05-13-2017, 08:46 AM
The thread to which I connect:
http://generational-theory.com/forum/thr...l#pid25549
In essence the rural areas have lots of jobs of mind-numbing awfulness and abysmal pay, like clerking in convenience stores. The people who do these jobs are very similar to those who did factory work in early decades of the post-WWII era and made adequate income to support middle-income lives. Such work gives bare survival at best. But it is worth remembering that Donald Trump did very well -- unusually well -- in states in an arc from Minnesota (which he barely lost) and through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- states that the experts thought would never go to Trump but did.
The resentment among those ill-paid workers is that they see city-slickers from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit-area and Cleveland-area suburbs, Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Washington, and Philadelphia going to their old swimming holes and canoe launches, spending more on gas for their boats than those convenience-store clerks make in one day, paying excessive prices for snacks and beer (those clerks get their stuff at dollar stores or Wal*Mart), and buying up the only attractive real estate in their communities (lake property) where the old boating places and swimming holes were.
Donald Trump has only one solution for the existential stress that the new working poor of America knows -- that those middle-class types can suffer, too! With his vulgarity he can reach people of little formal education who have contempt for such 'intellectuals' as school teachers who corrected them for bad grammar. He can show his contempt for environmentalists and others not having a firm reality in the new sweatshops of America, and he can excite people. He lives much as one would if one won the Super-Duper Megabucks lottery, the only way in which the new proletariat (that lacks imagination, entrepreneurial drive, or marketable skills) can imagine getting rich. Lots of gold leaf -- and few books, hated objects of middle-class oppression of 'real Americans'.
I expect to hate life in Trump's America. Second term of Donald Trump? There are parts of Dante's Inferno that are more attractive. But this said, Man is far more competent at creating Hell than at creating any Heaven, and such simulations that he has made of Heaven are only for elites like Donald Trump or are ephemeral delights that drain one of assets quickly (like Di$ney theme parks).
http://generational-theory.com/forum/thr...l#pid25549
In essence the rural areas have lots of jobs of mind-numbing awfulness and abysmal pay, like clerking in convenience stores. The people who do these jobs are very similar to those who did factory work in early decades of the post-WWII era and made adequate income to support middle-income lives. Such work gives bare survival at best. But it is worth remembering that Donald Trump did very well -- unusually well -- in states in an arc from Minnesota (which he barely lost) and through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- states that the experts thought would never go to Trump but did.
The resentment among those ill-paid workers is that they see city-slickers from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit-area and Cleveland-area suburbs, Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Washington, and Philadelphia going to their old swimming holes and canoe launches, spending more on gas for their boats than those convenience-store clerks make in one day, paying excessive prices for snacks and beer (those clerks get their stuff at dollar stores or Wal*Mart), and buying up the only attractive real estate in their communities (lake property) where the old boating places and swimming holes were.
Donald Trump has only one solution for the existential stress that the new working poor of America knows -- that those middle-class types can suffer, too! With his vulgarity he can reach people of little formal education who have contempt for such 'intellectuals' as school teachers who corrected them for bad grammar. He can show his contempt for environmentalists and others not having a firm reality in the new sweatshops of America, and he can excite people. He lives much as one would if one won the Super-Duper Megabucks lottery, the only way in which the new proletariat (that lacks imagination, entrepreneurial drive, or marketable skills) can imagine getting rich. Lots of gold leaf -- and few books, hated objects of middle-class oppression of 'real Americans'.
I expect to hate life in Trump's America. Second term of Donald Trump? There are parts of Dante's Inferno that are more attractive. But this said, Man is far more competent at creating Hell than at creating any Heaven, and such simulations that he has made of Heaven are only for elites like Donald Trump or are ephemeral delights that drain one of assets quickly (like Di$ney theme parks).
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.
