Thoughtless for the Day

"There was a time when reading wasn't just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories, that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!" - Pvt. Joe Bowers

Where were we? Oh yeah, how rural working-class Pennsylvanians devolved from a group of rustic intellectuals to the sort of backwoods motherscratchers who think there's a War on Christmas. The answer, as always, is "Cow, pigs, wars, and witches."

There once was a time in this great country of ours, when blue-collar workers and white-collar workers used to make roughly the same amount of money. Then, one day in late Seventies, it's became pretty clear that a college education might be required for those not dreaming of a career in the Fast Food Industry. You see, the reason that rural working-class Pennsylvanians act like a bunch of dumbshits is because that helps to distinguish them from a group that they see, at least on a subconscious level, as economic competition.

Do you know the real reason why rural working-class Pennsylvanians began hunting? If you've got cows, pigs, corn, and chickens at home, do you really need to spend all day in the woods stalking a bear? The working-class began hunting as a way of emulating the European Aristocracy whom they considered intellectually superior (obviously they hadn't met many European aristocrats): This why hunting dogs - hell, all dogs - used to have names like Cerberus and Hannibal. Today rural working-class Pennsylvanians hunt mainly because they believe that hunting pisses college-educated Liberals. And nearly every mutt in the land has a name like "Mr. Fluffy McSnugglenose."

And college-educated Liberals are just one of the groups that rural working-class Pennsylvanians see as economic competition. Hillbillies claim that they hate Gays because homosexuality is "agin' the Bible", but so are many of the staples of rural life, like divorce, incest, and alcohol consumption, but when Merle Haggard dies (and I hope he lives forever) you won't see a bunch of Fundies picketing his funeral with "God Hates Divorcees"signs. Rednecks hate Gays because, as Richard Florida pointed out in Rise of the Creative Class, Gays are an economic Cinderella Story (which might explain the Bob Mackie gowns)

It's the same reason that you don't see any Rocket Scientists in the Klan. White Rocket Scientists aren't competing against Black Rocket Scientists for grants. There are plenty of slices of the Rocket Scientist pie to be passed around, but poor Southern whites saw newly freed Black as economic competition. That whole "Them darkies looked at my Effie Sue and made"was a convenient and easily understandable excuse.

So the next time you're sitting in a bar just outside of Pittsburgh downing a PBR with a unemployed steel-worker, and he starts to rant about how Gay Black Muslims are using the Liberal Media to take away his gun so that he won't be able to defend Christmas, just explain to him that his fears are actually rooted in deep-seated economic concerns. I'm sure he'll understand.