Hillary would know how to operate a backhoe

Mined from the notebooks, very early Sunday morning December 2, 2018. Posted Tuesday morning, December 18.

Inauthentic: Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop at the Union Diner in Laconia, New Hampshire. September 17, 2015. Photo by Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters via MSNBC.

This is actually a follow-up---or at any rate an aside---to a post I need to blast out of the notebooks and type up which itself is a follow-up to another post lying dormant in the notebooks that I plan to title “Daredevil for English Majors”. All three posts include quotes from Richard Russo’s novel “Empire Falls” which I’m beginning to think should be required reading for anyone who wants to skip past the clichés of the national political media and truly try to understand life the small fading mill towns of white working class America beyond what happens in diners when journalists breeze in looking for quotes to confirm their narratives, and for anyone who just wants to read a very good novel by a very good writer. The irony in the previous statement is that “Empire Falls” centers around a restaurant that’s indistinguishable from the diners I eat in and the protagonist, Miles Roby, is the manager of the restaurant. Miles has half-hearted ambitions to own the place and turn it into an upscale restaurant with a creative menu that’s more than eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, steak and potatoes for dinner, and coffee all day. Half-hearted because his real ambition is to leave town for a more intellectually stimulating and spiritually fulfilling life somewhere else.

He’d actually been on his way to that somewhere else when he had to drop out of college and come home to take care of his mother who was dying of cancer. But for various reasons, once back home, he found himself stuck and twenty years later there he still is...

Only after taking over the restaurant did Miles begin to realize his relationship to the patrons of the Empire Grill had changed profoundly. Before he’d been the smart kid---Grace Roby’s boy---who was going to make something of himself, and this had been the object of much gentle, good-natured ridicule. The men at the lunch counter were forever quizzing him about things---the operation of backhoes, say, or the best spot to sink a septic tank---they imagined he must be learning about at college. His complete lack of wisdom on those subjects led them to wonder out loud just what the hell they were teaching down there in Portland. Often they didn’t speak to Miles directly, but through [his boos, the grill’s manager] Roger Sperry, as though an interpreter were already necessary. After Roger’s death, the food improved in inverse proportion to the conversation. The men at the counter wouldn’t have said as much to Miles, but in their opinion he spent too much time with his back to them, attending to their sputtering hamburgers rather than their stories and grievances and jokes. While appreciative of his competence, they began to suspect that he had little interest in their conversation…

Note that Miles is defined in his customers’ eyes by his family, they have no idea what college is for or why anybody would want to go except to learn useful skills that he could take back home and put to work for the most practical and mundane tasks of living life as they live it, and they resent his competence, never mind his talent, as a cook, even though they enjoy his food, because it separates him from them---they think that he thinks it makes him better than them.

During the presidential campaign, whenever the political media could force itself to focus on something other than the topic of her emails, it was to shake their heads and intone solemnly about her supposed lack of authenticity and her supposed elitism and how both caused her to misunderstand and slight the concerns and troubles of white working class voters who were the only voters who mattered. She was, the concern trolling went, out of touch with the regular folks living economically anxious in Real America. For some reason I never grasped, her fondness for hot sauce was considered emblematic of her snobbery. Probably it was just the Clinton Rules at work:

Anything a Clinton says or does is suspect and a sign of their vaulting ambition even if it’s something every other politician says or does and is therefore to be covered as a scandal or a scandal-in-the-making.

I guess we were going to find out that the bottles of hot sauce she carried in her purse were paid for out of donations to the Clinton Foundation by hot sauce manufacturers who were paying to play. Questions needed to be asked!

Anywho…

This probably explains why I remember her statements about bringing broadband access to rural areas that didn’t have it---people in many out of the way small towns were using dialup, if they had any internet access of their own at all---were met with dismissive sneering and knowing smirks by savvy pundits who seemed to be willfully mischaracterizing what she was saying as complaining about her own inconvenience when she stumped in those unwired places. That was my impression at the time and how I’d remembered it since until I did a little homework for this post. I couldn’t google up any columns, op-eds, think pieces, or transcripts of TV bobbleheading to back me up. What I’m thinking now is that I was remembering some random Tweets that flew through my Twitter Timeline during one of the idle hours when I had nothing better to do than keep half an eye on Twitter. In this I was violating two basics of using social media:

1.) Never let strolls down memory lane take the place of doing your homework.

2.) Always keep in mind that what’s going on in your news feed at the moment is representative of nothing except what’s going on in your news feed at the moment.

Even so, it’s still my impression of the coverage she got generally---and googling does back me up here---that she was never given credit for the many detailed plans she laid out for dealing with the problems of working class and middle class America (which she didn’t just see as white and confined to the small towns and rural areas of the Midwest). Not by the media and not by the white folks living in those small towns and rural areas whose lives she intended to help improve.

The reason for the media’s stubbornness is pretty obvious. They were determined to find ways to compare her unfavorably to Trump. It wasn’t that they were in the tank for him. They were, as they always are, in the tank for their own institutional vanity. They pride themselves on their objectivity which they define as balancing one side against the other without taking sides even if one side isn’t just wrong but deliberately wrong and wrong to destructive purpose. Trump was the subject of too many negative stories---I wonder why---so they had to balance them out with negative stories about Clinton.

There were various reasons for voters to resist giving her credit---one of which is, I think, generally ignored by the media and by many ”progressives” who are convinced that what those voters wanted was an out and out socialist (preferably one with white hair that wouldn’t stay combed): they were Republicans with the natural partisan disinclination to give someone from the other party credit for anything. (We Democrats are never like that, are we?) But along with the partisanship---and the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and sheer bloody-minded vindictiveness---that Trump appealed to, enflamed, and exploited, was something that’s laid out in that passage from “Empire Falls”.

All political candidates have flaws. The ones analysts identify as “fatal” are usually identified in hindsight after a candidate has lost. One of Clinton’s “fatal” flaws was something her supporters (me among them) regarded as one of her greatest strengths---her competence.

That, along with her can-do spirit, separated her from the very people she had set out to help.

Trump liked to boast that he alone could fix what was ailing America. But he didn’t mean it. Fix it, that is. His message was things had gotten so bad that there was nothing to do but tear it all down while punishing the people who’d screwed it all up, and those people happened to be Those People, you know, THEM!

THEM and the liberals buying their votes with free stuff paid for with money picked from the pockets of Real Americans.

To a point, that was Bernie’s message too. Not the racist and punitive part. The things have gotten so bad that there is no way to fix it except tear it all down and start over part: We needed a revolution with himself as the man on a horse leading the charge.

Clinton’s message was we can fix it and I’ve got some good ideas how to go about it.

But inherent in that message was the assertion that she had a degree of competence, knowledge, experience, and expertise few of the rest of us possess. As the Babe said, it isn’t bragging if you can do it, but it’s how most of us tend to take this kind of assertion and we resent it.

This is just human nature. We don’t like people who are smarter and more competent than us because they remind us we’re not as smart and competent as we like to think we are. Not making people feel inferior while you’re demonstrating your superiority is a talent and a rare one.

Mind if I speak figuratively and not literally (although literarily) for a minute?

Thanks.

I have no doubt that if Hillary had been asked about backhoes or septic tanks, she’d have known the answers, having anticipated the questions and done her homework. If she didn’t know, she’d have gone and looked it up, studied the topic, and gotten back to the questioners with the answers.

Which would cause the Chuck Todds of the world to dismiss her diligence as her being “over-prepared.”

And put her in the same boat as Miles Roby.

The customers at her counter wouldn’t have wanted the answers. They wouldn’t need them. Not from her. They’d know where they were going to sink the septic tank and how to operate a backhoe. What they didn’t know individually, they could learn from each other. And they’d know which local experts to turn to otherwise. What they’d want to hear was that she understood why septic tanks and backhoes were on their minds. They wouldn’t appreciate her offering to go off and do her homework. They wouldn’t admire her conscientiousness and diligence. They’d want her to stay right there and just listen and not turn their back on them even if it was to make sure their hamburgers didn’t burn. They’d rather she talked with them about their problems instead of to them about her solutions for those problems. They’d rather she listened as they talked about the way things used to be instead of instructing them about the way they could be. They’d want her to be more interested in hearing about the past they still feel as their present and not so enthusiastic about outlining her plans for a future they can’t imagine except as having no place in it for them.

Trump got a lot of credit from the media for just using the word infrastructure during the campaign. It proved what a populist he was. He didn’t have any real plans to improve the country’s roads and bridges, schools and public buildings. He hasn’t come up with any since he became president. What he did provide was the opportunity for his voters to complain about their roads and bridges and schools. They didn’t want solutions. They wanted to feel aggrieved.

More to my point, they didn’t want to be told how improving infrastructure would make their lives better in the future, even if the future is only as far away as next year.

They wanted to grumble about the pothole they hit this morning on their way to work.

This is a problem every progressive politician with a technocratic bent faces. Actually, it’s turned out to be a problem for every conservative politician with an ideological bent too. Voters don’t want you to talk about your big ideas. They want to talk to you about themselves.

Internet access is necessary infrastructure. Clinton’s plan to bring broadband to places that don’t have it is the 21st Century equivalent of building dams and canals. For some out of the way places it would be the equivalent of electrification. You can’t do business in a national economy, never mind a global one, if you can’t communicate nationally and globally via reliable online services. Just the opposite of proving her out of touch, it showed how attuned she was to living anywhere in the information age.

But people are people wherever they live. They don’t want to talk about fixing their problems as much as they want to grouse about having those problems. If they start complaining about how their dialup kept hanging up the other day and the YouTube video they wanted to view kept buffering, and you start in on explaining how wonderful it will be when everybody’s wired to broadband, they’ll interrupt you to tell you you’re missing the point.

The point is that when they did get YouTube to load, the guy in the video didn’t tell them a thing they already didn’t know about sinking a septic tank.

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“Empire Falls” by Richard Russo is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Comments

[Lynn D. Dewees]

Two farmers are standing by the fence.
A dog is nearby and the dog is howling like crazy.
Farmer 1 says "Is that your dog"
Farmer 2 say "Yup"
Farmer 1 "Why is he howling like that"
Farmer 2 "He's sitting on a burr"
Farmer 1 "Why doesn't he get up?"
Farmer 2 "He'd rather howl".

I was 8 or 10 when I read that story (I'm 61 now), but I've been amazed my whole life how true it is.

And you're right, you can't fix other people's problems. Just listen politely, make noises or nod your head at the appropriate points and sympathize. Only give advice if you are asked for it.

[Lawrence]

So Hillary was Mansplaining to the WWC? Maybe that's not the right term. Male relationship noob fail?
"I had such a bad day at work. I've told you that Raimundo and Genevieve are such suck ups, and..."
"Hey, I had an idea of what you could do about that."
"Don't you know sometimes I just want to be listened to?" Door slams.

Isn't that what you're describing? These conservative men, in defiance of all their professed personality traits, just need a shoulder to cry on? What do you do with people who just do not know themselves?