Category: Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch || By

Whenever I want to take the pulse of the Mon-Yough area, I don't look around and talk to my neighbors and friends.

No, I ask anti-Semite former Nixon speechwriters and failed presidential candidates.

Now, where can I find someone like that ... oh! Ladies and gentlemen, here's Pat Buchanan:

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona (sic), Alquippa (sic), Johnstown and McKeesport.

Wow, it only took Pat two sentences to work "Africa" into his column so that he could remind everyone that Barack Obama is black.

Incidentally, Pat's column was titled "Deepest, Darkest Pennsylvania." Just in case you forgot that Barack Obama is black.

Pat continues:

In Barack's mind, black anger and resentment at "racial injustice and inequality" are "legitimate." But the anger and resentment of white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are born of misperceptions -- and of "bogus claims of racism" manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that are the real enemy.

You tell 'em, Pat! I wake up every day and curse the heavens that I was born a white male Christian American.

Why God, why? Why couldn't I have been a black Muslim lesbian in a wheelchair? I would have had so many advantages!

According to Pat, Barack Obama's an elitist. But Pat's the one who can't be bothered to correctly spell "Altoona" and "Aliquippa."

. . .

Meanwhile, Bob Braughler's favorite word continues to pop up in political stories about Pennsylvania.

Remember when you read these stories that it's Barack Obama who's looking down on us, not the national hot-shot reporters and politicians.

• Here's "hardscrabble" Allentown in the Chicago Tribune, while a different article, also in the Chicago Tribune, introduces us to the "working-class residents of hardscrabble towns in the valleys and mountains of southern Pennsylvania."



• The Los Angeles Times visits "hardscrabble" (and "gritty") Philadelphia neighborhoods, while the Huffington Post takes us to "hardscrabble" Altoona.
  
  The Huffington Post is the outlet that broke the "Barack Obama is an elitist" story. Of course, it was founded by Arianna Huffington, whose own hardscrabble background includes her MA in economics from Cambridge.



• And here's the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, running a photo of Hillary Clinton in a Pittsburgh laboratory with the note that she's trying to appeal to "the hardscrabble working people of Pennsylvania."
  
  You all remember the hardscrabble research chemists at Alcoa and PPG, and the hardscrabble bioscientists at UPMC, who take their lunch buckets down to their laboratories.
  
  When I was a kid, my grandpappy used to take me to shift change time at the cyclotron, so I could watch the guys trudging through the clean room when the whistle blew.



• The U.K.'s Economist, in an article that will send the chamber of commerce types running for their Alka-Seltzer, says that "Pittsburgh feels decayed" and that the area is full of "beaten-up rustbelt towns":
  

  Parts of Pennsylvania offer classic rustbelt fare --- battered by downsizing and fearful of change. The state was a cradle of America's industrial revolution, the home of robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. But today it is littered with shuttered factories and shrinking towns. It has seen the slowest population growth of any big state in the country.

  
  What? Rusty? Shuttered? Battered? Why, take a look at the Mansfield Bridge, or Braddock Avenue in Braddock, and see if you can figure out what they're talking about. I sure can't!
  
  Remember, we've reinvented ourselves, we have world-class this and that, Pittsburgh is America's most livable city, and blah blah blah.



• Last and certainly least, here's a blogger for New York's free Metro newspaper: "After all, this is Pennsylvania. And outside of the Obama-friendly confines of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the rest of the state could very well be called Pennsyl-tucky. If it were located below the Mason-Dixon line, Pennsylvania's small-town electorate would be dubbed 'rednecks,' 'good old boys' or the 'NASCAR vote.' Instead, they're euphemistically called 'blue collar,' 'white ethnic' and 'Middle Americans.'"

And Barack Obama's the elitist. Not the New York-and-Washington-based media.

This is how we pick a president. Excuse me while I throw up.

. . .

Finally, a little birdie tells the Almanac that a correspondent for Italy's national financial newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, was in Our Fair City this week, while a reporter from London's Daily Telegraph was in Clairton.

At least you can get good Italian food in the Mon Valley. Where the hell do you get bangers and mash?