Blue-collar worker in America
Taylor. “Goddamn sons of a bitch”. Bill Ryan, the man wearing large suspenders (photo Tim McKulka), is sitting at the bar and cursing. He starts speaking about a life of hard work. About a life he spent driving his truck across the country. Mr Ryan’s scabrous monologue turns into a well-constructed political speech when he starts speaking about elected officials. The blue-collar worker criticizes the president. “I started working when I was fu… small”, he says. I was the oldest of 13 children and I had to help feed the rest of my family”. His voice and eyes express the melancholy he feels when recalling the school he could not finish and the hard life he sruggled to adjust to. But in the dark bar of the veterans social club in Taylor (Michigan), there is also pride in his eyes. “I did not go far enough in school to know how to use a computer, he says. Otherwise, I could repair it too” Bill Ryan spends his time repairing all sorts of stuff. The retired truck driver now helps people out to fix AC and similar devices. His motto is simple: “If you can do it, I can do it too”, he says. “I never found anything somebody else could repair and I could not. It might take me a little bit more time to figure it out. But I can learn”. Bill Ryan never fought in a war but the Taylor veterans accepted him. “When the army tried to recruit me, I told them I had problems with my balls”, he says laughing. “I had to earn a living, you know”. Bill is an intriguing man. He can make a lot of sense when he is not ranting about the women he met in motel rooms across America. The retired truck driver knows about class struggle. The Detroit Pistons are NBA champions. Detroit also has professional football and baseball teams. But Bill never attends a game. “It is too expensive for a working man with a family, he says. People can only take their kids to the park. The taxpayers paid for the stadiums of these teams. They should be able to get in for free. But you have to make $150 000 a year to afford to watch a game. Do you think it is fair?”. On the other side of the bar, the waitress is smiling. Everybody in this place knows Bill’s rants. She knows he is going to keep talking about “goddamn thieves”. Bill dreamt of an America without George Bush. He lost. “If I wrote a bad cheque, I would end up in prison”, he says. “What about the president? He blew $3 trillion! And nothing happened to him. If he keeps on doing what he is doing right now, millionaires will be able to rob workers. They do not want to raise the minimum wage. They want us to work more for less money while they are ruining the country”. Bill Ryan keeps speaking about what he describes as his fellow Americans’ weaknesses: “If you privatize social security, people are going to withdraw their money before they retire and will try to invest it. It is deadly because they can lose everything”. In Taylor, a town with a population of 65,000 sandwiched between two highways, 10% of the families live in poverty. In America’s smaller towns, residents generally feel a close sense of community. But as so many other US towns, Taylor has no real downtown. There are barely any sidewalks. A few hours before meeting Bill, this reporter asked a waitress in a diner where one could meet people in this town. The waitress seemed a little bit taken aback. She finally mentioned the Sportsplex, a sports facility. An ad in a local paper gave a different answer and mentioned the veterans union. Ken Melton, 49, a man with a tattooed back, is the head of the Taylor chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. He served in Vietnam. He used to repair jets and did not fight on the frontlines but the war left a deep scar. “One day, a Vietnamese asked one of my friends to hold her baby, he says. He agreed and the baby exploded. You could not trust anybody in Vietnam”. What John Kerry, the former democratic candidate to the 2004 presidential elections, said about Vietnam when he came back from the war in 1971, really hurt Ken Melton. The man does not consider himself as a children killer. “Kerry criticized US troops but the Vietnamese had no consideration for their own people’s lives. It is exactly what is going on in Iraq right now”. 9/11 shocked Ken Melton. “I have nothing against helping other countries”, he says when asked about the Iraq war. It is the first time we had an attack on our own turf. We had to do something about it. We are also one of the few countries who take care of what is going on in other countries. The problem is that when we are trying to help others, it is coming back and hurting us in the butt”. The mechanic, who used to make parts for Ford, saw jobs leave Motor City. “There has been a lot of outsourcing here, he says. I understand that companies have to cut costs because otherwise they will have to shut down. But if there are no jobs left in the US, who is going to buy the cars you are making overseas? If you outsource 10,000 jobs, you will lose 10,000 potential customers ”. Bill Ryan saw his investments melt. “I put $50,000 in stocks in 1996″, he says. “In 1999, I had $99,985. But because of Bush’s bad policies, I lost about $35,000. He wants elected officials to take a lie detector test every 3 to 6 months. He also wants people to choose their “city mayor for an established price”: “If one guy says he will run the town for $30,000 per year and another one with the same qualifications offered his services for $10,000, we should be able to choose the cheapest one, goddamn it”. Bill Ryan keeps drinking his scotch. Looking at his glass, he speaks about his vision of America. “I want to go where I want to go. I want to do everything I am able to do. I want to have the freedom to be as intelligent as possible. I did not go very far in school and I might not be considered as intelligent based on those standards. But I learnt it all by myself”. Jean-Cosme Delaloye / Taylor CommentsYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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