Dear Joe,
You are the first person I have heard say what I and my friends keep saying, that all the people being displaced by exporting jobs and high tech cannot be retrained because they are not all ever going to have what it takes. Some do, but not all. I have seen since I first worked for public welfare in the early 1960's that there are a lot of people who used to dig ditches and sweep streets, etc., who just are not needed any more economically and don't fit in and never will. (By the way, my parents had eighth grade educations and worked in factories. My parents were bright, but poor and had no chances. But I got chances.)
Many people never found employment after the great depression. And we can let them starve to death or we can support them decently so that if their kids have ability, they will be able to associate without shame with other kids in their classes and develop their abilities. I also saw working for welfare that when a really good training opportunity came around and you looked through your caseload for people who could benefit from one of the always FEW good placements, you could find a lot more possibles among your black than among your white clients. The white clients had been culled through by society already. The blacks had not. There were plenty there who could do the job, learn the stuff, and put it to use.
I think you are hard on liberals and well educated people when you blame them for not knowing these things. They come out of a subculture, just like I did, just like you did, just like everybody does. And theirs is no less limited or "provincial" just because it is more upscale. They can't help not knowing what working class people talk about at dinner or what flatware they put on their tables to eat with, anymore than a working class person can help not knowing which fork to use for salad or what you don't mention during a meal, as a subject of conversation. This is just cultural limitation. Most people are culture bound. I have a friend who really puts people off with her plummy southern aristocratic accent. She doesn't know that she puts people off. She is going on the assumptions about how to behave and to speak, that she was raised with, like most people do.
I like a lot about Robert Reich. But unfortunately he seems to have been raised among the educated classes and therefore thinks that globalization will be just fine, because people will all be retrained and educated and have "easier" jobs to do than in the bad old past when we had factories here. I can't say I can make that excuse for Bill Clinton falling for globalization. He has known some of these people in his early life and should have damn well known better. This is also a matter of being perceptive. People who are perceptive social workers and counsellors know all these things, but many social workers also do not know of these class differences and are culture bound too.
And listen, you are not that uneducated and unrefined guy you pose as, either, and you shouldn't do it. That is too Bob Dylannish. I will be buying your book.
Emma
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Dear Emma:
What an insight into our social system you have!
You are probably right that I am a bit hard on educated middle class liberals. I guess I do it because they are the best hope for my kind of people. I'm betting that more compassion can be awakened among them in then long run. Then too, I am subject to the biases of the class in which I was raised and would never deny that a certain degree of class anger pervades my online writing.
Of course as a socialist, my wish for society and the world is that we all be brought to exactly the same level of material wealth. I know that sounds stupid in such a materially focused culture as ours, but that's the way I feel. As the most materialistic society in the world, Americans are in a unique position. We will be, and indeed already are, seeing the moral and ecological problems it creates. Therefore, we are probably in a position to lead the way out of those problems for much of the rest of the world. Here's something that will probably alienate you from me forever. I don't believe any American should be allowed to earn over $30,000 a year. If that. Redistribution of wealth is so long over due in this country and all across global capitalism it may already be too late. Perhaps it will not happen until the ecological limits and peak oil start reducing American material expectations.
As for: "You are not that uneducated and unrefined guy you pose as, either, and you shouldn't do it."
Well, actually, it is my natural voice and the most important thing a writer can do is find his or her natural voice. "Write like you speak," as the writing teachers say. I am a Southerner and proudly sound like one. I know it turns off some urbane types. Unsurprisingly, I sound just like most of the working class people from my town, just a bit more literate because even though I quit school in the 11th grade, I lived in the public library throughout my youth, then spent part of the Sixties following my literary heroes. So it's not a pose. In fact, if one tries to pose while writing it will not work because it is too self-conscious and will impede the flow of inspiration. Best advice I ever had was, never think about writing while writing. It's like the Chinese monkey medicine thing.
Solidarity,
Joe
PS: Have you seen this magnificent piece of writing regarding the meaning of work? It cuts to the very heart of the matter.
