I publish below my letter to Joe Bageant. His latest book Dear Hunting with Jesus tells how the working person in USA ( 65% of the population) is kept enslaved and on the edge of bankrupcy. Even the media perpetuate the myth you gotta be poor and proud and it is your own fault!
Joe!
As a Brit living in Sweden, I am following your observations with interest, and with despair starting to see the same phenomena in Europe coming slowly.
However, that is not at the top of my mind just now; it's Die Hard 4 with Bruce Willis. We rented the DVD last night and I sat down to watch it at the request of the youngest member of our family.
At one point, the baddy looks up the personal details about the hero John McClane (played by Willis) on government computers. This New York cop of Irish origin, had no retirement plan, his personal economy was ruined, and he was divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter.
But he had saved thousands of lives earlier, in Die Hard 1, 2 and 3. Earlier in the film, he says how heroes are not welcome and he talks about how people want don't to know about them. It obviously does not pay well, but our hero appears to accept it.
I thought about Die Hard when I read your blog! This film is pure indoctrination into just what you are talking about. You are white and of Scots-Irish origin, have to lay your life on the line, because you just happen to be there, and be the one that does something about the situation because you are the only one who can. You find a computer hacker with the same sentiment. You are tough and reckless and do a jig when the bad guy gets killed.
The upper echelons of the middle class, the lackies of the ruling class, are either real bad-ass people who are using the education they got subsidized by the taxpayer to screw virtually everybody and topple the economy, or incompetent jobsworth who put daily life at risk by creating infrastructure and systems that blatantly do not work or are intrinsically unsound.
Talk about art imitating life!
Keep up the good work and saying it like it is!
Steve
Stockholm, Sweden
Joe replies...
Steve,
It never ceases to amaze me on how many variations on the theme can be created. In the end the American working class will always come to see their defeat and consequent suffering as heroic.
I heard a version of this yesterday on the radio as I drove back home from the airport, after having been to the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis. The radio program had a series of ordinary Americans -- people who had triumphed over their lack of health insurance or health care, through their own stubbornness, toil, ingenuity, individualism and sheer grit. Now implicit in this of course was acceptance of the complete lack of health protection whatsoever, and then overcoming that lack.
read the rest on....
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