Massey Coal: A Friend of America

Despite the U.S. coal industry's depiction of itself as a friend of the working class, statistics show that even as coal production has expanded in West Virginia, jobs in coal have declined steadily in the region since 1985.  This drop in employment corresponds with coal companies' turn toward highly mechanized mining techniques such as Mountaintop Removal, which allow companies to extract coal faster than ever before with fewer workers and with devastating environmental consequences. 

How do coal companies win the hearts and minds of the workers they exploit?  This YouTube video of Ted Nugent speaking at the Massey Energy  "Friends of America Rally" in 2009 in Holden, West Virginia hold some interesting clues:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR9Gs7akUqU&feature=related

In this speech, Nugent calls for Congress to "quit regulating us based on some pierced-eared hippie in San Francisco who thinks we’re destroying the environment while she puts on her light switch, and the light comes on."  Nugent continues, "On behalf of the Nugent family, I say start up the bulldozers and get me some more coal, Massey!" The crowd, waving miniature American flags, goes wild.  As someone who believes in workers' safety and workers' rights, the crowd's wild support for Massey Energy seems wrong to me.  Don't these people know that they're being exploited?  Don't they notice that their standard of living has declined since Mountaintop Removal (as opposed to traditional underground mining) became popular in their region? 

The key to Nugent's success in this speech lies in a complex mixture of ethos and pathos, with little to no logos involved (although logos can certainly be used to make the same points, and other speakers at the rally do this).  Nugent's lower class accent is essential to his mode of argumentation, as he positions himself as fundamentally similar to his listeners - a good, hardworking American.  Telling the story of how he made enough money to buy his first guitar, Nugent explains that he shoveled snow, sold squirrel skins, washed cars, and worked at a gas station for $1/hr, taking dirty jobs that others wouldn't take in order to work for his dreams.  In addition, he brags about hunting, makes fun of animal rights activists, and positions his interests as similar to those of his listeners. 

Nugent's accent and his pride in squirrel hunting and working at the gas station give him covert prestige in this situation.  He is not one of those suit-and-tie Washington politicos, he is a normal working class American, with normal rural working class interests and experiences.  By emphasizing the non-mainstream-ness of these interests and experiences, Nugent positions himself and his listeners as united by being different from the urban liberal elite that governs America.

If these disenfranchised workers feel like outsiders from the Washington D.C. political scene they see on TV, they especially feel separate from the liberal environmentalists fighting for regulation of coal companies.  These environmental activists have urban accents and styles of dress, and make little effort to understand or respect the lifestyle choices of coal mining communities.  Their worldview involves a set of values far from those accepted in normal in these small rural communities.  They seem to offer no alternative source of income for coalminers, while fighting for regulations that will hurt coal companies profits and probably increase the region's already growing unemployment rate.  At the same time, they argue that they are fighting against Mountaintop Removal mining for the benefit of the coal mining communities.

Ted Nugent, by appealing to his audience's sense of disenfranchisement, their reliance on coal mining for a paycheck, their conservative family values, their reliance on and enjoyment of hunting, and their pride in their worldview and lifestyle, makes his arguments infinitely more appealing than some University student from New York using communist and environmentalist rhetoric to explain to people that they are being exploited and the environment is being destroyed.