Hi Joe,
Faith. It's the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning and it has taken quite a beating lately. Seems there are a huge contingent that don't like us to keep it. Faith in God, faith in our fellow man, faith in those strange foreigners that seem to hate us. Faith has been down on the ground getting the shit kicked out of it for quite some time now. But it's still there. Sure, I'm one of those mutt people you describe that will probably never get a leg up. I'll never have to worry about managing a trust fund. Never have that McMansion on the hill. I've lived all of my 42 years working every day knowing that it will only bring enough to get me to the next day of more of the same.
Whether it was for the British Royals or the Robber Barons, we still get up and keep going, despite the unfairness of it. It's what we do. If history is any predictor of the future, we are all just waiting for the "engine of change" to hitch our carts to. We are looking for the next Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bob Marley to step up and side with.
These days however, I wonder if we'll know it if we see it. With so much noise and over-saturation of media, I wonder whether we would know what a true leader would look like if he came and sat on our collective rental porches. Damn, looks like faith just took another shot to the head. Your writing brings faith to me. Despite the vivid descriptions of a world gone to hell, I always find a glimmer of faith in all of your writing. You describe a commonality that is identifiable to everyone. Who doesn't think of themselves as that every man in the cheap beer zone?
I too grew up in the South. This is a mystical region that has spawned as much hope as it has agony. There is a poignant beauty to Bubba with his gun rack zipping down that county road to another day of back breaking work all the while thinking he's the luckiest fucking redneck in the world. In many ways, he is just that. Is he naive for not being concerned or aware of his brothers and sisters in the Middle East? Sure. Should he be more concerned with their fate and realize that it's so very closely tied to his own? Of course. That's were people like yourself come into the picture. You present some pretty complex issues in a language that is relatable and, more than that, have the wonderful gift of explaining the consequences of this unbridled corporatism that we've come to experience.
Lest you think I am blowing smoke up your ass, know this: It is only through the efforts of people like yourself that faith can possibly live. I've read enough to believe that you know what a bitch of a job you have cut out. I pray that faith will continue to live for you, because, when it does, it touches so many others. I also hope that you never give up. Somehow, I don't think you ever will. Viva Joe!
Yet another Mutt,
Marvin
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Dear Marvin:
Your letter sounds like the voice in my own head speaking to me. And like you, I have faith in the bubbas. More faith in bubbas than I do in an entire boatload of Harvard graduates -- the bubbas can at least tell me how I fucked up the wiring I installed in my basement. Bubbas are there for you when you are really down. Too drunk to find your car keys? Bubba will find them and hand them to you and help you into your car. Bubbas still have real values and can empathize. The American middle class has become incapable of real empathy and have almost no values whatsoever. To them, "values" are a Republican political issue -- not a daily responsibility. But they do not know it and don't believe it because Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and the blogosphere have convinced them that mocking George W. Bush, bashing fundamentalist Christians (and I'd be the first to admit I've done my share) and voting Democratic is the extent of their political responsibility. Safely ensconced among their own kind in their own neighborhoods, none of them can possibly wrap their minds around the fact that we mutt people are the majority and always have been.
I am finding that there is a new kind of mutt people among us, people who struggle and care just like we who grew up in the South, the Midwest and all the other massive flyover non-urban areas where people still have to bust ass or kiss ass for every nickel they get. The new mutt people are the working class immigrants. For example, in many Latin American immigrant households (Winchester now has about 4,000 Latinos, mostly illegals sought after by area employers) I often see the same dignity born of labor and faith I saw in my own. That gives me hope.
As for the coming of the next Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Bob Marley, I suspect we Americans are more likely to see a Commodus or a Caligula first. Perhaps somewhere in Latin America, or perhaps Asia, the next Gandhi is growing up. But common sense tells me he is more likely in a peasant rebel camp in the mountains of Bolivia. And I find hope in the women of Oaxaca, Mexico who just took over the television station in protest of crooked elections so they can broadcast the truth. And I especially find hope in the fact that, while my mutt people can be easily misled into doing some terrible things at the bidding of the Empire, like kill whole families in Iraq, I take heart in one thing I know about them that the urban liberals who mock them fail to grasp. Even though they have been purposefully kept ignorant, (see Gatto's The Underground History of American Education), once mutts get the picture, once they know exactly who is screwing them, once the television and the truck are repoed in the coming crash, they are far more capable of rising up and kicking some real ass than anyone else in this country. Capable of real resistance.
You're gonna hate me for saying this, but Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski are harbingers of an increasing widespread disenfranchisement and alienation. Read Gore Vidal's written exchanges with McVeigh. Read Kacsynski's manifesto. Despite the violence of their methodology, you won't find a word you disagree with, and in fact will find insight into our condition under the consumer totalist state.
Anyhoooo ... Here we are in the cheap beer zone of said consumerist state. And my friend Joe Guillory, a Baton Roooj, Looziany lawyer just sent 20 bucks to buy Virgil Jenkins a case of good beer. Which I will certainly do this Saturday. But it's going to be hard as hell to figure out what a guy who drinks Keystone Light would call gourmet beer. It sure as hell won't be Newcastle. I am guessing it's Miller Draft.
Not a bad way to spend a Saturday while waiting for the "engine of change," or The Rapture, or Tony Stewart to cause another three-car pileup at Pocono Speedway. Beats the hell out of whining in the blogosphere.
In brotherhood,
Joe
