ArcaMax

"Come and listen you fellers, so young and so fine

And seek not your fortune in the dark dreary mines

It will form as a habit and seep in your soul

'Til the stream of your blood is as black as the coal."

-- Merle Travis, "Dark as a Dungeon"

It's a coal mining song, is what it is, a hill ballad, a labor song, a lyric of damp and dust and clogged lungs and poor wages and the crushing feeling that it's all you've ever done, all you'll ever do 'til the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal.

And you are young and fine when it starts, but not when it ends.

J.D. Vance, already timbering down in the mine, props up the roof to avoid a rock fall of Trump's words.

Vance, Trump's running mate, says Trump didn't mean what he said about Kamala Harris when he spoke of her. He didn't mean she suddenly "became a Black person." It was a metaphor, or a simile, or poetry or, dear God, something that means something else, anything else besides what he said.

And Vance swings the pick, and feels the vibration run up his arm into his shoulder.

Vance picks at his hillbilly ancestry the way you'd pick at a scab, but he can't outrun the pick and the shovel and the strangling black lung disease that's choking his soul.

No matter how far he thinks he's risen in the world, like millions of his Appalachian ancestors, he's doing the hard, dirty work for a rich man from New York City.

The rich man needs you if he's gonna stay rich and stay powerful and keep his mistresses and his gold toilets, and he sticks his soft white hand out and there's a little bit of gold under his fingernails.

And you can have it if ...

And you know what he thinks of you. You're an overall-ed peckerwood, but if you can be kept sober enough to work, and hungry enough to keep coming back, you'll tunnel through mountains in the dirty dark.

Vance will say what Trump tells him to say. He'll justify anything Trump says. He'll cough up black dust on the honor of the Marine Corps; he'll say women are no more than cattle to be bred when they need breeding.

It's all just work, work the rich man from New York City needs done, an endless drawing of wages against the ever-blackening stream of your blood.

And his family's been rich for a couple generations, and your family's been poor since before God put coal in the mountains, and some clever old romantic invented the short-handled shovel.

And you can do anything, Yale, and suits and ties, and venture capitalism, but something in you calls like a lonesome hill ballad, and you look for the dirty job and the wage from the soft white hand.

Vance will labor with a mountain of black lies on top of him, propping and timbering and digging, and coughing a little more every day until his red blood is washed black.

All for the rich man from north of Richmond who pays you because they haven't yet built a machine that can do the job, though AI is getting better every day.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.