Page 79 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 79
p. mclaren ■ from a city on the hill to the dungheap of history
where parents grew tired of their children coughing up blood-flecked
blackened phlegm. To get to the polling stations, they passed through
ghost towns in rural Tennessee, where shuttered general stores and
demolished dime-a-dance halls held nothing but empty memories of
earlier generations. They came from neighborhoods in Iowa where
plants were no longer producing tower cranes and had laid off thou-
sands of workers. Supporters of the Orange Leviathan included spin-
dle-shanked retirees in eastern Kentucky living behind the eight ball on
straw mattresses in abandoned horse trailers, angry at the immigrants
passing them by on the ladder. Even those laid-off coal plant workers
forced down railroad tracks with their bindlesticks flung over their
shoulders, fighting graybacks and a disposable future with nothing
left but a ten dollar bill hidden in the heel of their boot, wore Trump’s
trademark red cap, emblazoned with the now famous phrase, “Make
America Great Again” (Trump had blamed environmental regulation
on the loss of coal mining jobs, without mentioning the country’s pivot
to the exploitation of another fossil fuel, natural gas, that can even be a
worse generator of greenhouse gas than coal). Hapless young vagrants
and itinerant workers huddled in abandoned coal-loading stations,
shooting up OxyContin (known locally as “hillbilly heroin”) with
nothing left but to Catch the Westbound (as the saying went during
the Great Depression), were all behind Trump, even if they were too
stoned to cast their ballots. With medically uninsured arthritic knees
and aching kidneys, the laboring poor embedded in capital’s extractive
essence—immiseration and privation—marched to the beat of nation-
alism, bemoaning the appearance of brown faces in the industrial yards
and agricultural fields that spoke a language they couldn’t understand.
They trekked through the dirt roads of Beauford County, South Car-
olina, and Duplin County to the north, past acres of pasture-raised
Berkshire pigs. They travelled to where they had last registered to vote,
even if it meant a trip across the North Georgia mountains, through
Clayton and Dillard, all the way to Chattanooga. Truckers for Trump
drove their eighteen wheelers through the low country of Louisiana,
gator teeth swinging from the rearview windows, so they could put the
man in the red cap into office.
For those who were experiencing city life, you didn’t have to be on the
rocks, or live on the nickel in penthouses made out of cardboard strewn
through the streets of skid row, “with cupped hands round the tin can” as
John Hartford or Glenn Campbell might put it, in order to be a Trump
supporter. Although generally risk-averse, many in the wage-labor-rich
77
where parents grew tired of their children coughing up blood-flecked
blackened phlegm. To get to the polling stations, they passed through
ghost towns in rural Tennessee, where shuttered general stores and
demolished dime-a-dance halls held nothing but empty memories of
earlier generations. They came from neighborhoods in Iowa where
plants were no longer producing tower cranes and had laid off thou-
sands of workers. Supporters of the Orange Leviathan included spin-
dle-shanked retirees in eastern Kentucky living behind the eight ball on
straw mattresses in abandoned horse trailers, angry at the immigrants
passing them by on the ladder. Even those laid-off coal plant workers
forced down railroad tracks with their bindlesticks flung over their
shoulders, fighting graybacks and a disposable future with nothing
left but a ten dollar bill hidden in the heel of their boot, wore Trump’s
trademark red cap, emblazoned with the now famous phrase, “Make
America Great Again” (Trump had blamed environmental regulation
on the loss of coal mining jobs, without mentioning the country’s pivot
to the exploitation of another fossil fuel, natural gas, that can even be a
worse generator of greenhouse gas than coal). Hapless young vagrants
and itinerant workers huddled in abandoned coal-loading stations,
shooting up OxyContin (known locally as “hillbilly heroin”) with
nothing left but to Catch the Westbound (as the saying went during
the Great Depression), were all behind Trump, even if they were too
stoned to cast their ballots. With medically uninsured arthritic knees
and aching kidneys, the laboring poor embedded in capital’s extractive
essence—immiseration and privation—marched to the beat of nation-
alism, bemoaning the appearance of brown faces in the industrial yards
and agricultural fields that spoke a language they couldn’t understand.
They trekked through the dirt roads of Beauford County, South Car-
olina, and Duplin County to the north, past acres of pasture-raised
Berkshire pigs. They travelled to where they had last registered to vote,
even if it meant a trip across the North Georgia mountains, through
Clayton and Dillard, all the way to Chattanooga. Truckers for Trump
drove their eighteen wheelers through the low country of Louisiana,
gator teeth swinging from the rearview windows, so they could put the
man in the red cap into office.
For those who were experiencing city life, you didn’t have to be on the
rocks, or live on the nickel in penthouses made out of cardboard strewn
through the streets of skid row, “with cupped hands round the tin can” as
John Hartford or Glenn Campbell might put it, in order to be a Trump
supporter. Although generally risk-averse, many in the wage-labor-rich
77
