Lump of Coal For Christmas

Gentle reader likely recalls the many times these essays have called out the ingrates in Red states, in particular Appalachia whose population would still be getting water from hand pumped wells, shitting in the dirt, and reading their Bibles with kerosene lamps were it not for the largesse of FDR and developed states. They remain multi-generational ingrates, whose leaders continue to push the USofA toward the United States of Alabama.

Yet another tome telling the tale. I've not yet read the book, and may not, naturally given that I am a member of the choir.

He is aghast that so many Appalachians vote against their own interests. (West Virginia went heavily for Donald Trump.) He posits that jobs versus health is a false choice. He suggests a way forward that includes reparations, the creation of new kinds of communities, free college tuition and other remedies.

As stated here more than once: the uneducated, unskilled, unemployed won't be helped by the likes of Orange Julius Caesar. He's just a Barnum, fleecing the already dispossessed, so hidebound and uneducated that they'll blame The Others (city/black/educated folks) rather than themselves for their predicament if gulled by an expert charlatan.

The review closes:

If a country can be judged by how it treats its worst-off citizens, we do not seem especially virtuous. "What made politicians and investors think," Stoll writes, "that they could do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted?"

The answer, naturally, lies in the title of Thomas Franks' "What's The Matter With Kansas". It's the stupidity, stupid.