WHY SO MANY?

Dana Prom Smith

 

Why are so many white people voting against their self-interest by voting for Republican candidates?  It isn’t out of patriotism with people putting the commonweal above their own welfare.  Some say that there’s an underlying racial motif.  While that may be true, there’s something deeper.  They see in Barack Obama a country which is slipping away from them.

 

          American was once a country of white hegemony where being a white male was enough to prevail.  Barack Obama behaves and thinks pretty much like a well-educated white male, but he isn’t.  He represents all those minorities who keep pushing their way into the mainstream, uppity-like.

 

          America is profoundly different from what it once was, in some ways better and some ways worse, and those whites voting against their self-interests are voting for a return to an America that no longer exists, an America of white hegemony.

 

          When I was a boy, Chinese food was the big excitement.  Now, I can easily eat all kinds of food from all over the world.  We may be a coarser culture than before although I doubt it, but we’re certainly a more cosmopolitan culture than before.  It’s the American promise of enrichment through immigration that sticks in the craw of all these whites who vote against themselves.

 

          Oddly enough, the Republican Party which these white males prefer has chosen to be the party of ignorance and obscurity, a party of the past, a rearguard.  They scream and yell a lot of obscenities as they slowly perish.    

       

DEAD WRONG

 

Dana Prom Smith

 

          Willard Romney was dead wrong when he said that he doesn’t need to worry about people like me, that is, those 47 percent dead beats and dependent victims.  I’ve paid income taxes for fifty-one years, save for military service and college, until I was 75 years old.  Also, I’ve paid all kinds of taxes all through those years and still do, but I don’t pay income taxes today.  I am munching at the government trough with Social Security and Medicare.  I get most of my medical care munching at the Veterans Administration, and excellent care it is.  I even went through college and graduate school at the public trough through the G I Bill.  My problem is that unlike Willard I did my military service.

         I did not welch on military service, bully fellow students in prep school, send my money off-shore, abuse pet dogs, practice sharpie capitalism, and advocate more wars.  Willard should be worried about dead beats like me because we vote, and we don’t like to be denigrated and ridiculed by some plutocrat who won’t tell us about his taxes while complaining about ours.

 

Perhaps, his best fate would be to be sent off-shore to the Cayman Islands where he can watch his money.  The man’s a bully.  About the only thing that comes to mind when listening to him is Cactus Jack Garner’s comment, “ain’t worth a bucket of warm piss.”