- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
...So, we cannot let simple-minded ideas take over. I respond now mainly to Poster Libertyaintfree's post about his or her experience in a manufacturing union.
1. I was a member of the UAW in 1972, making transmission parts for GM. We all worked hard, and everybody except me made great parts. I did not have much talent with the grinding machines.
Back then, if you looked at the little green booklet that laid out the bargaining agreement, the most striking thing was the names, the signatures at the end. The union guys were (e.g.) Joey Swidwinski, Tony Gharabaldino, Ti-Leandro Bates. In contrast, the management guys were H. Farnsworth Higgins, Christopher Hyght-Figgins, Lester M. P. Henderberg.
And the union signed off with a little over the top thing about, "fighting our common enemy, the management of the Hydramatic Division." Things have changed since then, in rhetoric and in fact. But, please note, we all worked hard and made good parts, even back in those 1970s. We had 35 minutes for lunch, and we worked lots of tough overtime for a little over five bucks per hour. I worked twenty days in a row once.
I suggest that your experience in a Navy shipyard is much different from the UAW. The UAW works in a for-profit real economy industry. In contrast, the US government may put up with lazy, old-fashioned workers, but the UAW and GM do not, even 36 years ago they did not.
2. Southerners in the North: Just west of Detroit, we have the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Southerners started moving there decades ago to work in the auto plants. To this day, Ypsilanti is known as, "Ypsi-Tucky," because so many southern families live there, because of the auto jobs. And the Ypsi Southerners themselves say, "Ypsi-Tucky." This is not some elitest put-down. It is a happy jest.
The whole Detroit area is populated by white and black families who came here to work in the auto plants. Many of them still have southern accents, and southern families, southern roots. These people are not fooled by creepy, simplistic southern senators, and neither are their families in the South.
3. We cannot have a new Civil War or a second secession based on geography, because Americans are inextricably mixed now. e.g. Indiana would have to go with the Confederacy, and Florida would have to stay with the Union.
The arrogant, unnaturally-self-assured, willfully ignorant, cartoonish Southern Senators who try to push a Cultural Civil War are following an evil path. They would get more credit and more votes if they took a 21st-Century path toward reconciliation and new paradigms. Tennessee Senator Corker sounds and thinks like a young Foghorn Leghorn. How long will it take him to realize how preposterous he is?
