May 8, 2004
ALL THOSE GOOD JOBS IN THE MINES ARE GONE (via Tom Morin):
Thatcher's revolution needs completing (Mark Steyn, 04/05/2004, Daily Telegraph)
Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, a "radical" "poet", decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for "in the absence of her loco parent". After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher's various crimes, he leant into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: "Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes."Carol was a jolly good sport about it, as always. And it has to be said that this terrible indictment loses a lot of its force when you replace "Vatcher" - a word the snarling tribunes of the masses could effortlessly spit down the length of the bar - with "your mum".
On the other hand, he had a point: basically, her mum did just totally smash the working classes. Today, if one hears the term "working class", one assumes the speaker is Billy Bragg or some other celebrity nostalgic speaking for himself and a handful of other firebrand romantics. But 25 years ago the "working class" still had the numbers, and nary a day went by when the evening news didn't include some menacing scene of big burly blokes striking for their right to continue enjoying the soft pampered working week of the more effete Ottoman sultans.
All aspects of life, from cars to newspapers, seemed at the mercy of this demographic. If one heard that, say, Teabags (the Technical and Engineering Association of Beverage Administrators and Grumpy Servers) were shutting down every British tea room, one would expect to switch on the news (assuming that the news wasn't on strike) and see big burly blokes in Lyons Corner House pinnies jostling with coppers outside ye olde tea shoppe in the Cotswolds.
All gone. The "working class" has itself been largely privatised, and thus dispersed - or, if you prefer, liberated. In Saturday's Telegraph, the various commentators on Mrs T's silver jubilee took it as read that Carol's mum had totally smashed the working class. The point of dispute was whether this was a good thing.
When folk look back nostalgically at the mining communities they grew up in, they never include the jobs as things they miss.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2004 11:30 AM
Back in the '50s, dead-end factory jobs were a supposed cause of juvenile delinquency. Now, of course, people lament the loss of so many of those jobs.
Posted by: PapayaSF at May 8, 2004 2:37 PMI saw Rick Bragg speak here in his hometown in Alabama a couple months back, and he was bemoaning the loss of all the cotton mill jobs thusly...
"You know you used to be able to recognize the millworkers around town because they'd be the folks missing fingers, or coughing up chuncks of cotton fiber" ...
followed by this wonderful paragraph...
"but still, I'm writin' a book about that cotton mill where once upon a time a blue-collar person could make a decent living...."
I wanted to point out that there's not a lot of nostalgia for the hand picking of the cotton, for the stoop labor way of life lost.
Posted by: H.D. Miller at May 8, 2004 8:29 PMCuriously enough, this is not true in Hawaii. Many of the old people really do look back fondly on their arduous jobs in the fields and mills.
But the theme of the fiction -- Sirota's "Lucky Come Hawaii" and Murayama's pioneering "All I Asking for Is My Body" (the first novel published by someone who grew up in a plantation camp) -- is getting out.
Some years ago, the biggest event on the island was the reunion of camp people. I cannot imagine a jolly reunion of people who grew up in, say, Kannapolis.
Miller's right about the South, though. As Hank Williams famously said, he had no desire to "keep surveying the same 40 acres over the hindquarters of a mule" or words to that effect.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 9, 2004 3:47 AMThere is a hilarious scene in Zoolander where Ben Stiller meets his filthy, half-dead miner father and brothers and tries to suck up with stupid comments about the wholesomeness of their lives. They obviously want to muder him.
Posted by: Peter B at May 9, 2004 7:16 AM