Where I grew up, everyone read the “big city paper,” The Parkersburg News. It’s a Republican rag from one of the more Republican cities in West Virginia.
And every Sunday, it publishes letters to the editor. Generally, more conservative readers feel more comfortable submitting letters, and some of these letters have some of the most exotic information in them. I make it habit to read them on Sunday. It’s usually good for a laugh.
However, every once in a while someone submits a letter that really strikes out at all that bullshit, and yesterday, there was this little gem:
Although I now live in Ohio, I am a native of the Mountain State [West Virginia]. One of my ancestors was Indian fighter Samuel Ferguson, who fought at King’s Mountain and was one of the first settlers in what is now Cabell/Wayne County, W.Va. Therefore, it both saddens and puzzles me that many present-day West Virginians are inclined to oppose their own best interests.
For 150 years, outside interests have controlled the destiny of this region. They have provided jobs, but they have also trashed the landscape and, in many instances, have treated West Virginia workers as “disposable resources.” Early UMW organizers realized this when they stood against corrupt and greedy mine-owners at Blair Mountain in the 1920s.
Today, there are other problems. Unlike Ohio, West Virginia is not a “swing-state.” This is because of the area’s declining population. Many West Virginians have been forced to leave the area because jobs have been eliminated or shipped overseas by greedy corporations whose only concern is the almighty bottom-line.
In the recent campaign, these same vested interests put forth numerous lies about a mythical “Obama war on coal,” but neglected to tell West Virginians that the decline of the coal-industry is not the “fault” of the recently re-elected Obama administration nor EPA regulations, but because of a drastic drop in the price of natural-gas, (engineered by opportunistic Wall Street commodities traders) that makes it cheaper to use gas instead of coal in electricity-generating plants. Despite this fact, many Mountaineers were conned into endorsing a candidate who epitomized the “vulture-capitalist” ideology that has decimated West Virginia’s economy for the past five decades.
Some say that West Virginians cling too closely to “God and guns.” I disagree. The good people of this region have been betrayed by two other “g”s – “greed” and their own “gullibility.”
Fred O’Neill
Marietta [Ohio]
That’s pretty much it.
This was the first election in which I saw no campaign signs along the highway for the Democratic nominee for president.
Senator Manchin and Governor Tomblin were both up for election this time. They both distanced themselves from the president, claiming that they would not endorse either Obama or Romney.
They won handily.
One state political figure who would not distance himself from the president was the attorney general, Darrell McGraw. He was always a champion of organized labor and consumer protection, and he made more than a few enemies with powerful interests.
He might have won had he done what Manchin and Tomblin did. But he never denounced the president. I remember him campaigning for Obama when I went to see Joe Biden at an event in Charleston. I pretty much knew that when the election cycle began, that he would be the one politician who would not turn his back on the president for political expediency.
And it cost him the election.
Some will say that the war on coal meme made the whole state shake its Democratic roots, which were once so strong that it once voted for Dukakis in that wave election in which George Bush the smarter won a healthy landslide.
Maybe.
But I think it’s something else.
I think we’ve seen a systematic attempt to keep West Virginia colonial in its mentality.
There has been a war against good quality public education in the state. Most school systems don’t have the tax base to hire good quality teachers, and those good quality teachers who start in the state wind up going somewhere else.
When people aren’t taught critical thinking skills, they believe whatever bullcrap comes filtering down to them. Fox News is popular around here. And a high school dropout “evangelist” is somehow more qualified to explain the nuances of foreign policy than “them smart people on the teevee.”
But I don’t blame all of this on the failing public school system.
I blame almost all of it on the fundamentalist churches, which engage in a very strong and systematic war against critical thinking. Here’s a very good example of what they do:
When people are taught that creationism is a valid scientific fact and that evolution is an evil force that is being shoved onto them by “experts,” then the qualified expert becomes someone to be distrusted.
It becomes acceptable to deny what the qualified expert tells you about the history of your state and of your nation.
If your preacher says that this has always been a Christian nation and then denounces the qualified historians who say otherwise, then you’re going to trust your preacher.
And he’s gonna tell you who to vote for.
He may not endorse, but he’ll definitely tell you that the only moral issues on the ballot are abortion and gay marriage.
And that’s as far as people take it.
It’s really quite sad.
The whole place is being turned into Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
One of the most insidious parts of this whole thing is that the controversy is portrayed as Christianity vs Evolution, when its really Creationism vs Evolution. Creationism didn’t really exist until Darwinian theory became widely accepted among the scientific community–which was made up at the time of religious people. Creationism is simply another cult, grafted onto our current Semitogenic religions–particularly Evangelical Christianity–by people unwilling to accept the concept that they too belong to a species of animal–one among many. What this subterfuge does is brand religious people who also accept evolution as heretics at best and Satanists at worst.
Team Heretic for the win! ;)
Maybe you should look into Unitarian Fellowship they even have animal blessings services. Quite different they accept even gay couples and so does the enire congregation. Many people grow up with church foundations they find conflicting as they reach maturity. Many adults have gone through this transition into adulthood as churchs are institutions devised by men. Many people have found the intolerance of parent’s religion and teachings conflicting. However, they do go around judging other folks by their belief systems.
The problem is that some religious people try to argue that science is just another religion, which it isn’t. If it were, people would be tolerant. Science is different in that religious beliefs are founded on the Bible or other religious texts or revelations. Science is founded on ordinary physical facts. When a scientist finds something interesting – a frozen mammoth, say – he doesn’t consult the Bible or his minister for an explanation. He looks for physical reasons to explain what that beast is and what it is doing there. That is not religion and so does not need tolerance. In fact, scientists cultivate a skeptical attitude towards scientific explanations.
Thanks cm, but I tend to be allergic to “isms” of any flavor and all organized religions give me spiritual dyspepsia.
I do reluctantly believe in the existence of a supreme being, whatever it may be, and in its corollary, spiritual dimensions beyond our ability to perceive. But I can also readily observe the empirical process of evolution in action. I therefore tentatively propose evolution as the mechanism whereby the fabric of life as we know it arose, (and by extension, that Creationism is a bunch of hooey.)
Was the cosmos an intentional creation of the supreme being or was all this far beneath the supreme being’s notice and thus actually the cosmic happenstance that atheists postulate? I can’t say, and probably will never know. I don’t believe anybody else can either.
In any event, I think a deliberate misquote I recently sent to a friend sums it up for me: “Render unto science what is measurable, and unto God what is immeasurable.”
I find it very interesting that people can be convinced to vote against their best interests. The billionaire that owns the Ambassador Bridge (between Windsor and Detroit) spent close to $30 million trying to convince the people of Michigan that it was a “bad” idea (read conspiracy) for the Canadian government to build a new bridge. His bridge (he actually owns it!) is 85 years old and Canada needs a safe and reliable bridge for moving goods into the states. Canada has said that we will pick up the whole bill (approx $1 bill + overruns) and this moron was close to convincing the people of Michigan that it is not in their best interest.
When the votes were finally counted last week (it was on the ballot) sanity prevailed. I don’t understand how people can be convinced to vote against their own interests.
It does boggle the mind sometimes doesn’t it?. But it really all goes back to that same old lazy thinking.
Hey, what are you? Catholic? Mason? Godless Commie? I don’t know what you are, but y’er not from around here! LOL.
You are right, of course, about lazy thinking, but I think it’s more than that. Even lazy thinking will lead you to the right conclusion if you have a strong tradition of organized labor and also a tradition of Philanthropy. In the North we had organized labor and filthy rich industrialists who bought into the notion that the workers could and should be “uplifted” by good schools, public parks, libraries, art galleries, etc. Some things were missing, of course. Marxism, for example. In this country social progress tends to follow from Christian charity, not Marxism. We are not Europe.
There was another cultural trend, though, one I do not understand. That is the notion that you don’t have to be rich, nor do you need religion, to appreciate the “finer things” including scientific ideas and to have “pride”, that is, to be morally upstanding. I’ve heard this duo of ideas only from my father, who was white, of English descent, from a small town in Appalachia and also from African Americans. Do you hear this sort of thing in the South? Because I think it provides a solid cultural platform for aspirations for education and for responsible political thought and action.
HI K; none of the above (LOL.) I’m afraid I share your cultural biases/influences since I was b. and raised in Chicago in a Euroamerican family of mixed British Isles/Germanic (N. Germany/Denmark) extraction.
I thus feel slightly uncomfortable addressing those particular cultural biases as they may exist below the Mason-Dixon, though I would attribute them in great part to the Border/Ulster/Scot’s Irish cultural milieu. (Before joining the Army, my experience w/ things “Southron” was limited to what my paternal grandma told me about her time down in KY (my Grampa Straight was from Appalachia as well), and those of my playmates who had emigrated to Chicago when their fathers’ moved north to find jobs.)
However, here’s my meager attempt. I’ve lived in MD since 1966, and my cultural/social experience here has always been a positive one. Having said that, the spectrum here runs the gamut from Budweiser-swilling good ol’ boys to pinky-lifting wine snobs (with most folks somewhere safely in the middle.) Up until 20 years ago, MD was primarily an agricultural state, w/ most of the wealthy and culturally-uplifted living in the vicinity of DC and was most decidedly less vocally religious than back in Chicago-land (which is definitely part of the Bible-Belt.) Yes there was indeed an innate dignity, regardless of social standing, a strong sense of self-reliance and an unusually open-handed generosity about these people. Its still there but has been overwhelmed by the influx of folks from elsewhere looking to Uncle Sugar and its corporate satellites for jobs, and by the subsequent McDonaldization of the landscape.
On the religious front, back to at least the 17th century, the most common trade in my Dad’s family, after farming, was clergyman. They pretty much covered the gamut of Protestant sects, C. of E./Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist/M-E, Baptist, Church of the Brethren, Quaker, etc., etc, ad nauseam. But the most recent crop have all been Evangelicals of one flavor or another. Those same Evangelicals were very intolerant of my Mom’s family, which though not particularly religious, did at least pay lip-service to the Lutheran (Missouri Synod), Methodist, and Roman Catholic creeds. Upon hearing my Dad state that my Mom’s step-dad (the only grampa I ever knew and who I loved dearly) was going to Hell because he was an “idol worshiping Catholic” and that the local Methodists (my Mom’s creed) were going to Hell because they snuck out for a ciggy-poo behind church on Sundays, I decided for my quite young self that religion wasn’t my cuppa. (This decision was made even easier after being forced to attend a revival tent meeting, but I’d rather not go into that any further.) In any event, along w/ other cultural changes, the Evangelical movements/super churches have taken firm root here now as well, thus tending to sublimate the more tolerant attitudes I first encountered back in the ’60’s. Not surprisingly, as the demographics (and relative wealth of the population) have changed the general political climate has swung towards the right as well. (Whew!)
Thanks for replying. Sounds like your family took a wrong turn into evengelicalism. Your mom’s family sounds like the neighborhood where I grew up. It was English and German. But, unlike you, we had no southerners. Religion was present but was not devisive because nobody over the age of 10 cared about doctrine. They just dressed up their kids and made them go to church every Sunday. LOL, we had a “Holy Roller” church, though. Socially, they were off the radar (just too weird – they played pianos and trumpets in church) until one of the pastor’s kids contracted polio. Then the neighborhood rallied and the holy rollers acquired some friends.
I’ve heard there’s cultural continuity in Appalachia, but I have my doubts. For one thing, not everyone in Appalachia is Scotch-Irish and that might make a big difference. This calls for more research.
Hi K; I’m talking about culture—language, religious propensities, food, personal space, art forms, work ethic, beverages, respect for authority figures–not ethnicity. A large portion of Appalachia’s Euroamerican community is indeed of German and Swiss extraction (many of whom migrated from PA) and of course other European ethnicities live there as well. But the primary overriding subculture appears to be Scots-Irish. The most ready example is the traditional music of the area–many of the songs are still sung to the same tunes and with the exact same words as they are/were in Ireland, and many of the instruments are the same or similar. Of course Gospel, Bluegrass and C&W are popular as well and pop culture in all its variations has crept in, but the cultural continuity between traditional Appalachian and Celtic music is self-evident. One can observe similar cultural milieus in WI–German; MN–Scandinavian; New Mexico–Spanish/Mexican; New Orleans–French, etc.. All contain a mix of ethnicities but also have one, sometimes two, primary subculture(s) to which their Euroamerican communities hew.
The Michigan voters at least got that right, about the bridge. But then there was the person who suggested that the new bridge be built from Toledo, Ohio, to Canada. . . . (refer to map!).
Reminds me of this
http://www.toonhole.com/2011/10/herd-animals/
And yes, these are the same folks who tell us the Holocaust never happened. *shaking my head in sadness & disgust*