My grandfather was a union enforcer, a knee-capper. At places like John Deere, Farmall and J. I. Case, he kept union members in line, doing and voting as they were ordered.
They called him “Hound Dog” because, if he were on your scent, he would track you down. That was never the good news because he was very good at this job.
Hound Dog was just one cog among many in the vast machine of union coercion and lawless strong-arming. For decades, that machine has been known for its acts of violence. In the past, as in the infamous Kohler strike, it dynamited non-strikers’ cars, fired shotgun blasts into their homes, terrorized workers’ wives and children, and literally broke the necks of their opponents -- as in the tragic case of William Bersch. Equipment was sabotaged, cars overturned, and multiple persons beaten by thugs known euphemistically by the unions as “morale builders.”
The morale builders of today are no different. Just this week, in Longview WA, hundreds of longshoremen, armed with baseball bats, stormed the new terminal, smashed windows, damaged railroad cars, dumped tons of grain, and took people hostage. They shut down ports from Seattle to Tacoma.
So when James Hoffa, Jr., the loud-mouthed barbarian-with-a-bullhorn who stands atop the current pile of union thuggery and goondom, calls his army to war, as he did in the recent Detroit area pep-rally for President Obama, I take him seriously. When he calls on his lackeys to “take out the sons of bitches” known as the Tea Party, I don’t hear the joke. Given President Obama’s proud embrace of Mr. Hoffa, the rhetoric of war has become the left’s ostensible new civility.
When Hoffa says that middle-class Americans are looking for a fight, he’s completely wrong. They’re not looking for a fight; they're looking for jobs -- millions of them -- jobs that unions like his have helped destroy, and which the far-left president he backs is powerless to produce. Indeed, that president has destroyed them by the millions. His progressivist nonsense makes it so.
I’m proud to say that Hound Dog eventually quit his union job, denounced the tools of violence, and became a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. He became a genial, jovial, raconteur -- a PG-rated version of Garrison Keillor. He was proof that if you get the man out of the union, you might get the union out of the man.
6 comments:
And my grandfather grew up in a town where two unions were at war and several of his relatives were shot at or attacked with bombs for refusing to take sides and continuing to go to work to feed their children.
Unions are, for the most part, a politically correct mafia.
It's always heartening to see someone call a spade a spade.
Thanks for your supportive comment, Mitch. I'm sorry about the troubles in your town's past.
"I’m proud to say that Hound Dog eventually quit his union job, denounced the tools of violence, ..."
I am very happy to learn of that, as you hadn't mentioned it before.
I am originally from South Bend, Indiana, the former home of the now-extinct Studebaker Corporation.
I am convinced, and will always be convinced, that the national-level union “leadership”, in collusion with certain hold-over elements within the federal government, conspired to destroy Studebaker, in keeping with the (by then) old New Deal mindset of consolidation, conglomeration, and control.
And, of course, the Big Three in Detroit were not at all averse to seeing their smaller regional competitors squeezed out of existence.
Nevertheless, you continue to bore me with your intentional-and-refuse-to-correct-it misrepresentation of "natural theology". And, being bored by your antics in that regard, I visit you (and read you) less and less frequently.
All you have to do is refute it. Nothing has been forthcoming on that count. To do so, you'd have to show that Yahweh and, say, thought thinking itself were the same, and that fallen humans beings have reached a knowledge of Yahweh by means of philosophy. You'd have to show that natural revelation, which is quite efficient at revealing God, is not radically twisted by natural theology.
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