Canaries in the coal mine

 Canaries in the Coal Mine

As much as I feel disgust toward the January 6th rabble and the Canadian KKKonvoy, and my neighbour across the alley who called me a Nazi jew, I can well understand what has them climbing walls and semi-trailering across the country. The world as they know it is dying, even more directly and precipitously than the planet as a whole is dying. Drawn out from their squalid double-wides and emboldened by a deranged narcissist, then confronted with the harsh reality of economic marginalization, these struggling masses of threatened white supremacists have arisen en masse.

Normal doesn't live here anymore. Beaver Cleaver (you'd never get away with that name in this day and age) has left the building along with Wally, June, and Ward. Andy is no longer the sheriff of Mayberry and the Six Million Dollar Man is doing windshields for spare change at Hollywood and Vine. Jackie Gleason would never get away with threatening to punch Alice to the moon and the Happy Days crown are either dead or in rehab. A nation founded on racism and slavery is no longer safe for Jedediah, or Big Frank, or Penny or Marsha. Because a black man threw the lie in their faces.

A lifetime ago there was a black president who was more articulate and poised than the Caucasians who bracketed his tenure. His competence and charm, his impeccable use of language was a resounding slap in the face of white America. The country had a first lady who was educated, intelligent, talented, poised and gracious. And white America blew an aneurism deep in the recesses of its racist brain. They carried a northern grifter and his slattern, dull witted trophy wife to the halls of power and attempted to erase the impact of the previous eight years. But his tenure was short lived, even though the poison of his brief tenure continues to pollute discourse and shatter common sense.

Decade upon decade of pale skinned, rough hewn machismo did not prepare the current European descendants to take a back seat to people of colour: it was always the black man who sat at the back of the bus! Now we had black CEOs and generals, Hispanic judges, and Asian lawmakers. The social landscape was no longer clearly defined in darkening shades as one moved from top to bottom.

LBJ famously said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This truism has served the American south and much of rural America since the emancipation; however, today's poor, uneducated, unemployable white man has to resort to major self delusion in order to keep the fantasy alive.

And if you can maintain one fantasy, why not entertain a host of outlandish conspiracies and deceptions. If the world is deceiving people to believe that white supremacy is dying, why not believe that the Clintons run a sex slave racket out of a Florida pizza parlour or that jewish space lasers are responsible for California's wildfires. Climate change is a hoax and Bill Gates is planting 5G chips in vaccines. If you don't like the truth, change it or find an alternate truth.

That's why 'fake news' was such a master stroke (Trump may be an idiot but he has a nose for promotion) providing a 'get out of jail free' card for all the lies, misrepresentations, frauds, and crimes that Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (to name a few) perpetrated. When the Sandy Hook massacre of little children was attributed to crisis actors, the whole world should have risen in an ear piercing scream. Instead, the group who Hillary Clinton would later brand as Deplorables showed why they are worthy of the moniker.

Economic marginalization is the other edge of the double edged sword that hangs over the deposed white dregs. Where their strength had been the colour of their skin, the new world, having automated unskilled labour out of relevance and relative stability, now chose to profit the trainable and educable. Service careers such as health care and social services far outstripped the want ads looking for pump jockeys and stock boys. Self checkout, Uber drivers, ATMs and Skip the Dishes have decimated the ranks of low skill/no skill employment and left the subsistence employables to stand on street medians with their cardboard pleas for food and money. The uneducated caucasian is reduced to the mendicant he always was but could, until now, deny.

At the root of the new paucity of lower end employment lies the nature of the economic system. As corporations and CEOs extract more and more wealth from the system, those who can be dispensed with to save money are thrown aside. The pool of available wealth that was divvied up in such a way as to carry the marginally employable now tilted away from the poor and carried an ever growing pile of wealth and power to the very rich. And, before you start feeling too secure, your turn, unless you can find a safe niche in the capitalist world order, is coming.

We are all Canaries in the Coal Mine, it's just that some of us will take longer to marginalize and dispose of. As the most vulnerable in our society, the poor white is the first to be affected. There is no room for passengers on this slave ship and the indigent, poorly educated whites can see the planks being extended all around them. Why not mention poor blacks and people of colour, you may ask? Because they're used to getting the shit end of the stick. They had nobody to look down on because the whole racist structure of law, finance and society as a whole relegated them to the bottom rung on the ladder of success. When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

In the same way that canaries in a mine don't realize what is killing them, neither do the good old boys. The right wing media that has egged them on by pandering to their paranoia and scepticism has helped to ensure that they will never sense the carbon monoxide that is killing them. Not only that, the rest of us miners breathing an ever more poisonous atmosphere won't acknowledge what's killing us either. The reality is that the obscenely wealthy are draining the oxygen out of the system. There is only one mine. There are lots of canaries.