Here's a delightful letter from Jim in Rice Lake, Wisconsin that must be answered point by point.
-- Joe
Jim: I really enjoyed your article, "Poor, White and Pissed." I think we'll be at odds, however, about many points you make. I might miss the point too, because, well, I'm white and I'm pissed.
I'm white, I'm pissed, but I'm not poor by my own standards. I make as much per year as those wage parameters you established -- somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 -- that identify po' folk. Yet, I feel adequately compensated, even satisfied. For two years, my wife and I have been going to Florida for two months annually. We have no debts, and own our own house. Our son is out of college with no loans. We live in the fourth highest-taxed state in America. Gas just hit $3.29 per gallon. What's wrong here? Why aren't we po', too?
Joe: Well, I'm like you. I feel adequately compensated at lower levels than most Americans do. I find that about $4,000 a year covers the basics for me. But that is because I have chosen to live in a Third World country most of the time, and use any money above that amount to help people there. As you say, the trick is to have no debts. But even so, I cannot live in the US, even debt free, on $4,000 -- even quadruple that.
Jim: It's just us. Our parents were "working class." My father-in-law was an iron miner in the upper peninsula of Michigan, my mother-in-law a high-school cook. My dad was a UAW guy in lower Michigan, my mother a garment worker. They impressed upon us the necessity of being frugal, of no extravagance, of saving, and working hard. They established a helluva precedent.
Joe: Amen! Evidently you grew up in an environment, place and time where parents could still influence their children and children looked up to their parents...at least enough to learn from them. Since World War II children have been warehoused in a vast peer oriented school system of their own, and parents have been steadily losing parenting skills in favor of consumption, stimulated by heavy peer pressure of their own and mass marketing. I believe we are seeing the long term result of that.
Jim: I went to college, got an MFA. I worked so frigging hard that I earned a distinction: the only grad student to hold simultaneous grad assistantships in art practice and art history. My wife was a hairdresser, never owned a car, lived two blocks from where she worked. She saved money.
Out of college, I taught college, but quit that after a few years and three university jobs. I worked for minimum wage to learn about film making, eventually was hired at an electric utility where I stayed long enough to take a buy-out at 55. Always, I believed in taking chances that would result in some kind of job contentment because we're told very few people are happy in their jobs.
Joe: Me too, more or less. I worked at car washes, etc, in order to learn to write. Eventually I became a reporter and then a magazine editor. I still believe in taking chances.
Jim: We pounded our son with some of the same notions pounded into us. He received two scholarships out of high school, (one a 4-year ride at the local U). His grandparents left him some money for college, so that helped. But that money was all part of a continuum established by somebody in our respective families "way back when." We also told our son that living in the United States is expensive, that you have to get a good job to survive, much less enjoy life. The continuum continued. He now works at a finance company that helps people. Yes, they actually help people. He shows all the signs of being a caring person who already knows a thing or two about a thing or two.
Joe: Same here. I'm proud that all three of my kids are strong, self-reliant and are doing more good than harm. Only one of them believes you need a good job to survive -- the one at Berkeley law school. The other two seem more interested in intellectual and moral thrivance.
Jim: I won't "organize" as you say because it's idealistic claptrap. I won't join the Elks' Drinking Club because it's the Elks' Drinking Club, a bunch of local white-collar snobs who distrust me immensely because I've only been in this town for five years and won't join the Elks or the service clubs or the local gun club. I won't go to the local bars because they stink of cigarettes, have loud obnoxious patrons too young for me to identify. But, I suppose you're not talking about people my age. Well, I didn't do that stuff when I was younger. A drink or two with friends is fine, but that's not the environment of redneck bars. I'll take an upscale bar any day, and ignore what I don't like about it -- which ain't the waitresses. In this town, there are no upscale bars. Gotta go to Minneapolis for that. In our previous town, I once went to a neighborhood bar. Two drinks with a pal, good state-of-mind. My pal was working for a bank, and if you opened an account, the bank would give books of $20 in one-dollar bills, to peel off like coupons. I asked the guy next to me for his two dollars, and I peeled off two to him. HIS pal said, "Hey, what're you tryin' to do, make fools of us?" I was disappointed, but I'm a male, so I said "Yeah, so what do you have in mind, mother fucker?" Either my eyes gave away my anger/disappointment, or my use of the big MF backed him off. I can find no way to remember that guy today other than what I called him then. Another innocent adventure in a bar caused a smart-ass younger couple to put a mickey in my glass of white wine. I almost lost me eye when I fell. Organize in a local bar? Bullshit. No way. I stay out of bars because they're not where reality is found. Sorry Albert Camus. Maybe it worked in France, but not here.
Joe: I catch a whiff or moral superiority there. Most of positive social change in the world came from organizing on behalf of the working classes. And it still does in most of the world. As to taverns, etc, that's a personal choice. I don't go as much as I used to. Maybe once a month these days when I am in the states. In Belize I have a couple every night, mostly because the Internet cafe has a bar and I enjoy a couple with friends when I knock off work at the computers at 4 PM. Bars and taverns are something to which I hope I never become morally superior, given that half the world hangs out there.
Jim: I find your suggestions at once good, sometimes funny and sometimes wrong -- but also not any of those, too. Every town is similar but different enough that exceptions to the norm can be found, aka "me." And, if there's me, there are others just like me. It's folly to lump us in a limited number of groups, because those groups contain exceptions.
Joe: Well of course. I'm one of those exceptions too. Consequently, I don't really lump everyone together in my mind. But when writing one has to generalize a bit, otherwise, the book would turn into a goddamned encyclopedia as you qualified ever statement. Boring too.
Jim: I'm sort of pissed lately at the the union magazines that still come to our house. "Woe is me" prevails. I don't think Joe Biden can deliver to these folks. Biden is pretty slick, gift of gab, and above all, a politician. Those union guys he's been courting lately are gonna have to move to China.
Joe: The unions, like the rest of the country, suffer from a lack of leadership and balls. As to Joe Biden, he's just a slimeball in a slick suit. Which rather describes most union leadership too. But just because America's union leaders resemble the rest of the country does not mean unions are worthless. We have a tendency to judge everything based upon America's experience. And America's weaknesses. Good men and women across the world are still dying for fellow workers and union organization. Provincialism and smugness kills solidarity.
Jim: A guy in a greasy spoon (I DO go to those kinds of eateries) had interesting things to say. His wife owns the spoon, and he drives a piece of big equipment for a construction company that builds highways. He confessed to his boss that $29 per hour was too much, that he wasn't really worth it. The boss said "I"ve got 25 guys ready to step into your job if you don't like it." Even the rednecks have trouble with their brethren.
Joe: So?
Jim: So, what's the point? Where are the answers? Did you ever notice how many new cars (or trucks, here) are part of the landscape. Doesn't anybody keep a car for more than three or four years anymore? They say Cuba's cars are worth a fortune: 1958 Chevys running in top shape because they have to.
Joe: I hear ya. I own a 1988 Toyota truck, which I do not drive unless necessary. Why does everyone else seem to be suckers for new cars and such? Because of a 100-plus year effort by industrial-financial cartels to first, turn everybody into workers (Americans resisted the hell out of becoming "wage slaves," as they termed it then), and then onto consumers instead of citizens. In the absence of organization, and with the help of conditioning through marketing propaganda the populace has become both.
Jim: Hopefully, we'll pull out of this malaise someday a la John Quincy Adams' "we are who we were."
Joe: Well, "who we were," includes our many genocides, including that of the red Indian, and our current policy of killing everyone at the edge of our empire to take their oil and other now vital natural resources, so that we, as six percent of the earth's population, can waste over 30 percent of its resources. I'm hoping we can become something better than we have been.
Jim: I think the US of A is heading for huge trouble, because our trouble has always emanated within. When the government established those auto tariffs back when that elevated Japanese cars (Toyota) to around $10,000 per car when we were paying about $5,000-6000 for ours, the auto industry simply said we'll raise prices! The auto-industry consisted of people we should have begun watching for their greed more than their pricing or quality tactics.
Joe: I pray for the death of the auto industry everywhere. It is unsustainable.
Jim: Well, enough. I should mention that Susan Sontag was on the board that vetoed my entry for an American Film Institute independent filmmaker grant. The subject of my documentary was "New York Jew Commie Bitch." Just kidding, of course, about the title. The rest is true.
Joe: Like the rest of us, Sontag had her vices and her virtues. But to me, her death comes down to a net loss for America. Would that the same could be said of us all.
Jim: As much as it might appear otherwise, I enjoy your writing immensely.
Joe: Same goes for your letter.
