YEAR-END DUMBASS CLEARANCE! As an English tutor of yout's, I teach a module on Fact and Opinion, in which I explain that assertions that cannot be proven are opinions. If you say "This potato weighs a half a pound," you are stating a fact, because you can weigh the potato to prove your assertion; but if you say "Potatoes suck," you are expressing an opinion, for there is no suckometer with which you could measure the suckage of potatoes.

Sometimes, though -- and don't tell the kids -- I feel as if I, perhaps alone among humanity, possess an internal suckometer, one that has been sensitized by prolonged exposure to the fatheads and dipshits that are alicublog's primary subject matter. And I must tell you that, by its measure, Crunchy Rod Dreher is reading absolutely off the charts.

First he bitches on and on about how they's a Wal-Mart a-comin' to his l'il ol' childhood home. In Crunchy Rod's former (and my current) jurisdiction, of course, we use activism and politics to prevent such noxious results; but, to each jerkwater burg its own.

Then he drops this turd:

Here's something interesting: there are Mexican laborers in town now. More and more of them. A local businessman said to me, "If you want to get anything done nowadays, you have to hire Mexicans." He explained that the black day laborers that people around here used to hire for agricultural or small-scale construction work aren't available anymore. He speculated that this must have something to do with the way the drug culture -- especially crack -- has made serious inroads into the black community here. Frankly, I'm so shocked by this that I can't even think about being sad. Crack for sale in this sleepy Southern town. I guess I'm too Romantic, too naive.

Because if blacks aren't doing the grunt work, it must surely be due to their crack addiction. "Romantic," indeed.

A commenter calls Rod on this, and Rod gits mad:

Harvey, you may valorize yourself your condescension, but you know nothing about the way life is and people are around here. You know how you wish they were. You know exactly nothing about how the black community, as a general matter, lives in this specific place, or the white community. Neither do I, though I know more than you do...

...It is also the case that the black unemployment rate is much higher than the white unemployment rate, which informs the "won't work" judgment -- you have a significant number of employable black men here who are able to work, but who do not work. Some of these men sell drugs instead. If someone needs unskilled labor on a temporary basis, when I was a boy it was possible to hire a crew of black men who didn't have regular employment to come perform the labor. I am told now that those kinds of jobs, which used to be performed by black men a generation ago, are now performed by Mexican laborers, who are available and willing to do the work that local black men, for whatever reason, are not...

...willing to do for a buck-three-eighty, like in my pappy's day.

How many times have you heard crap like that? I know it's not a Southern thing, because I've been hearing it since I was a boy in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And I've heard it in every region of the country: Oh, you don't know those people like I do. They just don't want to work! All they want to do is get likkered up and play dice! Or get coked up and play Young Jeezy, whatever.

Well, I'm here to tell you that I've been walking this earth quite a long time now, and the monstrous stupidity of that POV just gets clearer, and the traditional defense offered by Crunchy Rod -- that outside agitators don't know his little slice of Valhalla, where human nature is totally different than it is everywhere else you've ever been in your life -- increases past simple lameness and into immobility.