In Slovenia, they fought Tito's Partisans from the woods
i'm no fan of tito's politics, but the partisani were fighting nazi fascists and their collaborators!
and it pains me to say it, but much of the belarussian, lithuanian and ukranian diaspora in the US has an ugly history of vicious antisemitism and even sheltering of ss criminals.
but i suppose her point is that most people of such backgrounds in the US are productive, decent citizens who are proud to contribute to their society and don't deserve to be judged and condescended to.
You are quite correct, kobi, in your observations. And I bet she would agree.
No group is perfect. And as we see in Jeremiah Wright, racists are in every group. Blacks, Italians, Ukrainians, ...everywhere. They are a dimension of HUMAN sickness, not a group's sickness.
I don't have a lot of resentment about the following facts, but they are true;
1) My father worked two jobs when I was a kid. He worked as a mailman and as a janitor. At night I would go with him to clean white people's offices. Why did I go? Because it was the only time I could spend with my Dad.
2) My mom used to serve Hamburger Helper because we needed to stretch out the meat. We didn't truly have enough money to feed hungry kids.
3) When I was college age, I had to live in a shack which had been used as a crack house before I moved in.
I guess I am po' white trash.
;-)
I cling to religion.
I don't cling to guns, but if someone tried to stop me from practicing my religion, I'd probably blow their fucking heads off.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:42:00 pm
Anonymous said...
Superb piece of skewering. I went looking for her published works on Amazon and discovered she probably wouldn't want to speak to me except to scold me for being a "stupid atheist", but she does have Barack's number down cold.
(Uh, people, I just looked at the word verification and this one phonetically comes out "lesboqueer". Can I have the next one instead?)
Hey, Jaco. Wow. Great post....from Mary. I would like to add to it with some of the photos from Bittersville PA, where my daughter went a-road tripping with her buds and took some amazing pictures of Centralia...former coal town, where the only thing standing is a Russian Orthodox Church, sad, dilapidated and high above the still smoking destruction. If you'd like I can post it here.
As some here know, I spent a year down in the back-woods of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. I went down there to help clean up my families cemetery, which holds the graves back to the mid 1700's when my family arrived. I also went to there to explore my families history and meet the hundreds of blood relations who still live there. My family, like many other's, never left. Except for my great-grandfather. His leaving is the reason I was born, in Seattle.
While there, I lived the best I possibly could and took the only job available. I have gained a greater appreciation for my/our ancestors, due to my experience.
These are some of the people Obama talks down to:
Variously known as the Ulster Scots, the Scots-Irish and the Scotch-Irish, they traveled in family groups rather than as individuals and settled together on America’s frontiers, where, because of interlocking family networks, their folkways became dominant. One group settled in New Hampshire, spreading out into Vermont and Maine, but the overwhelming majority— more than 95 percent—settled along the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania down to north Georgia and Alabama.
These people, my ancestors, helped build this country from the bottom up. They faced the world on their feet and not on their knees. The typical Scots-Irish had no slaves. And I know from the research I undertook, that my family and those they traveled with, did not.
Today, just like back then, they were considered "white trash". In my life, I have lived in the poorest of black ghettos and the poorest of "white ghettos". The difference is striking. While the black ghettos have socialized assistance programs, the white ghettos, particularly in the South, have none. The people I met in the Appalachian Mountains are dirt poor. They live 2,3 and 4 families to a trailer or small house. But, they are proud as hell! They won't take a handout. They take jobs that most people would not.
I have their blood in me and unknown to me, til I went down there, it is in me. I am unafraid of work, no matter what it is. I have never been on welfare, even while those around me in the black ghettos, were. Pride is buried deep within my soul. Any assistance, is never forgotton.
Obama is talking down to people who are the last one's to deserve it. On the contrary, they are due the utmost of respect for what they have meant and still mean to our country. Hard work and dedication to family, church and country. Something that seems to have been left out of Obama's upbringing.
I am a graudate of U Va, 71. At the time I went there it was a private men's school in direct lineage from Jefferson's founding. It was HIS little baby.
I used to go and help my dad in the Bronx in grade school fix TV's. He learned electronics as a radarman on navy aircraft in WW2 off carriers. Eventually, by 6th grade, I actually became expert with tape recorders. Every saturday we went together. He worked six days a week, smoked 2 packs a day and dropped dead at 48. I had a big fat scholarship and needed all of it to go to school in Charlottesville Va, up near the Blue Ridge. Jacket and tie every day for every class, until Nixon invaded Cambodia, and the entire culture collapsed. The basketball team (no athletic scholarships then) was the 2nd string football team, and could easily have gotten lost in a talcum powder mill. GOT THE PIC?
Probably 75% of the people around me were Obama, except they were white. Those others who had to go to the community colleges, or worked for a living, well, one day we graduates would surrender to noblesse oblige and find ways to help them to better suffer their lives.
In the summers I caddied 36 holes a day on a country club with no blacks, no jews, no italians, no anything but Brandons, Woody's, Collins's, and Smith's, and helped around the pool while blondes sprayed mineral oil and lemon juice on themselves.
Just an outside effing agitator Bronx jewboy, son of a 6 day a week worker, 1st in the family to go to college, whose grandfather got out of the army in Germany by paying $2000 to some fool and running off to the USA.
Don't any of the white people around here have any silver spoons? For God's sake.
Sunday, April 27, 2008 3:37:00 pm
Anonymous said...
Good Job! :)
Saturday, June 28, 2008 8:33:00 am
[Image] OOPSI....I feel bad I never read this gal before. This is a Dowd level disembowelment. Read this little ditty because every point she makes drives a stake through the entire Barack Obama reason for being. [Image] Yes, Barack Obama, We Are Bitter By Mary Grabar
Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and teaches in the Atlanta area. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and published fiction writer. Visit her website and get on her mailing list at marygrabar.com
We know who you're talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have left. We know who you're talking about when you talk about those who "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion." You're talking about "those people." You're talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you're talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words. (EFFING A, HONEY !) You're talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums. (Can you believe how on target this chick is?) We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.[Image] We never wore buttons declaring "Slav Power" or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence. The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet, we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in "diversity workshops" that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified white people. I know this, Barack, because I have family members and friends who worked in factories. We used to trudge in to work and change into work clothes, like my father did. He began by knowing only one word of English, "Okay," which he found to be the most useful one in the language. When the boss man handed him a broom or pointed to a piece to be welded, he fairly leapt to the task. My uncles were injured in construction and mining accidents, and went back to work. But what did we get for that, Barack? We paid cash for our houses and kept impeccable yards, yet saw the value of our homes plummet after marauding hoodlums came into our neighborhoods in riots that were celebrated by the intelligentsia in Manhattan penthouses, who saw such violence as justified expressions of outrage over past discrimination. (hmmm...I see charges of of reactionary racist bourgeoisie selfishness coming from Barack bud Ayers on this one..better watch out Mary) We went to public schools in those same neighborhoods only to be accosted for our skin color and the presumed "privilege" that teachers said we had. Rather than teach us what was good and beautiful about Western Civilization and the country to which our parents had fled, teachers gave us Marxist nonsense, if they bothered to teach at all. Our schoolmates saw the evening news, mimicked their elders by wearing "Black Power" buttons and felt justified in roughing the white kid who didn't seem tough. Because we were "privileged"--despite washing our fathers' sooty work clothes while our mothers went off to clean offices and houses in the suburbs--we were not eligible for scholarships, not even to the Catholic schools. Teachers never cut us any slack. Guidance counselors told us to be secretaries or work in the factory, despite our volunteering and demonstration of academic abilities. Our brothers, cousins, and uncles went off to fight in Vietnam, while those from your class took up arms against their campus administrators. True, we had our problems, as all people do, with such things as alcoholism and family violence, but we handled those ourselves, and never blamed "society" or a history of oppression. Still, many of us did carry legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. So we were grateful for the opportunity to work and buy our own little patches of the American Dream. We were happy to use a welding torch, shovel, or broom to get them. We didn't insist that we should all get college degrees. We didn't have our documents translated for us or get bilingual instruction. If we didn't know English we made sure our children did and we relied on them. Your white friends in San Francisco, Barack, probably had cleaning women like my mother (and me when I accompanied her and then had my own cleaning jobs from age 12). As white people from a certain class and with certain connections, your donors knew that their futures would be secure because of their inheritances and the connections they could make in the media, politics, and business. In fact, it would benefit them in the world of "radical chic" to hang around those like you and support your policies. (Great opportunity to be photographed next to a black person!)Your black friends there, like your wife, see no end to the amount that this country owes them because of what happened to their ancestors. It makes no difference that many of the whites in previous generations also had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Or that blacks and Native Americans were among the slave owners.In fact, you and those wealthy donors sneer at white people who have had to do manual labor and who have paid for tuition at community colleges with the money earned that way, while our classmates received special scholarships and government grants--from our taxes. (Let's all remember at THIS point as we taste the soup Mary has cooked up here, that she and her parents exist in the DEAD CENTER of FDR and HST's democratic party..that which made up the most important majority of the 20th century. DEAD CENTER) You sneer at those like us who put our faith in God and not in those like you who would presume to know what's good for us and tell us what to do with our money and our children, and leave us with no ability to defend ourselves. [Image]Well, Barack, coming from your Ivy League world, you would not know much about us. You would not have learned that because we come from people who, rather than letting their communist benefactors redistribute the food, burned the crops in their little fields before they were forcibly "collectivized." In Slovenia, they fought Tito's Partisans from the woods and held mass at night when the Communists banned church services. They remember what it's like to be hungry, ill, and living in little more than huts, while Marshall Tito and his communist cronies lived in villas. Now you live in a Chicago mansion and sneer at those like us who simply want to keep and defend our little three-bedroom ranches. You don't know what it's like to have family members die for the right to attend mass. I know your liberal cronies, Barack; they make me check off my skin color on job applications and ask me during job interviews of how I teach multiculturalism, yet don't know where Slovenia is on the world map. They couldn't care less about my culture, nor about Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, or Lithuanian culture. (GOAL !) Your supporters often feel free to mock my Slovenian heritage in letters and comments on the Internet when they disagree with me. I guess it's like being called a "dumb Polack"--something that has never gained quite the opprobrium of other ethnic epithets. See, Barack, we know the system: Some are more "equal" than others. And we know how you really feel about the "proletariat." We know this from our experience either directly or as an inheritance from our parents and grandparents. And that is why we came to America. Addendum: Many of my non-European correspondents, like those who came from Cuba, agree--as their letters to me indicate. var sc_project=1455042; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=13; var sc_security="a6aa62ca";
13 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formi have to say, she is on target.
In Slovenia, they fought Tito's Partisans from the woods
i'm no fan of tito's politics, but the partisani were fighting nazi fascists and their collaborators!
and it pains me to say it, but much of the belarussian, lithuanian and ukranian diaspora in the US has an ugly history of vicious antisemitism and even sheltering of ss criminals.
but i suppose her point is that most people of such backgrounds in the US are productive, decent citizens who are proud to contribute to their society and don't deserve to be judged and condescended to.
well said mary.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 11:21:00 am
You are quite correct, kobi, in your observations. And I bet she would agree.
No group is perfect. And as we see in Jeremiah Wright, racists are in every group. Blacks, Italians, Ukrainians, ...everywhere. They are a dimension of HUMAN sickness, not a group's sickness.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 11:26:00 am
I don't have a lot of resentment about the following facts, but they are true;
1) My father worked two jobs when I was a kid. He worked as a mailman and as a janitor. At night I would go with him to clean white people's offices. Why did I go? Because it was the only time I could spend with my Dad.
2) My mom used to serve Hamburger Helper because we needed to stretch out the meat. We didn't truly have enough money to feed hungry kids.
3) When I was college age, I had to live in a shack which had been used as a crack house before I moved in.
I guess I am po' white trash.
;-)
I cling to religion.
I don't cling to guns, but if someone tried to stop me from practicing my religion, I'd probably blow their fucking heads off.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:42:00 pm
Superb piece of skewering. I went looking for her published works on Amazon and discovered she probably wouldn't want to speak to me except to scold me for being a "stupid atheist", but she does have Barack's number down cold.
(Uh, people, I just looked at the word verification and this one phonetically comes out "lesboqueer". Can I have the next one instead?)
Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:54:00 pm
Hey, Jaco. Wow. Great post....from Mary. I would like to add to it with some of the photos from Bittersville PA, where my daughter went a-road tripping with her buds and took some amazing pictures of Centralia...former coal town, where the only thing standing is a Russian Orthodox Church, sad, dilapidated and high above the still smoking destruction. If you'd like I can post it here.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:56:00 pm
Oops, Jaco, I posted as Jewel. Lemme redact a bit.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:58:00 pm
Hi Sra,
Just to be clear, this is Epa's post.
Yeah, please do publish those photos of Bittersville.
;-)
Saturday, April 26, 2008 3:39:00 pm
fantastic.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 4:54:00 pm
As some here know, I spent a year down in the back-woods of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. I went down there to help clean up my families cemetery, which holds the graves back to the mid 1700's when my family arrived. I also went to there to explore my families history and meet the hundreds of blood relations who still live there. My family, like many other's, never left. Except for my great-grandfather. His leaving is the reason I was born, in Seattle.
While there, I lived the best I possibly could and took the only job available. I have gained a greater appreciation for my/our ancestors, due to my experience.
These are some of the people Obama talks down to:
Variously known as the Ulster Scots, the Scots-Irish and the Scotch-Irish, they traveled in family groups rather than as individuals and settled together on America’s frontiers, where, because of interlocking family networks, their folkways became dominant. One group settled in New Hampshire, spreading out into Vermont and Maine, but the overwhelming majority— more than 95 percent—settled along the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania down to north Georgia and Alabama.
These people, my ancestors, helped build this country from the bottom up. They faced the world on their feet and not on their knees. The typical Scots-Irish had no slaves. And I know from the research I undertook, that my family and those they traveled with, did not.
Today, just like back then, they were considered "white trash". In my life, I have lived in the poorest of black ghettos and the poorest of "white ghettos". The difference is striking. While the black ghettos have socialized assistance programs, the white ghettos, particularly in the South, have none. The people I met in the Appalachian Mountains are dirt poor. They live 2,3 and 4 families to a trailer or small house. But, they are proud as hell! They won't take a handout. They take jobs that most people would not.
I have their blood in me and unknown to me, til I went down there, it is in me. I am unafraid of work, no matter what it is. I have never been on welfare, even while those around me in the black ghettos, were. Pride is buried deep within my soul. Any assistance, is never forgotton.
Obama is talking down to people who are the last one's to deserve it. On the contrary, they are due the utmost of respect for what they have meant and still mean to our country. Hard work and dedication to family, church and country. Something that seems to have been left out of Obama's upbringing.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 5:58:00 pm
Who knew? IBA is made up of po' white trash.
Epa, AOW, WC, you got any stories?
Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:11:00 pm
I am a graudate of U Va, 71. At the time I went there it was a private men's school in direct lineage from Jefferson's founding. It was HIS little baby.
I used to go and help my dad in the Bronx in grade school fix TV's. He learned electronics as a radarman on navy aircraft in WW2 off carriers. Eventually, by 6th grade, I actually became expert with tape recorders. Every saturday we went together. He worked six days a week, smoked 2 packs a day and dropped dead at 48. I had a big fat scholarship and needed all of it to go to school in Charlottesville Va, up near the Blue Ridge. Jacket and tie every day for every class, until Nixon invaded Cambodia, and the entire culture collapsed. The basketball team (no athletic scholarships then) was the 2nd string football team, and could easily have gotten lost in a talcum powder mill. GOT THE PIC?
Probably 75% of the people around me were Obama, except they were white. Those others who had to go to the community colleges, or worked for a living, well, one day we graduates would surrender to noblesse oblige and find ways to help them to better suffer their lives.
In the summers I caddied 36 holes a day on a country club with no blacks, no jews, no italians, no anything but Brandons, Woody's, Collins's, and Smith's, and helped around the pool while blondes sprayed mineral oil and lemon juice on themselves.
Just an outside effing agitator Bronx jewboy, son of a 6 day a week worker, 1st in the family to go to college, whose grandfather got out of the army in Germany by paying $2000 to some fool and running off to the USA.
Sunday, April 27, 2008 12:34:00 pm
Don't any of the white people around here have any silver spoons? For God's sake.
Sunday, April 27, 2008 3:37:00 pm
Good Job! :)
Saturday, June 28, 2008 8:33:00 am