"Those horrific photographs from Abu Ghraib may have thrown Washington into a frenzy, but outside the Beltway they have apparently caused less of an uproar. While public opinion across America does now seem to have become aroused by the evidence of torture, it is at least as concerned about the continued loss of American lives in what is, rather optimistically, called "post-war" Iraq."
<snip>
"It is because, when most of enlightened, moderately well educated America hears the words "West Virginia trailer park" associated with outrageous behaviour, they know exactly what to think: "This has got absolutely nothing to do with me. This is not my America. These people do not represent anything that I identify with, or take pride in. This is White Trash USA - which I like to pretend does not exist until I have to confront its grinning face splashed across my television screen on top of a pile of nude Iraqi detainees."
The gulf (and the animosity) between backwoods, redneck America and educated, liberal urban America is much greater than that between the classes in Britain. Here, class is now essentially a metropolitan phenomenon: it is the proletarians of the city versus the bourgeoisie of the city and its environs.
But in America, there is a true rural working class, whose lives and mores are held in a degree of contempt that is almost impossible to imagine in Britain, where society has become so homogenised."
<snip>
"Redneck America was, during my childhood, almost invisible in the official portrait of national life. It surfaced (and that is probably the apposite word) into public notice in a big way for the first time in my adolescence, with the sensational news that a rock 'n' roll star, Jerry Lee Lewis, had married his 13-year-old cousin.
(The predilection for incest is now immortalised in hundreds of fairly good-natured "You're probably a redneck" jokes. "You're probably, etc - if you think a family reunion is a great place to meet girls; if your state has passed a law saying that, when a couple are divorced, they're still legally brother and sister.")"
<snip>
"To most of idealistic - and idealised - America, the national values are freedom, democracy and opportunity. For redneck America, what the country stands for is the right to bear arms and not to be messed around by federal government. There is a good deal of the old Confederacy spirit here: people for whom the civil war never ended, or least ended the wrong way.
In other words, to the America that the New York Times addresses, redneck still means bigot and - this is not putting it too strongly - pervert. What would have clinched the dismissal of the Abu Ghraib incidents as the excesses of people whom enlightened America despises was the specifically sexual element of degradation."
<snip>
"If the US Army is now recruiting no-hopers from its social swamps, then it must come to terms with the fact that they, too, are Americans, who are prepared to die for their country - however alien their idea of it may be to their condescending countrymen."
Roadkill pie Maru
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Invest in a company any idiot can run because sooner or later any idiot is going to run it." - Warren Buffet
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