This diary expands upon a comment I wrote last night in response to the Clinton win in West Virginia. I am a son of Appalachia, born and bred to a line of subsistence farmers and coal miners which goes back in the hills of Tennessee to, at least, the beginning of the 18th century.
And I spent the first nineteen years of my life trying to get away, and the next forty years trying to forget. While the Clinton people were humming victory to the tune of John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, I was reliving my frustration as I find myself singing the chorus from the John Denver cover of that classic John Prine tune, Paradise:
And daddy wont you take me back to muhlenberg county
Down by the green river where paradise lay
Well, Im sorry, my son, but youre too late in asking
Mister peabody's coal train has hauled it away
I can truthfully say that the whole thing is not so much disturbing as it is just plain annoying. Nothing has changed there in three generations, and these are going to be the last people dragged into the 21st century...PERIOD. The jobs are gone; the young people are gone; and the mountain folk have lost much of their cultural identity while retaining most of their traditional economic problems. "Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town," as Paul Simon would say.
As Barack Obama barrels ahead to the future, Hillary Clinton is content to languish in the past, affirming and commiserating with the frustrations of a people and a culture which time and fortune has passed by, and for whom there is very little chance of renaissance.
If you look at any topographical map, you can see that this "Clinton coalition" follows the Appalachian mountain range from Pennsylvania down to the Alabama border. West Virginia is merely the most exclusively homogeneous population among the states in the Appalachian chain, so why does it surprise anyone, especially the gasbags in the pundit world?
But what pisses me off is that, once again, the bottom-feeding Clintons are exploiting the pain and affirming the prejudices of some unfortunate constituency for their own personal political gain. And they always end up proclaiming themselves as the champions of the people.
Hillary even had the effrontery to compare her win to JFK's victory over Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 West Virginia primary. It was a bad metaphor, as even diehard Kennedy admirers like me are forced to concede that Papa Joe's pecuniary and political intervention was all that saved his son's chances in that much more significant contest forty-eight years ago.
The people of West Virginia then had less use for Roman Catholics than they did for negroes. And Kennedy's win there could only have been due to some sort of extraordinary intervention, be it divine or profane.
So, what were the Clinton people thinking? Or do they even care about the consistency of any narrative anymore?
Goddammit! West Virginia didn't really change anything, I know, but it did make me extremely anxious for that bright and sunny day when we Democrats are relieved of the burden of the Clintons finally and joyously.
For twenty miserable long years, they have muddied the waters, changed the goalposts, exploited the pain and pandered to the prejudices of every constituency which would invite these vampires in. I just want it to be over.
Even as I write this, I am listening to Chris Matthews opine about Barack Obama's "problem" with white, working voters. This is an extraordinary piece of sophistry which borders on criminal libel. Barack Obama has demonstrated time and again that he can garner white votes in almost every region of this nation except Appalachia. And for those of us who are children of Appalachia, this is no mystery.
I remember well the days of Jim Crow, and I knew men of my father's generation (including one or two of my uncles) who joined the KKK with the same insouciance with which other men of my family joined the Knights of Columbus or the Masons.
I vividly rememberly hearing one old fat mountain boy compatriot of my uncle named "Dooley" proclaim almost plaintively, but never proudly, about his Klan membership with the argument that "If I ain't better than a n*****, I ain't better than nobody."
If his words were not so insidiously evil, they would have been imminently pitiful. He was a victim himself of a world which had passed him by forever and then ignored him completely. He was the past, always lingering there in the hills as a warning that all human progress is marked with a trail of history's losers.
I'm sure we Democrats will field successors to the Clinton slash-and-burn strategy in the years to come, but at least they won't bear the name Clinton, nor will they necessarily double-team us with their narcissism. But the thing about what happened in West Virginia last night is that Hillary too will soon forget these people who gave up their last franchise for her in a vain and desperate attempt to capture our attention.
Well, Im sorry, my son, but youre too late in asking
Mister peabody's coal train has hauled it away