Appalachia. It Ain’t What You Think It Is, Leftinesses. Bet On It.

Posted by Arthur Gilroy | Nov 12, 2013 | 12 |

In a recent post supposedly about the McAuliffe election in Virginia titled Get a Brain, Morans, Booman assiduously climbs to new depths of middle class, leftiness, suburbanist entitlement bullshit.

—snip—

I keep hearing that the people of Appalachia prize self-reliance and personal liberty, but I also keep seeing statistics that they have a level of reliance on federal anti-poverty programs that is comparable to our country’s worst ghettoes.

It’s like a whole region has been conditioned to say “Keep your government hands off my Medicare, I need this scooter to get my food stamps.”

I’m tired of listening to their hypocritical bullshit. It’s long past time that these morans get a brain.

The 22 or so comments that follow mostly take the same tone.

Why those lowlife, welfare-sucking, redneck moron assholes!!! Why on earth would they not vote for Terry McAuliffe!!! How dare they!!!

Entitlement to the max!!! Use the “moron” epithet carefully, fools. Ask not for whom the word tolls. It tolls for thee, motherfuckers!!!

Read on.

Go read Joe Bageant if you really want to understand what happened in Appalachia. Who’s he? You willfully ignorant, self-indulgent middle class assholes!!! It’s not as if he was hard to find on the net. For years.

Bageant was originally raised in Winchester, Virginia. He left Winchester and worked as a journalist and editor. In 2001, Bageant moved back to Winchester.[1]

In “Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War” Bageant discusses how Democrats have lost the political support of poor rural whites and how the Republican Party has convinced these individuals to “vote against their own economic self-interest.” The book is mainly centered on his hometown, Winchester.

In 2010, Bageant published a similarly themed book, “Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.” Bageant used his extended family’s post WW II years experience to describe the social hierarchy in the United States of America. The book examines the post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became, the author argues, the foundation of a permanent white underclass and comprise much of today’s heartland “red state” voters.

—snip—

During the last years of his life, Bageant lived in Mexico. He had been living in Ajijic, Mexico where he wrote “Rainbow Pie,” when he learned that he had a fast growing and inoperable cancer.[2] On January 4, 2011, Bageant announced on his web site that he had been “struck down by an extremely serious form of cancer” which was inoperable and was unable to engage in correspondence or his usual work, but hoped to be able to resume them in the future.[3]

After Joe died, his Australian publisher asked Bageant’s literary executor, Ken Smith, to select and edit about 80,000 words worth of Joe’s essays. This book was published in November 2011 as “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant”. Upon its original publication, this posthumous collection was only available in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa where, according to Smith, it sold reasonably well.[2] According to Smith: “no American publisher is yet interested in a book by a redneck socialist — and that says a lot about American culture and the US book business.”[2]

I repeat: “…no American publisher is yet interested in a book by a redneck socialist — and that says a lot about American culture and the US book business.” It says a great deal about the aims of the Permanent Government and its media satraps as well.

Joe…he was a friend of mine…treated these broken people as human beings. He didn’t call them schoolyard bully names…”You morons!!!” He understood that they had been taken off by the same monstrous Permanent Government that has waged war on most of the rest of humanity for 50+ years,. The Kissingers, the Bushes, the Reagans and Romneys of this world. And yes, the Clintons and Obamas too.

These white rural people want to work, just like inner city minority people want to work. In the ’80s and ’90s the Permanent Government sold American labor down the river to minimum wage foreign workers because the profit margins were higher. Way higher. Ross Perot had it right all the way back in 1992.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided i was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.

Ross Perot, 3-way debate w/Clinton and Bush, 1992

Perot was demonized by the Government Media Complex just as the Paulists are being demonized now, but his point stands for anyone with an ounce of common sense left.

Wake the fuck up.

The so-called “white conservative working class right” is just another bunch of ripped-off motherfuckers who are panicking and thus blindly lashing out at completely misunderstood groups of so-called “enemies.” Everybody is “the enemy” when you don’t have a decent education and you can’t get a job that will put sufficient food on the table for your children.

“A giant sucking sound…” The sound of their dreams and the dreams of their forebears vacating the premises.

Don’t call them “morons.” They are not high IQ clones…neither are most of us and neither were most of our ancestors…but they are some of the same people who built this country by the sweat of their brow for 300+ years. They are also potential allies if you know what you are doing.

Which you most obviously don’t.

There is an alliance coming though, Booman.

Watch.

An alliance between the disenfranchised of all races and cultures here in America.

Watch.

When it really finds its legs it is going to change everything!!!

Watch.

Meanwhile…wake the fuck up!!!

You’re next.

We are all “next.”

Bet on that as well.

P.S. Rural Virginia people? They see through a glitz-encrusted suckup to power like McAuliffe in a country minute. They’ve been dealing with mortgage gougers and revenuers for generations. It’s the media-blinded middle class that’s voted him in. Shame on all of you. Shame!!!

About The Author

Arthur Gilroy

Born. Still working on it.

12 Comments

Arthur Gilroy on November 12, 2013 at 10:42 am

Joe Bageant on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding:

Understanding America’s Class System

Honk if you love caviar

By Joe Bageant

How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters — huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.

Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington’s political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.

Moneywise, Washington’s political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite’s behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation’s most privileged and ambitious young moths.

—snip—

And y’all jes’ keep on hyping them. Wake the fuck up!!!

Joe Bageant on your redneck demons.

Poor, White and Pissed

A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals

By Joe Bageant

If you are reading this it is very likely that you are a liberal, maybe even an outright screaming burn down the goddam country commie — in which case I say, “Come sit by me comrade!” (Especially if you are a blonde.) Like most lefties you probably live in an urban area, or someplace with reasonable cultural diversity. More than likely you are educated and can read this without moving your lips. Maybe you even live in the freethinking People’s Republic of Berkeley, or bustle along under the fabled lights of Manhattan where you can see independent films and buy such things as leeks and soy milk at your grocery store.

I, however, live in a town where it is easier to find chitterlings, ponhaus and souse in the grocery store than a leek — and where Smokey and the Bandit still plays to packed movie houses year after year. My hometown’s claim to fame is the 1983 “Rhinehart Tire Fire” in which some five million discarded tires burned for nine months, gaining Winchester, Virginia national news coverage and EPA superfund cleanup status. The smoke plume was visible in satellite earth photos, the cleanup took 18 years and the fire stands as my hometown’s biggest event of the Twentieth Century. As for intellectual life, this is a town where damned few residents ever heard of, say, Susan Sontag. Even though our local newspaper editor did manage a post mortem editorial on Sontag, which basically said: Goodbye you piece of New York Jewish commie shit!, most people reading the paper at their breakfast tables around town were asking themselves, “Who the hell is Susan Sontag?” They would ask the same thing about Daniel Barenboim or Hunter S. Thompson because those figures have never been on Oprah. Our general ambience was well summed up by a visiting Atlanta lawyer who looked around town and observed: “Dumb lordee I reckon!” This from a guy who’s seen a lot of dumb crackers. Laugh if you want, but this is the red state American heartland everybody is talking about these days.

Is it possible for a higher class of person to live in American places like Winchester, Virginia? Not really. Only the local old family business elite and well-paid plant managers transferred here find such a place livable — the former for their social status and the latter in the safe knowledge they will be transferred out someday.

Most of the rest of us stuck in Winchester are what used to be called the traditional working class. These days, when we are called anything at all, it is White Trash. Poor working whites, people with only a high school diploma, if that. Nationally we at least number a quarter of white U.S. workers, thirty five million in all by the government’s own shaved-down numbers. Nobody knows for sure in a nation that calls millions of $7-an-hour janitors and marginal people working “contract labor”, with no insurance or benefits, “independent businesspersons” and “entrepreneurs.” Small independent business people are, we are told, “the backbone of America’s economy.” If that is true, then it’s a sorry assed thing because we are talking here about citizens who bring down maybe 25-30K a year before taxes. With both spouses working. I told my freelance janitor friend Gator that he was the backbone of the American economy; he said he felt more like its asshole.

In any case, my people are not the people in the cubicle next to you at work (though they might well be cleaning it at nights when you are sleeping.) Mine are not people complaining about paying off their college loans or who got the best parking spot at their office campus complex. They are people with different problems entirely. Mostly related to truck payments. Or people like my old tree service boss Danny, who cut off a finger working with a chain saw, wrapped it in a McDonald’s foil wrapper and ran to the hospital to get it sewn back on. Or any of the thousands of people in this town who smash apples into apple sauce or boil them into vinegar at National Fruit Products, performing soul grinding shift work year after year with no opportunity to ever be promoted, or obtaining health care at all. Just the seasonal layoff when all the apples are smashed and the millions of gallons of vinegar bottled. Working class people going nowhere in a town that smells like vinegar.

One of the problems we working class Southerners have is that educated progressive Americans see us as a bunch of obese, heavily armed nose pickers. This problem is compounded by the fact that so many of us are pretty much that. Call it the “Dumb-crackers-lordee-I-reckon” syndrome. But liberals err in thinking this armed and drunken laboring species is an exclusively Southern breed. No matter where you live in this nation you will find us. We are the folks in front of you at the Wal-Mart checkout lugging a case of motor oil while having nicotine fits. But even in such democratic venues as shopping, our encounters are limited because we do not buy designer beer and you do not buy ammo or motor oil by the case.

And if we aren’t in the checkout line then we are probably waiting on you as clerks. With our bright red regulated vests and nametags we do not look poor or desperate. But I can tell you that the smiling, wise old guy in the orange vest in the plumbing department of the local Home Depot, Roy, the one who knows everything there ever was to know about plumbing, is limping around on bad knees with two bone grafted discs from a life as a construction laborer, and at age 67 is working solely so he can have health insurance. Not for insurance from Home Depot mind you, but so his entire paycheck can go to cover the private insurance he must have if he doesn’t want to lose the rundown bungalow he and his wife bought right after the Korean War to medical bills. The one that is now in such a bad neighborhood only the slumlords who dominate our city council ever make an offer, and even then not much. He’s been losing ground for 25 years. Not that any of the tanned middle class suburban customers here or anywhere else give a good goddam. This is solidly red state neo-con Virginia, where people have a ready explanation for Roy’s condition in life: As Jimbo the newsstand owner here says, “They are losers who cannot cut it in the greatest society on earth. Darwin was right. Gandhi was wrong. Tough shit!” This is the same guy who once advised me to “Always kick a man when he is down; it gives him incentive to get up.” I sometimes think it was the meanest thing in hell that made America’s little working class towns such as Winchester.

Paw, am I a paradox?

To be poor and white is a paradox in America. Whites, especially white males, are supposed to have an advantage they exploit mercilessly. Yet most of the poor people in the United States are white (51%) outnumbering blacks two to one and all other minority poverty groups combined. America is permeated with cultural myths about white skin’s association with power, education and opportunity. Capitalist society teaches that we all get what we deserve, so if a white man does not succeed, it can only be due to laziness. But just like black and Latino ghetto dwellers, poor laboring whites live within a dead end social construction that all but guarantees failure. If your high school dropout daddy busted his ass for small bucks and never read a book in his life and your mama was a textile mill worker, chances are you are not going to be recruited by Yale Skull and Bones and grow up to be president of the United States, regardless of our national mythology to that effect. You are going to be pulling an eight-buck-an-hour shift work someplace and praying for enough overtime to make the heating bill. A worker.

The political left once supported these workers, stood on the lines taking its beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now, comfortably ensconced in the middle class, the American left sees the same working whites as warmongering bigots, happy pawns of the empire. That is writing working folks off too cheaply, and it begs the question of how they came to be that way — if they truly are. To cast them as a source of our deep national political problems is ridiculous. They are a symptom of the problems, and they may be making it worse because they are easily manipulated, or because they cannot tell an original idea from a beer fart. But they are not the root cause by any means. The left should take its cues from Malcolm X, who understood the need to educate and inform the entire African-American society before tackling the goal of unity. Same goes for white crackers. Nobody said it would be easy.

Don’t laugh, you’re next!

Middle class liberals, or affluent conservatives for that matter, are hard put to understand poor white working class culture. With our guns, God and coarse noisy aesthetic, (let’s face it, NASCAR and Shania Twain?) we look like a lower species, a beery subset of some sort. The truth is that poor white working culture is not a subset of any other American class. It does not operate below the middle and upper classes, but parallel to them. Just as there are few ways out of it, there are few ways in. Its inhabitants are born here. The educated left cannot easily get inside. When it comes to access, liberal social academics are camels passing through the needle’s eye, though I’ve never met one who would admit it, or even knew that observing is not necessarily understanding. Consequently we find many books/studies focusing on ethnic minorities, but few credible ones about our defiant native homegrown poor. To my mind, it is impossible to be tenured and have street cred, but then I am just a prejudiced redneck prick from Winchester, Virginia, otherwise referred to as “Dickville”.

Yet this place from which and about which I write could be any of thousands of communities across the U.S. It is a parallel world created by an American system where caste and self-identity are determined by what one consumes, or cannot afford to consume, education and of course, the class into which one is born. Like most things American, it was about money from the get-go. The difference is that some of us have known this truth from birth and on brutal terms. For instance, few middle class Americans today ever sold newspapers on the street corner at age twelve to pay for school clothes or carried coal to a dirty living room stove all winter. I did both. They never sat down to a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner. If this sounds like some Depression era sob story, let me say that it was in 1959-62. And right now I can find a hundred people in my neighborhood who did the same, or some kids still doing it (often Latino these days). My point being that there are and always have been a helluva lot of us know-nothing laboring sons out here, whether more fortunate Americans acknowledge our struggles or not. But they should. You see, it’s like this: When the heartless American system is done reducing us to slobbering beer soaked zombies in the American labor gulag, your sweet ass is next.

—snip—

i repeat:

“When the heartless American system is done reducing us to slobbering beer soaked zombies in the American labor gulag, your sweet ass is next.”

Don’t laugh, You are next!

Bet on it.

Unless of course you…

WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!

On the evidence so far?

Y’ain’t gonna.

Too bad.

You had yer chances. And you blew ’em.

RIP, Joe. You was right all along.

You was right all along.

Love ya, man.

Later…

AG
- Marie2 on November 12, 2013 at 2:44 pm
  
  Bageant loses his argument right here:
  
  They never sat down to a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner. If this sounds like some Depression era sob story, let me say that it was in 1959-62. And right now I can find a hundred people in my neighborhood who did the same, or some kids still doing it (often Latino these days).
  
  Poor working class Latinos that are eligible to vote aren’t showing up for the GOP. They get that the GOP has never and will never give anything to the working class. It may be very slim pickings with Democrats but at least it’s still something.
  
  Their white counterparts — most of whom enjoyed more economic privileges from the New Deal, Great Society, and tough unions and union leaders such as John L. Lewis — were only too quick to reject those that brought them to the dance. And while still grabbing for every buck from programs and institutions only liberals and socialists were able to construct, have been a reliable base for those hell bent on deconstruction. So reliable that around 1988 PoshLiberals began offering them the same deal. That horrifies the non-PoshLiberals, but we’re a freaking minority that struggle to do more than observe the poor GOP suckers voting for nothing but endorsement of their right to be racist, misogynist, Bible thumpers and poor DEM suckers occasionally getting a minimum wage raise.
  
  If the only information I had to go on wrt to the values of Clinton and GWB were:
  
  How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters — huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.
  
  Or Jenna Bush’s much smaller and more private wedding at her parents’ “ranch,” I’d have to go with GWB. Public policy wise, Clinton gets a slight edge. But both are so gag worthy, that neither deserve the votes of anyone not in the top 10%.
  - Arthur Gilroy on November 12, 2013 at 7:08 pm
    
    What arrant bullshit, Marie.
    
    #1-Joe wasn’t making an “argument.” He was just stating the facts of his life as he had lived it.
    
    #2- You write:
    
    Poor working class Latinos that are eligible to vote aren’t showing up for the GOP.
    
    First of all, it’s “Poor working class Latinos who are eligible to vote, not “that.” They are people, not objects. Language does not lie. I am willing to bet (on the strength of that weak sentence construction alone) that you do not intimately know any “working class Latinos.” Not really. Maybe as servants or waiters or groundskeepers, but not as human beings. I do. I have played latin music in NYC for almost 50 years. Tito Puente used to tell me that I was “Puerto Rican by injection.” (It’s a joke, just in case you are actually as stiff as you appear to be.) Most “working class Latinos” so deeply distrust government on all levels…w/good reason, considering their ongoing treatment here and the situations in their own countries that led them to go all in and take the plunge to come here in the first place…that they simply stay out of range when crooked PermaGov pols and their reps come a’knock-knock-knocking on their doors.
    
    #3-You also write:
    
    Their white counterparts — most of whom enjoyed more economic privileges from the New Deal, Great Society, and tough unions and union leaders such as John L. Lewis — were only too quick to reject those that brought them to the dance.
    
    Did you even bother to read what Joe was writing? Where do the phrases “…a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner.” and “…economic privileges from the New Deal, Great Society, and tough unions and union leaders such as John L. Lewis…” intersect in your granite-encrusted mind, woman?
    
    Or…do you think that Joe was simply lying for effect? That writing on that level of brilliance and outrage just spews forth from low-level, lying media hustlers like the ones you have apparently been reading?
    
    Wake the fuck up.
    
    Step away from the media with your brains in the air.
    
    Go take a load of laundry to the nearest working class laundromat…black, brown or beige…and get to know some real people. Y’might just learn something.
    
    Unbelievable.
    
    AG
    - The Voice In The Wilderness on November 13, 2013 at 6:54 pm
      
      You are grammatically correct, Arthur, but Marie was using a common mode of speaking. The “that” is a collective noun, admittedly incorrectly used. I doubt she had the intention you ascribe to her.
      - Don Durito on November 13, 2013 at 7:56 pm
        
        Yeah, for someone who seems to want to be the voice of the working stiff, the sudden insistence on using the Queen’s English seems a bit strange.
        
        Also…
        
        Something about this sentence seemed a bit on the offensive (as in an undercurrent of sexism) side (my emphasis added):
        
        Where do the phrases “…a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner.” and “…economic privileges from the New Deal, Great Society, and tough unions and union leaders such as John L. Lewis…” intersect in your granite-encrusted mind, woman?
      - The Voice In The Wilderness on November 13, 2013 at 8:47 pm
        
        That did strike a note of discord. Time to apologize, Arthur.
      - Arthur Gilroy on November 13, 2013 at 9:35 pm
        
        “Marie” is generally considered to be a female name, right Don? Right, man? Is “woman” to be considered a derogatory word while “man” is not??
        
        Not in my book it isn’t.
        
        You?
        
        Nice. Don.
        
        Up to your usual level of subtlety, I see. “Commie.”
        
        Wake the fuck up.
        
        AG
      - Arthur Gilroy on November 13, 2013 at 9:30 pm
        
        “Intention” has nothing to do with it, Voice. What you say…consciously, so-called “unconsciously” or whatever…is what you get.
        
        Be careful what you say.
        
        You’ll have to live with it eventually.
        
        Bet on it.
        
        AG
  - Don Durito on November 13, 2013 at 6:29 pm
    
    I’d want to chew on it a moment, but Bageant does a decent job of describing something that Silva was apparently finding in her research (see that diary I posted a while back). If I take him at his “Redneck Marxist” word, he would never make for a reliable Paulbot, although I am sure a few would have tried to claim him. What he did manage during his all-too-brief life was to describe the frustration that a subset of working class leftists (and not the faux-left “progressive” variety) feel, and he intimately understands what it is like to be working class in the southern US highlands (Appalachia, the Ozarks, etc.). I could make rather similar observations just from my own neighborhood in my little corner of the region.
    
    Back when he was alive, his writings were among my first-reads in the morning along with the cheap coffee I could afford. I think he hoped that there was enough overlap between his ideological leanings and those of the average center-left blog reader to spark some much-needed action. He undoubtedly died a disappointed man. This bio (an intro to one of the two books he wrote) is worth a read, to get a flavor of what he was about. One thing that he makes clear – for actual leftists who want to reconnect with the working stiffs of my region, and anywhere working stiffs can be found, we have a long row to hoe, after generations of neglect.
    - Arthur Gilroy on November 13, 2013 at 9:37 pm
      
      I agree.
      
      AG
TarheelDem on November 12, 2013 at 2:26 pm

In 2012, Winchester incorporated city voted:

Obama 5094 49.5%
Romney 4946 48.0%
Other 256 2.5%

Surrounding Frederick County voted:

Obama 12,690 34.9%
Romney 22,858 63.8%
Other 846 2.3%

The city vote shows the evolution of Frederick into a bedroom community for folks commuting to the outer fringe of DC offices and businesses.

Lee County in extreme southwest Virginia is in coal country, has lost jobs and population–period. No offices to go clean, nowhere to go easily. Well, there’s Bristol.

Here’s their vote.

Obama 2583 26.91%
Romney 6847 71.34%

The third parties get interesting in Lee County.

Virgil Goode – Constitution Party – 67
Gary Johnson – Libertarian Party – 59
Jill Stein – Green Party – 26
Write-ins – 16

Here are the demographics:
96.3% White, 2.9% Black or African American, 0.2% Asian, 0.1% from other races, 0.7% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

The median income for a household in the county was $29,889, and the median income for a family was $40,721. The per capita income for the county was $16,317. About 20.3 percent of families and 22.7 percent of the population were below the poverty line, including 30.1 percent of those under age 18 and 23.3 percent of those age 65 or over.

Median rent is $381/month. Median house value is $74,932. Median real estate property taxes are $416 a year. Around 67% are affiliated with a religious congregation: Pond View Church, Alvis Chapel, Belcher Chapel, Ball Chapel, Beech Grove Church, Bethel Church, Roller Chapel, Big Door Church, Rosedale Church

Occupations:
Male:
Driver/sales workers and truck drivers (9%)
Construction trades workers except carpenters, electricians, painters, plumbers, and construction laborers (5%)
Extraction workers (5%)
Electrical equipment mechanics and other installation, maintenance, and repair occupations including supervisors (5%)
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations (4%)
Vehicle and mobile equipment mechanics, installers, and repairers (4%)
Other management occupations except farmers and farm managers (4

Female:

Secretaries and administrative assistants (6%)
Preschool, kindergarten, elementary and middle school teachers (5%)
Other office and administrative support workers including supervisors (5%)
Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides (5%)
Registered nurses (5%)
Cooks and food preparation workers (5%)
Cashiers (5%)

Origin of the 200-some foreign-born residents:

Pakistan (29%)
Germany (17%)
Brazil (12%)
China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan (11%)
United Kingdom (9%)
Austria (7%)
Philippines (6%)

Here’s an interesting statistic:
People in group quarters in Lee County, Virginia in 2000:

76 people in homes for the mentally retarded
49 people in nursing homes
44 people in local jails and other confinement facilities (including police lockups)
37 people in homes for the mentally ill
20 people in other noninstitutional group quarters
6 people in homes or halfway houses for drug/alcohol abuse
3 people in other group homes

People in group quarters in Lee County, Virginia in 2010:

1,486 people in federal prisons
184 people in nursing facilities/skilled-nursing facilities
36 people in residential treatment centers for adults

And this:
Deaths per 1000 population from 1990 to 1999: 12.3
Deaths per 1000 population from 2000 to 2006: 13.3

Persons enrolled in hospital insurance and/or supplemental medical insurance (Medicare) in July 1, 2003: 5,294 (3,459 aged, 1,835 disabled)
Population without health insurance coverage in 2000: 18%
Children under 18 without health insurance coverage in 2000: 12%

Lee County, Virginia

The local radio station is WSWV.

Harlan County, KY is the neighbor of Lee County to the north.

Just folks trying to raise their families and get by in a tough situation. And that’s much more typical of most of the population than Winchester.
- Arthur Gilroy on November 12, 2013 at 3:05 pm
  
  As you say, Tarheel…
  
  The city vote shows the evolution of Frederick into a bedroom community for folks commuting to the outer fringe of DC offices and businesses.
  
  Winchester is getting gentrified. So nu? Joe was speaking pre-gentrification. The “morans” of whom Booman spoke so disrespectfully and without any compassion whatsoever are many of the same people who used to live in the newly gentrified areas. I have seen the same principle in action in NYC. The new, expensive areas of Harlem and Brooklyn/Queens are touted as Bloomberg’s success, but the only “success” he managed was to move poor people out of those areas and into equally bad if not worse living conditions in small towns and cities up and down the Hudson, out into Long Island and over the river into New Jersey.
  
  White, struggling “Appalachia” is nationwide, Tarheel. Blackalachia, too, and Hispanalachia as well. What happens when all the gentrifiable neighborhoods, towns and cities are fully genrtiified? What then? What happens to all the non-“gents,” and what do they do when they are even poorer than they are now?
  
  Joe pinned it.
  
  Yet this place from which and about which I write could be any of thousands of communities across the U.S. It is a parallel world created by an American system where caste and self-identity are determined by what one consumes, or cannot afford to consume, education and of course, the class into which one is born. Like most things American, it was about money from the get-go. The difference is that some of us have known this truth from birth and on brutal terms. For instance, few middle class Americans today ever sold newspapers on the street corner at age twelve to pay for school clothes or carried coal to a dirty living room stove all winter. I did both. They never sat down to a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner. If this sounds like some Depression era sob story, let me say that it was in 1959-62. And right now I can find a hundred people in my neighborhood who did the same, or some kids still doing it (often Latino these days). My point being that there are and always have been a helluva lot of us know-nothing laboring sons out here, whether more fortunate Americans acknowledge our struggles or not. But they should. You see, it’s like this: When the heartless American system is done reducing us to slobbering beer soaked zombies in the American labor gulag, your sweet ass is next.
  
  One way or another…”your sweet ass is next.”
  
  Bet on it.
  
  No number of demographic surveys can change the facts of the matter. Get in a car and drive straight out from any newly gentrified city or neighborhood in America until you begin to see rough bars and rundown diners. There it is. Black, white, whatever. There it is. Get out of the car; go in and have a coffee or a beer. Go ahead. Tell them that they lost because they aren’t good enough to win, that it’s just how things work. I dare ya. You’d best go in strapped and ready to use it, though, ‘cuz they’re pissed off beyond belief, them “morons.” Not too dumb to realize that they’ve been had. Bet on that as well.
  
  Wait ‘tll the dispossessed working class…white, black and Hispanic alike…realize that they have all been had equally and begin to ally with one another. UH oh!!! Better hope all’ s they do is vote, ‘cuz if that don’t work?
  
  UH oh!!!
  
  AG

Appalachia. It Ain’t What You Think It Is, Leftinesses. Bet On It.

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Arthur Gilroy

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