Friday, June 13, 2008

Oakhurst, California

Commenter huy (his blog is here) responds to the World O' Crap, Meet World O' Lies post with this very astute comment, that sums up completely a town where I spent 16 years of my life - Oakhurst, California. He's captured the Zeitgeist of this town, and really all of White small town rural California perfectly. My comments follow:
huy: It's annoying to see Republicans call liberals elitist.

Its playing to the stereotypical backward small town white Americans. "Us Republicans are like you guys only richer and with more class. We hate blacks and Homos. We love guns and bashing immigrants. We hate feminists. We are real men just like you, and the liberals are all mocaccino-drinking art fag homos unable to accept reality and the competition and ruthlessness of capitalism."

The Republicans try to give the image that they share more personality traits with the white small town American (despite the fact that their policies shoot them in the foot) while the liberals are made to seem as out-of-touch elitist faggots who look down on the small town working class White Americans (despite the fact that the liberals' policies do more to help the working class small town White Americans than any other party).

The Republicans want presidential campaigns based on personality traits and 'values', while the liberals want a campaign more centered around policies and how they affect the citizens and individual demographic groups within the US population and the economy.

A Republican can wear a cowboy hat and a lumberjack shirt, drink a beer, hold a rifle and say "homos can fuck off" and he'll be sure to get a significant percentage of the less-educated more socially deprived small town American White vote.

Social Deprivation breeds ignorance and rightwing attitudes and the rich Republicans are abusing this social deprivation in small town America to maintain their presidential power and electorate. Religion also helps make people vote Republican, and religion is strongest amongst the poor and socially deprived.

Its a disgusting, feudal, immoral, sick game the Republicans are playing. By keeping the poor poor, they can preach the backward views fostered by poverty in order to stay in power and continue to exploit the very poor people who vote for them whilst the Republicans and tycoons own multi-million dollar estates and control the media to further control the minds of the poor and socially deprived and earn in billions.

The Republicans need poor small town White Americans to stay in power and stay rich, thus they do everything they can to prevent the social progression and economic development of small town America, because that would mean they would lose power, and also they want to spend as little money as possible on helping citizens anyway so they can spend more money on themselves and their businesses.

The Republicans are keeping the poor just wealthy enough not to complain, but preventing them from escaping enough social deprivation gaining enough and education and possibly economic development too so they don't turn liberal.
Huy hits it spot-on, but there's no point talking sense these Whites. Most of them are not rich at all, and those that are doing ok are usually making a lot less money than Whites in liberal bastions like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, so there's no way to explain this stuff on a money basis. I guess you could try to explain it on a "we hate minorities" basis, but in these types of places, there are no minorities.

This is what I don't get. If any Whites should vote "we hate niggers* and Mexicans", it should be those in the cities that have the most contact with them. Surely at least some of those contacts are going to be quite unpleasant.

But if you ever find a 90%+ White area in California, rich or poor, it's solidly Republican. Since there are no minorities around to hate, and those that are are well-behaved, how could they be voting "we hate niggers"? Apparently a lot of them are. Question is, how does voting Republican protect your pretty White towns and cities from the nigger and beaner hordes? It doesn't. Not one bit.

Whites have been voting in an openly racist way for Republicans for years (as commenters at American Renaissance say, the Republican Party is the party of the Whites) and what have they got to show for it? Not a hill of beans.

The Republicans have been in a contest with the liberal Dems to see how many million illegal Mesoamericans they can flood into our country to wreck every White city and job in their path. Are Republicans passing laws legalizing housing discrimination against Blacks and Browns? Are they bringing back segregation? Are they bringing back Jim Crow? Are they sending all the niggers back to Africa? Course not.

So how does voting Republican benefit these Whites in their White towns in any racial way whatsoever? It doesn't, and it can't possibly.

Huy only briefly touched on the all-important Christian fundamentalist aspect. It's everywhere in White rural America, and the fanaticism and insanity of these folks is something to see.

I'll take the Hispanic Catholic Church any day over these loons. Catholicism, despite all its faults, is at least sane, and your average Catholic is a sane human being. I wish I could say that about a White fundamentalist. A White fundamentalist, no matter how intelligent, is seriously out of their fucking mind. I mean it.

In White small town America, just about every White is some kind of fundamentalist nutjob. Even those that aren't are usually anti-abortion. Why? Who knows? Don't they know that abortion kills way more Black and Brown babies than White babies? Guess not.

Living in Oakhurst, I generally avoided politics or religion. Just about every White you met was a Republican or a fundamentalist, or usually both, so you just kept away from those subjects and made friends anyway.

These are funny places. You have the Republicans who spent years in state prison and ride motorcycles and hate niggers and beaners. You have lots of speed freak Whites on meth, missing teeth and parts of their minds, and they all vote Republican, if they vote. The Republican Party has the White rural tweaker vote down pat. Why do the tweakers vote Republican, the party of the drug war? Family values? Don't ask.

One really needs to ask what all these idiot fundamentalist Whites have gotten for voting Republican for all these years.

Someone tell me what the Republican Party has ever done for fundamentalists. Is abortion illegal yet? Are the fags in jail? Is porn illegal? What's the point? The Republicans talk the fundamentalist talk, but they never deliver a thing. Yet every year, the White fundamentalists march off and vote Republican again and don't get a damn thing in return.

If one could make a case that Republicans were good for low and average-income small town Whites, while Democrats were harmful to them, one could say that small town Whites are at least voting their economic interests. That's not the case. The Republicans have never helped these small town Whites in any whatsoever, and in fact, their politics have been hostile to them.

Let's look at statistics - since 1980, non-supervisory wages (80% of US workers) have risen by a mere 1%, despite very high cumulative economic growth and rising productivity all through that period. Other studies show that the bottom 90% of US income bracket has lost 7% of its income over 30 years, while the top 1% doubled their income.

Clearly, the Republicans don't do jack for small town Whites making less than $80,000/yr or so. In fact, objectively, they fuck them over, year in and year out.

So why vote for em? As huy suggests, it's all psychological. Living in these White towns, I can tell you, voting Democrat is virtually a sin. If you are young White male and vote Democrat, your peers will say, "But you're White!" The Democratic Party is "the party of the niggers and Mexicans" as one young White Republican (one of most wild drug abusers I've ever met) told me.

And it's more than that. If you are young, White, male and redneck-macho the way you are supposed to be in White rural America, voting Republican is frankly an assertion of masculinity. The Democratic Party is the party of the fags, and it seems that many young White males in the rural West vote Republican as an assertion of masculinity and a way to show that they are not even 1% queer, dammit.

Seriously, if you tell other White males in these towns you vote Democrat, they look at you like you're not much of a man, or maybe even you are a little bit queer, or maybe more than a little bit?

In these towns, Whites buy groceries with food stamps and the doctors' offices are filled with Whites in Medicaid. And probably 90% of them vote Republican. Guaranteed.

I don't hate Oakhurst at all; I've made my peace with it. It's a very peaceful, albeit somewhat boring, town, and there is almost no crime. You're away from the diversity, the excitement, the petty crime, the gangs and dark-skinned Underclass and it's ok in a sleepy and pretty kind of way.

*"Nigger" is used here in a sarcastic, sardonic way. Sorry if it bothers you.

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