A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court
Listen up,
you dour Minnesotans. If you ever got
out of the state to head south – except to Disney World in Florida – you’d have an idea how different the U.S. South is
from the North, and especially from the cold North in Minnesota. A North which is not the 'Midwest,'
in spite of our geographically-challenged media. You can’t discover the world just by looking
at documentaries or movies.
Some
reflections while driving:
Stone Mountain, GA. On one side a nice walk up a hill. On the other... |
One thing
you start to notice is all the junk on southern freeways – plastic bags,
shredded tires, dead animals, dead cars.
It’s no wonder Lady Bird had that “Keep America Beautiful’ program. She was from Texas.
Those mournful cars, stickered or not, forlorn, left behind in some kind
of poverty rapture. There must be stats on broken car to road ratios which closely
correlate with low wages and poverty. In
Kentucky they
don’t pick up the dead animals, which are shredded beyond recognition over
time. In the North we have groups that
volunteer to pick up the garbage – adopt a highway. Not so much in the South. I guess they figure their jail gangs will do all the cleaning up for them. If you’ve read Bowling Alone you know the South has fewer social groups beyond
family and church. And it shows. I did see one courageous young man blue
bagging piles of garbage along a Tennessee
freeway about every 100 yards. Lots of
bags and that was it.
The majority
of the South was built yesterday. Before
the 1960s and the advent of air conditioning, most people didn’t want to boil
to death and so the “Sun Belt” stayed sunny and empty except for the people
that hadn’t escaped. Then it changed and
they had to build mini-malls, one story chain stores, fast-food joints, parking
lots and roads everywhere. The ranch houses in the woods followed. They brag
about all the northern ‘snow birds’ who come south for the winter. Well, there are also ‘heat birds’ who go
North for the summer. They don’t talk
about them. It’s not hot in the
summer, it’s not!. (This year was one of
the hottest and wettest years in Southern history for Southern cities.)
Subject to
hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, killing heat and heavy rains, the South is
like a punch drunk Christian Hero if you watch enough of the Weather Channel. Especially that Dixie alley sky river coming out of the boiling Gulf, stretching across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky. You can only tell the Weather Channel reporter that “The only important thing is that we're alive” and “Thank
God!” once while looking at your decimated home and crushed or flooded pickup. But twice?!
After that you have to start to wonder.
Granular change … very granular…
Then there
is ‘revenge’ driving, a little cousin of road rage.
This usually involves people playing games on freeways by getting in
front of you and then driving really slowly.
Repeatedly. Usually in beat-up
cars, because taking your anger out on other people on the freeway beats
standing up to the local capitalist. Did
I say that? I did. Not to mention the clowns in their jacked-up Silverado’s
with airplane light packages on the front of their pickups, blinding
everyone, their version of a Monster Truck rodeo. I suspect the beds of those
trucks have never seen a scratch.
You might
know of all the factories that have moved or have located in the South. I’ll just mention auto plants. In one drive through Alabama I counted 3 plants just off the
freeways – Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Hyundai.
VW is in Chattanooga, Tennessee ("We Sign Off..." ad). Toyota has ones in Kentucky,
Texas, Mississippi
and Alabama, Nissan has them in Tennessee and Mississippi, Kia
has one in Georgia, Mazda in Alabama, Volvo
and BMW in South
Carolina and BMW in Alabama. The foreign capitalists
know where the cheap labor can be found! But they are not alone. GM has them in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas. Ford
has them in Missouri and Kentucky. Fiat-Chrysler
is the only one that does not have plants in the South. If you want to know
where Detroit
went, it mostly went south.
There are
no unions in these plants. 2 large
recent votes also ‘went south’ for the UAW.
It was not just the opposition of the full range of southern Republican
politicians – the modern neo-Confederate factory plantation aristocracy – it
was also a split between the more passive and servile workers and the less
passive and servile workers. And I
suspect this split is based on gender and color lines. If you’ve been around middle-aged 'white' male southern workers, they
are more servile than in the North, in Minnesota. A Minnesota
worker has some tradition, some dignity, some knowledge that he’s not just a
clown or a ‘hand’ or a brown-nose. Not
in the South. Looking up to your betters is big stuff here. That is because the class and color-caste
systems are stronger.
However
proletarianization brings forth … proletarians.
Atlanta
is home to many large corporations and so attracts labor from the North too. At
a bar on North Avenue,
the Northside Tavern attracts
northern transplants to listen to party blues.
A beautiful blonde in a short dress came down and sat next to me at the
bar and we got to talking.
Naturally. I was wearing a dress jacket
and jeans, as I’d come to pick up some friends.
I was not dressed in a NASCAR T-shirt.
At one point she leaned over and said, “Ahm’ pretta sic o’ rednecks…” I had
to leave but that little comment tells the tale. There are granular changes going on, even
here.
Spelling Problems. Jesus is an American Patriot! |
This is an
area where a Georgia
politician can compare Trump to Jesus and the Democrats to Pontius Pilot. Which tells you that reading more than the Bible might be necessary. I listened to an hour-long broadcast of
Richard Wolff on his Alternative Radio
show in southern Illinois
around Champagne-Urbana talking about Marxism. Then I got into Kentucky
and the Jesus and anti-abortion billboards, Trump love and monuments to
Jefferson Davis accumulated. An official
state park in Fairview, KY celebrates Davis’ birth. So a note to Joe Biden: Winning Democratic primaries in most of these
states will not help in a general election.
Democrats at their convention might as well ignore them.
Military
bases are all over the place. Most of
the bases in the U.S.
are located in the South. I drove by Fort Campbell
in Kentucky, Arnold AFB in Tennessee
and Dobbins Air Base in Georgia.
Georgia alone has 13 bases. The
most notorious is the “School of the Americas”
in Fort Benning, Georgia, home to torture training
for Latin American thugs. These federal bases provide a large economic stimulus
to the communities they are in, dominated by politicians who want to ‘shrink’
federal dollars to anyone but themselves.
And we wonder why the South provides such political support (and
personnel) to endless wars.
I go into a
Burger King in Tennessee looking for the vegetarian “Impossible Whopper.” Sorry, but road food is pretty awful and you have to get your breaks when you can. The store is run by young people spilling
food on the floor, not paying attention to anyone waiting to order, basically
horsing around. In Minnesota you do not see that level of chaos
in fast food joints. It is the little
things… I left.
P.S. - Another fun southern statistic - Mostly Southern cities lead the country in eviction rates. Memphis, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond, Charleston - we're looking at you.
P.S. - Another fun southern statistic - Mostly Southern cities lead the country in eviction rates. Memphis, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond, Charleston - we're looking at you.
Other acerbic
takes on the South below, use blog search box upper left: “Southern
Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,” “Why
the South Lost the Civil War,” “May Day in the Southern U.S.,” “The North is
Not ‘The Midwest,’” “Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Go Set a
Watchman,” “Selma,” “Meridian.”
The Cranky
Yankee
Athens, Georgia
December
31, 2019
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