How the white working class lost its patriotism
but I did know that Breathitt allegedly earned its name because the county filled its World War I draft quota entirely with volunteers — the only county in the entire United States to do so.
.. Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.
.. The factories that took to the hollows of Kentucky and West Virginia to recruit my grandparents’ generation refused to hire mine, or closed down altogether.
.. Polls suggested that, unique among all subpopulations in the country, the white working class expected its children to live less prosperous lives.
.. But most of the people I know dislike Obama for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. They think of him as an alien because, compared to them, he is.
.. At my high school, ranked for a time in the bottom 10 percent of public schools in the state, none of my classmates attended an Ivy League college. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy and speaks like the law professor that he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent — clean, perfect, neutral — sounds almost foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening;
.. Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities: He is a good father while many of us struggle to pay our child support. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.