SYLVA–It was one of those sequences of odd serendipity that comes up now and then, when each event seems tied to the one that came before.
Thursday morning I flipped on the radio in time to hear a “Morning Edition” story about Richard Trumka, a former steelworker and a current labor leader with the AFL-CIO, who’s been working the backroads, stirring the pot for presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama. He gives speeches on the role of race in the race, and, as befits his former profession, he’s quite a firebrand. He doesn’t preach to the choir, he speaks to mostly rural steelworkers, and he takes it directly at ‘em.
He tells them that while there are many reasons to vote for Obama, there’s “only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that’s because he’s not white.”
During each speech, he tells the story of an encounter he had with a woman in the Appalachian mining town where the both lived. After a string of excuses, the woman told him she wouldn’t vote for Obama because of his race.
Trumka said he told her to look around at their town. “This town is dying — literally dying,” he told her. “Our kids are moving away because there’s no future here. And here’s a man, Barack Obama, who’s going to fight for people like us, and you won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin? Are you out of your ever-loving mind?”
Later, the same morning, a Sylva friend talked to me of her surprise at the number of McCain/Palin signs she’d seen in nearby Swain County. She’s no neophyte–she understands southern mountain voter dynamics–but she also runs a thriving, though commodity and labor-intensive business that puts her in a strong position to understand how rotten things have gotten in the past eight years.
She sees clearly that a vote for more of the same government we’ve got is in direct opposition to the best interests of most everybody in this region.
In some senses Swain County has a beef with regulation-heavy feds. Nearly three-quarters of the county belongs to the federal government. But this entire region also benefited deeply from the arrival of the TVA and from FDR’s depression-era New Deal, a fact that helps cause an odd political dynamic across the southern mountains. The Republican Party, in structural terms, hardly exists at all. But the advantage of being a Democrat dwindles in inverse proportion to the level of office a candidate seeks. The mountain democratic machine is disproportionately made up of old-time pols, many of whom are of clannish and independent Scots-Irish heritage, and many of whom are socially conservative in the same way that Sarah Palin is socially conservative.
Friday, I picked up on a story in the Durham Herald-Sun regarding Smoky Mountain High graduate Katya Hill’s direction of a stage adaptation of Joe Bageant’s “Deer Hunting with Jesus; Dispatches from the American Class War.
Bageant comes from a rough background in Winchester, VA., as a child of hard-working parents each with an eighth grade education and with a 250-year family history in the same town. He went on to make a name for himself as an editor and writer, and he eventually returned to Winchester, where he knows ever-body, and wrote an hilarious and wrenching book that takes a frank look at America’s growing, permanent white underclass. Bageant speaks in honest terms about why this group consistently votes against it’s own best interests — and why it so despises “liberals”.
Writes Bageant at one point: “Being born lower class in working America makes some of us, probably most of us, class conscious for life. Consequently, a good deal of this book is about class in America, especially the class from which I sprang, the bottom third of Americans constituting the unacknowledged working- class poor: conservative, politically misinformed or oblivious, and patriotic to their own detriment.”
Then, also today, fellow blogger Gulahiyi was kind enough to send me a copy of Kathleen Parker’s recent column in the Washington Post, in which she talks at some length with author and Western Carolina University professor Ron Rash, and also with author and US Senator James Webb, both of whom have written trenchant, widely popular books that cast in sharp relief the history of we Scots-Irish, and why we act the way we do.
Says Rash, “One thing about Appalachian people is that they don’t bitch and moan.”
Both Webb and Rash make clear through their writings that any sense of entitlement is distasteful to Appalachian people in general, mainly because they’ve done for so long with so little. But the writers also illustrate in different ways the fact that when “outlanders” show up in our verdant hills, it’s usually to take something they need, whether it be timber, votes, minerals or tough boys to fight and die. They don’t show up again until they need something else. In that way, through exploitation, African Americans and white Appalachian Americans share more in common than they know.
Together, my little string of events wrapped itself neatly around what makes this election so compelling.
As Webb wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal: “The greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African-Americans to the same table.”
