ZoWie wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 11:46 am
> Rivera
He knows his audience. TV is show business. Remember when California was sending its actors to public offices to restore Decent White Folks' boots on everyone else's faces? How they tried to turn the UC into a rich white kid school like U$C? How a body builder got elected governor? Geraldo is not alone. He's part of a phenomenon that's always been a part of right-reactionary politics.
> Dairyland
I know just where that is. Or, to be exact, was.
When I was a little kid we'd go through large stretches of places like that. There were orange trees, fields, and cows.
Haha LOTS of cows. For people here who don't know, the other nickname for the place was Cowtown.
There were always people outside doing hard work. There were tractors and old trucks.
Yes I found that part kind of interesting, even as a child. I REALLY dug going to the old parts of downtown and seeing the old buildings and decommissioned railroads, California Conservation Corps projects that were still operational. Always the history nerd.
One thing that should not be lost on people here is that the heaviest lifting of the hard work was done by Latinos. The dairy owners, who were probably 90% Dutch American, very openly them and approached that whole community with a real Simon Legree attitude. The scene was replicated -- still is -- over the hill in Kern County/Bakersfield, where that history is every bit as intense.
In other places, there were forests of oil derricks, like in those old photos of Texas. A lot of the beach towns had oil patches randomly appearing among the crowded apartment blocks. Signal Hill still has a place called Oil Patch Liquors, and a little park around Discovery Well #1. Culver City has whole hills of pipes, weird old industrial things that might or might not do anything, and a park where the dam collapsed from ground subsidence. Some other places, you might see normal suburban houses with pump jacks in the front yard. That's why there's always oil leaking into the ocean.
It was always understood that more of the world was like that than wasn't. My mother grew up on a farm. She got it.
SoCal tried to become a uniform expanse of little boxes, all in rows, with new sundown towns and shiny subdivisions with deed restrictions where conservative whites from points east could escape Those People. Orange County cut down the trees and grew a vast expanse of places with names like Garden Grove and Buena Park, where you really did see IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs everywhere.
I remember it, well. That's how I learned what the hell the John Birch Society was.
That's pretty much old news, thank goodness. OC is turning purple, or even blue in places.
Same for San Bernardino county. Actually, a childhood friend of mine's own mother (not from either of my hometowns) was in the Assembly for a while. I used to tease her about being president.
Thing is, our parents laid that groundwork as regular not-white people in that region. Her parents stayed D while mine jumped ship to the R's for religious reasons. But in that time, they had a lot more conscience and ethics. My parents moved to SoCA bright eyed and bushy tailed, just having watched the whites-only signs come down, and as soon as they get there...BAM, there's the Watts Rebellion, thanks to Ronald Reagan.
In the ensuing years, they got to learn was segregation California-style was. Same for desegregation and integration. So unfortunately, so did I, and the Latino kids who also had to endure these people.
Settling down in that area warped their minds and ground them down as individuals. White supremacy is designed to do that.
Now we have a similar attempt to escape, only this time by thinking maybe those 1940s fascist screamers had the right idea. All I see there is the old order dying. It's not going gently into that good night.
Not quite clear on what is meant here, but yes, they definitely are not going gently into the night. They are desperate and are starting to act like desperate caged animals who see the big needle full of tranquilizer coming. For the past generation and a half, they've been legally defanged. They want the fangs back, and they want their legalized discrimination back, with the government acting on their behalf, again.