Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/674536
April 2016 | EquipmentWorld.com 86 final word | by Tom Jackson I f you've never seen the movie Five Easy Pieces, I heartily recommend it, espe- cially in this summer of our political discontent. In it, a young Jack Nicholson (Bobby) plays an oil field roughneck who has been called north to the family home in Washing- ton state, where his father is dying. He dreads both the trip and the confrontation, although we don't know why. To make matters worse, his ditzy girlfriend, played by Karen Black (Rayette), insists on going with him. When he gets there, we discover that Bob- by's family is rich and cultured; all world-fa- mous classical musicians, and that Bobby had abandoned a promising career as a pianist to sling pipe, drink beer and chase women. In fact, he loathes the high life and the sophis- ticated, intellectual dinner guests who show up at the compound. Bobby endures the high-brow chit chat as best he can, until one of the guests begins patronizing Rayette's cu- rious country mannerisms, at which point he rips into the guest and everybody else in the room. It's one of those epic rants that only Jack Nicholson can do so well. The reason Five Easy Pieces, which pre- miered in 1970, comes to mind today, is that Hollywood hasn't made a movie about a real blue collar character since. The movie indus- try, for all its talk of being daring and edgy, is much too timid to look into that gulf between America's elites and the blue collar workers who keep the machinery of civilization running. Until Donald Trump declared his candidacy, there hasn't been a national political figure who could claim to have credibility with blue collar America. Prior to 1972, the Democrats were the party of the working man. But in 1972, the Democrats nominated George Mc- Govern, a far-left politician who was crushed in the general election by Richard Nixon, who appealed to the "silent majority." A decade later, Ronald Reagan dished up enough patriotism to create the Reagan Dem- ocrats. But aside from appeals to patriotism and law and order, the Republicans have nev- er done much to improve the lot of America's blue collar class. They aggressively shipped factory jobs overseas and stonewalled any at- tempt to create a serious infrastructure budget for the country. They nominated Mitt Rom- ney as their last presidential candidate – the epitome of the banker elite. And they're all for raising the retirement age to 70, having no inkling of what it would be like to work on a construction crew at the age of 70. Only Trump seems to understand this. Like him or not, agree with him or not – he pushed the Republican Humpty Dumpty off the wall, and now all the king's horses and all king's men aren't going to put it back togeth- er again. It's the price they're going to have to pay, maybe for decades to come, for ignoring the fact that working-class Americans make up 58 percent of their party. Donald Trump and Five Easy Pieces TJackson@randallreilly.com