Clark and I sat in the back booth of the High Country Lounge, I drank tequilla, he drank some kind of craft beer. There is a road crew in the bar, and that little gal that the owner hired to clean up and sing. She never sings, she seems to hate it. She draws cartoons on the back of the paper coasters. Clark is an asshole, but we’re longtime friends, I tend not to notice it. He comes off as something like the Ted Knight character from Caddyshack, deciding who has value, and who doesn’t. He’s a snob. He moved up here back about twenty years ago when he made a few hundred grand in a dot-com before the bubble broke. Now he’s a nurse. He looks at the road crew, and says “look at that mouth breather with the Amped Energy t-shirt, I hope he drowns in the shallow end of the gene pool.”
Clark is a bigot. But he doesn’t see himself as a bigot, since he only hates working class Caucasians, not Black people.
The reality here is that Clark makes his living and pays his bills off of mouth breathers like that, they tend to end up in the hospital in which he works, there are a lot of dangerous jobs at this altitude, including jobs that a person would assume wouldn’t be all that dangerous. Clark had some aspirations to become a surgeon, he thought of himself as sufficiently driven and intelligent to do it. One day he chopped off the end of his index finger while relieving the spring tension on a cocked-up reel mower with the three horse Briggs and Stratton. It gave him a good excuse to quite the pre-med program, he couldn’t hack it anyway, and he looked like an idiot in there with all those kids.
I said “Clark, you’re a bigot.” He laughs, the idea doesn’t even penetrate his skull. He sees himself as a progressive and the idea of hating rednecks gives him a kind of holy progressive aura, he sees it as a character feature.
Clark smells like Clark and anyone who shits on Americans (and even Aussies) who don’t look like you, or dress like you, or vote like you. Do you or Clark know how to run a high tension line to clean out the splices? I don’t know how to run a high tension line to clean out the splices. So therefore, my life relies on those rednecks who do, when I hit the power switch in my bedroom and tell the raccoons to climb back out the same window they just climbed in. My life relies on that redneck whom you hate, that redneck on whom Clark shits and declares that “we’re fucked” because the guy didn’t give him back the ass-kissing look of adoration, “oh thank you wise and kind healthcare provider, for granting me and my wife the ability to continue our lives in a living state, rather than as a corpse in a bag.”
The electricity that comes out of that switch and heads into that light so that I can keep from tripping over all the lingerie scattered about from whatever adventure I had found myself the night prior, that electricity is in part due to the redneck whom you hate. And maybe I don’t agree with him on his political theorems, and maybe I choose not to end my sentences in prepositions as often as he chooses, but I find a a way to find some common ground with people, and the first step in doing that is not hating the breath that comes out of his mouth.
Clark doesn’t see any problem with his hatred, because he sees it as a way to give credibility to his aura of progressivism. Clark justifies his bigotry in a way that I find remarkable, I’m incapable of believing my own lies for as long as he does. I can last maybe a few weeks, he manages to last the larger part of his life.
Maybe someday, Clark will find a way to rebuild his own transmission, or operate a backhoe to clear out a trench to run a new drain from his house. Maybe someday he will know how to operate a CNC machine, or a turret lathe. And when he learns all the things he needs to do to create a functional, vibrant economy, then he can go ahead and hate all the rednecks. But until that day, he’s a prisoner of his own deficiencies. And in reality, that redneck can survive a whole bit better than Clark if the shit hits the fan and our economy plummets down the same well into which they threw the Jews, Armenians, Chechnyans, Sufis and All Black Fans. Because that redneck can keep a truck running, can rig up water filtration, can fix a roof, can deal psychedelic mushrooms for a few weeks to keep food on the table, can keep his wife sober, keep his daughter in nursing school, and keep his son out of prison. These people that Clark hates will end up saving our collectives asses someday soon … and on that day, we will no longer hate the rednecks. But then the day after we will hate them as usual, because we’re powerless, ineffectual and weak, and the rednecks remind us of that in a way that we don’t want to be reminded.
Clark will likely never understand that the mouth breathing voter who keeps the sanitation plant running, saves just as many lives as he does, because a lot of healthcare providers think of themselves as gods who hold the ability to grant life, and when they fuck up, it’s just part of the job. Almost none of those quarter million Americans and two thousand Aussies who die every year due to hospital error will have the words “hospital fuckup” stamped on their death certificate. It will stay something with words like “cardiac” and “respiratory” and “complications” and so forth, because dead people can accept the blame for their death a lot easier than healthcare workers who see themselves as infallible instruments of divine protection. How could Clark ever see himself as a normal human when he is legally protected from fucking up and killing someone?
But you will get this, I hope … this is an American shitfight. You have no idea what’s really involved here because as much as I like to joke otherwise, vast chunks of the rest of the planet solved their class problem a long time ago. That’s part of the reason they hate tall poppies and sit in the front seat of the taxi and influence Yanks to get in the front seat of the taxi after they live in Oz for a few years, and call each other “mate.” They do those things because they partly solved their class problems. Yeah, there are still a few random Pommy fucks who give Aussies a bad name, but you lot know how to laugh and kick the fucking tin, bitch. We haven’t solved that problem here yet. Our economy relies on an unspoken hatred of the “underclasses.”
Our economy relies a pronounced and undeniable polarization of people. Back in the day, we hated the British. That worked well enough for us to get away from them and build the most powerful country on the face of the planet. And then we hated the Indians. We killed as many as we could, but then we found out they were actually a whole lot tougher than any of us imagined they would be, and a whole lot more ruthless and intelligent than we could possibly be, so we found a way to make peace with them. So then we saw all these slaves that we kidnapped from Africa, and we were like “what good slaves, we need to find someone new to hate.” So we hated Mexicans, Chinese and even Australians for a bit, but then before we knew it, the slaves were no longer slaves. They were an underclass that threatened our ability to build the kind of wealth, power and future that we wanted to build. All of a sudden, our vision for a Caucasian utopia evaporated when we realized that our women wanted to fuck the Black dudes, and that these Africans were stronger, smarter and more cunning than we could ever be, with out pasty European weakness. So we then decided to hate the Black men and rape the Black women. And it was a glorious love-affair with hatred. We hated the slaves and the children of slaves and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves as long as we could, and it brought us wealth, that hatred. For a few years, we even found that we could beat the Nazis by taking a page from their book and rounding up the Japanese Americans and putting them into concentration camps … we hated them really well for a while. But after the war was over we said to ourselves “So where were we? Ah yes, torturing Black people. Black people, please come here, we’re going to accuse you of crimes that you didn’t commit and turn you back into slaves, and we’re going to accuse you of murders you didn’t commit and execute you, just in case those Azteks were onto something with sacrificing their virgins to the volcano gods and we need to sacrifice George Stinny to the electric chair, then perhaps the economy gods will take mercy on us and bring us wealth, power and the utopian future that we want to build.”
Yeah, that’s right, we executed a fourteen year old boy by putting him into an electric chair that was too big to kill him without an unimaginable amount of pain to the boy. And sure, it turns out he had nothing to do with the murder, but it wasn’t really about justice, it was about the gosh-durn volcano gods, and hey it must have worked, killing that boy, because no volcanoes erupted that year, and we pretty much had World War Two beat.
We hated the descendants of the slaves for a good while longer, and it made us wealthy and happy, and we didn’t feel too bad, because we were polite in our hatred, we talked about “giving them a chance for success” and “giving them a decent education” and “giving them a chance at a future.” But ultimately, we didn’t want to live next to them, and if we considered ourselves to be a better class of person than our fellow human, then we didn’t want to come in contact with their body fluids, we didn’t want to inhale their smell, because as Orwell wrote about this unique brand of comforting hatred; “the lower classes smell.”
We didn’t really have the luxury of an actual lower class in the USA, being a nation of mongrels, so it was simple enough to hate the descendants of slaves. And that brought us straight in the 1960s, and we killed as many as we could, but then we found out they were actually a whole lot tougher than any of us imagined they would be, and a whole lot more ruthless and intelligent than we could possibly be, so we spent a few decades getting used to their body fluids, and most of us found a way to make peace with them.
But the elites needed to replace their hatred with something new, and by that time they finally figured out how the British manage to maintain their snobbery for the lower classes and those who “drop their aitches.” That’s when polite society found they could hate the rednecks. And not all rednecks, because there are just as many Black rednecks, Mexican rednecks, Jewish rednecks, Asian rednecks, Native rednecks, and Mormon rednecks. But in this case, they found that restricting their hatred of rednecks to a specific kind of redneck. It worked, it’s the new socially-acceptable hatred. And Clark wants to see his fellow human “drown in the shallow end of the gene pool” because he is a bigot … a bigot who listens to Public Radio, who donates to the limit of his tax deduction to his favorite causes, and yes, even a bigot who allows a robot to drive his car, but a bigot nonetheless.