One Order Of Circus; Hold the Bread

Circus wagon, Alger, Sheridan County, Montana
Russell Lee, 1937
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI archive

Circus? More than a week of this.

Forget about bread? With the transfer of wealth ever upward, a pointless urge to appease the punditry is one explanation why the administration has never really exerted itself against policies that make no practical or political sense.

But just give the media:

A dazzling technology [which said media also does not understand];
A Democrat plus sexual context [if only virtual];
A Democrat outspoken enough to be on the takedown list—and stupid enough to provide the means...

Give the media all this and Andrew Breitbart—if not yet crowned King of Investigative Journalists—has at least become feared as the J.J. Hunsecker of our time.

Weiner's real tweeting problem may well have been this; after all, he was seriously involved in pursuing this effort.

As to what the media feasted on: there would have seemed to be no other news, despite our living in a world of meltdown, metaphorical and real.

In the latest sign of climatic meltdown, a tornado destroys much of Joplin, MO, in just the most recent of these epic storms.

Our economy continues melts down for the average person, while the unemployed may as may has vaporized, as far as our bi-partisan establishment is concerned.

Bridges, roads, and anything else once considered necessary public works are melting down.

Another day, another war: we're in number four.

And three months later in Japan: there is official admission of three nuclear plant meltdowns at the start.

Meanwhile, some Americans were rude enough to bring up this.

It's not just an ugly present reality, of workers whose lives are expendable and the mountain landscape of an entire state blasted to rubble. It's also a story that harkens back to some ugly parts of our buried history—

... one of the biggest union busters in American history, Massey Energy, is launching a final assault on the icon of America's union movement, Blair Mountain.

Blair Mountain's storied history dates back to West Virginia in the 1920s, when the entire state was a company town. Big Coal dominated every aspect of economic life. The industry owned the shops, the homes, of course the mines -- and made sure there was virtually no other source of employment in the state. Working conditions were horrendous: men and their sons worked 12 to 16 grueling hours in dark, dangerous mines dying from a notorious plague of subsurface explosions, cave-ins and black lung.

Workers began standing together, supported by local sheriff Sid Hatfield, who would be murdered by coal operatives.

Hatfield's assassination triggered one of the biggest labor demonstrations in American history. Ten thousand miners from the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia marched for six days, converging on Blair Mountain to confront their industry bosses. They were met by King Coal's powerful army of thugs and mowed down by Gatling guns.

President Warren Harding, a so-called "friend of coal," like most of the leading politicians of the Gilded Age, authorized the U.S. army to drop bombs and poison gas on the marching miners -- the only time in American History when our military deliberately bombed U.S. citizens. These military measures broke the demonstration but outraged the public, and gave vital traction to the United Mine Workers and the American labor movement.

Massey's plan to blow up this particular mountain inspired the march.

In a state where people are trying to save "The Last Mountain" from falling next; in a country where it's the same old fight against the same old forces, over and over and over.