A literary depiction of the geography of the class culture wars: Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've been listening to Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole, which the New York Times reviewed in March.  I was intrigued by the socioeconomic class aspect of the review, set in that fateful election year 2016.  Here's what Hamilton Cain wrote in that NYT review, referring to Cole, the author, and Owen, the novel's protagonist:  

If economic class is the third rail of American life, then [author] Cole eases his hand out, gently, to touch it, his realism a meld of Richard Russo and Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney. Despite [protagonist] Owen’s modest upbringing, he’s a striver with scant chill. He’s liberal in his politics and passionate about Walt Whitman and Modigliani, stoking a sense of curiosity and discipline not always associated with his demographic.

And here's a quote from the novel, excerpted in Cain's review, that illustrates the role of place and culture in it.

“I explained that Cracker Barrel was cheap, and they were working-class people without a lot of money who nonetheless wanted the experience of a family outing,” Owen notes. “They loved the food and the décor not because they had bad taste, but because it was familiar to them. They’d grown up on actual farms, milking cows and pulling the suckers from actual tobacco. They’d eaten stewed apples and turnip greens and ham hock, and the tools on the walls had been the tools their fathers used, in a time that was not, at least in Kentucky, some distant yesteryear. It was recent and vivid, and the ache of its passing away therefore still present, like a phantom limb.” 

Cain's review tells us that the protagonist grew up in "a dot of a town" in western Kentucky.  In fact, there is not a lot of rural in this book--unless one believes, as I tend to do, that rural culture moves to town when rural folks move to the city.  This novel seems to support that thesis.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say this novel illustrates why "rural" is often conflated with "working-class white" in contemporary political discussions.  

The rural culture associated with the flyover states is alive and well, it seems, in places like Louisville, where the novel is set.  That's evident in this conversation between the two primary characters.  One is  Owen, who aspires to be a writer but for now is working as a groundskeeper at a posh Louisville university; that job permits him to enroll free of charge in a class, and he's studying creative writing.  The other is Alma, a professional writer who is writer in residence at the university, an immigrant from Bosnia.  You see here how her parents' attitudes toward education differed dramatically from that of the parents of Owen.     

You'll be able to tell who is who in this dialogue, which occurs at a juncture where they are becoming romantically interested in each other:    

As we walked on, she pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists and crossed her arms, shivering a little. Did you go to Princeton? I said.

Yep.

How was that?

She thought about the question a few moments. It was wonderful in a lot of ways, and also evil in a lot of ways. Going there as an immigrant is different than going as a legacy from some old-money family.

Was that where you always wanted to go?

I got into Dartmouth and Penn, too. I might’ve gone to Harvard, but they wait-listed me.

I didn’t ask where you got in, I asked where you wanted to go.

It’s hard to differentiate what you want from what your parents want at that age, you know?

I nodded as if I understood what she meant from experience, but I had no idea. When I was eighteen, all of my energy had been spent maintaining a clear border between what I wanted and what my parents wanted, defending its sovereignty against constant incursion.

No state schools?

She laughed.

Yeah, right.

So it was Ivy League or nothing?

Not even, she said. Cornell is a joke. Stanford would’ve been all right. I would’ve been okay with Stanford.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Why would I not be serious?

There was a finality to her response that made it seem like she’d rather talk about something else.

I always wanted to go to a highfalutin school, I said.

She smiled skeptically. Now you’re just playing it up. You don’t really say “highfalutin.”

I just did, didn’t I?

So what happened, why didn’t you go to a highfalutin school?

I explained to her that I’d wanted to go to a good school when I was young, but by the time I finished high school, my grades weren’t good enough, and anyhow, my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford the out-of-state tuition. I ended up at the University of Kentucky, barely managing to graduate with a degree in English.

Didn’t anyone tell you that you were capable of more?

My parents didn’t want me to go off and become a coastal elite. If they’d had their druthers, I’d have gone to Murray State, an hour from their house.

Their druthers?

Yeah, you’ve never heard that? No, she said, laughing. That’s definitely going on the list. 

When do I get to see this list? 

When the time is right, she said. So what’s wrong with being a coastal elite? 

Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. To them, it’s the worst thing you could be. I’ve wanted to be a coastal elite my whole life.

She looked at me as if she both pitied me and found me adorable—a look I was getting used to.

(pp. 87-89) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition (emphasis mine)

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Academic research: J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility

Here's a link to the article by Milena Feldman and Markus Rieger-Ladich, published in Reading the Local in American Studies:

In the US, writing about oneself is still strongly influenced by religious discourses as well as by the idea that an individual’s success is primarily determined by his or her hard work and talent. Hence, focusing on oneself as the object of inquiry often fails to raise awareness of structural disadvantages, such as in the educational system. Against this background, this contribution turns to a memoir that takes a different approach and made its author famous overnight: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Published at the beginning of the Trump administration, many hoped that his story of social ascent from the milieu of the white underclass would help explain Donald Trump’s success. Why do people have such high expectations when reading a book that focuses on the lives of those who some refer to as “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” or “white trash” but whom J.D. Vance calls “neighbors,” “friends,” and “family”? We read the book as an auto-sociobiographical text to find out what it might tell us about social mobility, educational careers, and institutional discrimination in the US and to examine in how far J.D. Vance’s can be read as a specifically US-American version of auto-sociobiography.

Bradley Jackson of "The Morning Show" as country mouse--or is it country bear?

I just started watching "The Morning Show" (Apple+) last week and was soon struck by the country mouse-city mouse dynamic the creators set up between Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Anniston, and Bradley Jackson, played by Reese Witherspoon.  Bradley is the new morning co-anchor, joining Alex, after her former co-anchor, a man, is deposed for sexual harassment in the era of MeToo.  

There are so many important themes in this show--not least the patriarchy, sexually predatory behavior by men, and--ultimately--women's empowerment.  Here, I want to pick up on two other themes that jump out--two themes that happen to be my pet issues:  rurality and class.  Bradley Jackson represents the rural kid from West Virginia--brusque, direct, rough around the edges even when she is gussied up in the fine New York duds the network provides her (she prefers pants to dresses, thank you very much).  She was raised working class.  Bradley is the country mouse foil to Alex Levy's super polished, conniving, and inwardly angst-ridden/falling apart city mouse. 

In Episodes 4 and 5, which I watched tonight, Bradley reveals--in her first appearance as co-anchor of the show--that she had an abortion when she was 15. Here, she brushes right up against being white trash. And while the abortion and the matter-of-fact way she discloses it are controversial and thus shake network executives, they also generate a younger following for the show.  The disclosure also inspires college students in Mississippi to stand up against state abortion regulations.  To them, Bradley is a hero.  Critical issues of generational difference and generational conflict are thus surfaced.  

Also notable is how the show's creators give Bradley the "Pretty Woman" treatment--putting her in posh clothing, including a private shopping spree at Barney's over the weekend before she begins her gig.  They do not, however, ask her to eliminate the slight twang with which she speaks.  

Another interesting scene is when The Morning Show "cleans up" Bradley's mom in West Virginia to bring her on air--reading from cue cards--to talk about what a great kid Bradley was growing up.  In fact, Bradley and her mom were frequently in intense conflict, and it is this ruse by The Morning Show's producers that causes Bradley to burst out and disclose a more honest portrait of her life in the Mountain State, including her teenage abortion.  

In another scene, Bradley is talking on air about a young adult author and says "ya"--as in "y'all"--rather than "Y", "A," as this term gets pronounced, with the letters articulated separately.  She handles it well, repeating "ya" in realization--or is it poking fun at herself?--and then saying it the way said by people in the know, upper class folks. 

I'm looking forward to more rural-urban differentiation in future episodes.  I'd also love to see some commentary on these issues, but so far, I've found only this piece offering a nod to Bradley's Appalachian roots.  (Oh, and there's this ad for the West Virginia hoodie Bradley/Reese wears in an episode of the show).  

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.  

White trash in Percival Everett's new novel, The Trees

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  I'll just excerpt a short quote here from the commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class and whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

On "Hillbilly Elegy," the film, and cultural and geographical divides in the United States

I published this today in The Conversation, about the new Ron Howard/Netflix film, "Hillbilly Elegy," based on J.D. Vance's book by the same name.  Here's an excerpt:

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction. 

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

I want to be clear that I didn't see the film depicting rural in any sustained or meaningful way.  Middletown, Ohio, Vance's home town is not rural by any measure.  Indeed, it's not even technically Appalachian.  But about the first 10 minutes of the film take place in Jackson, Kentucky, the Vance Family's ancestral home.  That's Vance's real claim to "hillbilliness," and I don't dispute that a certain hillbilly culture followed his family into the Rust Belt.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Obituary of country songwriter Jerry Chesnut notes his "Blue-collar hits"

Here's the obituary in today's New York Times.  Of course, country music is often associated with working-class whites, as are the lyrics of the genre.  But it seems Jerry Chesnut, who died this week at 87, had real blue-collar credibility based on his roots in Kentucky's coal country. 

The obit reads: 

Mr. Chesnut, who grew up in rural eastern Kentucky, came by his working-class sensibilities honestly. 

It quotes Chesnut's 2009 interview: 

I was born and raised in the coal-mining camps and the railroad center where they all came together. 

To say the least, it was a very poor place to be from. When you’re from Harlan County, there’s no way to go but up.

Harlan County, among other distinctions, is one of the poorest places in Kentucky.  The poverty rate is 41.5%. It's iconic coal country and also the setting for parts of the series "Justified"; it's the home county of protagonist Raylan Givens. 

I only recognize a couple of the Chesnut songs listed in the obituary, so it's a little hard to say what made them oriented to the working class, except in a few instances specified in the obit:

Mr. Chesnut had a gift for illuminating the struggles of working people, like the beleaguered factory hand in “Oney,” a song, drawn from his experience with a tyrannical employer, that became a Top 10 country hit for Johnny Cash in 1972. 

“Looking at the World Through a Windshield,” a two-stepping country hit for the singer Del Reeves in 1968, portrays a solitary trucker speeding through the night, longing for home.

At least 30 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame have recorded Chesnut's work, as did Elvis Costello in a 1981 album, Almost Blue, in which he covered a number of "hard-core country" hits.  And this causes me to ponder the attraction of country music--including that oriented to the working class--by pop artists like Costello and his fans.  I suppose there is an element of voyeurism. 

Is there anything we can learn from professional wrestling? (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final part of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses elite cultural superiority in their criticisms of Trump and professional wrestling, and what liberal elites can learn about communicating with the white working class from professional wrestling.

Are there any lessons to be learned from professional wrestling? Maybe not. Despite changes to the blood, sex, and violence that characterized pro wrestling during the 1990s and 2000s, the sport remains an oft-maligned curiosity to elites that many would say carries little to no cultural value. According to Common Sense Media, an organization that recommends media for children, WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (a leading pro wrestling show) is “crass, outlandish, and not recommended.” The organization further writes that, “parents need to know that this sporting event-meets-soap opera is brimming with non-stop physical violence, including body slams, headlocks, knees to the groin, smacks, punches, and kicks.”

It’s also quite tempting to dismiss any possible value in pro wrestling not only because of the violence inherent to the sport, but also because until relatively recently matches were replete with extreme racism and sexism. For example, the Mexicools were a group of unmasked luchadores who wore stereotypical Mexican attire like cowboy hats and bandanas and carried leaf blowers and rode in on lawnmowers in their first appearance. Women were also frequently confined to marginalized roles and hyper-masculinized if they dared to deviate at all from the oversexualized, feminine norm. Women in the ring existed solely for the male gaze, as either hyper-masculinized comic relief or arm-candy for male wrestlers.

Since Trump’s election, elites have written many negative comparisons between Trump’s presidency and professional wrestling in the opinion pages. To many elites, pro wrestling is the perfect analogy for Trump: low-brow, racist, sexist, violent, and possessing a shaky relationship with the truth.

To be fair to these commentators, over the years Trump has done much to earn this comparison: at first by sponsoring the wrestling contests, then by throwing thousands of dollars from the rafters in a dramatic stunt, and later by being a physical participant in Wrestlemania 23. All this involvement with pro wrestling earned Trump a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, making his election the “first time in history a WWE Hall of Famer would ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.”

Indeed, there are many reasons why comparisons between Trump and pro wrestling are likely deserved. For example, who can blame commentators for drawing comparisons when the biggest donor to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation was the WWE? Or when Trump posts GIFs of him bodyslamming the CNN logo on Twitter?

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

However, it’s pretty clear when one scratches the surface of these criticisms even a little that the real target of many of these opinion pieces are the white working class. Dripping with condescension, these critical pieces often bear the same hallmarks of arguments for cultural superiority that are frequently levied by elites at the white working class. Fans of pro wrestling are reduced to caricatures of racism, sexism, violence, and yes, white trash. Some commentators have even tried to equate fandom of wrestling or other violent sports with support for Trump, as if by consuming this low-brow, culturally inferior sports entertainment it causes you a more gullible victim for Trump’s lies.

Professional wrestling is the perfect example of a sport that has acquired distributional significance, because it is strongly classed, both internally and externally. Externally, pro wrestling embodies the virtues of the lower classes in open displays of strength and violence. Internally, as discussed in the prior part in this series, wrestlers purposefully work to class the sport by playing on class conflict in their backstories.  What elites seek by putting down pro wrestling are the social profits they obtain by outwardly differentiating their own choices in consumption from the working class.

However, while the elites may continue to thumb their noses at the nation’s first pro wrestling president, they should probably take note that the animosity between wrestling fans and elites is mutual. Like the white-working class heroes that dominated pro wrestling storylines in past decades, white working class wrestling fans don’t very much like being told what to think or how to act.

Outside of the opinion pages, a different type of class conflict is happening in the ring. One Appalachian wrestler from Kentucky has capitalized on tension between elites and the working class by dubbing himself the Progressive Liberal. This uniquely Trump-era wrestler wears shirts emblazoned with Hillary Clinton’s face and trunks that bear Obama's face or say "Blue Wave". He berates the Appalachian crowd with airs of cultural superiority, calling them “Fox News maggots” and riffing on country music saying, “it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.” The wrestler also throws out nasty political one-liners like, “You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state” or “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

I wonder how much right wingers will like the new gear I’m debuting this weekend. pic.twitter.com/SGzPd65w9a

— The Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards (@ProgressLib804) September 26, 2018

The Progressive Liberal acts out what white working-class fans fear from coastal elites: cultural superiority weaponized into a threat against their existence. The Progressive Liberal's patronizing espousal of elite liberal values makes him the perfect “heel” (i.e. the villain in a wrestling contest) for the Appalachian white working class because he threatens and denigrates their way of life.

So perhaps, instead of adding fuel to the fire and sneering at the “the lowbrow guilty pleasure” of professional wrestling, liberal elites should instead look to pro wrestling for clues on how they can recapture the white working class. It’s impossible to ignore how the average WWE viewer is exactly the sort-of person that Democrats failed to reach in this last election – white, male, low-income, and possessing less than a college degree. Quite simply, pro wrestling offers a unique insight into the white working class in America, primarily because they are its biggest fans.

A good start for elites would be accepting a more nuanced view on the white working class and learning to communicate with them on equal terms. While Trump represents the worst of pro wrestling, it is helpful to instead look at the best. The Dusty Rhodes or the Stone Colds of the sport were clearly able to communicate with the white working class, and it wasn’t because they were overtly racist or misogynist. What these white working class heroes did instead was authentically communicate that being working class was not an inferior way of life and that fans or even athletes didn’t need to change their culture or conform with the values of elites.

Tandem attacks on Trump and pro wrestling may give elites a nice frame for arguments for cultural superiority over the white working class, but ultimately, it’s not productive to moving the conversation forward. Democrats who won in deep red areas often did not directly attack Trump and instead avoided the extremes. They also directly appealed to working class voters by highlighting their working class backgrounds and sticking with non-partisan messaging around education and healthcare instead of divisive social issues.

Understanding the distinction between the worst of group and the best is completely lost on many elites because it is easier to be reductive about sports or classes of people than it is to have a nuanced perspective. (It’s probably also fair to say the same is true of the attitudes of many working class whites towards Blacks and Latinos.) However, if liberals want to be able to recapture the white working class and turn Trump from hero to heel, it may make sense to slack off of criticisms that espouse cultural superiority and instead turn to communications that will reassure working people that their way of life is safe.

The white working class hero trope in pro wrestling (Part 2 of 3)

 This is part two of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses the trope of the white working class hero in professional wrestling.

More than perhaps any other sport, professional wrestling embodies the virtues of the white working class by uplifting heroes with backstories rooted in the trope of the white working class hero. Stone Cold Steve Austin was one of the biggest stars of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. He was known for wearing a black leather vest and jeans, and had proclivities for shotgunning cans of beer, giving the finger on live TV, and overall sticking it to the man.

One of Steve Austin's most infamous rivalries was against Vince McMahon, the CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE), who constantly pressed working-class Steve Austin to clean up and go corporate. In one memorable encounter, Austin at first pretends to cede to McMahon’s demands by wearing a well-tailored suit and tie and agreeing to change his ways. To thundering boos, Stone Cold tells the crowd that he realized that “little old Steve Austin . . . a redneck from South Texas”, could never defeat Vince McMahon, “a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a man with a multi-million dollar company, an entrepreneur, a leader.”

However, at the last moment Austin changes his tone and rips off the layers of his suit to reveal a black t-shirt, with cut-off sleeves, featuring his signature phrase “HELL YEAH” and a skull. Stone Cold addressed the stunned McMahon, saying:

You gotta remember son, what you see is what you get with Stone Cold Steve Austin. I ain’t fancy. Am I a redneck from South Texas? You’re damn right. And I ain’t gonna change for nobody.

Although Steve Austin knows his corporate overlord wants him to sell out, he turns down all the privileges that would have come with being in the managerial class because to do so would be to abandon his working class values and instead adopt the values and respectability of the elite in the ways he speaks, dresses, and acts. Because of his working class roots in South Texas, Steve Austin may not talk right, dress right, or act right; but dammit, he is who he is and no businessman from Connecticut can take that away from him.

This is far from the first time that a white working class hero has been involved in staged class conflict under the guise of professional wrestling. Take for example this verbal takedown by the white working class hero of the 1980s, Dusty Rhodes, against his arch nemesis, the Rolex wearin’, diamong ring wearin’, limousine ridin’, and jet flyin’ Ric Flair:

You don’t know what hard times are, daddy. Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work, they got four or five kids and can’t pay their wages, can’t buy their food. Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ‘em to go home. And hard times are when a man has worked at a job for thirty years—THIRTY YEARS—and they give him a watch, kick him in the butt and say “hey a computer took your place daddy,” that’s hard times! That’s hard times! And Ric Flair you put hard times on this country by takin’ Dusty Rhodes out, that’s hard times. And we all had hard times together, and I admit, I don’t look like the athlete of the day supposed to look. My belly’s just a lil’ big, my heinie’s a lil’ big, but brother, I am bad. And they know I’m bad.

It’s hard to avoid the allure of Rhodes’ words. Is this an impassioned speech from a Bernie Sanders-style populist with a Texas twang? Or a professional wrestler ready to chokehold his opponent in staged combat? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that Rhodes was a star at the top of his profession, but like Steve Austin he never forgot who he was or where he came from.

The lower-class virtues born from the struggles that stars like Austin and Rhodes had growing up white, rural, and working class are the same ones that gave them popularity on the wrestling circuit or give white working class politicians today a boost at the polls. There is something inherently appealing about a person who reaches the highest levels of their profession, but never forgets about the little guy along the way.

This is the total opposite of what is normally expected in the sports world. Where cultural and economic elites love a bootstraps story, they hate when a sports star acts in conformance with what the upper echelons fear from the working class: violence, outward class expression, and a lack of decorum and respectability.

To elites, becoming a sports star is supposed to improve you, because wealth is supposed to instill the values and virtues of the elite. Athletes who know “hard times” are supposed to forget those and stand for the national anthem even when they feel they were left behind and have no affinity for it.

Pro wrestling may therefore be an anomaly in the sports world because it rewards athletes who proudly reflect working-class values. The normal assignment of cultural capital is entirely reversed because it doesn’t help stars to be respectable or espouse the values of elites in their conduct. Indeed doing so may actually hurt them. While other sports stars are expected to adhere to the conventions of the elites, pro wrestlers eschew them.

Elites may continue to turn their noses up at pro wrestling, but the sport is still a place where working class whites can find affinity with certain wrestlers. Every time Steve Austin or Dusty Rhodes went to the mat, they were there to do staged violence against the elites, the enemies of the working class.

Examining these white working class heroes gives elites insight on how the white working class responds to criticism. They doesn’t like being judged by cultural and economic elites for how they look, act, or talk. They don’t like it when their “hard times” are diminished because they refuse to leave behind their rural and working class roots – spiritually or physically – even though they may know their jobs and communities will eventually be the victims of the steady onslaught of technology and globalization. Though these white working class heroes may not espouse elite respectability, they instead exude a working-class definition of respectability which means never turning your back on where you came from or changing who you are because of wealth or success.