The Cracker Rich’s Dire Entitlement Disorder
Money can’t buy happiness
But it could buy me a boat, it could buy me a truck to pull it
It could buy me a Yeti 110 iced down with some silver bullets…”
— Chris Janson, “Buy Me a Boat”
Money can’t buy happinessThe presidency of America’s 45th Commander in Chief will make a wild, revolutionary, possibly harrowing chapter in US history books in about 50 years (should there still be a United States as it currently exists). The hindsight explanations of the causes for his election and the analyses of what may be a historically short (or at the least historically tumultuous) reign will liven up social studies classes for centuries. But at the moment, the great question is WHY?
Why would 45 deliberately tank our international standing and interrupt our march forward to give false hope for the return of obsolete jobs? Why would people who elected a president based on his extricating us from international influence shrug when it’s revealed that he and his people have lied about contact with and aid from a nation considered US public enemy number 1? How can people talk whimsically about returning to the “good old days” when their chosen leader shows no respect for the moral, social or political decencies that defined them? Finally, why do struggling, unhappy Americans who have nothing but hatred for those rotten immoral New Yorkers and big-city billionaires think the poster child for rotten immoral big-city New York billionaires represents them?
The Cracker Rich
They call me redneck, white trash and blue collar
But I could change all that if I had a couple million dollars”
— Chris Janson, “Buy Me a Boat”
Racism. Bigotry. They’re not the complete explanation of the Trump phenomenom but they provide a great background for his populist appeal.
Everybody knows the term for poor black people with flashy things. It starts with an “N” and ends with “rich,” and everytime you discuss entitlements, well-off white people on the right point out that they see ethnics in ghettoes wearing brand new Nikes and owning big screen TVs and riding around on motorbikes. Escalades and spinning rims and gold chains in West Baltimore prompt white rants about how irresponsible the blacks are with their money and how they must have stolen what money and opportunity they have from the pale-skilled proper overlords. But I’ve noticed they never mention the white people on welfare and near-eternal unemployment spending their money on survival gear and motorized toys; the ones who can say they have no opportunity yet can afford to fly to virginia and buy riot gear and flak jackets.
I’ve seen up close the cracker rich, the backbone of the Trump presidency, who strike fear into the establishment both parties. They’re the real mooches on society, the ones who stand for everything America is not. Yet they see this as their country to plunder, see government subsidies as something they’re entitled to because they’re so brimming with patriotic love that they deserve a reward, and that they would be rich if it wasn’t for people unlike them.
These are the people who live in a trailer but own a couple ATVs, some motorbikes, a snowmobile or two, a couple cars, maybe even a $2000 bass boat. Folks down south (the south being the region that sucks off the Federal teat more than any other) who voted for Trump despite his promises to cut their insurance and his history of ripping off working class contractors. Countless articles have been written about how Trump’s blue collar voters think they could be Trump if only they’d had a little luck, if the chips had fallen right (and judging by his taste being ripped out of a movie entitled “The Jerk” it’s probably how they would decorate should they be rich). For years they’d been told by their daddy that he coulda been somebody if those gays and blacks and Mexicans hadn’t ruined America, encouraging a hypocritical belief that the benefits they receive aren’t the same as the “welfare” bestowed upon the ethnics in spite of very real evidence of the opposite.
It’s an interesting aspect of capitalism that success is attributed to the victor’s individual skills and character while failure is chalked up to bad luck and, when possible, some exterior force railing against them. For working class whites left behind by science and technology and multi-culturalism, that exterior force is the Liberals who’ve unabashedly embraced the unholy hordes under the guise of embracing “the march of time.”
The Poor Racist
America’s ethnoclass system harkens back to the early rise of Southern agriculture, when white indentured servants worked alongside black slaves. It didn’t take long for plantation owners to realize that if the basically-enslaved whites aligned with the literally-enslaved blacks, they would make a force to be reckoned with. So they made the whites poor farmers, passed laws giving them legal precedence and favor and encouraged a feeling of superiority among the ancestors of America’s white trash, a consolation prize to keep the poorly-educated and rural stiffs content; at the least they were better than the blacks. That’s been taken to the next level by 45 praising conservative native Americans (not to be confused with actual Native Americans) and then linking this nativism to a simple nostalgia for life before political correctness, when patting a woman on the ass was a compliment and refusing to rent an apartment to people because they were Muslim or gay was completely legitimate and there was no chance a black would get promoted over you.
Thus the “white nationalist” movement aimed at helping white Americans first and foremost, the hideous vampires whose recent murderous, flame-wielding Charlottesville mob showed the world that America can hate those different from them on a par with even the most fervent of Middle East terrorists. Ann Coulter wrote right before the election that if only people whose grandparents on all side were Americans were allowed to vote, Trump would win by a landslide. What you couldn’t help but find ironic was that if such a scenario was made a law, Trump’s own children wouldn’t have been able to vote for him.
International Playboy and Debtee To Fight International Community
Of Donald Trump’s multiple wives, two have been foreigners (the third being a woman he met at church and committed adultery with). He has hotels all over the world, including in many Muslim countries, and he and his brood have, before the election, broadcast their huge investments from Russia and China.
Famously, four years ago presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked Obama for telling a Russian pol that he wanted to improve America’s relationship with the former-USSR. The rightwing media Propagandaministerium called Obama a traitor; now those same people are welcoming Russia with open arms while cheering Trump’s alienation of our European allies; they’re trusting this man to put America first despite mounting evidence that he’s at least a little beholden to Russia.
This ability to combine pride in American nationalist individualism with affection for our largest competitor for global influence is possibly the most shocking double-think embraced by the Trumpkins. At the least it’s up there with the idea that a billionaire who has thrived on the corruption of urban businessmen and politicians represents the average working stiff of rural America. But how was it pulled off?
Simple: make impossible promises. And 45, with his disregard for facts presented an easy-to-understand reason that all these malcontents were struggling: The liberals and their coterie of panethnic, pansexual devils have made a concerted effort to destroy the proud white straight God-fearing American. The next step: Trump claimed he would somehow save them, that despite a complex system of technological evolution and obsolete infrastructure and robots and the need for diverse viewpoints to keep the economy moving forward and the historic consumer comfort provided by today’s trade system; despite a job market with record openings while the cracker rich claim there’s no opportunity, under 45 all those deserving white bread “average Americans” will magically get back on top without changing a damn thing.
The Liberal Plot
I ain’t rich, but I damn sure wanna be
Working like a dog all day, ain’t working for me…”
— Chris Janson, “Buy Me a Boat”
Trumpkins’ favorite thing to say, after the term “libtards,” is that liberals are lazy, over-educated lay-abouts who don’t understand a healthy work ethic, have gotten to where they are by rigging the system against, and stealing from, the hardworking blue collar white man. When you bring up statistics about unemployment in rural white communities, you hear the conspiracy theories: Mexicans have taken our jobs; the blacks have dirtied our cities; the gays have taken our toughness; the liberals have taken our pride; Dem urbanites have stolen our energy livelihoods to build up their “eco” businesses and GOP urbanites have exported our manufacturing jobs. Now we’re gonna take ’em back.
In a 2009 federal study, rural communities were shown to receive more federal funding per capita than urban areas and despite the fact that rural communities are disproportionately older and whiter, they make up 51% of all gun-owning households. Or, put another way, the older whiter people receiving more federal support are spending that money on several-hundred-dollar tools they often don’t use for anything more than super fun toys while claiming the younger, darker Americans are getting an unfair advantage.
Living in a rural community, I can say people in cities have an unfair advantage but that’s always been the nature of cities. There are more job opportunities in cities because there are more people and there’s more access to trade. A simple economic fact but that doesn’t help the towns crumbling from the death of their chief industries, the mines and factories which, in a former universe, were able to sustain whole towns like medieval fiefdoms. The hopelessness is very real and for many, that’s led to a desperate lashing out at anybody else; the easiest to attack are the ones most unlike oneself.
Sorry, You Can’t Buy that .454
Sadly, keeping up with the Joneses, er Kardashians, er Robertsons has more to do with this attitude than anybody would want to admit. I wrote previously about how our liberal culture vaunted wealth, snark and nihilistic hedonism to such a point that a right wing bent on insulting and amoral grasping couldn’t help but emerge.
The cracker rich don’t just want to insult and disrespect people; they want to be able to buy that boat without working hard. They want to be able to create a stockpile of weapons while having enough time to shoot everything. They want to be rich without working for it. And they hear all these stories about how they used to be able to live large (nevermind the average house in the 50s was about 1200 square feet and nobody owned a boat) and they wonder — who’s to blame? The cracker rich don’t want to admit they are. So their only excuse is to blame others.
Lucky for them, right now they have a president who, lacking any other solutions to their problems (because, short of finding a new career, getting a new education, starting a new livelihood and living a new lifestyle no real solutions exist), will fall back on the cornerstone of his campaign: It’s somebody else’s fault.
Republicans and Democrats alike, be very afraid of these anarchists; they’ve been told everything they want was stolen from them and they too can be wealthy if they just take it back. They can be more than cracker rich; if they just destroy all the people their leader has blamed for their problems, they can be Trump rich overnight.
The cracker rich have hope. They don’t really care about statues. Probably couldn’t name a single battle of the Civil War or even list which states were involved, which weren’t. They don’t even really care about America. Fiscal responsibility goes out the window when it comes to what they want, what they “deserve,” so the GOP’s out of luck. And Liberals have been savaged by politicians and rightwing media alike for a decade now to the point that no amount of sound logic could convince them that Democrats want anything short of gay Sharia law.
No, theirs is the battle cry of the illogical, of the desperate. What the cracker rich want is to get what they’re entitled to and if that means they preside over a burning slagheap at least they’ll be at the top.
