>Jose Antonio Chambers, Loggan’s son, a Chicago police officer, told me, “My father is old school — never complains about nothing, never. My mother too. There were times it was hard to get food on the table, and they did not complain.” He said his father was great with numbers, that “if he hadn’t grown up in the South at that time, if opportunities had been there, he might have done something else. But he got this job, he did it well, held on to it, and there needs to be a lot of respect for someone like that.”
I can't speak for Loggan. If he's happy, he's happy. Still, this smacks of, I dunno. I imagine an 1800s factory owner twirling his moustache while saying "mm yes, my workers, they don't put up much of a fuss at all!" Or maybe, a Lord looking across the fields and saying "the peasants have learned to keep their thoughts to themselves."
I grew up poor and in the rust belt, then the south. Blue collar. This bootstrap republican mindset always baffled me. I could watch TV at Walmart, I saw how most Americans lived. When friend's parents would talk about how they proudly were putting in hour after hour at the same pay and "never raising a fuss about it," I'd wonder why. Why didn't it piss them off that their boss had a Cadillac while they took a bus, and yet they were both in the factory the same hours? Boss in air conditioning, friend's dad on the factory floor.
It was like my class was getting off to how shitty their lives was. I had a fluke of genes or radical parents or something and so instead I got pissed off and made a fuckload of money and broke out, but all my old friends are still just there, stuck, masturbating to how good they are at being blue collar. And I run the risk of being labelled a liberal elite trying to claim I know better, because "they're happy, aren't they?!" Well, sure, I guess they gotta be!
Now that I was lucky enough to get educated, I'm convinced it boils down to that. One of Loggan's family even suggested it as a reason he didn't seek more. "He didn't get much education, so maybe that smoothed things out for them." So I have all sorts of crazy theories about the rich defunding education to make sure the proles stay in line... There's a Peanuts single panel comic where one of the characters is sitting at a desk saying "Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them."