Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
White trash, trailer trash, call them what you will, have been identified as bulwarks of the Republican Party since before the rise of Trump; but Trump’s election cast them in a brand new light and gave them immeasurably more importance.
white people, especially in the south, being unhealthy, uneducated and shiftless, quickly identified trailer dwellers are bastions of Trump’s base—and thereby undesirable.
In “White Trash,” Isenberg traces the rube reputation of trailer parks back to the 1930s, when The Depression forced Americans by the millions into mobile home parks, “rickety boxes…eyesores” associated with “deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringes of the metropolis.” Isenberg tells the story of Agnes Meyer (mother of the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham), who, in 1943, set out on a cross-country tour for the Post to report on the war’s “home front.”. Encountering trailer parks throughout the south, Meyer found the residents pitiful, ragged, illiterate and undernourished; astonished, she asked herself, “Is this America?” A new brand of pulp fiction arose, portraying trailer dwellers as promiscuous, amoral trash. Dime-store novels like “Trailer Tramp” and “The Trailer Park Girls,” Isenberg writes, “told stories of casual sexual encounters and voyeurism…Tramps and trailer nomadism, like drugs and gambling, identified social disorder on the edge of town.”
By the 1980s, these poor white trailer dwellers had turned into Republicans (to the extent they bothered to vote). Two factors fed into this phenomenon: the trailer dwellers’ feeling that educated, coastal “elites” were putting them down, and their embrace of a new form of politicized evangelical Christianity, which encouraged them to vote—and vote conservative Republican.
With the surprise election of Trump—not only to Americans, but the world—trailer trash became the object of intense study by political operatives, who suddenly felt it imperative to understand what made these poor white Americans tick. An Australian newspaper last year reported the startling news that “China’s top think tank has turned to a New York Times best seller to understand what drives US President Donald Trump.”
That best seller was, no surprise, Isenberg’s “White Trash.” The think tank put Isenberg’s book at “the top of the reading list” to understand Trump; the editor of a Chinese scholarly publication told the Australian reporter, “Trump represents that political class [i.e., trailer park residents], and I don’t know how China should respond.”
The Chinese still don’t how to respond to the Trump phenomenon, any more than many of us Americans do. It’s far from clear what, if anything, Chinese intellectuals have learned about Trump from Isenberg’s book, but probably, whatever decisions the Chinese government has been making about tariffs are influenced, in part, by their impression of how tariffs impact the lives of poor white Americans. China may be betting that making cars, flat-screen TVs and War-Mart gadgets more expensive will turn trailer trash against Trump, which seems unlikely, given the “Fifth Avenue shooting” prophylaxis he’s already Teflon’ed himself with.
http://www.steveheimoff.com/index.p...er-trash-and-the-chinese-connecting-the-dots/
white people, especially in the south, being unhealthy, uneducated and shiftless, quickly identified trailer dwellers are bastions of Trump’s base—and thereby undesirable.
In “White Trash,” Isenberg traces the rube reputation of trailer parks back to the 1930s, when The Depression forced Americans by the millions into mobile home parks, “rickety boxes…eyesores” associated with “deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringes of the metropolis.” Isenberg tells the story of Agnes Meyer (mother of the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham), who, in 1943, set out on a cross-country tour for the Post to report on the war’s “home front.”. Encountering trailer parks throughout the south, Meyer found the residents pitiful, ragged, illiterate and undernourished; astonished, she asked herself, “Is this America?” A new brand of pulp fiction arose, portraying trailer dwellers as promiscuous, amoral trash. Dime-store novels like “Trailer Tramp” and “The Trailer Park Girls,” Isenberg writes, “told stories of casual sexual encounters and voyeurism…Tramps and trailer nomadism, like drugs and gambling, identified social disorder on the edge of town.”
By the 1980s, these poor white trailer dwellers had turned into Republicans (to the extent they bothered to vote). Two factors fed into this phenomenon: the trailer dwellers’ feeling that educated, coastal “elites” were putting them down, and their embrace of a new form of politicized evangelical Christianity, which encouraged them to vote—and vote conservative Republican.
With the surprise election of Trump—not only to Americans, but the world—trailer trash became the object of intense study by political operatives, who suddenly felt it imperative to understand what made these poor white Americans tick. An Australian newspaper last year reported the startling news that “China’s top think tank has turned to a New York Times best seller to understand what drives US President Donald Trump.”
That best seller was, no surprise, Isenberg’s “White Trash.” The think tank put Isenberg’s book at “the top of the reading list” to understand Trump; the editor of a Chinese scholarly publication told the Australian reporter, “Trump represents that political class [i.e., trailer park residents], and I don’t know how China should respond.”
The Chinese still don’t how to respond to the Trump phenomenon, any more than many of us Americans do. It’s far from clear what, if anything, Chinese intellectuals have learned about Trump from Isenberg’s book, but probably, whatever decisions the Chinese government has been making about tariffs are influenced, in part, by their impression of how tariffs impact the lives of poor white Americans. China may be betting that making cars, flat-screen TVs and War-Mart gadgets more expensive will turn trailer trash against Trump, which seems unlikely, given the “Fifth Avenue shooting” prophylaxis he’s already Teflon’ed himself with.
http://www.steveheimoff.com/index.p...er-trash-and-the-chinese-connecting-the-dots/
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