Last night I went to bed before midnight. I did my “personal hygiene chores”, as my autistic friend Scooter calls showering and brushing one’s teeth. I put a Seinfeld DVD in the machine, the voices and stories lull me to sleep most nights . I was really too wired to sleep and I had slept most of that day anyway. Retirement has done that. I sleep when I feel like sleeping. It is a deleterious habit and one I hope to break, but I can tell you it won’t be any time soon.
I awoke around 0315 this morning. I did not easily fall back to sleep, to which this blog post testifies. The trains grabbed my attention and, by accident, I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in my Kindle. It struck a few common chords. Both his family and mine are “hillbillies”, his from Kentucky, mine from Tennessee. I will post more about this common thread as I delve more deeply into his story. I will say this. That there are sizable numbers of poor people in this country who happen to be white, who are afflicted with similar, if not the same, problems as Blacks and Latinos. This inconvenient truth does much to discredit Critical Race Theory. So I’m suggesting we listen to other voices in the current domestic debacle playing out before us.
What I do want to say is that American propaganda dictates our perception of our current crop of seemingly intractable problems. We are told what to think about everything, from COVID-19, to economic policy, to foreign/military policy, to race issues. Today the traditional media outlets, the pawns of the public relations industry, are losing their power to control the stories and what to think about them.
Now I’m tiring again. Drinking chamomile tea, as opposed to coffee, has assisted in stoking the fires of Morpheus. There are other things I want to talk about. For example, American Myths, not in the bastardised sense of that word, that equates myth with falsehood, rather than with deep and profound truths. Think Joseph Campbell.
I’m really just too tired to say anything more.
Dispatches From Dystopia 
What do you think about Hillbilly Elegy? I’ve been thinking on reading it.
I hope you are correct and more people are wising up to the propaganda the media dishes out. I’m not so optimistic. To hear him talk, my husband thinks CNN preaches the gospel. Needles to say, we can’t talk politics.
Oh yes I know what you are dealing with. Hillbilly Elegy is well-written, though provoking. It deals with class distinctions. We don’t like to talk about class any longer. We prefer to look at fractures along racial lines,even though that analysis has limitations
I grew up a hillbilly…I know all about class distinctions. And though I now live in a city, I live in the South and not along the coastline so am considered being in a lesser class than the elites. I believe class divides us much more than race, but the media and those in power choose to push the race thing. It’s the old divide and conquer.
Absolutely. Class divisions in the South are profound. Nobody among the coastal elites wants to delve into the issue, so it is ignored.Class divisions within the African-American community is perhaps the greatest of all the “dividing” issues.
I wish more people understood that class divides us much more than race, no matter our color. I worry it will be our country’s undoing.