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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mac Con Ulaidh who wrote (45229)	11/20/2008 10:58:22 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 149317

I remember many years ago when I worked on the AK oil pipeline, those pipeliners and welders from Louisiana and Mississippi would spend all day arguing whether a Ford or Chevy was a better brand. They were both bad compared to Japanese cars-lol. Drove me nuts. I had a very hard time adjusting to their culture and they, of course, thought I was the devil incarnate. We would often spend all day sitting on the bus waiting for one crew or another to catch up but they would never let us read. We had to sit on the bus and stare out the window for 12 hour a day. They were really good at it. They were intimidated by knowledge and cultural evolution. They wanted to keep everything the same. It was an interesting time because many people with lots of education worked out of the laborer's union. It was the one blue collar union anyone could get into. I was working my way through graduate school at he University of Washington at the time. So it was an interting dynamic i.e. at the time, the Alaskan labor union, was the most educated blue collar union in the country with lots of counter culture folks. And the pipeliners and welders from Louisiana and Mississippi were among the most uneducted and culturally conservative people on earth. To add to the dynamic the unions had a pecking order with the labor unions on the bottom. But many of these folks in the labor union were already lawyers and people with college educations like me, just trying to get some of the big money. The clashes came because the pipeliners and welders liked to "haze' the laborers. But they were also sort of afraid of them becasue the laborers had so much education. I always felt it was sort of an instinctual fear, like having large horns-lol. My best story is that one day I defended a black guy and got in big trouble with the racists. I was hooking pipe (each one weighed 22,000 lbs and would crush me), and the crane operator (just a kid) started jiggeling this huge crane and pipe to scare me. I climbed down off my stack of pipes and went up to the kid and told him: "look I know you hate me, but you cannot kill me-lol. We were all working long hours and were 'bushy", but he realized he had gone over the line and didn't do it again. But they would still get drunk at night and come into my room to try and scare me. I remember thinking at the time: "would Albert Einstein do that-lol?

To: Mac Con Ulaidh who wrote (45229)	11/21/2008 12:01:45 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

In this case it might be simpler than that - I learned when I came here that you are either a Ford person or a Chevy person. I'm guessing Shelby is a Ford man and doesn't care if GM goes down. Most folks I know would only drive a Chevy pickup. Maybe that could be an ad "Chevy folks, Shelby is threatening to take your trucks away. You'd have to drive Fords!" That's exactly the narrow thinking we don't need right now. I take it you didn't grow up in ALA.