The "Unnecessariat" and the rise of Trumpism.

[pbrower2a]

(07-17-2016, 08:22 PM)Odin Wrote: A really depressing blog post about how those currently left behind by out "new economy" and are completely ignored by mainstream politicians. I grew up around the rural "unnecessariat", so this really hits close to home for me. Lots of people out here in "flyover country" killing themselves directly by suicide or indirectly by drugs because they have no hope in their lives.

We should have gotten a new CCC and TVA -- indeed a new New Deal. Instead we found economic elites squeezing people even harder because such fits the logic of those elites, the only logic that matters to them. So much for "Black Lives Matter" as a desperate protest of police misconduct real or imagined. But dead of overdoses and suicides if one is white is no less dead, and often no less tragic.

The elites used to mollycoddle white people while sowing racism as a division... but that mollycoddling is over.




With the exceptions of New Mexico and the urban counties of Nevada the darkest shades of red would seem to have some correlation with political "redness" -- that is, Republican voting. The blue and light-blue areas include the giant cities with the nastiest traffic jams and highest property rents -- like most of coastal California from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego, Baltimore-Washington, southern New England, southeastern Pennsylvania, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, and Chicago.  Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque have high suicide rates in contrast to San Antonio and El Paso... go figure. Even the urban wrecks of southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio seem to be doing OK.

So if you have a one-hour commute each way in your car and at least get to listen to an enjoyable book-on-CD or great music, then the stats say suck it up -- you are lucky in contrast to people living in the wrecked mining and forestry towns.

Quote:The View From Here

Its no secret that I live right smack in the middle of all this, in the rusted-out part of the American midwest. My county is on both maps: rural, broke, disconsolated. Before it was heroin it was oxycontin, and before it was oxycontin it was meth. Death, and overdose death in particular, are how things go here.

I spent several months occasionally sitting in with the Medical Examiner and the working humour was, predictably, quite dark. A typical day would include three overdoses, one infant suffocated by an intoxicated parent sleeping on top of them, one suicide, and one other autopsy that could be anything from a tree-felling accident to a car wreck (this distribution reflects that not all bodies are autopsied, obviously.) You start to long for the car wrecks.

The workers would tell jokes. To get these jokes you have to know that toxicology results take weeks to come back, but autopsies are typically done within a few days of death, so generally the coroners don’t know what drugs are on board when they cut up a body. First joke: any body with more than two tattoos is an opiate overdose (tattoos are virtually universal in the rural midwest). Second joke: the student residents will never recognize a normal lung (opiates kill by stopping the brain’s signal to breathe; the result is that fluid backs up in the lungs creating a distinctive soggy mess, also seen when brain signalling is interrupted by other causes, like a broken neck). Another joke: any obituary under fifty years and under fifty words is drug overdose or suicide. Are you laughing yet?

And yet this isn’t seen as a crisis, except by statisticians and public health workers. Unlike the AIDS crisis, there’s no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There’s no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There’s no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is “dirtybutts.” Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.