Canaries in the Coal Mine

- Fritz Kropfreiter

As much as I feel disgust toward the January 6th rabble and the Canadian KKKonvoy, I can well understand what has them climbing walls and honking their horns.  The world as they know it is dying, even more directly and precipitously than the planet as a whole. Drawn out from their squalid double-wides and emboldened by a deranged narcissist, then confronted with the harsh reality of economic marginalization, these struggling masses of threatened white supremacists have arisen en masse.

Normal doesn't live here anymore. Beaver Cleaver (you'd never get away with that name in this day and age) has left the building along with Wally, June, and Ward. Andy is no longer the sheriff of Mayberry and the Six Million Dollar Man is doing windshields for spare change at Hollywood and Vine.  A white guy sits in the Whitehouse but, not long ago, there was a black president who was more articulate and poised than the Caucasians who bracketed his tenure.

And decade upon decade of pale skinned, rough hewn machismo did not prepare the current European descendants to take a back seat to people of colour: it was always the black man who sat at the back of the bus! Now we have black CEOs and generals, Hispanic judges, and Asian lawmakers. The social landscape is no longer clearly defined in darkening shades as one moves from top to bottom.

LBJ famously said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This truism has served the American south and much of rural America since the emancipation; however, today's poor, uneducated, unemployable white man has to resort to major self delusion in order to keep the fantasy alive.

And if you can maintain one fantasy, why not entertain a host of outlandish conspiracies and deceptions. If the world is deceiving people to believe that white supremacy is dying, why not believe that the Clintons run a sex slave racket out of a Florida pizza parlour or that jewish space lasers are responsible for California's fires. Climate change is a hoax and Bill Gates is planting 5G chips in vaccines. If you don't like the truth, change it.

That's why 'fake news' was such a master stroke (Trump may be an idiot but he has a nose for promotion) providing a 'get out of jail free' card for all the lies, misrepresentations, frauds, and crimes that Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (to name a few) perpetrated. When the Sandy Hook massacre of little children was attributed to crisis actors, the whole world should have risen in an ear piercing scream. Instead, the group who Hillary Clinton would later brand as Deplorables showed why they are worthy of the moniker.

Economic marginalization is the other edge of the double edged sword that hangs over the deposed white dregs. Where their strength had been the colour of their skin, the new world, having automated unskilled labour out of relevance and relative stability, now chose to profit the trainable and educable.  Service careers such as health care and social services far outstripped the want ads looking for pump jockeys and stock boys.  Stock room to the boardroom was always a lie to keep the peasants slavering but now it was impossible.

At the root of the new paucity of lower end employment lies the nature of the economic system.  As corporations and CEOs extract more and more wealth from the system, those who can be dispensed with to save money are thrown aside. The pool of available wealth that was divvied up in such a way as to carry the marginally employable now tilted away from the poor and gravity carried an ever growing pile of riches to the very rich.

Hence the title, Canaries in the Coal Mine. As the most vulnerable in our society, the poor white will be the first to be affected. Why not poor blacks, you may ask? Because they're used to getting the shit end of the stick. They had nobody to look down on because the whole racist structure of law, finance and society as a whole relegated them to the bottom rung on the ladder of success.

In the same way that canaries in a mine don't realize what is killing them, neither do the good old boys. The right wing media that has egged them on by pandering to their paranoia and scepticism has helped to ensure that they will never sense the carbon monoxide that is killing them. Not only that, the rest of us miners breathing an ever more poisonous atmosphere won't acknowledge what's killing us. The reality is that the obscenely wealthy are draining the oxygen out of the system.

Watch the canaries.