The New Middle Class
Merle Haggard used to sing a song called “The Workingman’s Blues,” a common song among C&W, old rock & roll, and blues from all venues—the workingman—works like the devil from sun up to sundown for little pay then he gets a little drunk to relax and they throw him in jail; plus he has a lot of kids and of course a wife, barefoot and pregnant again usually. I mean it can read “The Workingwoman’s Blues,” too; I don’t mean to discriminate except it still is a man’s world (like James Brown used to sing)—even when a woman’s in charge. Oooh, that will get me shot at.
All of this because of the janitors protesting in Houston, Texas. Most of them of foreign tongue and accent—can I say most of them with Spanish as their first language?-- though a lot of them are blacks, or what Michael Richards calls the N word. During my growing up in the racist South, in racist Texas, but under very farsighted people who taught me that the Civil War was anything but civil and that the God they believed in loved us all, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his [old Uncle Jesus] sight, Uncle Jesus loves the children of the world," and as a result of these white folks’s educated reasonings, I was forbidden to ever use the N word at the risk of having my mouth washed out with soap--a truly cruel and horrible old-way-parental punishment for such crimes. To this day, I still find it hard, hell, imposible to use that word, even in writing. The F word? I’ll say that all day, in every phrase I utter, but the N word, and it is locked away in my subconscious, is a far worse word than Fuck. Fuck isn’t personal; the N word cuts right through the layers of defense and stabs right into the solar plexus. Only a white scumbag could come up with such a word; the same white scumbags who came up with “fuck,” as far as tracing word origins is concerned—and I shall be corrected if I’m wrong about that—the accurate l hat will pin my ass to the high-court linquist's barn door. My point being, yes, most of these protesting janitors were of a color other than white. [I must note here that American black folks came up with a great insulting form of Fuck, "motherfucker," which when used by one man against another, no matter his color or origins, will induce a brutal fight to the near death. "Why you, son of a bitch...you don't call me a motherfucker and get away with it, you motherfucker." Wonderful! How I love the explitive! Gosh darn. Heavens to Betsy! And Heavens to Betsy got my ass whipped one time [my parents didn't "spank" me, they "whipped" me. That's what a whippin' is; however, a "whuppin'" is a whole other ball game--a whuppin' is where you get you head knocked off by someone with a wolf ticket out on your ass. "I will personally whup your ass if you don't leave my wife alone." "I'll give you the whippin' of your life, you little [bleep-bleep]...." Maybe I should keep this a wholesome blog? Naw! Ain't nothin' wholesome much in the world this day and age. It may say it's wholesome on the label, but check out the ingredients, there's something deadly in it no matter how next-to-nature it's manufacture. Sometimes life can be just about avoiding its many poisons. Poison stands for death--the skull and crossbones--like Georgie Porgie, our "president," and John "Loser" Kerry's good ole boy Yale secret society (do you really have to give a guy a blowjob to get in that club? Anybody know? Com'on you Sons of Eli, spill the beans about being a business major at Yale.
One of those Houston custodial workers was a Mexican-American lady who said she cleaned offices four hours a night for 5 bucks an hour flat—no benefits just 5 bucks an hour. Hey, you’re sayin’, come on, that’s 140 bucks a week if she works every night—plenty of money for a workingclass woman in this the Land of the Free—free to die in this case since the woman has since these protests began found out she has breast cancer and needs immediate surgery and chem. treatments. Too F’in’ bad, says the Big Bossman—let her eat cake—or maybe she should go back to her country of origin and get her treatment there. Hell’s Bells, old Steve McQueen and recently Coretta Scott King went to Mexico for cancer treatments.
The last job I had here in NYC I cleared 25 bucks an hour—which means I was making close to 40 bucks an hour. I had a healthcare plan, I had a dental plan, I had a life insurance policy, plus a pension plan. Not bad, right? And still the company I worked for made tons of millions of fast bucks--when I got a raise, they simply went up on their fees. The women that cleaned our offices at night were Spanish in one of our buildings and Haitian in another. I never ever considered their plight as they worked around me especially when I worked night shifts. As a person trained to have a sociologist’s eye, I observed several working patterns and hierarchies among the clean-up workers—the cleaners were always women but they always had a man with them—usually a big overweight man who collected the ladies’s bags of garbage and loaded them on a dolly to take them to the building incinerators. That man always had privileges that the women didn’t have and there definitely was something sexual going on between this dude and some of the women, several of whom were young and very pretty, and we dudes in the office were told you could slip that big dude a twenty if you were interested in maybe getting a quickie before you went home to your boring wife and boring kids. Back when I worked at Time Inc., the cleaning staff were Polish women. My best friend at the time was always staying late to make it with one of those women—he had two of them who would come in his office, lock the door, give him a quickie, empty his garbage and vacuum his carpet, and then go on about their chores. He said he gave them a hundred bucks every now and then if they were especially “healthy,” as he put it.
All of this started me to thinking, and it has to do with these janitors wanting healthcare, why don’t communities start their own health centers, at least neighborhood clinics every so many blocks—emergency centers with emergency workers—you know, save waiting for an ambulance? Or why not union hospitals? Clinics? I mean, come on, NYC is currently helping the Mets build a new “modern” baseball stadium that will cost close to a billion dollars by the time it’s finished so why not health stations like fire stations. Have them with the firehouses. Our billionaire mayor has given away huge development rights in Brooklyn to one of his rich asshole friends who’s bringing the New Jersey Nets basketball team to Brooklyn—the mayor has given away millions in taxbreaks and lease rights to this billionaire buddy; they could have built the greatest free medical center in the world for the millions they're losing bring that stupid basketball team to Brooklyn [and then having the nerve to claim it's like having the Dodgers back in Brooklyn--no it ain't, boys, no it ain't.
Billionaire Bloomingidiotburg and Rudi Guiliani really wanted to privatize city hospitals, most of which were built as free hospitals for city residents, the oldest and biggest free hospital in the country here, Belleview Hospital over on First Avenue—yeah, that’s right, the one where they dump all the totally insane together in one big wild-ass dorm room and whose terminal patient area is a screened-in porch on a back once-loading-dock that brinks out over the filthy floating-with-rotting-bodies East River—like when a cranky bitching nurse rolls your feeble ass out on that porch so you can watch the garbage scows plough by you know right then and there that your goose is cooked and ready to be devoured by that river, that River Styx—especially if you die a John Doe, like a lot of them over in Belleview do every hour of every day; then your old rotten ass is piled on one of those scows and they float you up to Hart Island, bury you a numbered condo grave and there you disappear--totally disappear, born a named child with gleeful hope but died and buried a nameless number.
Isn’t it weird to think that our hospitals now are corporations that are indebted to their stockholders to make profits?—profits off the sick, mostly mentally sick since I think most diseases that attack people attack them because they are under stresses they just can’t mentally control so they let go and the disease takes them over, or depression takes them over which leads to drinking, drug addiction, more depression, and eventually insanity or if you’re lucky, a quick death.
Why shouldn’t people suffering from something like a devastating cancer get free treatment?—if they survive, they can maybe pay a pittance back when they get back on their feet and able to have an income again? AIDS patients, too; why shouldn’t they get free treatments? I don’t get this privatizing every god-damn aspect of our lives and yet we aren’t allowed to privatized ourselves—oh no, everything we do has to be out in the open; our books have to be spotless or else we're branded felons.
As Lefty Frizzell used to sing, “If you got the money, honey, I got the time….” That’s pretty much the preamble you have to sing before you face anything devastating in this country. Privatize yourself; put your name on the New York Stock Exchange, sell your soul to the highest bidder even if its Old Ned himself buying up your shares.
Old Lyin' BastardI notice old Aussie asshole Ruptured Murdoch is being praised by his own Fox News numbskulls for taking the strong step of stopping the Judith Regan–O.J. Simpson interview that was to have introduced O.J.’s newest literary effort, I think it's called How I Would Have Killed Them Had I Done It, or something absolutely scumbucket like that. Sounds exactly like a Murdoch sleazebag PR move, yet now his highass is lying like the lowest Dingo and he's bullshitting that he had not been aware of how controversial and insulting such an interview was apparently seen by the American teevee viewer—and, hell, he didn’t know he owns NewsCorp that owns Harper-Collins that owns Judith Regan Books--give us a break! And here's old Judy Regan back again, the celebrity publishing whore—the woman who banged old worthless ass Bernie Kerick in an apartment he was given when he was becoming a hero during 9/11 that he used to bang all his mistresses an apartment that overlooked Ground Zero, and he banged old Judith one day with her naked butt in the dust of all those innocent victims whose flesh and bones were literally turned to dust and ashes by those tumbling down fiery WTC buildings on 9/11—disgusting, but, hey, she’s sooooo successful—and she is the editor who made her claim to fame on the publication of Howard Stern’s first book—Private Parts, the fastest selling book of all time, setting all kinds of publishing records, putting Judith Regan in a national spotlite and eventually making her a rich bitch with win/win money behind her pretty good-looking, I must admit, sweet ass.
Murdoch knew all about that O.J. book. Come on; you don’t do anything like that without Murdoch knowing about it—it’s certainly his style—sleaze and slime—what they used to call “yellow journalism." He turned snobby London newspapers into National Enquirer-type tabloids; and this Aussie sleazebag grew up working for his father’s Aussie newspapers—his father being a liberal politically back when little Rupert was wanting to be a newspaper reporter—why, even young Rupert at first was a liberal. Oh yeah, mates! What a lying piece of crap. We the people are who blew that OJ interview out of the water. Yeah, Rupert stopped it at Fox but not before he got so many letters of complaint and advertising cancellations he was facing another losing quarter for Fox, a losing network, just like Murdoch's New York newspaper is a losing effort. Old lying fart.
When in doubt, LIE.
thegrowlingwolffor The Daily Growler
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