I was listening to this episode of Snap Judgement podcast [the country doctor] and found my eyes kept filling with tears of shame and sorrow. As I listened, I realized that they were exposing the true core of “down home” America: racist but above all ignorant chucklefucks who don’t think – they robotically adopt the attitudes of their collective at church, and what they hear on TV.
The doctor in the story is a highly qualified and successful doctor who wants to step off of the fast track and do some real medicine – to get down in the trenches and help people. And, he finds a lovely little town, and a yellow victorian house, and a hospital that has no qualified doctor (during his “job interview” he winds up in the ER performing surgery on someone) and everyone is welcoming, polite, and he feels incredibly fortunate. The family takes root immediately and everything is just great until Trump is elected. The problem, you see, is that the doctor and his family are muslim and he takes it personally when he discovers that most of the town voted for a guy who wants to put him and his family on a registry.
One of his patients, whose life he saved at great effort, talks to him, and is surprised at how upset he is. And it’s exactly the kind of thing I can imagine coming from anyone in small town Pennsylvania – in other words, my neighbors – you know, “well they don’t mean you – you’re our doctor.” His neighbors and patients are surprised that he’s taking it so hard. But, once the topic is in the open, the death threats start appearing in his mailbox, a swastika is drawn on the sidewalk outside of the yellow victorian house, and suddenly he is face to face with the realization that he’s living happily in a town where everyone hates him, in principle, but doesn’t realize it because they are such stupid chucklefucks that they haven’t put the whole picture together.
The story gets surreal – people who were thanking him for helping them, and yelling at him because he’s a muslim and, you know, they’re bad people. The story, as it’s recounted, is completely plausible – the things that his neighbors say are exactly the kind of thing that thoughtless, ignorant, privileged, smug, chucklefuck christians say. You know, those christians? The ones that think that the world – let alone this country – was built for them. Their hatred is casual and it’s so deeply embedded that they don’t even realize it until the doctor opens his mouth and then they turn on him.
“God Guns and Country” – three things that Trump has never stood up for in the slightest degree
I know you know better than to expect that the story has a happy ending, to expect that the doctor confronts the town, reaches out to them with his humanity on full display, and they respond and learn and try to be better human beings. That’s the kind of redemptive story we expect, except … American small town chucklefucks just don’t have that in them. They’re too confident of their religion, too confident of what they are told on TV, and they’re basically thoughtless herd animals that obey Big Brother’s command to hate when the stranger reveals themself.
It’s worth listening to, but you won’t enjoy it. Those of you who aren’t small-town Americans will probably think that the story is exaggerating. But, it’s not. “Main St” USA really is a shithole of ignorance and you need to understand that. On the road I take to get into Clearfield, there are two houses that fly confederate battle flags, and over a dozen that have Trump signs. It doesn’t matter if you’re in small town Minnesota or small town Pennsylvania or small town Tennessee – it’s going to be the same, everywhere. The christians are so damn sure of themselves that they won’t even realize that you’re an atheist unless you shove it in your face. They assume you’re a Trumper, out here – I’ve had to head off some conversations by saying “I’m a liberal, progressive, socialist, I’m probably not what you think I am.” Then, they look at you with a new focus and say, slowly, “Yeah, but you’re not a bad guy.” See? It’s the assumption that a liberal, progressive, socialist is a bad guy – or the town’s sole qualified doctor is a bad guy because he’s a muslim. Howard Zinn, in one of his talks says something (paraphrasing) “You don’t realize that there is a racism problem in Beech Fork, Montana, because there isn’t until a brown family moves in. There was no racism problem because everyone there was white until 15 minutes ago.”
I feel drained and helpless, and I listened to that podcast episode 5 hours ago. “It ruined my day” is an understatement.
American xenophobia has been ratcheted to just below the level where the death squads will form and start marching around. But it’s nothing new – the whole country was founded on that kind of xenophobia – that’s how white America found the cowardice, ignorance, and violent cruelty necessary to push everyone off their land in North America, and steal people from Africa, enslave them, and use them to do the hard work. An hour before I had started listening to that episode, I was listening to an episode of The Bowery Boys about Chinese restaurants in New York City and their history, and of course it was replete with references to how the Chinese were brought over as cheap labor and abused and reviled and put in prison camps. Listening to the story of the muslim doctor, I thought there were countless ignorant, christian, racist American chucklefucks who ate yummy Chinese food, while supporting anti-chinese immigration acts. Just like the ignorant, christian, racist American chucklefucks who would turn on the town’s only qualified physician – who they loved yesterday – because they suddenly noticed that his wife wears a scarf all the time. They don’t have a race problem eating cheap vegetables, but they wish there weren’t so many Mexicans, and they’re too ignorant to realize that Texas was part of Mexico until we stole it, and the word they’re looking for is “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide.” But, like the people in the doctor’s small town in America – they’d be shocked if someone told them they were not Good People. The Very Best Kind of People.
Someone once asked Howard Zinn “why don’t you love America?” and he replied “which America?”
This whole Trump thing is not going to stop. Because it’s a reflection of small town America – he reached out and stirred them up and they voted him into power because he’s not educated, because he’s mean, and because he’s shit. He’s them. He’s their kind of guy. He’s Archie Bunker with an inflated bank account. He pretended to be a christian and they’re so stupid that they’re only just now starting to realize that he worships at the altar of himself – and they’ve decided they’re OK with that. They were OK with the concentration camps full of Japanese. They were OK with the million-plus braceros being “repatriated” back to Mexico after their labor was no longer needed when WWII ended. They’re OK with cops killing anyone who’s not them. They were OK with bombing Vietnam flat, with bombing North Koreans back to living in caves, and I really would be surprised if there is any atrocity that they’re not going to shrug and ignore, so long as it doesn’t interrupt the football game.
Don’t over-estimate small town America. And don’t turn your back on them, either.
I grew up in a small town in PA. I didn’t get along with my family. I got to leave to go to school somewhere else, and I never returned.
Like you said, I think the only reason it wasn’t so obvious in how bad it was, was because it was so damned homogeneous. My parents moved there, and were basically considered outsiders, like anyone else who couldn’t trace their ancestry back longer than the local records. There were about 1K kids in my highschool (it covered a fairly large geographic area), and when I graduated, I think there were two half-black, and one Asian… I had a college friend visit on break, and they commented on how fucking blonde everyone was.
The same is happening also in other places. In Latvia there is no problem with bigotry towards LGBTQIA+ people as long as they stay hidden in their closets. The moment somebody dares to be publicly homosexual or trans, all hell breaks loose. The same goes also for racism and xenophobia.
I stopped going to a local watering hole when one of the patrons there straight out said he’s a racist, as if that were a normal, expected thing to be. I realized that in that place, it was. Now I go to the place across the street which is owned by a Filipino woman. At least, there, the racists know to keep their pie-holes shut about it and I can ignore them.
Yonks and yonks ago, I was in a medium-sized USAlien town where I’d spent some time as a youth, and where my family (then) still lived. The town is a known conservative hot-spot and happens to have a “police” force which is one of the most violent in the country (statistically). I went out bar-hopping one night, and found myself in a mostly-empty bar — three patrons at the counter and that was it — and a person of the dwarfish persuasion tending bar. (By that I mean the individual was a dwarf, I have no ideas of their opinion on Tolkien’s stories). “Right”, I thought to myself, “seems like a fairly nice place”, especially when I discovered they had some quite decent bottled beers (those on-draft where the usual crap). I ordered a Sam Adams and settled down to read a paper I’d brought with me from Europe (the Irish Times as I now recall).
No problem initially, but after ordering my second beer — the bartender was very kind and chatted with me a bit about good beers (they clearly weren’t impressed with the on-draft offerings either) — things began to deteriorate. First problem was one of the one patrons (no-one else had arrived) began SHOUTING about “being a damn library”, with another joining in about “commie propaganda rubbish”. Ok, leave ASAP, and the bartender signaled with their eyes to exit quietly but also (using their hands to imply calm down), to wait a bit. I took their advice, finished my beer and settled my bill, and then left — somewhat assisted by the fact all three of the other patrons had ran from the bar, two chasing one over something. (I asked the bartender about that, who replied (paraphrasing from memory), “They do that all the time. I’m sorry, but now is perhaps a good time for you to go the other way.” I took their advice…
The cheeto did not win the popular vote. Small town america did not elect him. It may be that they share the same attitudes, but he was elected by 307 douchebags in the electoral college.
On the road I take to get into Clearfield, there are two houses that fly confederate battle flags…
Clearfield, PA: 165 miles/3 hours from Gettysburg. One can only wish for a time warp to throw such “patriots” 156 years into the past.
American xenophobia has been ratcheted to just below the level where the death squads will form and start marching around.
Don’t look now, but… Anti-Lockdown Protesters Now Calling for Dems to Die.
Stoned Ranger:
another part of the real problem is not small town America. It’s the gated subdivisions in metropolitan areas throughout the country. It’s not the yokels-it’s the small city lawyers and car dealers and doctors-many of whom attend the 3,000 congregant megachurch down by the freeway exit.
bmiller@#7:
It’s the gated subdivisions in metropolitan areas throughout the country
… which are, for all intents and purposes, racially segregated.
From Pierce Butler’s link, we have an anti-lockdown grandstander saying this: “I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ”
There is no “literally” with these people, apparently.
It isn’t quite as bad here, but only because there is no easy access to guns and our crap doesn’t include christianity, it’s just unvarnished racism with a side of anti-intellectualism. It is as destructive to my mind.
I have not, yet, seen a Biden sign. And I never saw a Clinton sign.
Marcus: Four More Years is inevitable, I fear. How can anyone be INSPIRED by Uncle Joe? Unless one is a credit card company stockholder, I suppose.
Uncle Joe: https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1385308627_5.jpg
If Biden wins it’s going to be because of a massive voter turnout in the “right” places motivated by fear of Trump. Inspiration and hope are off the table.
@ lochaber – Same, except central Illinois. My mom and I moved there. She married a local. She lived there for 20 years and was still an outsider, conditionally accepted based on her marriage. Assuming, of course, that she behaved appropriately and acted grateful and retiring. Spoilers: she didn’t. It went poorly.
It went so far that any “outsider” was made uncomfortable enough that they would leave. They would proudly tell the story of how they drove out those Springfield folks who tried to open a restaurant in town. It was an epic of clannishness and shunning. Clannishness as cliquishness rather than KKK, but that too. Openly carrying a KKK keychain was a thing of pride.
One of my uncles is Apache, adopted as an infant. When he came to visit, everyone treated him well, with plastic smiles to his face. They were quick to assure him that he was a “good one”. He absolutely wasn’t “one of those people”. He was just a “normal guy”, not like the rest of them. There doesn’t seem to be any dissonance between “this person of color is a decent person” and “people of color are subhuman”. The decent person that they know is clearly exceptional, and honorarily white. AS LONG AS THEY DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
I couldn’t figure out why closed-minded assholes who claimed to be religious supported Trump. He personifies the opposite of everything they claim to support: traditional family, ethical integrity, devotion to christian beliefs, bootstrap pullings-up. Once I saw the pictures of FUCK YOUR FEELINGS shirts at Trump rallies, I realized that these horrible people will support him, regardless of what he says or does as long as he keeps demonstrating that they are welcome to be their worst selves and are entitled to treat other people who are different like garbage.
@ bmiller – Probably. It’s what enough people want and the alternative is oatmeal.
BTW, today is the 190 anniversary of Andrew Jackson signing the Indian Removal Act into law.
(I heard it in the morning in the radio https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vor-190-jahren-indian-removal-act-wird-unterzeichnet.871.de.html?dram:article_id=477474 .)
There you have your ethnic cleansing / genocide.
Marcus,
I too listened to that show about the doctor. It is engrossing but also, as you say, very sad about what it reveals about the attitude of the people in that town.
I’m pretty sure what Andreas Avester said is valid for all of Eastern Europe. I don’t know first hand about many countries, but Romania is a morass of xenophobia, racism, homophobia and transphobia, at every level of society. The xenophobia modulates with education level the most, so the “liberal elites” have a lot less of it. They’ve been making some progress against homophobia in recent years, but racism is completely normalized (the Roma are de facto segregated, severely disadvantaged with regard to education, health and justice, and almost universally hated) and casual transphobia is rampant.
@12. bmiller : Do people really need to be inspired by Not-as-bad to avoid voting for Appalllingly-far-worse? Really?
Do you only vote when you are truly personally inspired to do so* or can you vote to do the right thing even when its choice between dishes that are unpleasantly unpalatable versus deadly poisonous?
When those are the only two real options.
Hoping Biden’s VP choice is a really good and inspiring one.
Hoping Biden himself dies of COVID or whatever else and right soon. Hoping Trump and Pence exit stage soon and maybe enables Pelosi to be come POTUS and, yeah, she’s not great either but better than Biden who *_is_* considerably better than Trump, limbo record low bar as that is.
* If that’s the case, I suggest you are part of the problem here. How much better would the USA be now if Hillary Rodham Clinton had become POTUS in 2016 or Gore had becoem POTUS in 2000 do you think? What do you think NOT voting for Biden this year will get you and where do you think the USA will be if Trump gets another 4 years? If I was American and thus could vote in your elections I would vote Biden without hesitation. despite him being not my first or second or third or fifth choice for the Democratic party nominee. (Disclaimer : Aussie typing, when – I presume – your country says jump to war; mine says how high?)
That’s not quite right. Racism doesn’t become a problem until 3 brown families move in, maybe 2, depending on how thin the veneer of “we’re not racist” is.
Curious Digressions gets it. When I was in school, everyone was white except for the children of one black family, who by a quirk of where the city limits were drawn, were technically in our rural district (had they lived across the street, they’d have gone to the small city school, which was probably 10% black, maybe?). This was fine, because they were “good ones,” “ones” being the critical word here. The oldest son was valued because he was on the basketball team that won our sole state championship in its class.
When he went to college though, he apparently dated a white girl, and got involved in some civil rights politics, and you could hear the biddies clucking and squawking over it like a fox had gotten into the coop. They were no longer the “good ones.” Tsk, tsk, such a shame.
When I was in high school, there were no obviously black kids, but one Mexican guy, who was also tolerated as a “good one.” There was one kid who was probably mixed race, but since it didn’t matter to me either way, I only sort of heard an occasional comment about it and never asked to find out what they were talking about, so I’m not sure about that.
One white girl in my class was dating a black guy from the city to the north of us, and boy howdy did that cause a stir. It even provoked my mother to confront me about it when she saw me talking to him at a basketball game, concerned about, I dunno, me dating him too? I didn’t date at all, so I don’t know what her deal was, but it was apparently major enough for her to shed her “I’m absolutely not a racist – didn’t I always treat the [black family]s like they were white?” self-image for a moment.
The “not racist, no sirree” veneer was pretty thick where I grew up, but the late 60s were the lye that peeled it off in sheets.
@19, so we are supposed to tolerate a slow decline over a quick one? Trump burning things to the ground might make a positive reconstruction more likely. These systems are far too complex for my ability to predict anything. But your tolerate a slow decline and actively contribute to it, rather than stand by and let the world burn until enough people understand how broken systems truly are, is not a very compelling argument to me.
Of course I will continue to vote, even if I don’t for Biden, for any down-ballet progressives. Biden is a tough pill to swallow, I hate Trump so much my personal feelings my dominate my disgust.
I will never blame the ‘spoilers’ who vote for genuinely good candidates for president. Unlike you, apparently. Instead I blame that assholes who force such bad choices to begin with. Especially anyone that obstructs rank-choice voting in even the slightest manner.
@ ^ Sam N :
ideally neither. I’d hope that the decline can be halted and reversed and USA culture evolve to embrace a lot more if its good aspects than its worse one’s. To be the USA of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statute of Liberty, of the likes of Carl Sagan, Rosa Parkes, Katherine Johnson, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and Michelle Obama than of these petty, toxic MAGAt bigots and the cult of Trumpism with all its corrosive hatred. I’d like the United States to get better not worse. Electing Biden won’t instantly fix everything but it may halt the decline and give it a chance to do so.
Or it might well not. Probably not in fact given y’know SCOTUS and its impacts and the other appointees and trends we’re seeing towards a full blown fascist police state. Is taht reallya gamble worth taking? Did it work out the first time by having Trump installed by a horrifically flawed and undemocartic system despite a 46%- 48% vote in favour of HRC in 2016?
I hate seeing the world burn. There is too much that is good and wonderful and too many good people that deserve better to want to see any decline let alone stand by and just watch it all burn. How am I actively contributing to this slow decline in your view? By suggesting that Biden who won the nomination democratically including a majority of African-American voters is the better choice over Trump despite personally disliking him and stating I hope he soon dies so that his hopefully vastly better VP pick can take over?
I agree with you there.
I don’t quite understand what you are saying here. Disgust is a personal feeling. I understand you hate Trump and are disgusted by him. Me too. The only way to hurt Trump in the 2020 election is to vote for Biden.
Yes, I do blame third party spoiler voters along with non-voters as oen of a number of factors enabling Trump’s “election” and Dubya’s before that because the USA has a horrifically flawed system without preferential or run-off voting. It baffles me that there aren’t more moves to make major necessary reforms totehj USA’s politial system. Scrapping the ELC, adding preferential / run-off voting, removing gerrymandering, etc.. except of course making those changes will be incredibly hard. But then you know what JFK said about doing hard things in his moon in a decade speech right?
Agreed. Not mutually exclusive to what I am saying at all. There’s plenty of blame to go around and not just a single causative factor here.
Also I presume by rank choice voting you mean preferential voting which is teh Aussie system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting ) and which yes I support and think would be a great thing for the USA’s sytem to adopt so like here where I can and do vote Green first an then preference the ALP you could vote say, Greens 1 then Biden 2 and when the Greens candidate does’t get in your vote flows along to Biden and helps him defeat Trump.
***
@ 10 Jazzlet :
Not sure where your “here” is but that sounds a lot like Oz.
***
@22, Yeah, that was a typo and poorly explained regarding hate dominating disgust. My hatred for Trump may dominate my disgust for Biden when I vote. If I do vote for Biden, it’s not some rational choice for a lesser of two evils. It will be because I would have voted for Pence over Trump out of an overwhelming emotional hatred of Trump.
Also, I don’t simply watch the world burn, nor would I recommend it. But in this case I don’t see much of a difference between voting for a building to burn down within hours and voting for a building to burn down over a few days, if no one is going to bother to alert the fire department (which all evidence leads me to believe how things will play out in this metaphor for national politics). You have far more hope than I that Biden will do a damn thing to halt the downward slide that has proceeded with every democratic presidential candidate since at least the ’60s. Certainly Clinton and Obama. And I find you far too certain that in our complex oligarchic system of government that a slow down of harm by Biden will result in any reversal at any point. The American citizens seem to require a beatdown as heinous as the great depression or truly massive rioting to do a damned bit of somewhat lasting good. I sure wish more young progressives would vote in primaries instead of shirking their duty, but there isn’t much I am able to do that is genuinely positive beyond the scale of small and local communities. I take actions, and will continue to do so, at that scale.
Ah. Thanks that makes sense now. Prone to typos as I am, I should have guessed.
I do see quite a difference there. The time gives you more of a chance to save things and the intensity of the fire is, I’d think logically, less and thus maybe less completely destructive for that to occur. Yes its a matter of degrees but if you’re choosing between being trapped somewhere that’s immediately exploding in a huge fireball or slowly and less fiercely burning which do you rationally choose?
Maybe the metaphorical alarm is going out and being heard though? I hope it is. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic. Maybe. But, again, what choice do we have? What can we do that is productive and helpful in de-escalating and reducing the intensity of the problem and buying more time for something good to happen and for people to wake up? Time we can use educating and raising awareness and helping. And more. We buy time, we can use that to change things. We don’t have tiem, we’re out of time. Game over. We can hope and we can work to make things better as best we can.
Your’re right I do have more hope in Biden – and his potential VP who we don’t know yet but hopefully could be progressive and hopefully will take over from him sooner rather than later. I’d love him to pick Elizabeth Warren though that seems a long shot. Maybe Stacy Abrams? If he’s smart or his advisors are, they’ll know they need to offer progressives something. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
That last one certainly appears to be happening now..
Agreed 100%, likewise and thankyou.