CLASS WARFARE ONSCREEN

"Life is a zoo in a jungle." Peter De Vries

aloha again, it's the middle of the night again and i think i have a point to make.

where to begin?
saw BABY MAMA on pay cable over the weekend (Tina Fey & Amy Pohler deserve a better movie!) in which a professional woman (upper class) hires a surrogate mother ("white trash" lower class) who is dishonest,loud,booze guzzling and junk food addicted.i was mostly offended by this movie,as was SM,we rarely agree on movie choices but this time we did. SM often reminds me that white trash is the only minority you can insult with impunity (see Jay Leno).so i was all set to write an angry self rightous screed about it being sexist,anti woman, cruel & unfunny,lame & predictable yada yada yada.then a funny thing happened, i let it soak in before limping to my keyboard-oh boy!

first of all BLACK SNAKE MOAN altho imperfect is a better,more humane representation of the working poor, as it most anything on IFC or Sundance channels.secondly i remember a petite young druggie blonde i picked up in The Misson while driving cab.she was drunk on schnappes and still sipping in mid afternoon as i drove her to a local hospital.she confessed blandly to taking LSD all thru a recent pregnancy and even tripping on LSD when her water broke and they rushed her to the hospital NOT COOL! thirdly i remember some of my paternal relatives,black uneducated sharecroppers who came to NYC to do...God knows what.
my Aunt Bessie was a crying profane drunk who slept around.she once pressed a superhot steam iron against her husband's face as he slept because he was screwing her three daughters too, jealousy? every Xmas it became an unwanted tradition for Bessie to come over drunk and fall into the Xmas tree destroying lites and gifts,Bessie was a large woman like my mother.she had a thinner prettier sister Jennybelle ( i am not making this up) who was 'seddity' (i.e. fronting,putting on airs of education and breeding) JB also slept around looking for Mr.Right, she had a moody son who was college educated and spent his time in Greenwich Village screwing white girls who used him to blackmail money from their parents before dumping him.
Barb was one of Bessie's daughters who used to eat razor blades (!) and glass to keep from being molested, she cultivated a crazy image but was actually rather sweet.she used to visit to read my comic books and tell me who she was screwing , she was maybe 3-4 years older than i. Barb would have three bastard children by a fertile Puerto Rican gangster, she named them Puddin & Peaches (girls) and Papo.i went to visit her several times at the tenement she lived in...there were dirty diapers and feces of all kinds on the stairs, the tenants threw their trash out in the window into the central airwell instead of paying for trash pickup. Barb's tiny apartment was a study in chaos and happy dirty children.many in this tenement were the PR equivalent of white trash,Barb's moody brother in law killed people for the gang her Baby Daddy ran,or so it was said.

i was trying to make a point?
i have been to school in NYC,North Carolina (expelled),Texas and California. the education i got in Texas equipped me to knock up some local and get a job pushing a shovel or broom for a lifetime. in the 60s i worked at a minimum wage job until the wage went up and my paid hours went down. people there drink too much,drive too fast and lead dark dreary lives,including my maternal aunt who is a cold hearted multi millionaire.

my aunt, yes that's it.
old black people have a joke about The Great Depression "Depression,what Depressinon? we always bin poor!" my mother ( born 1925) and her siblings grew up barefoot on a horse farm outside Austin, her father was a blacksmith and dog racer.they were so poor her youngest brother wore hand me down dresses.
parental authority was brutal and schooling negligent , the children often ate 'dogbread' cheap cornbread with syrup just as her fathers prized dogs did,yet my mother went back to college after @36 years to become a Special Ed teacher and her sister,who had 11 children by four legal husbands, now lives in the richest part of a gated San Antonio enclave.when my mother died my Aunt chided her for dying just as she was closing in on another million dollar deal, no really! then she stole hundreds of dollars collected by my ex brothers college friends and when caught rationalized that we were both deadbeats & would probably never pay her back....

so white trash stereotypes can be both true and false.
class warfare against the poor & defeated,like Aunt Bessie, or a challenge to the ruthless like my other Aunt.the only trouble is the people mocking 'white trash' have all the cards ($$$) like the joke about W 'someone who was born on third base and thot he hit a triple'. there is naked constant class warfare in the USA, sacrosanct contracts for AIG white collar crooks and fragile whittled down
union contracts for Detroit blue collar workers,same difference right?

i hope this lights a small fire of humanity in all who read this next time you read about Mountain Top Removal,coal miners dying anywhere,sore footed waitresses,teachers, pink collar workers amidst the rise of tent cities for the foreclosed here in opulent decadent America. what does Gore Vidal call us ? THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA.write on!
"It is not from top to bottom that societies die;it is from bottom to top."
Henry George

in other news,
on HOUSE one of the doctors is an apparent suicide (no, not the lovely 13) and they used the plotline to advice people with suicidal thots to contact NAMI.ORG. (National Assocation of Mental Illness?)
MHCAN here in Santa Cruz, this group has good peeps who offer peer counseling and life skills training.i badgered my bipolar son into attending but he soon quit when 'somebody looked at me funny'.HUGE SIGH.

namaste
semper grumpy
mega