Ask A Genius 1063: The Hard Times for White Blue-Collar Americans
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/05
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I remember when I used to work at the pub in my old hometown. They were considering me for a potential managerial position at the Bistro side of the building. They owned the property. A manager there had some issues and eventually left because she got frustrated with management. I was in charge of cleaning up the office area. As I was doing so, I found a coffee mug, a thermos coffee mug, a simple one you can get at Starbucks or Tim Hortons. While rifling through all the stuff, cleaning up papers, and organizing things, I scrubbed everything down, making it tidy and sanitary, a proper office.
The mug had something in it, and when I opened it up, it looked like coffee. Then I took a smell. It was hard, like rum and coke. It was black and appeared mildly caffeinated black coffee, maybe dark roast, but it was hard liquor. It was another insight into small-town life and how many tragedies there are like that. People’s stories often need to be told. I think a lot of the Trump phenomenon is derived from that, in many white, poor, blue-collar, small rural towns, a huge geographic swath of American territory that may not be as dense per square mile. There are many stories like that, and that resentment is fueling it. It’s not like it’s baseless; they’ve been having hard times. I think it’s being redirected toward people who are also victimized differently in American society.
What are your thoughts on stuff like that, and maybe tie them to some of your public commentary?
Rick Rosner: Various forces affect different demographics. When I think about politics, I think about an exercise you must do in first-semester college physics. They give you a box and say it rests on a tilted table. You have to dissect all the forces on the box. The normal force is the table supporting the box’s weight and resisting gravity’s pull. So you have two arrows right there.
Then, if the table is tilted, you have the frictional force. There’s an arrow for friction and gravity pointing straight down. But since there’s a ramp, you’ve got a bunch of arrows. So you’ve got a bunch of forces on the middle class, the lower middle class, rural people, and less-educated people.
What you’re talking about is the quiet desperation of small-town rural life. There’s an arrow for that; that’s an old, long-standing arrow. Then you’ve got newer forces, like the loss of jobs to technology and people being pissed off, and that rage is exploited and redirected. People are trying to deflect the arrow by blaming it on the opposition like the Republicans blame the Democrats and vice versa. Then there’s a part they don’t talk about because they don’t have any solutions, and that’s often the tech angle. Somebody did a study and said that.
Technology could do 52% of the average working person’s job. However, there are demographic issues and the problem that older people have all the money, with 94% of privately held assets in America being held by people 45 years old and older.
You’ve got the problem of brainwashing low-information voters. There is a lot of targeted propaganda, both sophisticated and not, but generally not as good as it claims to be. For example, Cambridge Analytica was exploited by the Republicans and the Brexit supporters. They gathered social media information from people, pulled it from their accounts and classified them so they could be targeted with propaganda. But there were only about five flavours of propaganda. It could have been more precise, but bombarding people with propaganda is sufficient, even if it could be more precise. You’ll drive a certain percentage of people into stupid beliefs. So, what do you think about the idea that there are many legitimate grievances, but some people are also falling for the bullshit that is semi-targeted at them?
Jacobsen: When I was a janitor for two restaurants, it was for that pub and the cafe in the connected building. I knocked it down to about two hours a night to do both. It became a routine, and I did my three other shifts in the day at those restaurants, and then I did my janitorial shift. So, I would finish up in the dish pit or wherever I was, and then I would do my janitorial tasks:
- Cleaning bathrooms
- Sweeping the floor
- Mopping the floor
- Cleaning the tables
- Flipping the chairs on top of the tables
- All that shit.
It became a nice little dance. What was your experience early on, as a bouncer, roller skating waiter, nude model, etc., and as you become more proficient at it? I liked being a janitor.
Rosner: It was not dissimilar to when I started as a bouncer in 1980 at Middle Earth, a shitty little three-two beer bar in the basement underneath Jones Drug on the Hill in Boulder, Colorado. I tried to do my job and be of use. We didn’t have to throw out that many people, but I learned how to check IDs and loved doing so. Middle Earth would have Drown Night, five bucks for guys, four bucks for women, all the beer you could drink, and some people would drink to the point of puking. I became the guy who wanted to become indispensable so they couldn’t fire me, regardless of my other deficiencies as a bouncer. Those deficiencies weren’t visible because we needed to do more brawling. But I became the puke guy. If somebody puked, they’d call me, and I’d scoop up the chunks with a broom and a dustpan. The place was carpeted with disgusting carpet, and I was wearing cowboy boots or Frye boots, and I would stomp the juice into the carpet. And then, as a nude model, I learned what poses I could do comfortably.
Carole and I are watching this portrait artists’ competition out of Britain. They have amateurs sit for four hours, posing for celebrities, actors, and athletes. I can usually tell whether they can get through four hours of posing. You can’t pose for four hours with your legs crossed; that will be uncomfortable. The idea is to build an interesting pose with as many support points as possible. So, you can only pick a standing pose where you’re standing on your two feet.
It would help if you had a stick because it gives you one more point of support where you can shift your weight, not super perceptibly, but shift more of your weight to the stick, to the arm with the stick. You’re supposed to get a break every 20 to 25 minutes, regardless of the pose, but the idea is to distribute your weight across as many points as possible, which raises the probability that the pose will be bearable. It’s a thing you and I learned to do: certain poses that looked spectacular but were doable. For example, I am lying on my back, draped over a stool with my arms over my head, holding a book. My rib cage is cranked open, and my head is basically upside down. It looks like an ordeal of a pose, which it is, but because I have a book, I can distract myself with reading. So, you learn tricks.
I never learned how to hold a sleeper properly as a bouncer. A guy at Kimmel taught me the key to the sleeper hold until years after I finished most of my bouncing. It’s a hold where you come up behind somebody, throw your arm around their neck, and make them harmlessly, in most cases, and temporarily unconscious. I thought it was a straight arm bar straight across the neck, cutting off their windpipe, but no, that’s the way you strangle somebody to death. It’s a triangular bar against each side of the neck, which cuts off the carotid arteries to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. That puts somebody to sleep, usually without killing them. But I never learned how to do that. So, on the few occasions that I tried to do the sleeper hold, I was strangling somebody, and everybody in the bar would freak out, and the person I was strangling would freak out. Then, I’d let go of them. Then they’d turn around and punch me, at which point I’d grab them again and put them in the same stupid hold. So, I learned some stuff, and then I didn’t learn other stuff.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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