexit are just terminal signs of a pot that has been building in temperature for several decades and now is exploding its lid.
Pericles21 also proposes that, once again, in America and as well in Great Britain, the roots of citizen passivity-until-eruption derive from the same source - the culturally-engrained, centuries-old, feudalist acceptance by the 'common folk' to be governed by their 'bettors', currently the all-mighty corporate citizens (white collar and those somewhat securely employed under that umbrella) and corporations themselves who in recent years have been given by governments and legal courts astounding recognitions and power in the form of the 'Gift of Beiing' as proferred on bended knee to the corporations by the American Supreme Court in the above-mentioned 'Citizens United' SCOTUS 2010 decision that gifted corporations with personhood.
This class fatalism can still be heard in direct or indirect form among back country, 'White', Scots-Irish-transplanted English folk in the Virginias, Carolinas, Georgia, ...and their generatios later descendants just about anywhere in the south-of-Dixie original states and especially in the family trees of the former Confederate states.
The modern form of this feudal 'inheritance', passivity in the face of corporate excesses, is not a good thing for a modern nation - this passivity is civically unhealthy, but it is ingrained and difficult to get rid of because it is a key theme of American culture that is still programmed into our group think in the iconic symbols of the 'suffering-with-pride', simple-living, uneducated heroes exampled by the Clampett's of television's'Beverly Hillbillys', the 1940's movies' 'Ma and Pa Kettle', ...and many other movie and television creations. These simple folk were held as American memes of truth and quality-of-life, in integrity, while material and social network quality-of life was preserved for their 'bettors', the corporate and upper classes.
This self-delusion had to (must) end and Trump is its voice. If Trump is not eleted President, let's hope that the next President anad Congress will have listened to what Trump's calling out is messaging, deep disatisfaction of the American working class, and implement programs to better the quality of life for the common folk of America (national health care, free college at least at the two-year level, national wage reviews, ...), modernize America's infrastructure to support the businesses of the next century (high-speed rail, national internet, space-resources exploration and mining systems development)
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