Dick Cheney Can Go Fuck Himself

West Virginians were dumb enough to vote for these clowns twice.

Here’s what Dick really thinks about us. He’s talking about how he and Barack Obama are relatives. Then he makes this joke about inbreeding.

 

Not all people in WV are religious nuts, right wingers, racists and xenophobes. I’m clearly not one, if you’ve read any of the posts I’ve placed on this blog. We have a long history of labor struggle. Some of the most militant trade unionism in US history. We have several armed conflicts between militant trade unionists in the coal mines and the company’s private police. One of these, the Battle of Blair Mountain, actually involved the US army dropping bombs on the miners.

All of this happened so that the people who worked the mines would have some human dignity. The miners lived in what were called company towns, which are kind of like sharecropping arrangements in the Deep South and tenant farming is in many parts of the world. The miners were paid in scrip, company money, which could only be spent at the company store. The miners and their families lived in company housing. Their whole lives were run by a single ruling entity– the coal company. That’s why West Virginians didn’t vote Republican until the election of 2000. Republicans think the whole world should be run that way. It sounds efficient, but it’s also bad. Typically, the miners would wind up owing the company store much more than they could afford, so they wound up working for next to nothing. Remember the song “Sixteen Tons”– “I owe my soul to the company store.” The unions fought to change that. To actual liberate these people from their bondage. The militant working class movements of that period  was something that all West Virginia school children were taught. It has since been removed from the curriculum.

To break those unions something else had to happen. In the Deep South, share-cropping arrangements were beginning to fall apart, as prices of cotton and other crops fluctuated, many African American sharecroppers left the farms in search of better wages. Coal companies hired many African Americans to work in the coal mines for lower wages than union miners. This, of course, is the beginning of modern racism in West Virginia. The typical coal miner had no desire to use a class analysis of the situation and blamed the African Americans for his problems. It is kind of like the Lou Dobbs phenomenon. Someone blames the migrant workers for the labour conditions, and both exploited groups wind up fighting each other for the scraps.

I should put here that West Virginia consists of the counties of original Commonwealth of Virginia that were generally unable to have widespread slavery. West Virginia–except for the southwestern part of the state and the Eastern Panhandle/Lower Shenandoah Valley– has a climate much like southern New England, whereas Virginia has a largely subtropical climate, approaching that of a true subtropical Southern state in its southeastern corner. This means that West Virginia could never have large scale tobacco production and absolutely no cotton. In 1830’s, Virginia seriously considered abolishing slavery to allow this part of the state to industrialize, because it was argued that Wheeling could surpass Pittsburgh if the conditions for industrialization were encouraged. West Virginia also had lots of Underground Railroad stations, which means that it was impractical to have the plantation system here.  As a result, West Virginia had very few native born African Americans, except in the Eastern Panhandle/Lower Shenanadoah Valley.  Slavery in eastern Virginia is one of the main reasons West Virginia is so horribly underdeveloped. This was exacerbated with development of extractive industries in West Virginia, which created a colonial economy in the state. It’s actually very easy for me to understand Marx and what’s called “dependency theory,” when we talk about the exploited Third World countries in social science.

Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan journalist and author, once wrote a book called The Open Veins of Latin America, the veins meaning both the veins of silver and gold and the bleeding veins of the people of that continent. Exploitation of natural resources and of the people living there led to the accumulation of great wealth into the hand of the Europeans and later the North Americans (specifically, US interests). Similarly, exploitation in West Virginia has led to the development of the large steel industries in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and perhaps even Chicago (which are now nearly dead). For it was West Virginia coal that fired the furnaces. Andrew Carnegie would have been nothing without our coal.

I know it is now popular for progressive people to look down on people in West Virginia. I guess Dick Cheney has decided that it’s okay for conservatives to do the same. Progressives rightly point out the horrors of racism here, but I think they need to understand that this racism did not come in a vacuum. The people who are exploited, who are pushed to the edge, are lashing out at what they have been told is their enemy. It’s better for us to understand that racism is not merely an attitude. It is a structure that is used to divide us in our struggle for democracy. It does us no good to merely attack racist attitudes, because if you do, these people will call you an elitist and you will never be able to talk to them again. If you understand the structure of racism, then you can have a conversation that might help shatter these views and get us closer to a more equitable system.

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