02-08-2022, 02:32 PM
(02-08-2022, 01:04 PM)David Horn Wrote:(02-07-2022, 01:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The legal process has been slow, but guilty pleas suggest that a plea deal will work out better for a defendant than will a jury trial.
Michigan is Ground Zero in the struggle between freedom and fascism in America.
I spent a fair amount of time in Michigan during the early to mid-90s, when my company was deploying a new radio system throughout the Consumers Power service area. I was all over the state, from Benton Harbor to Ann Arbor to Cheboygan, and most of the territory in between. I was surprised to be warned on several occasions that this or that bar or restaurant was a militia hangout, and best avoided. Most were in rural areas, but a few were in solid blue-collar towns, that seemed about as normal to me as any other.
The 1990's were clearly 3T. That is still when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City with the loss of 169 innocent lives, and he was connected to the Michigan Militia. Blue-collar America has drifted Right as its economic security fades and as people unlike them seem by ethnicity and religion seem to have kids shooting ahead of their kids in economic life while blue-collar America fades in importance.
I think we can all agree that the quality of life in America as a whole depends heavily upon the revival of blue-collar prosperity so that people who have learning and skills need not leave places like Battle Creek, Flint, Jackson, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw to have a chance in life only to end up becoming little more than conduits of money from one plutocrat (an employer) to another (a landlord who gouges tenants during a housing shortage in places where the economy is still vibrant). It's better that we have more well-paying blue-collar jobs instead of white-collar jobs pushing papers in which those who do such work question not so much the quality of their bureaucratic behavior as the meaning of what they do even if such allows one to have a McMansion and a couple of expensive cars, private schools for their kids, costly vacations, and much the same sort of life for their kids after they graduate from the State University for which prole kids not only lack the means but would be ill-prepared if they did enroll due to bad K-12 education that ensures that those kids from not-so-privileged backgrounds would surely flunk out fast. We will be better off if people who do vehicle service and restaurant work can get paid enough to allow some dignity in life off the job instead of being consigned to poverty.
It may be ironic from someone like me to recognize (except for having some such people as ancestors in the 19th century who lived like them) that the people with the sanest economic lives are the Old Order Amish. That may not be one's ideal way of life, as it constrains learning and precludes access to such wonders as opera, but consider that their world has few filthy-rich people... and no bureaucracy. That also means a paucity of white-collar jobs and no chance of being a well-paid professional. Is that what it takes?
Or will we have a war or social implosion that destroys so much wealth that the soft white-collar jobs disappear because the money no longer flows that supports them? Then survivors who have recently had such soft jobs will find themselves clearing rubble before they get to learn the rudiments of bricklaying or in finishing concrete to replace what used to be the offices in which they worked. It is hard, honest work, but such is the basis of the prosperity that allows people to buy sports cars and pianos on installment accounts before people again have the means for buying sports cars and pianos.
Quote:I never took the time to find the reason that these militia existed, but it's obvious that being in the north was no exception to the rule: radicalism grows organically anywhere people feel threatened or unappreciated.
I think of Willie Stark in All the King's Men tongue-lashing the ill-educated, economically-disadvantaged white men of Louisiana with the vile smears such as "hick", "hillbilly", "redneck", "peckerwood", and "cracker" only to remind those people that the economic elites who exploit them and hold them in contempt use those words to describe poor white people.
Of course we liberals need to banish such words from our lexicon. Those words can hurt some people just like a certain word that rhymes with the name of Roy Rogers' horse... but like that word we white people are not truly free of it until we no longer think of that word.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.