I’ve only been to pick the Butcher up at work today and yet, somehow, I’ve lost my cell phone.
Edited to add: My phone has returned, leaving me to believe that the Butcher found it. Because we all know the Ghosts of the Civil War never return anything.
I’ve started the small squares. I’m going to run out of solid colors before I run out of needed squares; that’s obvious. But I’m going to settle for some all variegated squares. That’s fine.
Here’s how the tiny squares are going:
I have enough tiny squares to piece together half the pattern. But you can see why I doubled it. Piecing it together reveals that 1/2 of the original pattern just covers one couch cushion. Even if that’s just a quarter of the afghan, it’s still going to be small for my taste.
I’ve got to tell you, I’m deeply tickled to be making an afghan from thread my mom and I dyed. I just can’t believe that I’m going to take this from white yarn to finished colorful afghan and that there will never be another one quite like it.
Edited to add: The blue dye still rubs off when you crochet with it, so I clearly can’t avoid washing it. The dye all claims to be colorfast, but is there anything I can do to protect the color when I wash it?
I wanted to get back to the exchange in the Ag Committee meeting from Tuesday. But I still don’t know how to wrap my head around it. There’s a lot going on here and all pieces seem important. I don’t know, though, how they fit together.
The Pieces
Agriculture in the South has revolved around a few labor-intensive crops. In Tennessee, the most profitable crop for a long time was tobacco. But, because of shifts in tobacco use and issues with the feds, folks are having to find other uses for their land. Many people have shifted to growing plants and trees for nurseries. And this is now an important stream of revenue for people in our state.
It also, is hard, labor-intensive work.
…
Never mind. This isn’t helpful.
Let me tell you this story again.
The Professor and I found ourselves in Coahoma County down in Mississippi a few years ago on the Stovall Plantation, which is, as you recall, the plantation where Muddy Waters worked. You may also recall that, after Emancipation, many black people were free in a technical sense, but still worked basically as indentured servants on the land they had previously provided slave labor on.
Things were different in important ways, but things were the same in important ways. You still needed to be closely associated with a white family (run, obviously, by a powerful white man) in order to have a somewhat safe place in society. You needed to have a white man to vouch for you, someone who could say “That’s one of mine.”
So, it’s hard for me to hear any white guy speaking to another white guy talking about non-white men using the term “mine.”
When Swafford says “I can’t speak for everybody but I know mine,” I think he means “I can’t speak for everybody’s experience with their Hispanics, but I know my Hispanics and can speak about my observations of them.” It could be that he means “I can’t speak for everybody who doesn’t go to the doctor, but I know the reasons my employees don’t go.”
But it’s hard for me to hear that second thing in what he said.
So, yes, anyway, the Professor and I are driving through the Stovall Plantation, trying to picture what it would have been like in the late 40s, when we pull up to the Stovall Plantation store to get a pop.
I run in. It’s empty except for a couple of white women who are obviously employees in the store. Before me are a few tables where folks might eat, some small rows of snacks and coolers with drinks.
I grab my Diet Dr Pepper and go to the counter to pay. And there, on the counter, are two piles of slips of paper, one in English and one in Spanish, both containing directions for how one should properly treat and address the women behind the counter.
To me, it seemed like evidence that one disenfranchised group with little power was slowly being replaced by another disenfranchised group with little power. There’s also something important there about the precarious position of the white women, who must be treated as if they have authority and are due respect, but only because, again, they have some white man to vouch for them.
That makes me wonder about Representative Bell’s comments about abortion, and how it’s that those 50 million aborted fetuses aren’t here that causes labor problems.
I’m not the only person to notice how deeply personally offended men who’ve never had any woman they know abort fetuses they’re responsible for helping to create get by the whole notion of abortion.
And I’m not the only person who’s noted how it seems to have more to do with controlling women than saving babies (since these are the same people who can turn around and cut funding for social services to babies, once they’re born).
But I wonder, then, if abortion is perceived as a threat to the white social order (we cannot overlook the ways in which the abortion controversy plays out much differently in different racial and ethnic communities). White women belong to their fathers and then to their husbands. A child is an indication that the husband has successfully taken claim of the wife.
There is room for “fallen” women. If you find yourself pregnant, you might be lucky enough to still have some man somewhat closely associate with you–maybe the baby’s father, maybe a man from your family, maybe some other man who’s taken pity on you. But you have some place in the hierarchy, even if it’s at the bottom.
And your child, or children, also have a place–at the bottom.
Because, ask yourself this. If Swafford can’t get “Americans” to work for him now, why does Bell assume that those “Americans” who’d been aborted would be willing to work for him?
Well, they would be willing to work for him if that were the best choice they had.
And why would that be the best choice they had?
Well, it would be if they accepted their place in the hierarchy.
Abortion, then, is not just a medical procedure. It’s not just ending a life. It’s a rejection of what’s supposed to happen to women who affiliate too closely with the wrong men.
It not only is a way for women to “cheat,” to get out of having evidence of their shameful behavior. But it’s a bigger cheat because it deprives powerful white men of desperate white people they can exploit.
It seems to me that both of these men are talking around the same underlying problem. There’s a lot of work in our state that, though it doesn’t take even a high school diploma to do, needs to be done by fairly smart people. You can’t be stupid and be a successful farmer. You have to pay attention to the plants and be able to understand what’s going on with them and what you can do to help them grow better. You can’t be stupid and work in construction.
In the past, not all smart people had options. “Clever” slaves still had no choice but to tend cattle or pick cotton or build walls. Smart poor whites still had no choice but to work in the coal mines. And so on.
So, there were smart people with no other options to work back-breaking jobs for little or no pay. Our country is built on the labor of those people.
Well, guess what?
That work sucks.
And so people don’t want to do it if they don’t have to.
They won’t do it if they don’t have to.
So, our state has a real dilemma. We need illegal immigrant labor. And we need those laborers to continue to be illegal so that they can’t organize, can’t leave jobs for better jobs, can’t complain about working conditions, can’t demand justice, can’t leverage their experience for better pay. Our economy depends on smart people with no other options but to take the shitty jobs we have for them.
And groups that we could previously count on to supply us with smart, desperate laborers have ceased to provide us that labor in the numbers we need.
But we have real hostility towards the illegal labor we’re now dependent on (and, in the past have had real hostility towards the other laborers we’ve been dependent on) and have, seemingly, not only just swapped them in for other populations of laborers, but gone ahead and attached the stereotypes we used to attach to those other laborers on them so that we don’t have to feel too ill at ease about treating such labor like shit.
So, if everyone hates the illegal labor and wants them out of the state, where are we going to get smart people with no other options to fill those jobs?
I don’t think Bell could have been any more obvious: we must force women to give birth to babies we will provide no other options for.
It’s not a contradiction that the very pro-life politicians who advocate against abortions are the same ones who stand opposed to state funding for pre-k and spreading lottery money around to more poor people.
We must force women to give birth to babies we will provide no other options for, no support for, nothing at all for, so that those babies–some of whom will be smart (but not so smart, because we’ve malnourished them and blamed it on their mothers)–will have no other options but to take the shit jobs we have for them.
One reason, then, that illegal immigrants are such a great hot-button issue is that their presence is a continued reminder of the failing patriarchy, which can no longer crush enough people in our own country to provide labor for the shitty jobs upon which their wealth is derived.
At some point, we’re going to have to ask ourselves whether we want to continue a system so dependent on the exploitation of people–legal or not.
But I think we all know that day won’t be today.
Tiny Cat Pants 