In 2008 I was gainfully employed at a family owned Glass Company, making pretty good money by blue collar standards in my corner of the country, when I went to work as a Neighborhood Team leader in the Obama Campaign….
My brother-in-law got me hired on, being in the family in question proper, and though there was a good chance, where I live, that the family’s politics were not my own, I had never really been in a position before where my political leanings were germane to my employment. Still, I didn’t talk about the election much, my co-workers weren’t really political types and sports, television and other cultural touchstones connected us for the most part. But I did slap an Obama sticker on my car and scheduled vacation days on the day the Obama campaign blew into town:
Unfortunately, my nefarious activities did not go unnoticed.
Shortly before election day my brother-in-law’s sister-in-law, who functioned as the company’s bookkeeper visited with me on the shop floor and asked me “Why Obama?”
I explained I was a Union Democrat, like my father before me, and had always supported Democratic Candidates.
I didn’t mention the fact that Democrats were, like waaaay cooler that ‘thuglican’s…
...or that there were certain benefits that came with hangin’ with the cool kids…
(Ashley photographed better while speaking.)
...nevertheless, when the Bush recession hit, she took the first opportunity to muster me out of my job.
So, during 2009 I laid around and played around on my unemployment until hooking up with the 2010 census; and when that played out took a gig cooking at an assisted living home. Things went well there, and I advanced through the ensuing years to where, by 2012 I was again making a fairly good wage. Then the boss got kicked up a rung and Nurse Ratched TeaParty took over. Fortunately Obama didn’t play for Missouri in 2012 and I was able to lay low and slap a McCasskill sticker where the Obama one had been and survived by zipping it when she made her Obama care asides, but she finally stuck the knife in last November.
I took a job telemarketing (which i sucked at) and drew some U.I. again, until last Monday when a local unemployment agency sent me to a gig with City Utilities, driving a pick-up and generally policing and cleaning up the bus stops. The big boss took me out the first day and we got along famously, as my father had worked with his at C.U. many years ago and he intimated that the job I was doing had been contracted out until the contractor’s rates started getting out of hand and that his goal was to turn the position into a City Utilities permanent position - which would be like manna from heaven to this fatboy….
That was Monday.
Tuesday I go out with the lady Number Two boss. We’re at like our third stop when I return to the truck and Glenn Beck is barking and slavering out of the truck radio and she’s reading Newt Gingrich's science fiction ahistoric novel of the civil war, Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War ( I was googling that night) in the pages of which Robert E. Lee is converted to abolitionist by a Baltimore based Rabbi and Flanks the Union Army at Gettysburg, winning the civil war, and thus avoiding all that Democratic Jim Crow nastiness by establishing Republican rule of the known universe…
Needless to say, my head was spinning from Deja Vu all over again as I put the truck in gear for our next stop, and Beck has chosen this Tuesday, of all days, to bad mouth LBJ and this beautiful speech which he delivered in Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 24th, 1964.
Now, I don’t read Newt. So I know that Johnson grew up dirt poor in hard scrabble east Texas in the 20’s and thirties and fought to gain his modest college degree. And I know also that Johnson alternately resented and envied the Kennedys for their immaculate educations and easy social graces. So it was poignant to hear his speech across the decades from the truck radio...especially this passage (written I assume by Richard Goodwin…)
“Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
I struggled with my emotions, as Beck slandered Johnson and “progessiveism” after that passage was aired and petty boss lady listened intently... her Gingrich folded in her lap.
When I left work that afternoon I saw her car with it’s “Trump” and “Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote For one.” stickers prominently displayed.
God help me.
In my misspent youth I read Carlos Castaneda and remember him speaking of “Petty Tyrants” who recur in your life until you have absorbed the lessons they are sent to teach you.
I fear I am caught up in such a loop.
Any advice?