BEWARE OF THE WHITE-COLLAR REDNECK

How can smart people be so stupid? Every talking head and syndicated pundit is on a tear about Howard Dean and his ill-spoken one-liner about courting the redneck vote. Defend him. Criticize him. In the panoply of last week’s political blather, it was nowhere nearly so idiotic as the President’s vision of Middle Eastern theocracies and monarchies epiphanic embracing of Western-style democracy.

Believe me. I live in the heartland of guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. And, do not forget Confederate battle flags defiantly unfurled from front-yard flagpoles and vituperatively racist bumper stickers. (I saw it with my own eyes: If I Knew You’d Cause This Much Trouble, I’d Have Picked the Cotton Myself!) These are not nice people. These are folks who are still ranting about secession and slavery and “outside agitators.”

Do they scare me? You bet they do. Does their influence befoul the entire civic-economic-social-cultural-political agenda of places like Greenville? You bet it does. Howard Dean will never get their votes. If nothing else, he is a slick Yankee who went to med school at Yeshiva University and has a Jewish wife and kids.

The rednecks really worthy of fear, though, are those encircled by white collars and Brooks Brothers ties. Their agenda may not be quite so radical and the rhetoric not quite so bellicose, but the underlying ethos is the same as that of their grimier cousins. And worse, their wealth and power enable them to impose the redneck agenda, not merely rail about it.

At its crux, the white-collar redneck agenda is also about segregation and marginalization. The extent to which it enforces racial boundaries, though, derives from the compulsion to divide the America into haves and have-nots. The haves must perpetuate a socially- and economically-bereft underclass on whose backs their comfort and fortunes are built.

I worked for a couple of years as factotum to a prosperous boss, compelling me to be an observer of an affluent community’s power-elite. There, I witnessed first hand the openly discussed machinations of the overclass. The plan always revolved around subjugating the underclass to ensure that a continuous flow of fodder would sustain the prosperity of the overclass's factories, mills, ziggurats and palaces. Have-nots were treated benevolently, but not so benevolently that they could ever transcend their paltry wage and inferior housing and education. And, if the economic winds were to shift, somehow the overclass would find a way to maintain its gracious lifestyle, while the underclass would get laid-off.

I have seen enough of the underclass to know that it is not full of shiftless, drugged-out ignoramuses. If it suffers from any malady, it is hopelessness. Its hopelessness is well justified by the ludicrousness of trying to sustain a family at minimum wage.

It comes from the pre-planned inferiority of educational opportunities and social services. It comes from public transportation systems that get servants to and from their masters’ homes but that are willfully not routed from where poor people live to where they might find better employment. It comes from the bureaucratic labyrinth and its indifferent bureaucrats that homeless people must navigate to gain basic sustenance, much less to transition themselves out of homelessness. It comes from tokenistic urban renewal for the poor, while community after community arises to feed gentrification. It comes from creating an urban facade that keeps poor neighborhoods just out of sight, so that no one proper might see the eyesore and realize that the streets are so narrow that they cannot be reached by fire trucks and EMS.

No, theirs is not the kind of hopelessness that one transcends with a “Golly gee! Time to get off my butt!” Theirs is a hopelessness meticulously choreographed by the overclass largely for its own selfish purposes. For, however threatening a crack dealer or a panhandler might seem, face it, they are nowhere nearly so threatening as a truly empowered underclass.

Hence, the rancor should not be over wooing pickup-truck rednecks. It should be over the courtship of the white-collar rednecks, the ones who really wield the influence.

You see, you battle-flag-wavin’, snuff-dippin’ rednecks need not despair. Your goals are already being well accomplished by the rednecks who can make a difference. They are white-collar guys like George Bush the Younger, who will make sure that his button-down buds prosper through an economic upswing and social programs that are built on the back of the hopeless underclass. The only thing that you pickup-truck rednecks have not yet figured out is that you, too, are just part of the same hopeless underclass. And guess what? President George W. Bush does not care about you any more than does . . . Howard Dean.