Rainbow Pie

by Joe Bageant

Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass; or, being firmly placed in the true middle class themselves, can even agree that such a thing exists. Apparently, you can’t smell the rabble from the putting green.

These days more folks are paying attention because much of this "underclass" has gone right wing!

Conservatives cackled with glee, and dubbed them the only real Americans.

But most of the shrinking middle class pulls its blinds shut, hoping that if they don’t see bad fortune, perhaps bad fortune can’t see them and will not find their doors.

These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass.

these people abandoned farm life in such droves because the money, excitement, and allure of America’s cities and large towns was just too great to resist.

the official version of all life and culture in America is written by city people.

the sell job goes on that we are a classless society with roughly equal opportunity for all.

Given the terrible polarization of wealth and power in this country (the top 1 percent hold more wealth than the bottom 45 percent combined, and their take is still rising), we can no longer even claim equal opportunity for a majority. Opportunity for the majority to do what? Pluck chickens, and telemarket to the ever-dwindling middle class?

From birth to the grave, you needed neighbors and they needed you.

Especially how our degraded concepts of community and work have contributed to the development of physical and cultural loneliness in America. Not to mention the destruction of a sense of the common good, the economy, and the natural world.

out there in the country was an endless supply of placid mules, who said, “Yes, Ma’m” and “No, Ma’m”, and accepted whatever you paid them.

these family- and clan-oriented hillbillies were not joiners, especially at some outsiders’ urging.

the independent Scots–Irish and German settlers’ politics of self-sustenance and plenitude. Those politics are still part of conservative political culture in heartland America.

when they put this belief and their own money into practice, history shows that they tend to take care only of their own kind — Protestant whites.

the tomato, dear friends, is the most truly democratic vegetable in America.

the tomato is actually a fruit, because it is developed from an ovary at the base of the flower. Ovaries be damned. Anything that is eaten with sausage gravy and biscuits is a vegetable. Nobody ever ate blueberries or bananas with meat gravy; at least, nobody in their right mind did.

the tomato in Morgan County proved itself an ally of true democracy and a binder of community — a great leveller of men, transcending even religion and politics.

he was a Republican with the common wisdom to understand something that no Republican has ever grasped since: he realized that any wealth he might acquire in life was due not only to his own efforts, but also to the efforts of all other men combined

Food corporations made short work of the little tomato operations, through numerous tactics and with the cooperation of the US government, new industrial taxes, and FDA legislation that allegedly created safer, more sanitary, and standardized canned tomatoes.

in the late autumn, it stirred the reveries known only to old men.

As the idea of indebtedness came to be accepted as part of “farming as agri-business”, debt mounted.

The assumption seems to be that Mother Nature will grant American farmers an exemption from having to face up to sustainability problems. We shall see if American exceptionalism can be stretched that far.

nature and man do not stand separately.

Acknowledging such things about our destructive system requires honesty about what is all around us, and an intellectual conscience.

TO SOME DEGREE, MY PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN “human assets” for “the big-money boys”, as Maw called them.