Dear Joe,
I've read your book Deer Hunting with Jesus and it reminded me of growing up in a small mill town on the Connecticut River called Bellows Falls. We used to call it Fellows Balls. When the paper mills closed and the railroads became a shadow of their previous selves, most workers traveled to Springfield, 12 miles north, to the machine tool plants, then those plants closed down.
It's an irritating litany repeated everywhere in this country. The little village of Bellows Falls couldn't even support the 12 or so bars for its 3,500 population. Bellows Falls is having a semi-gentrified cultural/arts/music scene revival, but the poor and working folks are still struggling to survive. Now I'm 58 and live in a hamlet of 250 just 20 minutes from Bellows Falls. Sometimes it seems like a thousand miles away. I enjoy reading your work in this dark age.
Steve
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Steve,
Consider this:
- 72% of all U.S. shoes are made in China
- 50% of all U.S. kitchen appliances are made in China
- China has the largest number of Internet users in the world, 220 million
- 432 million Chinese own Chinese made cell phones
- Hottest car market on the planet -- China
- Number of Chinese who pay for their cars in cash -- 96%
- Portion of wages saved by the average Chinese wage earner -- 25%
- Percentage of Chinese parents who believe their children will have a better future than they did: 89%
- Source: National Geographic Survey, and others
Now China may well be a governmentally repressive, polluted place with many folks living in backward places (I could make the same argument for the U.S. these days). But it appears to me that they are happy as hell to embrace "the American Dream," that our government (the corporations) drop kicked across the Pacific in the name of Wall Street and gold plated toilet seats for CEOs .
And let's not even talk about what's happening in India.
Anyway, as one European friend of mine, a fellow socialist, jokingly puts it, "You Americans abhorred being called part of the world's 'working class.' Now you are not. So quit bitching!"
In art and labor,
Joe
