Cotton Socks Are Good Enough for any Working Man's Wife

by Mona Shaw

“Herbert Hoover said, ‘Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife,’ That’s all I needed to know about the man,” my granddad told me.

It’s the “little” slights that wear one down. Someone, something persuades us to let it go. “Pick your battles.”  

But, each time you say nothing, a piece of your soul dies, and larger and larger parts of yourself believe the lies that you and your kind are less worthy. You even repeat their jokes or slurs for their approval. Eventually you collude with your own oppressor.  A hundred times a day you hear things like:

“Don’t worry about the poor,” they don’t vote.

“I have a high credit rating, and they still discriminate against me as a lesbian.”

“She dresses like she shops at Walmart.”

“I didn’t buy a $400,000 house, so people could build houses next to me worth $100,000.”

“The poor wouldn’t be stressed if they just got a job.”

“No offense, but I prefer to socialize with people in my own economic stratum.  We have more in common.”

“We don’t care what Joe Six-pack thinks.  He’s not supporting this university.”

“I was stunned and repulsed.  They were using pots and pans for serving dishes.”

“It’s only $500.  Anyone I know has shoes worth more than that.”

“My father, the bank president, says we should do this.”

“He claims to be poor, but he was eating a Dove bar.”

Or, the time a director of the UI Labor Center told her own secretary, “If you want a better salary, get an education like I did.”

And all the jokes: about hard hats, red necks, polyester clothes, trailer parks, fake wood paneling, welfare, hair-styles, fake fingernails, dirty fingernails, subsidized housing, Jello or mayonnaise salads, cheap beer or cheap perfume, raggedy-ass cars, velvet paintings, country music, pressboard or plastic furniture, Jesus nightlights, dime-store jewelry, lunch meat, ice-berg lettuce, Jerry Springer or Maury Povich guests, and cat clocks with rhinestone eyes and a wagging tail, etc.

Let’s not even get started on dialects, speech-patterns or grammar.

It is bottomless, the reservoir containing all the quotidian and ubiquitous ways to render the underclass inferior and unworthy.

So, it came as no surprise to me when Hillary Clinton was praised by “progressives” for a recent speech in which she defended people of color by stating many Black people were well-off.  She called Trump’s assertions about poverty in communities of color as bigotry toward those communities.

No one in the mainstream media or politics (including Trump, perhaps especially Trump) thought to counter with the fact that being poor should not be an insult. She suggested that while there is no shame in being a person of color that to consider someone impoverished was shaming them.  She completely ignored that people of color are, indeed, far more likely to be poor.

In America there is no shame as pervasive as the shame of being poor. Racism can still get one killed by a cop, but the tragedy of the death will still be gauged by the economic status of the victim.  “And he was a counselor.”  “She was a teacher.”

It doesn’t matter that racism catalyzes every instance of poverty, including that poverty suffered by white people.  The ruling class can’t maintain an underclass to work for poverty wages without methods to control them.  Racism is their most effective whip.  No race in the underclass realizes that enough.  Far too many have bought the lies that white poor people really are just inferior or that people of color are getting something for nothing.

Martin Luther King, jr. saw through this divide and conquer strategy, and he was in the process of addressing and organizing all poor people when he was murdered.  History shows that effectively organizing poor people and workers will get you killed faster than anything else.  Even the big unions won’t do that anymore.

The poor are inferior in every way in America.  Class bigotry is almost considered good manners.  It demonstrates refinement and good taste.

It’s really telling that Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the Trump speech was to defend affluent people of color rather than show compassion for the suffering of those banished to poverty.

It was also telling that the Democratic National Convention was a parade of Horatio Alger stories, the one who overcame, who grabbed her bootstraps and made something of herself (not poor, no more). 

It serves the American agenda.  If she saw poor people as equal, if she admitted that not every little girl or boy can be president or even earn a living wage, then poor people might deserve things like housing, food, or healthcare.  But in today’s America, where we can’t do everything for everyone, we know who will be left out.  And, it’s not the woman in the $12,000 jacket or any of her friends.  Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife.

Of course, getting rid of Hillary won’t solve the problem.  She’s a snob, but everyone who runs for president in America is a snob.  Hillary is just the current spokesmodel for the status quo. 

It doesn’t matter who you vote for.  It matters if you continue to collude with the lie.  Not everyone can make it in America.  That’s a wholesale lie.  Our forefather’s never intended for that to be the case, and no one in power--or seeking power--wants that now. Change, when it comes, will come from the bottom up.  It’s time for decent Americans to cry, “Foul,” no matter where or how they encounter class bigotry.

Mona Shaw is a low-income Iowa grandmother of no particular importance and has no credentials whatsoever.  

A Song from the Underbelly: How I Stopped Worrying about Trump

I’m suffering from serious fear fatigue this morning.

Something is going to get me.  I know it.  It might be Trump pushing “the button.”  It might be the Russians stealing the election.  It might be the rising seas from Climate Change.  It might be an asteroid that comes to close the planet.  It might be some red neck who shoots me on the street for entertainment.  Maybe the economy will collapse, or we might have an earthquake in Iowa.  It is possible. Then there are the pandemics: from Ebola to Zika to that yet-to-be named deadly flu or an infection impervious to antibiotics.  This doesn’t include all the mercury and arsenic that’s in all of the food we eat.

Scores of people aren’t dying from anything of these things right now.  But, they might.  And the likelihood of all that rests on how I vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Now, if I had ever had any institutional power--ever--I might believe that how I fill in a circle on a ballot matters so much.  But, I haven’t, and I don’t.

I’m going to stop being terrified of Trump being elected.  I’m wiping that right off the list.  There, its’ gone.  Why?

First, he can’t do any of the things people are terrified he’ll do.  He can’t build that wall.  Mexico won’t pay for it. 

Next, he can’t deport all the Mexican from the U.S.  It’s logistically impossible.  There are too many of them.  God knows Obama has tried.  ICE has never been busier than during the Obama administration.  Clinton will follow that program.  The same number of Mexicans will be departed regardless, i.e. as many as we can find and round up.

He can’t even ban Muslims from entering the country without a constitutional challenge that he would certainly get.  Can he kill Muslims?  Sure.  But he’ll be hard-pressed to kill more than million or so that have been killed by the past two administrations.  And Clinton has promised to kill lots more in Syria.  I wonder, if we asked, who Syria wants to be president.

Is Trump crazier than bat shit?  Oh, God, yes.  But we’ve dealt with that before too.  E.g. Reagan had advanced Alzheimer’s and Wilson was a total vegetable while still in office. It was dealt with.  Hell, Truman dropped atomic bombs just to see what they’d do.  How insane was that?

Could he appoint some creepy Supreme Court justices?  Yes, he could.  But we’ve survived that before (See Bush II.), and we would again.  Let’s say somehow, the worst thing happened.  Let’s say Roe v Wade was overturned.  That would not make abortion illegal across the land.  Some states would make it illegal.  Women would have to travel to a state in which abortion was legal.  Yes, this will cause a harsher burden for poor women, but only the price of a bus ticket.  It’s not as if there is federal funding for women to get abortions now.  Or, did you forget the Hyde amendment?  Let’s be honest.  This isn’t a problem for poor women as much as it is an inconvenience for affluent ones.  Plus, these court decisions have a way of getting overturned.  See: Plessy v Ferguson, Bowers v Hardwick, et al.

Please. Please take a survey of all the women who are struggling economically.  Ask them their greatest fear.  They won’t say, “I may not be able to afford an abortion.”  (But academic and professional “feminists” have never been much interested in their opinion.) 

This brings me to another observation.  Clinton supporters (or big shot Republicans) don’t seem to be afraid of the status quo continuing.  And, there are some very real things to fear.  The War on Terror will continue, children will still be burned to death by U.S. drones.  Tens of thousands will still die on our own soil because they can’t afford the medical care they need. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Still, somehow, it’s become my moral obligation to just accept those things.  Collateral damage.  There have always been these things.  Nothing can be done.  At least not right now.

Then. I notice something else.  The people doing all the dying now aren’t usually the same people who are so afraid of Trump.  Then again, they’ll probably do okay with the status quo.  It’s sort of working for them.  They probably won’t bury someone they love next year who’s been killed in war or from lack of medical care.  Collateral damage is a bad thing to poor people thing, comfortable people don’t understand why that royally pisses some of us off.

The privileged equivocate these deaths.  They do it ALL THE TIME.  They NEVER say, “Yes, I know innocent people will die, but...”  Not in so many words.  They always sanitize the truth and talk about future organizing or lamentable foreign policy or something that makes killing these people sound not so bad. 

I suspect it’s because, you don’t lose much sleep over these folks. They’re not their folks.  But now the Trump specter has left them fearing for their own hides, and THAT’S scary.

They try to wiggle out of this with ridiculous spin and obfuscation.  They make up things that have no basis in reality like, “It’s a privileged position to not vote against Trump.”  Or, “It’s not about you.”  (No, it’s about them.)  I am sorry, but these are such an utter crock.  Marginalized people are going to die regardless.  We know that.  We’re not fooled.  You’re only able to sell that to comfortable “liberals.”  We know better, and that makes you mad.  It’s disgusting that you try to blame us for our deaths and continue to expect us sacrifice our lives for your comfort.

We didn’t create Trump.  You did.  You did it by using us as cannon fodder in your wars for profit and by colluding with and creating an economic system that makes it less and less likely we will survive.  From NAFTA TO GATT to the repeal of Glass-Stegall to shredding the social safety nets to putting us in prison so the rich can get richer, to bailing out Wall Street, etc., etc., etc.  You’ve been doing this on a fast-track since the first Clinton regime.  You’re not going to reverse that trajectory, and we know it.  Some of us are so sick of you that we’re voting for Trump.  It’s true, our Trump supporters may be the less aware of us, but we’re more aware than you are in any case.  You created this mess.  You did, and now you’re guilt-tripping us about it.

Still, I think about voting for Hillary.  I’ll admit it.  I do.  Even Chomsky says I should.  And, then, I feel nauseated.  Not figuratively, literally.  I have to lie down and stay very still for several minutes, or I’ll throw up.  I’ve—literally—had to buy heartburn medicine twice this month.  Because, because, because I know I’m voting for someone who will kill people I love.  I don’t think most of you internalize that “Sophie’s Choice.”  You certainly don’t show explicit empathy or compassion for it.

We really aren’t stupid, you know.  We know Trump isn’t our savior for the most part.  The minority of those who don’t will soon figure it out.  We’re survivors and quick learners.

I’m simply saying I’m exhausted of hearing about your current bogey men.  I’m going to figure out what I’m going to do on election day in my own way with information that makes sense to me.  I’m going to keep advocating for common people in every way, every time I notice something that hurts them.  I’m not going to stop doing that.  In between elections—and during them, for that matter—I’m going to entertain any action I can take to dismantle the Empire.

I trust my people.  We will figure out what to do, and we will do it.  It will take too long, but we will do it.  So, please, stop trying to get us to vote for your candidate by scaring us or rubbing in that we don’t matter.  I’m sick of being afraid.