New Broom Coalition

A WARNING FROM GEORGE CARLIN TO THE LEFT

Justice for Working Class Americans

By John A. Murphy

“You called down the thunder—well now you've got it.
You tell them I'm coming . . . and Hell's coming with me!

You hear?! Hell's coming with me!”

- Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp

Immediately upon the death of George Carlin along with all of the articles and eulogies in the corporate media and on the Internet there was also a raft of editorial cartoons. One of them really caught my attention. It had a messy teenager sprawled out on a couch listening to television with his mother standing busily in the kitchen. The television was "saying":

"We're so self-important. Everybody is going to save something. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. WHAT?!!

I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bike paths. The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've only been engaged in heavy industry for little more than 200 years. The planet has been here through a lot worse than us. Earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, magnetic reversal of the polls, bombardment by comets, asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, retiring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are! People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos! Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet; they don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live; their own habitat. They're worried some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced."

Upon hearing this coming from the television, the mother in the cartoon screams out to the kid, "who is that right wing nut you're watching?" The kid replies "George Carlin".

Is this the same George Carlin who railed against conservatives?

"Pro life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no Head-start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're pre-born -- you're fine. If you're pre-school, you're fucked. Conservatives don't give a shit about you until ... you reach military age.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.

Pro-life! These people are killing doctors. What kind of pro-life is that? They'll do anything to save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they must just have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman."

It almost seems impossible that the same person could have delivered these two apparently disparate monologues.

The Okie from Muskogee

In a way it kind of reminds me of some of the comments I've received on what happens when you open my congressional campaign website (www.johnmurphyforcongress.org ). If your default player is QuickTime, when you open my website you will hear Merle Haggard singing "Rebuild America First". In my anti-Vietnam war protest days I couldn't stand the thought of Merle Haggard. He was the guy who sang "Okie from Muskogee". Back then I thought Haggard was a complete reactionary. He also wrote "Fightin' Side of Me". How could I come to like a man who wrote lyrics like:

And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

A place where even squares can have a ball

We still wave Old Glory, down at the courthouse,

In Muskogee, Oklahoma,USA.

…

If you're runnin' down my country, man,

You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me.

But this is the same man who also wrote "Branded Man" which is a song about how ex-convicts found it hard to go straight. He wrote "Sing Me Back Home" a song about a man facing the death penalty. "Hungry Eyes" and "If We Make it Through December" are songs about poverty. Woody Guthrie would have been proud to claim the lyrics to those songs. It is hard to imagine such a populist songwriter being branded a reactionary because he sings of plight of the lunchbox American.

Let's get out of Iraq and get back on the track
And let's rebuild America first."

…

A WARNING TO THE LEFT

Most people do not consider George Carlin to be conservative but he certainly delivers a powerful indictment of the left as seen by the American working class. Perhaps Merle Haggard and the people for whom he sings might be considered as “right-wingers” because the left is just not at ease with working class Americans. It is certainly clear that they do not want anything to do with the left – the left at least which is characterized as tree-hugging, politically-correct, liberals.

George Carlin, although certainly a champion of what we might call progressive causes, was as sickened by what has become of the left in the United States as is Country Western singer Merle Haggard.

Carlin realized that the left lost sight of what it was supposed to be about -- opposition to imperialism and seeing that working Americans have their general welfare safeguarded by government as their constitutional and human rights. The left forgot that people can regard their country as their family even if the wrong people are in charge. The left forgot that while championing the causes of women, blacks and homosexuals, it completely forgot that working people also needed to be liberated. The left has forgotten that the working class has been robbed and exploited and victimized by a political system that has refuses to repeal Taft-Hartley in generation after generation of Democrat congresses. Even worse, the left often tends to stigmatize working class white men as being the cause of racism and sexism. It is clear that this “bourgeois” attitude, as Carlin characterized liberal environmentalists, angered George Carlin and the left should be aware of the family members it has left behind. I suspect that Merle Haggard has tapped in to the same social zeitgeist that Carlin experienced.

How long do we cower down?

Is this really still our ground?

Our country is like a prisoner of war

Where's all the freedom that we're fightin' for?

“Where’s All the Freedom” by Merle Haggard

THE WEIMARIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

Lunchbox America is feeling the pinch and has been feeling the pinch for over 30 years. There is an overwhelming sense of despair which has arisen from decades of economic struggle. Tens of millions of Americans feel that they have been disenfranchised; their communities along with their sense of community are gone. There is no feeling of security. No stability. When people work for less than $15 an hour with no health insurance; watching their schools crumble and their infrastructure collapse, desperation is the predictable result.

Corporate America through its control of the media and its success in having our political establishment adopt the gospel of neoliberal economics as preached by Milton Friedman is destroying the social safety net of the American working class. The myth of the "free market" is invoked even to prevent the American people from enjoying the benefits and security that would be delivered through universal single-payer health care. The left, at least as embodied by the Democrat Party, is unwilling to press any major legislation which would lessen the malaise of working America. The Democrats who are so contemptuous of the working class that, along with Taft-Hartley, they are unwilling even to repeal the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill!

Chris Hedges, long-term war correspondent and author of "American Fascists" warns of the Weimarization of the working-class. He suggests that all we need is a crisis for a strong right wing to come to power. Naomi Klein in her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" explains to us how monstrosities like Ronald Reagan were able to force “free market”, neoliberal economics onto a corporate-media-addicted, dumbed-down public which had no strong labor movement and no tough independent press to warn against its malevolence. If the research and conclusions of Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein are ignored, if the musical expression of Merle Haggard and the comedic warning of George Carlin go unheeded the Weimarization of the American working class will most assuredly be the final nudge that is needed to move our nation into an absolute, not merely virtual totalitarian state.

THE WHITE KNIGHT BECOMES WYATT EARP

Two years ago when I ran my first campaign for Congress I really tried to push environmentalism when speaking with the voters in my district. Of course I wanted to make sure they understood my position on ending the war and my position on single-payer health care but I also wanted to create an awareness of environmental problems facing the United States and the world, especially "global warming". I was a reasonably well-to-do, left-wing, retired, white business owner who came to preach the gospel of environmentalism to people who were wondering if they would be homeless come this time next year or wondering how they would pay for chemotherapy if someone in the family was diagnosed with cancer. Yes, before coming into the city I stopped at Starbucks and had a decaffeinated Latte -- fair trade of course -- and a chocolate chunk brownie for about seven dollars. This did not exactly create a mindset prepared to deal with the real problems of working America.

This is the environment

I was campaigning in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There are about 12,000 families in Lancaster with a medium family income of $34,000. I was speaking with a group of African-American men gathered near Penn Square about the environment and specifically global warming. One man quietly stepped forward and took me by the arm and turned me slowly around. He pointed down the street to a homeless woman huddled up in the doorway of what was once a thriving neighborhood hardware store. It closed, with dozens of other local businesses, about a year and a half after Wal-Mart and Home Depot moved into the area. He said to me "there's the environment, do something about that. Get us some justice here and you'll get my vote". Needless to say that was the last time I spoke about global warming in Lancaster. Now I speak about jobs, punishing corporate criminals, penalizing corporations for out-sourcing jobs, taxing wealth not work and universal single payer health care. It is my job to help working America in my district to get what they need – justice; the justice that would have been called a “Fair Deal” in 1949; the justice which was to have included universal single payer health care. A sixty year old promise of justice for working Americans the Democrat Party has still not delivered, nor has any intention of delivering.

There is now a three way race in my district and my job is to bring that, long-overdue justice to working people.

A canvas covered cabin in a crowded labour camp
Stand out in this memory I revived;
Cause my daddy raised a family there, with two hard working hands
And tried to feed my mama's hungry eyes.

He dreamed of something better, and my mama's faith was strong
And us kids were just to young to realize
That another class of people put us somewhere just below;
One more reason for my mama's hungry eyes.

-From “Hungry Eyes” by Merle Haggard

John Murphy is the independent candidate for House of Representatives in the 16th Congressional District of Pennsylvania. www.johnamurphyforcongress.org In 2006 he was endorsed by Michael Berg, Peter Camejo, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn. He is one of the founding members of the Pennsylvanian Ballot Access Coalition , working to change the egregious ballot access laws in Pennsylvania which allowed the Democrat Party to knock Ralph Nader off the ballot in 2004 and Green Party Gubernatorial Candidate Carl Romanelli in 2006. He can be reached at: johnamurphy@comcast.net.

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