Don’t Tread on Me
I live in a small mountain town in western North Carolina, in the heart of the Bible belt, in the heart of Trumpland. I drive by at least two of the Gadsden flags in a two mile section of road near my house, just outside my town of approximately 500 loyal Trump supporters, both flying aloft, all alone, on flagpoles in the front of single-wide trailers set in the woods.
Slightly further afield, along Interstate 40 near Charlotte, North Carolina, one sees enormous Confederate Battle flags flying atop 50’ flagpoles near the Interstate, on private land, for all to see. Note that this attention, the reverence, for the Confederate flag — lighted at night, blustering in the breeze throughout the day, hundreds of feet in the air, flying presumedly at a private residence whose occupant wants to send a clear message to the thousands of travelers who drive that route every single day.
My county, McDowell County, is one of the poorest counties in the state of North Carolina. Here, far from the sophisticated banking centers of Charlotte and the high-tech biotech of the Research Triangle Park, people are bereft of both meaningful employment and basic technology. High speed internet is unavailable outside of the limits of the two small towns where I live — there are many, many schoolchildren in my county who have no access to healthcare, no access to high speed internet to do their schoolwork during the sheltering in place orders caused by COVID-19, many people who have never travelled outside of their home state. The 45,000 residents of my county are largely white (92%). Thirty percent (30%) lack broadband access. More than 80% do not have a college education; of those, 30% did not graduate from high school. Almost 20% live in poverty.
My county, with its shabby trailer parks inhabited by meth dealers and pit bulls on chains, with its unloved children playing in the dirt, miles from the information superhighway, huddled under the banner not of an American flag nor of a military flag but of a 250 year old flag of revolution or a 130 year old battle flag that represents oppression to almost 46 million Americans, is ground zero for Donald Trump and the Republican party.
In the recent local election, the Republican candidates all won handily because the Democratic party, who do exist and are active of Facebook, meeting every month or so at a Chinese restaurant to whine about the lack of Bernie Sanders, failed to put up even one local candidate for the open seats.
Barack Obama made a swing through my county in 2011. He stopped at a local barbecue restaurant, his modus operandi for the bus tour (and, as you might imagine, barbecue being the beloved food of all North Carolinas, perhaps the only thing upon which all people could agree). The Republican sheriff of my county was dining in a small dining room off the main lobby in the tiny restaurant but did not come out to meet the president. Several people said, “I don’t like him but it’s good to see a president anyway.”
Donald Trump carried more than 75% of my county in the 2016 election.
For all the would-be patriotism of the rural south, the shiny, patent-leather veneer of the Bible belt reigns supreme among the God-fearing, poverty stricken, uneducated and unemployed people of the rural South. The county-council in my local town is currently fighting a new business, a brewery that had recently invested millions into a crumbling Main Street, because the town aldermen do not want to approve beer sales on Sunday, citing a law from the 1800s as their precedent.
It would be easy to make some wild assumptions about the people all across America who are living in such communities, the rural poor, the uneducated, the drug addicted, those people who have to choose whether to buy another case of ramen noodles or a week’s worth of insulin.
I think the clear understanding of the issues they face — and the type of reporting that they receive at the hands of the national media — is largely absent from the national dialogue about the meaningful way forward.
Sure, the press might visit my community. The New York Times even did a feature on the demise of the textile factory around which the town is built, the nearly 800 jobs that were lost when ‘the plant’ closed and the textile finishing industry moved overseas. They might write a small snipped about the changing business plans of a company such as furniture manufacturer Ethan Allen, whose recent bankruptcy and restructuring closed one of the main points of pride in my small community, where many people have houses full of upscale Ethan Allen furniture as a result of their involvement in the now-defunct North Carolina furniture industry.
So when the White House press secretary stands on a podium and says, as she did yesterday, that a new day is dawning, I know she’s not talking about my community. I know that Donald Trump will never visit to have a look at the small businesses that a new generation of people are struggling to build, the ones that supplant the crumbling mills, the ones that serve hand-crafted beer or the small art gallery or the small beds and breakfasts and might entertain tourists who visit the mountains for adventure and relaxation.
The thing to remember is that the people of my county, the ones who would not come out of the back dining room of a small barbecue restaurant to see the first black man elected as President of the United States, the ones who pray on Sunday and think beer is a fast track to the devil, the ones who don’t have internet, who live in a small single wide trailer next to a meth addict and let their kids play in the dirt in the front yard, these are the people who elected Donald Trump. He has their support. And, when the fast-talking, well educated, worldly by comparison Democrats across town show their possible love of multiculturalism by talking politics in a Chinese restaurant and yet fail to deliver one single candidate to the local election, it is certain that the Republicans and all that isolationistic talk of American jobs and America First and Make America Great Again resonate with this base of voters. And while the liberals and the ideologues twiddle their thumbs, the Trumpers are using the power of symbols, the rhetoric of hate and isolationism, to fire their guns from the shoulder of those who don’t know any better, the uneducated whose idea of an ultimate vacation would be a condo at Myrtle Beach for a weekend, a round of golf, and a cooler full of beer.
It is a message that resonates with the outcasts. When they see Donald Trump, they don’t see a slick, would-be billionaire with a nude model wife, a gaggle of blondes in his wake, a man so confused and convoluted and, frankly, unschooled in the issues of geopolitics, economics, history, health care, and the rule of law that he has brought an entire cadre of frauds, hucksters, opportunists and gold diggers right through the front doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Rather, his voter base sees a guy who ‘gets them,’ who was fun to watch on The Apprentice, who Is reshaping the culture in his own image thanks to a media that focuses on sound bytes rather than context. They love it when Trump yells at the media, ‘fake news!,’ because his behavior echoes their own frustration with a media system that talks down to them, relentless in its stereotypes, utterly irrelevant in its approach to the concerns of their neighborhoods and the reality of their lives.
