It’s a good thing we have the AP, the news organization of choice for those who support our boys in uniform, to let us know when there’s a desperate need to be filled. In this very sad story, they describe the plight of those poor misguided souls from small towns who, desperate to survive in the dog-eat-dog world that is this broken economy, swallow the tripe coming from BushCo and enlist in the Armed Forces. As they tell the story:
Nearly half of the more than 3,100 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have come from towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. One in five hailed from hometowns of less than 5,000…..Many of the hometowns of the war dead aren’t just small, they’re poor. The AP analysis found that nearly three quarters of those killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.
As supporters of our boys, we need to come together in this, their time of need. If there’s one thing I tell people about the loyal readership here at the Good Ship Pasty, it’s that they’re committed. And if they’re not, they ought to be. In that spirit of commitment, I have formed the Help a Hick Foundation. I already have some good ideas about how to move forward, like spreading out through these poor rural communities and having teach-ins and consciousness-raising sessions. I need help, though. Those of you who would like to volunteer for the Steering Committee, please e-mail me so that we can get this project off the ground ASAP. Just think of the difference we can make in people’s lives by explaining to them how they’ve stupidly bought into this war for profit, while, ironically, NOT GETTING ANY THEMSELVES. At the same time, we can put up Job Centers, and do some union recruiting. We could even explain how much damage this war is doing to the environment, and teach them the benefits of natural foods, not to mention which coffees they should boycott.
I’m already feeling a sense of accomplishment just from the good intentions that are flowing through me right now. Won’t you help today?
No, I won’t. What for? They’re all over in Iraq living in Saddam’s palace. All of them. Every single one. Surrounded by filthy amenities. No, not filthy, vulgar…no, that’s not it. Oh yeah! Obscene amenities, that’s it! The right honorable Jack “Thanks for showing up Bronze Star with no V for Valor device but still every bit a combat veteran and you’re not chickenhawk” Murtha said so. So, those hayseed drooling killbots will just have to do with no further assistance from this sophisticant, thank you very much. Although I will express duly shrill moral outrage over the terrible living conditions in Walter Reed. At least until after BushCo (TM) is out of office.
AP = Appalling Posturing.
Sure, I’ll help. Just so long as I get to shoot somebody.
Or maybe we could design cards like these.
Um…hell no?
I’m going back to Oklahoma in a few weeks, I’ll be sure to ask my relatives who have served in the military whether they feel they’re missing out by not receiving this edjimacatin.
Holy shit, they’ve got a “Women are like teabags” teapot. Which I first read as “Women like teabagging.”
ACK
The snobbery is just so over-the-top.
But I think we should also have an “Adopt a Hick” program, where we take them into the big sophisticated city and teach them how to ride the subway and ignore the panhandlers.
And I wanna know where the card is for “I’m sorry your spouse of 24 years left, what kind of weapon would you like to ease your anguish?” I’ve got someone I need to send it to.
I fricking hate it when press idiots mangle economic data like this. They’re glossing over a very big reality here. The cost of living in most small towns is far lower than that of suburbs and big cities. Therefore a person who lives in West Texas pays a lot less in living expenses than someone living in Baltimore. Therefore he can earn far less and live in relative comfort.
During college I lived in a smaller town, 8,000 people, where 1 bedroom apartments were almost always below $300 a month, and this was less than 10 years ago. Despite the fact that the town had a decent size University, which probably drove up housing costs.
By using national averages, which are heavily affected by big city incomes, they are painting a picture that only confirms their preconcieved notions that only poor dumb white-trash hicks join the military. I bet if you compared standards of living between small town recruits with national averages you would erase most of this percieved socioeconomic class differential. But then they might have to face the fact that the overwhelming majority of the military join due to patriotism and national pride.
I won’t help..
Hell if you take all the bumpkins out of the service, how will the Military find snipers? You know those hicks develop the abitility to shoot straight from hunting squirrel and racoon….And don’t forget all the other varmints that reside in
in the woods….
We should discourage the hickoids from thinking globally. It’s beyond their psyches and we can’t have them traipsing into the Blue – have you seen their xeriscaping?
AP= absolute pussification
This could be a part of the problem.(Wall Street Journal, don’t know if subscription req’d)
Excerpt:
URBAN WITHDRAWAL
A Retreat From Big Cities
Hurts ROTC Recruiting
I mean, if they give up getting recruits from Urban areas, what do you think that does to the averages?
No! “Poverty” obviously builds character, and anyway we’ve been helped enough, thank you.
Along with what The Deacon says, I could rent small cabins around here which would be cheaper than my property taxes, though I also am “poor” by income. I don’t really even need to file tax returns. One of my daughters lives in a small house in yet another “poor” area for about $350/month, including utilities.
Another of my “poor” friends with a family of 5 owns a ranch and 3 vacation cabins, among other things. She works assiduously to stay below poverty line so that her two daughters can get about $70,000/yr. in edjumacation grants.
Poverty also bred a Marine another of my daughters just married. They are not poor, and they never have been.
But we all are small and rural, and proud.
Sounds to me like the Army has decided not to recruit people who have multiple body piercings and carry man-purses.
BECAUSE OF THE METROSEXUALITY!!!
McKeesport is about 12 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA. The majority of residents own shoes and enjoy the benefits of indoor plumbing.
As someone whose mother grew up in McKeesport, and who himself went to high school in McKeesport (my bona fides are the jelly cookies at Minerva’s Bakery on Fifth Avenue), allow me to speak to the matter:
The town, just miles outside of the city limits of Pittsburgh (and hardly a rural area – ain’t gonna see a tractor but you’ll hear plenty of hip-hop and classic soul today), has been in depression since steel manufacturing became cheaper elsewhere. The fact that the laws of economics, like the laws of gravity, were enforced on the marketplace has been blamed on every Rethuglican administration since Reagan (never mind that the local pols are all Dems and are always there to hand out the government cheese). A veritable cottage industry of dependency support has grown, like weeds, around this fact, supported by the local pols and their desire to be reelected so that they can keep ‘helping’ you.
In the end, it, like many other towns of the rust belt, has been left behind by its youth and former youth. I’m gone now, an hour’s flight south of you, Jeff; my daughter’s cardiologist is also from the same neighborhood. Neither of us could imagine returning.
They’ve left not because of lack of opportunity – there’s plenty of that in the surrounding towns, and in the ‘big city’. They’ve left just like their grandparents before them, who left another country (then it was from slavic communities in eastern Europe) to come to the steel town in the first place, because it wasn’t where they were (and, really, if you grew up in or near McKeesport, and kept hearing on the news and in the local paper every day about what a s–thole it has become, why would you want to stay?). Our hunter-gatherer instincts, and our willingness to look for something better, haven’t left us yet. And that, in the end, is a good thing.
Oh, and one more thing. Towns just like this one are full of kids who haven’t become cynical about serving their country (if I started from the middle of McKeesport, I’d be at least a 25 minute drive to the nearest copy of the New York Times). I’m sure if someone did a geoplacement of Medal of Honor winners, you would find a preponderance of this fact over many wars.
TW: It’s been a long time since I was last in McKeesport. But a part of me is always there.
Heck, I enlisted and I came from a union town of 150,000. My Dad was a doc, Mom a teacher.
And I done got me some book learnin’ – a BA, MA and one of them thar JDs too!
Y’all ‘scuse me – I have to go check the moonshine still… hee yuck!
So the AP is lamenting the Soldier From The Suburbs, while wording it to sound like most of our GIs are from the sticks of Kentucky? B-b-b-b-but that would seem opposed to the standards of journa– no, I can’t even get through that without laughing.
<blockquote>The snobbery is just so over-the-top.
Ya think, PC? More than a little. I grew up in a middle class suburb of Kansas City, and had my BA before I enlisted at 24. Not that any of that matters to AP or anyone else. As far as they’re concerned, any state in between NY and CA, with that little island of barely educated descendants of Slavic brutes in Chicago, is purely cow/pig/sorghum intensive. And thus, destined for economic ruin.
The local rag here played the same article, and mentioned Seaford Delaware. it’s a small town, that’s been hit by plant closings (Dupont nylon facility) and other changes. The lead was that the small towns are bearing the brunt.
All this begs the question: If this military were led by Clinton instead of Bush, and they were in Kosovo or still sweating in the Kuwaiti desert, how would this ‘fact’ change? or should we believe that the recruiting ofices in blue country would be swamped once Hilary saves us?
My mailing address is in a town whose population is less than 10,000 people, if you only use that as a gauge. If you look just a teensy bit further, though, you’ll find that it’s effectively part of Orlando, which has a metro area population of about a million and a half people.
I’m a bumpkin!
AP=asinine pseudojournalism
Pennsylvania especially has an inordinate number of these “small towns” like Green Lane Boro, population 584 and all of .3 sq miles of area. It’s suburban Philly, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a municipal boundry.
But they’re all hicks and rubes, no doubt.
Not to start a competitive thread on living costs in small towns, but in the late 1980’s I lived in College Station, Texas (home of the fightin’ Texas Aggies! Gig ‘em!) and shared a 2-bedroom, 1.5 bath, half-of-a-duplex 2 blocks off campus that rented for $200/month (of course, utilities were extra -a round $60/month).
Student slum? Hell yes. Affordable and comfortable to live in? Double hell yes. Was A&M full of hicks? Only if you think engineering students with Southern accents are hicks. Did many go military after their college graduation? Well, mostly the military cadets, but likely some of the civvies, also.
The correct response to people who belittle small-town life is to ask them how they like living in a rabbit warren.
The most recent Heritage study shows that military recruits tend to trend “rural” in the first instance, so it should not surprise the AP that fatalities do also.
While rural, military recruits overall tend to come from areas making above the national average. And the trend has been for the poorest quintile to be underrepresented.
This is why they have focused on the fatalities, rather than the military in general. The Army alone has had 650,000 troops in Iraq since the the invasion. That there is some under- or over-representation in the one-half of one percent of them who died is not necessarily statistically significant of any larger point.
But it is classic lefty thinking, as it underlies affirmative action as well. That African-Americans may be under-represented in the piano tuning business is not necessarily proof of racism in that business. That the war dead come more from smaller, poorer towns is meant to imply what, exactly?
I’m guessing that the enemy isn’t targeting US troops differently based on their hometowns. And there’s nothing about coming from a smaller, poorer town that necessarily renders one physically or intellectually inferior in terms of military training. (Indeed, overall, recruits are better educated that their perrs on average.) So what the AP has identified is a sad coincidence, with a not-so-subtle undertone of social Darwinism.
But it’s a nice emotional appeal that can help sap morale, which was probably the purpose of the piece.
What Deacon said. I was from a little town in the boonies of Nebraska before I joined in the Air Force. You can buy a very nice little 5-bedroom, all-brick house there today for $80,000.
Someone earning well under the national avereage there could buy that house, no sweat. If it were in Baltimore or San Francisco lots of people earning twice or triple the national average couldn’t afford it.
On a related side note, how much do you reckon the AP makes selling stories like this one (or their wire service, on which stories like these are shipped) to small local newspapers like, say, the McKeesport Shopper (or whatever-it-might-be-called)?
Do stories like these make the small local (maybe even weekly) paper more or less likely to continue their relationship with AP?
Yes.
Love and Kisses,
Rice grad
More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.
As they don’t show us their analysis in detail, I can’t imagine how much ‘more than half’ that ‘more than half’ is, but, gee, given that we’re talking about the national average of poverty, it doesn’t take much variation at all to make “more than half” come from such a place.
After all, if we had a Gaussian distribution half would be expected to in the first place (Assuming we take the average as a point rather than a distribution, of course).
ELarson,
Unfortunately, the local rag, the Daily News, is a paid site ($153/year!) so I can’t tell if they carried this story or not.
Oh, another BTW. More bona fides: my grandmother lived down the block from the Warhola family. His brother painted soup cans for a living.
???
Great name for a brothel near the front lines, huh?
What a crock. No one is “forced” into the military by financial considerations. The little town I just moved from in Nebraska has a meat packing plant and they can’t find (legal) workers to fill all the positions. They start at over $13/hour. So do you pack up and go to Iraq where someone is shooting at you, or do you pack up and move to Nebraska and make $30K a year cutting up cows? The people who are from the small towns who are signing up for the military are doing it for the same reason the people in the big towns are. They want to.
Dear Rice owlet, thanks for the chuckle. Maybe we can compare marching bands sometime?
I also grew up not too far from McKeesport (my bona fides: the Original Hot Dog Shoppe a.k.a. Dirty O’s in Oakland, and the god-awful smell coming from Neville Island) and I was forced into the military at the tender age of 17 by…well, the fact that I’m a poor, garbage blanc peasant who doesn’t know no better ‘n’at.
What this really is is the AP saying “O! The great unwashed! See how they suffer under the heel of the lords of the manor!”
No one who grew up more than ten minutes drive from a major metropolitan center could possibly comprehend “smart folk” ideas like truthiness and sensitivity and thinking what they’re goddamn told to think!
Thomas….
mmmmmmmmmm…..
O-fries…..
and a crispy hot dog….
mmmmmmmmmm…..
No longer OT, know what you mean. Dad worked at the ‘circle W ranch’ but was just a technician. Sons got smart, an’ got away. Still root for the Stillers, though.
To the mainstream media:
Fuck off and die. For such “highly educated” people, you seem incapable of pulling out a dictionary to look up the words “honor,” “sacrifice,” and “patriotism.”
Sincerely,
A legacy military member
Maybe we can compare marching bands sometime?
Except when they’re making fun of Reville, I happen to like the MOB.
I wonder what living costs are like in the B/CS microplex these days? I was there from 1984 to 1989, and it was pretty good living, even if I was just a poor dumn Aggee.
Now, if you can explain to me who died and gave us a basketball team, I’d be really appreciative.
So that’s why I joined? To escape the poverty of western New York (West of the Hudson is cow country, you know.) I’m glad somebody finally told me. Why else would anyone quit college and join the Marines in the midst of a shooting war, except for the $128.50 per month we were paid, and free ammunition?
I’m such a dummy; I could have walked to Canada from my home in a couple of hours. OK, I think the pedestrian toll on the bridge was a quarter, but I’m sure I had that much…