Tonight on the dark road I heard a song I'd never heard before, the end of a ballad as I turned on the car, haunting and hollow in fourths and fifths unaccompanied male voices--
...Listen through the rubble for a rescue team;
Six hundred feet of coal and slag--
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam,
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam.
Eight days passed and some were rescued,
Leaving the dead to lie alone--
Through all their lives they dug their grave:
Two miles of earth for a marking stone,
Two miles of earth for a marking stone.
I had to wait out the rest of the set in the driveway, listening for the host to identify it, so that I could find out the rest of it - "Springhill Disaster" by Peggy Seeger.
The version they played on NHPR was the Spain Brothers' on
Fields of Stone, but that's not online, but you can
hear the tune here from the site of a newer progressive band (they've got songs for Joe Hill and the environment and 9/11 there too) called U-Liner.
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia,
Down in the dark of the Cumberland mine,
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In the roads that never saw sun nor sky,
Roads that never saw sun nor sky.
In the town of Springhill you don't sleep easy,
Often the Earth will tremble and roll;
When the Earth is restless, miners die;
Bone and blood is the price of coal,
Bone and blood is the price of coal.
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia,
Late in the year of '58,
Day still comes and the Sun still shines,
But it's dark as the grave in the Cumberland mine,
Dark as the grave in the Cumberland mine.
Down at the coal-face, miners working,
Rattle of the belt and the cutter's blade;
Rumble of rock, and the walls close 'round:
The living and the dead men two miles down,
Living and the dead men two miles down.
Twelve men lay two miles from the pit-shaft;
Twelve men lay in the dark and sang.
Long hot days in the miners tomb:
It was three feet high and a hundred long,
Three feet high and a hundred long.
Three days passed and the lamps gave out,
And Kaehler Brushen, he up and said,
"There's no more water, nor light, nor bread,
So we'll live on songs and hope instead,
Live on songs and hope instead."
Listen for the shouts of the bare-faced miners,
Listen through the rubble for a rescue team;
Six hundred feet of coal and slag--
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam,
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam.
Eight days passed and some were rescued,
Leaving the dead to lie alone--
Through all their lives they dug their grave:
Two miles of earth for a marking stone,
Two miles of earth for a marking stone.
You can read about the events that inspired it here, and some of the AV from the day's news back then is online at CBC's own page.
I don't know that that song was played as a subtle comment on todays news (although I think so) because the host of the show didn't say anything about it.
But it's the same old damn story - them as Have take all they can from them as Have Not, who must put up with it until there's nothing left to lose, all the while the complacent world feeds on their labour, and then it goes to strikes and strikebreakers and dynamite and rifles and the Pinkertons and government men whether it be here today or half a hundred years ago or a hundred, or Canada or Kentucky or Wales or Yorkshire, or in China where miners' kin used pagers to get around their media blackout as mining folk used blogs here to get past our media whitewash, same as we're doing now on this site for Halliburton and WaPo--
The editor of the WV Charleston Gazette, lays it all out on the table here, she does:
Duty and need send them to war, to the mines
...West Virginia's mountain country breeds people who are fiercely attached to the landscape and its communities. That landscape, alas, doesn't allow for much in the way of economic activity. It's not great farming country. It's inaccessible. It doesn't provide a lot of opportunities to earn a decent living. So generation after generation, young people looking to make a way in the world go in two directions: the coal mines or the military.
Both occupations are exacting and dangerous, requiring skill, courage and maybe even a bit of recklessness. And in both, decisions are made by people who are not themselves in the line of fire. In many cases, the interests of the people running the show and the people doing the work are at odds.
Coal company executives are answerable to shareholders who want maximum profits with least possible expenditure on anything that doesn't directly contribute to the extraction of coal. So, generation after generation, miners die of preventable accidents and mining-induced diseases like black lung.
Human capital
High-ranking military officers are answerable to administrations that want quick results without exhausting too much attention or money on niceties like body armor or safe vehicles or training troops in the complexities of foreign cultures so they can avoid making simple blunders that antagonize the people they're supposed to be trying to help.
Soldiers lose their lives because their armor protects only their chests and backs or their vehicles lack sufficient armor plating. They die because the brass wants to get somewhere in a hurry and can't wait for an escort. They die because the locals are needlessly affronted and inspired to help an insurgency they didn't much like to begin with. They die because money that was supposed to pay for their supplies is lost to graft....
Now, just as before, some idiot was there saying in comments over at Americablog that well, WV voted for Bush again in '04 so the miners deserve what they get until they wise up and start voting for Democrats [again], only someone else alleged that no, the southern part, the coal-mining country, went for Kerry, only the bulk of the population's not there--
Now, I don't know the other parts of the East Coast the way I know the little bits of it that are my stomping ground, the way I was able to look at the election results for my state and know what I was seeing and show that (counterintuitively for some) it was the well-educated and well-off and not the poor working-class folks and the real farmers (what few's left of them) who were voting Red here. So I sort of despaired of proving or disproving that argument, one way or the other, and the amount of research I'd have to do to try to verify it independent of Wikipedia - gave me a migraine just imagining it.
But the way it turns out, CNN's website had not only results for 2004, but also maps with shading by district for states, so you can go there and see that the southwest, the coal country, did go more heavily Democratic than the parts of it closer to urbanization, though I'd have to do more digging before I know how closely the upper-east sections of the state correspond to what I know of Virginia and Massachussetts/NH - white-flight/tax-flight pocketbook voting types who don't give a damn about community, Burbclavers just out for themselves and their trophy-kids, security voters who know which side their bread's buttered on--
I suspect it's so, though - I've enough family down that way to have heard enough about VA and the Beltway over the years not to mention all the New England white-flight/tax-flight types I knew who've gone south to "escape" and carpetbag on the cheap land prices and get management jobs with the companies relocated for the cheap labour, that I've something of a notion of the shape of it. (There's some northern WV cross-border entanglement with the heavily-conservative-Catholic Steubenville OH area, too, I think, but I'd have to check with people I know about that.)
And when it comes to throwing stones - well. There's an old saying about glass houses that never goes out of style.
Yes, more people voted for Bush in WV this time than in 2000. More people voted for Kerry than for Gore, too - despite Kerry spending about 1/3 what Bushco spent campaigning there to get his message out.
But consider this: a lot more people voted for Bush in MA in 2004, than voted for Bush in WV. (Almost half as many people voted for Bush in MA as live in WV, as a matter of fact.) Not only that, more people voted for Bush in MA in 2004 than voted for Bush in 2000. It's just lucky that there were enough people outside the Cape and Worcester and Essex county to counterbalance them, although part of that is due to the fact that a bunch of MA conservatives have moved up here over the past 20 years and vote against improving our infrastructure, the sons of guns--
So when it comes to learning curves, even "true blue" Massachusetts isn't so very smart. (And let's not even go near Nixon-Reagan-Schwarzenegger-supporting California!)
But something else, that ought to put a flea in the ear of the smug and all who qualify themselves for the sneer of elitist liberal in Blogistan - when you look at the MA shaded map, what you don't see is the rural poor voting for Bush, but rich posh Cape Cod mostly, and Worcester, the one big city in the west half of the state, and the burbclaves north of Boston. Now the rural west of MA, the Berkshires and all, are pretty iffy about gay marriage, I know this because there were some interviews on local radio when the law was going through, and the folks there sounded pretty dubious and unhappy about it, mostly because it was making them think about TEH GAY at all.
But as you can see, it didn't make them vote for Bush. And that area is really rural - there's no roads out there, I heard from one escapee from that half of the state, that the biggest excitement in her town was when they put in a traffic light, and people came from miles around to drive through the intersection, for excitement. And she wasn't imaginative enough to exaggerate.
Before you go assuming, and then asserting (and it's just a coincidence that the first three letters of those words are the same as another word for fool, but it's a good one) that all the people who voted for Bushco were a) poor, b) uneducated, c) Southern, d) any combination of the above, and the converse, that all the people who voted Democrat were upper-class educated Northern and Californians - if you haven't any intention of actually investigating or paying attention to the numbers that are out there, I respectfully suggest you shut your trap, because you're Part Of The Problem, as they used to say in the Air Force.
There's a lot of dumb, rich, college graduates out there. And they're not all in the southeast of this country.
--Not all of them vote Republican, either. Although most of them supported the War, at least at first. [coughKevinDrumcough] But they give lots of good reasons for not voting, Democrat or otherwise. As do all those who mindlessly repeat the Coastal Elite Self Glorification mantras and pat themselves on the back for being so smart as to vote for a party that doesn't do anything or give a damn about them, but handwrings and is nicer about the screwing-over and doesn't act quite so hypocritical about it--
In other words, if you want to convince workers to keep voting (and working as volunteers!) for the Party you back - it's up to you to show them that it's going to help - not as the Irish RAF officer in the poem realized, serving the Allies could do nothing for his own people, "no likely end could bring them loss/or leave them happier than before" and his death a waste, except that in those brief moments of flight he knew a freedom that he could never have found in the dead-end County where otherwise he would have lived and died working to the bone. No matter who wins, who loses, they just get used up and shafted, maybe a little nicer, but--
Support has to be earned - you don't deserve it by being not quite as bad as the other guys.
Let me tell you something else, who live in the Northeast: if you live up here above Boston, and you hear a whistle in the night - and probably by day as well, though there's a few passenger lines now - that old steam wail that hasn't changed in a century, you're hearing coal going by, on the old Boston & Maine line. Coal dug far from here, down the other end of our Appalachian trail, the coal that keeps your lights on and lets you come here and rant and learn, because that's what runs most of our plants here still, now that the hydro dams are going from the rivers, what electricity doesn't come from Canada or our own midwest - where they burn more coal coming from West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Your freedom (and mine) comes with their blood. Don't forget it.