One of my favorite college professors used to say that the greatest achievement of Southern aristocracy had been to convince raggedy-ass, one-step-up-from-sharecropper, dirt-poor folks to die for the rich folks’ right to keep slaves.

I was reminded of that tonight, watching some of the poorest white populations of Louisiana and Mississippi railing against the government. These people are still without food, water, electricity, relying on groups like Oxfam and churches and individuals with initiatives and cojones who don’t seem to have a problem driving trucks laden with supplies into areas where FEMA is worried about “stressing the infrastructure”. They seem numb, still trying to work up to rage, stunned to find out that in the larger scheme they seem to have been expendable, just like their black neighbor down the road.

Many of these same folks have spent all their lives making distinctions between “us” and “them”, and making believe that their government check was somehow different than the one handed to a disabled black man in New Orleans. You hear them all over the South, if they trust you enough: them lazy, good-for-nothing ……… breeding kids like rabbits so they can get more on their welfare.

They are not evil folk; they will often go out of their way to help one of their own, no matter what the color. Individuals are fine; there’s a stunning disconnection in poor white southern culture between the individuals they know and the imaginary hordes of “lazy, good-for nothing …….” But the Southern aristocracy then and the modern Republican party now has made it their business to keep the hordes front and center so that they never see the skull beneath the skin: that they are in basically the same social class as the blacks they look down on. Poor. Expendable. Negligible as Russian serfs. It’s only when something like Katrina happens that they are stripped of their illusions, if only for a little while.

Not that the clarity is likely to last. Look at some of the consevative websites; the demonizing of African-Americans in this crisis is already well under way. When a supposed intellectual can make a barefaced racist statement like ” African-Americans have less native judgment” and not even raise a wince among his readership, you know the full effort is under way to roll the poverty issue into the race issue and place the blame on the victim. As long as they can keep the noise machine going, poor white Americans will continue to vote their way. And after the election? Keep them occupied with horror stories about missing white girls and daydreams of lottery tickets.

Somewhere there’s someone with the fortitude and the eloquence to put this case to white Americans: there is a class war going on, and the bad guys are winning. I just hope he can be heard through the din.