Welcome to middle-class lockdown; now shut up and buy something
By Joe Bageant
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 8, 2006, 16:41
Take away America’s Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them. --James “Mad Dog” Howard
When I was a boy on my grandparents’ farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads . . . One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible -- or at least was at one time in this country.
And if I ever doubt it, I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail. They are passing quickly now and I drive by more than a few of their graves in the old Greenwood Cemetery when I visit that place where there are still old men who know how to plow with horses and the women who can chop a live copperhead snake in half with a hoe then go right on weeding the garden. “Yew kids stay ‘way from that damned dead snake, ya hear me?”
Fifty years later nobody cans peaches any more, or depends upon a neighbor to cut their hair or get in the hay crop. And 50 years later I found myself in the middle class and softening like an overripe cheese. Given my background, I never guessed I’d see the day when I would be bitching because I could not get Hendricks gin or fresh salmon delivered to my door. (But when you’re too drunk to drive or even walk to the supermarket . . . ) Such is the level of self-insufficiency to which some of us weaker souls devolved.
Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. When live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facades (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick), which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we “order out.” Or go shopping for it at the mall.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_496.shtml
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