Mudsills* vs Blue Bloods

Trump has set up an altar of sorts in the Oval Office (2025).

There is a strong class system in the United States, and a strong prejudice encouraging male Americans of Northern European descent, especially those of British descent, to be the powerful ones on top.
That’s why—when we’ve “cast” candidates for the role of U.S. President (by voting for them)—they’ve been male, and had at least one parent who was of Northern European descent.

Both the Right, and the Left, seem to be fighting against the class system.
Who knew that when Graydon Carter (and Spy Magazine) called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 80’s they’d help to bring a crass real estate developer into the White House?
Who knew that when candidate Kamala Harris (in her run for the presidency) called for more people to obtain college degrees, less citizens would come out to vote?

Last year, I read Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, by British author Kevin Siena.
This book reveals the English perspective on Britain’s colonization of North America.
The 2019 book explains how the British upper crust dealt with the British, Irish and Scottish vagrants who wandered the cities and countryside.
During the 1700s, the government essentially used vagrants to populate the 13 colonies, and thereby reduce the prison population.
(It wasn’t until the 1840s that British intellectuals began to deal seriously with the British class system. Let’s just say real social change is taking a while.)

Tattooed Barbie (2011). Today, around 33% of US adults are inked.

I just finished White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
This 2016 book describes how the class structure in the U.S. has kept its’ Anglo-Saxon plebs under control, from colonial times through this century.

I learned from these two books that it wasn’t just prejudice against black and brown people, that fed the class system in Europe.
For centuries, the European elite believed that there were two types of people—the people of “good blood,” and the people of “bad blood”—and sometimes people with “bad blood” could look similar to you.
Giving alms boxes to the poor at Christmas was one thing.
Associating with them, was quite another.
Obviously, this attitude toward people who didn’t own property carried over to the New World.

Trump being interviewed while sitting in a garbage truck (2024).

Class-conscious Republicans have elevated Trump, possibly because they identify with him?
In the last days of the 2024 campaign, this all became clearer when it seemed each side was talking about the opposing side as “garbage.”
MAGA has chosen Trump to fight against “educated elitists” who they assume look down on them.
The Left dislikes Trump because he’s acting against their cherished fantasy that America is a classless melting pot.
It’s a big mess of people—sometimes ones who are essentially in agreement—fighting each other over scraps.

Some Right-wing pundits have acknowledged that Donald J. Trump isn’t a particularly good representative for the Anglo-Saxon “cause.”
Trump is one of our very few Presidents to be the child of immigrants.
(Andrew Jackson’s parents immigrated from Ireland in 1765.)
Trump’s mother was a servant girl, who immigrated as a teenager from Scotland.
His father was a first generation American.
Both of Fred Trump’s parents were born and raised in Germany.
When Trump chose to marry, his first, and his third, wives were both Slavic adult immigrants.
Only his middle wife (Marla Maples) was born in this country (the state of Georgia), and that was his shortest marriage.
(Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been aghast! Is Donald Trump afraid of American DNA?)

Babs Johnson’s trailer in 1972’s Pink Flamingos. Middle-class couples sometimes drive their children past trailer parks, and tell them: “This is NOT where we want you to live. 

Unlike other “developed” nations, the citizens of the U.S. live in a country without a safety net.
It’s estimated that around 26 million Americans have experienced homelessness.
Since the 1970s, we’ve lived in a country in which it takes two salaries to buy a house and/or raise a family. 

In The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future, by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann describes how the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, began to destroy the middle class, from 1981-1989.
Back in the early 1980’s, the middle class controlled almost 22% of the nation’s wealth. Today, it controls under 5% of the wealth.

Since the late 1770’s, the United States has lied to the rest of the world, and portrayed itself as a classless society.
However, America has never been that.
The Englishmen who planned the colonization of North America saw this land as one giant workhouse where they could send their orphans, debtors, vagabonds, and convicts.
In Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, she mentions how the third US President Thomas Jefferson (in one of his public education proposals) planned that a few lucky scholars be “raked from the rubbish,” and be educated above grade school level.
(Jefferson used the word “rubbish” to describe poor men who didn’t own property.)

Urbanites confront hostile locals in 1972’s Deliverance.

When Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he wasn’t speaking about everyone.
He was only referring to white property-owning males, preferably, Englishmen.
It’s a certainty that many of our Founding Fathers thought of poorer communities as “waste people.”
It wasn’t until 1830 that all states dropped owning property, as being necessary in order to vote.

The Civil War was about class, in addition to being about slaves.
Confederate leaders argued that the planter class was born to rule, and that Northerners were degenerates for not believing in their Southern “utopia.”
Southern plantation owners, newspaper editors, and politicians argued against the education of “offscourings,” “mudsills,” crackers, hillbillies, and swamp people.

The 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), explained the Southern Dixiecrat mentality to his White House staff:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Americans seem angry at the class system, but the Right, and the Left, are in conflict over solutions.
Right-wingers believe they are fighting the educated elite; they want white, property-owning Northern Europeans to be honored as those with the “best blood.”
Left-wingers are sick of the empty promises of DEI departments, and the Democratic Party; they want real change, not just adherence to slogans and political correctness.

*The term “mudsill” was coined by US Senator James Henry Hammond (according to Nancy Isenberg, on page 157 of White Trash) to describe the innate inferiority of Northerners, to the plantation elite of the South. According to Hammond (1807-1864), “mudsills” were the “urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, and unwashed immigrants” who infested Northern cities. 

Pink Flamingos and White Eyeless Crabs

Babs Johnson (Divine) outside her trailer with pink flamingo lawn ornaments in Pink Flamingos.

The above title isn’t a reference to the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
Instead, the title comes from a long-ago discussion, when I was fifteen.
I was walking (in a Michigan neighborhood) with a German foreign exchange student.
We passed by a front yard bedecked with pink flamingo* lawn ornaments, when my new friend commented that this was the way she expected all American homes to look.
I got it.
She expected all Americans to be vulgar, ignorant and low-class.
It’s just the way Europeans thought of the U.S.A.
(I tried not to take it personally.)

This memorandum compares the 2006 English translation of the German eco-thriller The Swarm, to the 8-part mini-series (based on the novel), which aired on European TV in March of 2023, and in the U.S. on CW (sadly, the lowest-rated American network).
A future memorandum will deal with science-fiction novels that deal with humankind’s relationship with nature, and the oceans.

The Swarm deals with humanity destroying the oceans—dumping radioactive and industrial waste; laying down deep sea cables with magnetic fields (that interfere with the homing instincts of salmon and eels); and laying waste to ecosystems and coral reefs.
As the result of this activity, entities in the oceans begin to fight back.
Although the novel is science-fiction, and not a scientific book, most critics say The Swarm presents marine biology and geology very accurately.

Board game for The Swarm.

The Swarm novel sold over 4.5 million copies and has been translated into 18 languages.
The mini-series has an international cast, and the mini-series was the most expensive German TV show ever made.
There’s also a popular strategy board game, based on the novel, in which each player sends scientists to confront the ecological catastrophes.

Frank Schätzing, creator of the novel, is of the same generation as the German exchange student I knew in the late 1960s.
In his novel, the U.S. President talks about the “ridiculous little countries” of the U.N., and says that “God’s still holding His protective hand over the West.”
CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt wears “a bright yellow T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiss me, I’m a Prince,’ stretched over his expansive belly,” when he greets a team of scientists.
The U.S. Defense Secretary arrogantly says to the President: “We are the free world. Europe is part of the American free world.”
(Most of the American government officials featured in the novel are hyper-nationalistic jerks.)

While the basic plots are the same, scientists versus a higher intelligence—that’s existed in the oceans for millions of years—a lot of material couldn’t be used from the 881-page novel.
Some characters (Norwegian biologist Sigur Johanson, American astrophysicist Samantha Crowe, and Canadian biologist Leon Anawak) carry over from the novel, but they’re altered, both in appearance (age and ethnicity) and in personality.
New characters were created, and the novel’s main American villains—General Judith Li, and CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt—are completely erased from the mini-series plot (probably, because of misguided hopes for reaching the “American market.”)

Scientist Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim) in the mini-series The Swarm.

At the beginnings of both versions of The Swarm, we’re introduced to several scientists as they begin to realize that a superior intelligence exists deep in the oceans, and is moving against humanity.
Whales overturn ships, and millions of white eyeless crabs invade the shorelines.
A species of marine worm (with teeth) destabilizes the continental shelf, causing a tsunami that kills millions in Northern Europe.
Eventually, some of the scientists are united on a big ship, and attempt to communicate with the intelligence (named the Yrr by Dr. Johanson).
In the novel, the scientists unite on a gigantic U.S. Navy ship.
In the mini-series, a Japanese industrialist finances the mission.

Despite calling out many countries (including Germany) for their non-ecological methods, the novelist does focus, in a few instances, on American actions.
According to one section on the Vietnam War dolphin experiments, the U.S. Navy created a:

Swimmer Nullification Program. . .Those animals were trained to tug at divers’ masks and flippers and disconnect their air-supply. . . The navy strapped hypodermic needles to their beaks and the dolphins were ordered to ram the divers. . . Our animals killed over forty Vietcong and two of our own guys by mistake.

While I’ve read that the U.S. Navy did use dolphins to blow up ships during the Vietnam War, the idea of dolphins being turned into “killing machines” is a bit hard to accept.

A beached orca in the mini-series The Swarm. Its’ brain has been tampered with by the Yrr.

Another sequence deals with the U.S. Navy Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), and how its’ brain-damaging sonar makes whales beach themselves.
(“Evidently the Americans couldn’t pass up on the opportunity of putting 80% of the world’s oceans under surveillance,” says a Canadian character in the novel.)
However, the U.S. already has plenty to feel guilty about in terms of polluting the oceans with DDT, nuclear waste, and chemicals (in case you’ve never read Rachel Carson’s 1962 science book Silent Spring).

In the novel, the first “physical” interaction with the Yrr occurs when dolphins return to the ship hanger with Yrr and murderous orcas.
Alicia Delaware, and other crew members, die gruesomely, and she’s taken over zombie-style.

Mini-series episode 7 is far less violent than the novel.
In it, after oceanographer Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) and a robotics expert return to the ship in a submersible, they unknowingly bring the Yrr along.
Later, Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) is alone in the hanger, when she spots a strange glowing form in the water.
The Yrr hijack her nervous system (just as it took over sperm whales, orcas, lobsters, and crabs).
Delaware is the Yrr’s first human experiment, and rather than becoming a zombie, she goes into a coma.

The final chapters of the novel involve the heroes fighting (action-movie style) with part of the U.S. Government.
Aware that destruction of the Yrr might end in earth’s extinction, the scientists hope for co-existence.
However, the American officials just want to eradicate the Yrr. . . no matter the consequences!
(In an attempt to implement their plan, Li and Vanderbilt kill many of the hero-scientists.)

The cover of a new American edition of The Swarm.

The novel ends with the big ship going down, and journalist Karen Weaver traveling down 3,466 meters in a submersible and dropping off a corpse (full of pheromones), for the Yrr to examine.
Only a few scientists and crew members survive the sinking.
Canadian biologist Leon Anawak rescues Karen Weaver from the water in a helicopter.
A year-later, an epilogue reveals that the nations of the earth are slowly recovering from the tsunamis and the Yrr-created pathogens.
We don’t learn much about the Yrr, but they do give surface creatures a reprieve.
However, at the point that the novel ends, humankind has gone into in a deep funk over its’ “loss of primacy,” and armed conflicts are spreading across the globe.

The mini-series ending is not quite as dark as the end of the novel.
Episode 8 concludes with oceanographer Charlie Wagner traveling deep in the submersible (to show “good faith” to the Yrr?), communing with them/it, and (strangely) washing up alive on shore.
Even a comatose Alicia Delaware seems to survive!
Since the last episode was listed as a season finale, and not a series finale, there’s the possibility of a second season.

In Frogs,  millionaire Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) represents those who want to “use up” the earth’s resources, and nature photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) represents those who respect the environment.

Putting The Swarm into context, it’s in the tradition of eco-thrillers. The 1968 Japanese film Genocide, also released as War of the Insects, tells of insects attacking humanity because of humanity's nuclear threat.
(Brave scientists battle the unreasoning American military in that film, as well.)
In 1972’s Frogs, reptiles, insects and amphibians stalk rich patriarch Jason Crockett after he uses poisons against creatures on his estate.
In Phase IV, ants (taken over by a superior intelligence from outer space) wage war against humankind in the American desert. 

Phase IV was released in 1974 with a truncated ending. The “real” ending (“discovered” in 2012) shows people merging with the ants, and a new species being formed. (Paramount found that ending too disturbing to use in the initial release.)

*According to the Wikipedia article on pink flamingos, some U.S. homeowner associations forbid the placement of these lawn ornaments because they lower real estate values.