Not the first time I've seen him express his disappointment in democrats. Maybe he's finally had a little good sense knocked into him.
Posted on 05/30/2017 10:35:01 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I think it was over Thanksgiving dinner. My mother's best friend, a dear woman who has been nothing but good to me, decided to poke some gentle fun, Dayton Ohio-style, at me.
Actually, let me be more specific. It wasn't Dayton. The conversation took place in Kettering. It's a suburb of Dayton. A small suburb called Oakwood separates Dayton and Kettering.
"Ted," my mom's friend began, "what's with these terrible descriptions of our city? The way you write, you'd think this was some bleak post-industrial wasteland."
She motioned out the window to her manicured lawn, punctuated by a set of perfect flowers. As were those of her neighbors. As if to drive home her point, a bird chirped.
I held my ground. "What about down by Route 4? Rusted-out factories, meth houses. It's like a war zone."
"But that's" -- she searched for the word -- "downtown. That's not here."
"It's five or six miles, at most," I pointed out. "You can walk there!"
And you can, if you don't much care about personal safety.
Dayton is a mess. Once a booming manufacturing city, its population is plunging, having shrunk by half in 50 years. Its housing stock, including historical buildings, have been gutted.
After decades of factory and corporate closures accelerated by free trade deals like NAFTA, the local economy sucks. Crime, driven by my hometown's status as Ground Zero of the national opioid epidemic that has turned so many young men into corpses that the morgue ran out of room, has made Dayton even more dangerous than Chicago.
The 2008-09 housing crisis left countless homes abandoned (but cheap! you can buy one for four figures). Fearing eviction in 2009 but receiving no help from a government who instead gave $7.77 trillion to the banks with no strings attached, one poor guy hanged himself; a kid found his mummified body five years later.
He should have stuck around. The banksters never bothered to foreclose on his modest house.
So much misery, so little help from the government. Four out of five Ohioans who lost their jobs receive zero unemployment benefits.
Downtown Dayton, and its citizens, were dead to my mom's friend. But not to me. I used to take the bus there to look at record stores and attend meetings at Democratic Headquarters.
Sometimes, yes, I walked. After I left Dayton for New York, the road from the Dayton airport to my mom's house sometimes took me through downtown. Downtown was real. Downtown existed.
If downtown Dayton was less than an afterthought to suburbanites a hop, skip and jump away, it was a black hole as far as the national media and the political strategists were concerned.
Daytonians didn't donate to presidential campaigns. (They couldn't afford to.) Downtown was reliably Democratic. Republicans didn't bother; Democrats took Dayton for granted.
You've probably already figured out that this essay is a parable about the Rise of Trump. Downtown Dayton was far from unique. There were downtown Daytons all over the post-industrial Midwest: ignored, forgotten, taken for granted.
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin -- states Hillary Clinton ought to have won, and was so sure she was going to win that she hardly showed up, but went Republican in 2016.
Dayton Congressman Tony Hall (disclosure: I worked for one of his campaigns) watched the growing chasm between his working-class -- and unemployed poor -- constituents and the national Democratic Party, in thrall to the Clintons, free trade, and Wall Street contributors.
"A lot of Democrats in the Midwest feel that they didn't leave the Democratic Party -- they feel like the Democratic Party left them," Hall says.
That was me, for sure.
"As long as we had our 10 or 12 auto plants, we were pretty good, but we felt that the NAFTA deal made it a lot easier for companies to go to Mexico -- and they did. They shut down our factories," remembers Hall.
Young adult voters "saw their moms and dads lose their jobs and they didn't think anyone did anything for them."
Day after day, the citizens of Dayton and Flint and Milwaukee opened their newspapers and flipped the cable news channels. Never, ever was there anyone talking about, much less interested in solving, their problems.
As far as the elites -- and that included Democratic politicians like Clinton -- were considered, victims of rapacious global capitalism didn't exist and didn't matter.
Until Trump.
Trump didn't offer credible solutions. He hasn't lifted a finger to help Rust Belters as president. What he did do was acknowledge their existence.
Writing about the French election, Edouard Louis wrote that a similar cri de Coeur motivated many Marine Le Pen voters.
Louis grew up poor: "In the minds of the bourgeoisie...our existence didn't count and wasn't real."
That was the message of many Trump voters to the op-ed writers of The New York Times: we know he isn't perfect, but at least he knows we exist.
Despite Bernie Sanders (and Trump), the Hillary Clinton Democrats still don't get it. When Trump mentioned "mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation" in his inaugural address, my liberal New York friends shook their heads.
Like my mom's friend, they had no idea what Trump was talking about.
The misery is real.
They exist -- sometimes they exist five or six miles away.
"They" are us.
That name sounds familiar. Didn’t he regularly say some very hateful things about GWB about a decade ago?
Yes. He’s something of a cartoonist.
It is a shock to see this from him.
It’s interesting the very different people who can hear Trump’s message and see who it’s aimed at. On both sides of the political spectrum there are those who get it. All the rest have some kind of blind spot.
Surprising indeed.
If “we” means Trump voters, that includes me, but I am by no means in the predicament described. It seems to me Rall is trying to reduce everything to socioeconomics, but this is not all there is to politics.
>>>If you’re familiar with Ted Rall, you know how surprising this column is<<<
>>>He hasn’t lifted a finger to help Rust Belters as president<<<
Ahem. Trump has been President for only FOUR Months and he is getting no help from ANYONE.
A backhanded slap from good old Ted Rall is still a slap.
#1. Yes. This really got my attention as I consider Ted Rall to be a conservative hating psychopath. His cartoons, if this is the same guy, were the worst I have ever seen (I saw them in the Washington Post), beating out his predecessor, the Nazi propaganda cartoons against the Jews, the Soviet’s slime in Izvestia/Tass/Pravda (and their propaganda booklets and leaflets), as well as the neo-Nazi “Thunderbolt” or “Aryan Nation”.
looks like his neighbor’s reality observations bite him in his leftist/hate-filled ass to the point that he actually came out of his far-left stupor and took notice of what was going on right down the block. Imagine that. What the Republicans/conservatives have been saying for decades WAS ACTUALLY REAL, THE TRUTH, THE REAL MCCOY.
The rotting of Dayton didn’t start yesterday. It probably started during the Clinton administrations, continued during the Bush years (Dayton was a Democrat Party stronghold so why bother with the stupid enemy), and was accelerated under the Marxist regime of Obama the Great.
Well, Ted. Perhaps you would like to revisit the “hate” that you heaped upon decent Americans, Republicans, conservatives, moderates, etc and APOLOGIZE for your Nazi-Like/Marxist-crap propaganda that posed as “cartoons”.
It is never too late to repent, or at least say that you’re sorry for the derision/hate you created, and that those you attacked were actually correct in much of what they said.
That would be a very interesting “Start” on your road back to reality which you left so long ago when Dayton was once a livable/viable city.
I used to drive the outpatient van to Wright-Patterson in Dayton from Fort Benjamin Harrison on a daily basis while I was waiting for reassignment.
Yes, that`s a good point. And even as far as Economics goes, it sounds like he still holds some of the simplistic ideas of Progressives. Still, relative to his past history, his comments were surprisingly reasonable.
>That name sounds familiar. Didn’t he regularly say some very hateful things about GWB about a decade ago?
Funny thing is looking back I’ve nothing but hateful things to say about GWB. He was fake Conservative who sold us down the river.
His cartoons showed long ago how deranged he is.
I felt very differently about the Bush Family back then. Their behavior during the last election forced me to admit what they really were, which is Globalist-Progressives as an ultimate goal and RINOs as a device of reaching that goal.
It was both disappointing and enlightening.
When I read the closing, I scrolled back to the top to re-check the author’s name, and wondered if it was the political cartoonist. Then I read your comment.
I find the irony of the theme “We Exist” delicious, since that’s the name of a song by a mediocre indie band named Arcade Fire singing about the terrible plight endured by gays who think everyone wants to deny their existence (as if that was possible in the modern world). I hope he did it on purpose, although it is admittedly an obscure reference.
Trump didn’t offer credible solutions. He hasn’t lifted a finger to help Rust Belters as president.
It’s been four whole months! He’s had to fight with Congress! Good grief!
Dayton has been dying for decades. Downtown started dying the day the city commissioners made most of the roads through town one way, making it very difficult to get to what little parking there was. There has never been anything done about the situation. I haven’t been downtown is 50 years. It isn’t worth the hassle, not even for Dragon’s games.
Like most cities in the midwest, it has been run by Democrats, again, for decades.
Yes, I was very pleasantly surprised by how rational Ted sounds in this piece. How very strange...
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