By Steve Otto
“Now reigns
pride in price [wealth]
And covetousness is deemed wise
And lechery without shame
And gluttony without blame.
Envy rules with treason,
And sloth is in great season [is popular]
God help us, for now is the time.”—John Ball (1338-1381)[1]
Most of us have
heard the expression “trailer
trash.” Anyone who has watched the Jerry
Springer Show has heard that label almost every time they watch
the show. But that brings to mind an interesting question. Why would poor
people from the “trailer trash” class come on a show where they know they will
be surprised by a wife/girl friend/ best friend or a family member who is
stabbing them in the back? Outside of any money to be made—why would anyone go
on a show were they know they will be ridiculed by millions of people watching
television and waiting for someone to make a fool of him or herself?[2]
The theme of
this lumpen-proletariat
journal entry is: ‘Life among the trailer parks.’ The first thing to point out
is that the stereo type promoted by Springer and others is obviously false.
There are some trashy people living in trailers—prostitutes, drug users and
dealers and welfare queens—but there are also regular working class people who
work a 40 hour week and live relatively normal lives.
Trailers are
cheaper than other buildings that people commonly rent or buy, so a lot of poor
people do live in them. Some trailers are quite large and those who live in
them are not that poor. I once had a friend who worked as a full-time cook,
making good money, and he lived in a large well furnished trailer. He did not
fit the stereo type of a poor “white trash” trailer park person. He was a
regular skilled proletariat.
I have lived in
trailer parks twice in my lifetime. In the mid 1980s, I had just earned a BA in
Journalism and I moved to Osceola, MO, in order to begin working at my first
newspaper job for the St. Clair County Courier. I found a trailer to
rent for a reasonable amount of money. I moved in and shortly after that, my
wife moved in with me—about six months later. I was working full time, earning
a professional salary. I was a law abiding citizen, even though I drank a lot,
at that time. But drinking is legal. At that time I did not consider myself a
lumpen-proletariat. By that time I had risen up to become a regular
proletariat.
I was a
lumpen-proletariat the first time I lived in a trailer park in Lawrence, KS,
during the 1970s, when I was still married to my first wife, I will call Diane
(not her real name). It was September and Diane thought she had a new apartment
lined up for us to move in. I was going to school, part-time, at Kansas
University and I was working at a minimum-wage, part-time job washing dishes at
a restaurant in the Kansas Union, a building at Kansas University. Diane was
still getting some unemployment. She found an apartment she wanted to move
into, but the land lord, a middle aged woman, kept stringing her along, telling
her “I might be able to rent this to you, but I haven’t decided yet.”
“It’s
humiliating,” Diane said. “She obviously looks down on us and wants to find
someone she thinks is better than us. She is looking for a better renter,
possibly someone who makes more money. I take offense to the fact that she is
stringing us along and will only rent to us if she can’t find the renter she
wants. This is an insult to us. I’m tired of her stringing us along as chumps.”
I agreed with
her. The woman was being an elitist snob. So, we didn’t take the apartment and
we stopped asking her about it.
We spent day
after day racing to the newspaper office and then running to see the rooms,
apartments and homes the town’s people had for rent. At the same time we were
trying to beat the other students, in town, trying to compete with us for the
same spaces to rent. We finally got an offer to rent a very small trailer.
Once we signed
the papers and money changed hands we were living in a trailer park court. It
was a long driveway shaped like an oxbow lake. There were probably 30 trailers
in all. Ours was one of the smallest. It was a small metallic trailer and
very cramped. It had air conditioning and yet on a hot August day, it just
didn’t get very cool. There were no trees in the park—nothing to break the
sunshine and the heat it caused in the little metal capsule.
When we first
moved in it was a rainy and cloudy day. It was a cool day, so it was a few days
later when we had a good dose of what the rest of the summer would be like.
Even if we had known, it would not have mattered. We couldn’t afford to wait
around anymore. We needed a place to live. So, we would have moved in
regardless of how hot it was inside.
It was also
cramped. We barely had room to invite people over and since I was in my mid 20s
and we had just moved to Lawrence a few years before, having guest over was
important to us.
In just a few
days we met our closest neighbors. They were Rob and Molly with their 9 year
old daughter Amy. They were Native American Indians. They were at least 99
percent assimilated to life in the trailer park and the ways us white folks
live. There was nothing wrong with that. They never discussed what tribes they
were from or anything to do with their Indian heritage. One thing we all had in
common was our fondness for drinking alcohol (except the 9 year old).
I remember
one afternoon, I thought back to a documentary by some Disney outfit were a
young boy went to visit some Indians on a reservation and he got to observe
their many traditions. I thought about what it would look like if I made a
documentary about Indians I knew living as every other American—what they ate
for food, what they did for a living, their living quarters—all the same as any
other American people only they are assimilated Indians. It seemed kind of
funny—not hilariously—but good for a chuckle just the same.
“I should be
able to get unemployment in a week or two,” Rob said. “I don’t see any point in
looking for a job when I can just collect unemployment for a few months.”
As with any
proud lumpen-Proletariat Rob was willing to take free money from the government
for as long as he could and felt no obligation to get a job and contribute to
society. That was especially true for those of us who were under 30. When we
are younger, six months sounds like a real long time. As we get older, it seems
as if that time seems to get shorter and shorter. By the time we are in our
40s, six months seem very short and being laid off creates a sense of panic in
us. We worry that we will not get a job before the six months ends. It is a
purely practical reason for us to look for a job.
However,
avoiding work is more than simple laziness. Rob probably learned as I did that
we rarely get a decent vacation unless we keep the same job for at least five
years. With all the lay-offs and the instability of the working world, it is
best to take at least a few weeks off before seriously looking for a job. It is
also a way of getting back at the establishment for treating us as if we are
just expendable machine parts rather than working people who have value for
what they contribute to the various corporations we work for.
By the time I
got divorced from my fist wife, I had developed a bitter streak in me that is
still there today. My brother and I noticed that going to work for the first
time is when we learn that the companies we work for want to get as much out of
us as they can for as cheap as they can. They constantly run a scam off of us
to take as much from us for as little money as they can get away with. They
don’t trust us and for those of us who wise up to them, we never trust them.
Part-time, full-time, minimum wage, higher pay—it all boils down to a
relationship that is never fair and we never actually trust each other. That
was the one constant of everyone in the trailer court and it never changed as I
went from being a lumpen-proletariat to a full-blown proletariat.
We got to know
the other people in the trailer park. There was a mother and daughter two
trailers down. The mother is on welfare and going to school. She told me she
would rather work, but she needed health care for her seven-year-old daughter
and welfare was the only way to afford it. If she got a job she could not get
or afford health insurance.
At the other end
of the trailer park were Vicky and James. They had a little girl about
three-years-old. Vicky was dark haired, part Indian. James had blond hair and
was tall and stocky. He dressed as a bicker with a vest and a wallet with a
chain on it. He would come over from time to time when I bought a friend’s
Talwin[3] scripts.
We both had a taste for that drug, which resembled the affects of morphine, and
we all liked beer. They two were married and they ran with a rather Rough crowd.
James was working at the pork and bean factory I had once worked at. But James
hurt his back and was on disabilities.
The trailer
structures are not suited to withstanding tornado and hurricane attacks, which
has led to the stereo type label “tornado food.” So, some of the people fit the
stereo types of “trailer trash” and many did not. I remember an old man in the
town of Clinton, MO, who I interviewed for a newspaper I worked for after
a drug raid staged in that town by the police, during the mid 1980s:
“They don’t have
decent jobs here, many people are on welfare, they have nothing to do—what they
(local authorities) expect them to do?” he said loudly. “Of course people are
going to use drugs.”
[1]John Ball's letter to an unidentified community, 1381,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_an_unidentified_community
[2]“Better to be king for a
night, than schmuck for a lifetime."—Rupert Pupkin, character from The King of Comedy, 1982.
This quote
above says it all. Desperate and poor people with little to show for their
lives can become instant celebrities for just one afternoon, as on the Jerry
Springer Show. As the above quote suggests, it is better to be the center
of attention and a celebrity for one after-noon—than to be a poor person who
will live their whole life unnoticed by anyone. Even being the butt of jokes
and playing the fool is better than being unnoticed. So Springer took advantage
of that desperation by poor people to make his fortune and ratings.
[3] Pentazocine is a synthetically prepared prototypical
mixed agonist–antagonist narcotic(opioid analgesic) drug of
the benzomorphan class
of opioids used to treat moderate to moderately severe pain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentazocine
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