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Paul R. Hollrah

Slackers & Useful Idiots
November 28, 2008

Reading a much-publicized letter to Barack Obama from an east Texas businessman called "Cory the Well Driller,” I couldn’t help but think about a recent weekend visit by a sister and brother-in-law from Missouri. They are typical of the white Democrats in a mid-October poll, 30% of whom said that they would not vote for a black candidate. From the things we heard them say during the Clinton-Obama primary battle (they were strong Clinton supporters), they felt that Obama was unqualified and would be a disaster for the country and for their party. But guess what. Being the loyal Democrats they are, when they walked into the voting booth on Election Day they just couldn’t resist pulling the Obama lever.

 

It would have been unthinkable to refuse them food and drink over the weekend but, hey, we may yet haul the guest bedroom mattress out into the back yard and burn it.

 

My brother-in-law is a typical "yellow dog” Democrat. He spent almost his working career as a union worker in a St. Louis defense plant, and almost everything he knows about government, politics, and current affairs he learned from his daily propaganda briefings by the union shop steward… almost all of it wrong.

 

Having started my working career in 1952 as an assembly line worker in the very same defense plant where my brother-in-law toiled under corporate slavery (as he would describe it), I have some idea of how he came to be the Democratic "tool” that he is.

 

As an 18-year-old Sheet Metal Assembler & Riveter, it was my first face-to-face confrontation with the American labor movement. Having been brought up in a home where my siblings and I were taught that we should always give our employer at least eight hours of our best effort in exchange for eight hours pay, it was a major culture shock to learn that there existed in our society an entire sub-culture in which the lifelong goal is to earn the maximum amount of money for the least amount of work.

 

From my first day on the assembly line, I noticed that a significant number of my co-workers maintained an odd work routine. They would show up for the start of our shift, work for fifteen or twenty minutes, and disappear. They would not reappear until fifteen or twenty minutes before lunch hour. After lunch they would work for another brief period, disappear, and not return again until just before quitting time.

 

When our supervisors would stage an occasional raid on the men’s restrooms they’d find the slackers engaged either in a crap game or in a story-telling session about their latest hunting or fishing exploits. And whenever the company worked up the courage to fire some of them, then, and only then, we would feel the union’s presence. Invariably, the union would threaten a plant-wide shutdown if the workers were not rehired, with full back pay.

 

We were building Voodoo jet fighter planes for the Air Force and carrier-based Demon fighter-bombers for the Navy at a time when the country was at war against the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists. I felt sorry for the pilots who had to strap themselves into the cockpits of planes built by those slackers and fly them into battle.

 

Cory the Well Driller described such men in his letter to Obama. He said, "What’s remarkable is that you, who have never produced a job in your life, are going to tax me to take more of my money and give it to people who wouldn’t need my money if they would get off their entitlement mentality asses and apply themselves at work, demand more from themselves, and quit looking to liberal politicians to raise their station in life.

"You see, I know because I've had them work for me before… hundreds of them over these 25 years… people who simply will not show up to work on time… people who just will not work 5 days in a week, much less 6 days… people always looking for a way to put out less effort… people who actually tell me that they would do more if I just would first pay them more… people who take off work to sit in government offices to apply to get free government handouts… You see, all of this comes from your entitlement mentality culture.”

He concluded, "In short, Mr.. Obama, your political philosophies represent everything that is wrong with our country. You represent the culture of government dependence instead of self reliance, entitlement mentality instead of personal achievement, penalization of the successful to reward the unmotivated, political correctness instead of open mindedness and open debate. If you are successful, you may preside over the final transformation of America from being the greatest and most self-reliant culture on earth, to just another country of whiners and wimps who sit around looking to the government to solve their problems… God help us...”

 

Within the ranks of the United Auto Workers there are thousands of workers just like me and just like Cory the Well Driller, but they appear to be a distinct minority. There are far too many who are just like the slackers of my early working career and just like the workers that Cory the Well Driller described. These are people with an innate sense of inferiority, people who see everyone who makes more than they do, who has more education than they do, who is in authority over them… literally everyone who has more of anything than they do… as their enemy.

 

These are the modern day version of Lenin’s "useful idiots,” men and women who comprise the rank-and-file of totalitarian regimes. They are the essential tools of the thugs who run the United Auto Workers and other labor unions. They are an essential element of the Democratic Party; the party could not exist without them. Unfortunately, like the poor, they will always be with us.

 

If Democrats in Congress give the Big Three automakers the billions they are asking for, without first requiring major adjustments in wages, benefits, and work rules, the only beneficiaries will be the members of the UAW and the survivability of the industry will not be enhanced.