Interview with Tom Sexton of The Trillbillies podcast on Kentucky Floods

Socialism for the wealthy and rugged individualism for everybody else.

screenshot, CNN news broadcast

A little over two weeks ago there was massive flooding in Eastern Kentucky. People went to bed one night and woke up to hell. The intensity of the rainfall was unprecedented, and the results, which would have been bad already, were worsened by the conditions of this part of the country, where the land has been degraded heavily by coal mining. Many of the dwellings are cheaply made and therefore easily destroyed. The infrastructure in much of the U.S. is falling apart but is particularly shitty in Eastern Kentucky, because, as you might have noticed, poor people in the US have always been fucked and they’re getting more fucked every day. Right now the death toll is at 39. It is believed to be much higher. 

I’m a long-time listener of The Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast, a left, anti-police, anti-capitalist, twice-a-week (if you pay, like I do) show out of Whitesburg, Kentucky, one of the towns deeply affected and in some places just about ruined by the flood. The show is hosted by Tarence Ray, Tom Sexton, Aaron Thorpe and Tanya Turner, who work altogether sometimes or in groups of twos or threes.  Tom is a friend of mine, and I wanted to ask him some questions for a deeper understanding of both what’s going on there and his feelings and thoughts and reactions to it. 

Please listen to the three episodes about the floods. Also, check out Tarence’s story here, from The Baffler this week. I don’t really know how to put this, it feels weird praising the work people do about horrible things but these two podcasts are brilliant — close friends coming to terms, in real time, with the fact that their lives as they know it (and the lives of people dear to them) have basically come to an end, and trying to go on with as much strength, humor and love as they can despite this.

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ME: Tom I’m sorry I texted you three days after the flood which I did not know about because I was not looking at news on purpose and was like hey you’re ok, riigggghhttttt??? 

TOM SEXTON: A real friend lets you sit with it for a minute—you did the right thing Sarah.

I’m also sorry that when you said your sister almost died escaping the flood and you sent a New York Times article about this event I just thought “oh this can’t really be his sister this he must just be sending this as an example of someone who had a similar experience,”  because, I guess, I still wanted to believe that nothing this bad had happened to you or anyone you know, even though I already knew it had? 

That shit was crazy. I was freaking out. I couldn’t get ahold of anybody back home like all day besides Tarence and at the same time I had friends from back home some I hadn’t spoken to in some time calling me losing their shit saying they couldn’t get ahold of any of their loved ones. My friend Wes called and said he couldn’t find his wife and kid, they ended up being okay but I think all of us had somebody we care about displaced or in kind of a hairy situation for a bit. Turns out all the phone lines and cell towers were down. So you know one thing you definitely don’t want happening in a crisis is no way to communicate.

I want to say though you’re in Whitesburg a lot, where you grew up, you live in Lexington now, but your family still lives in the area, and they pretty much lost everything? 

Yeah, we didn’t fare so well. My mom has been in the hospital and isn’t even aware of it yet. She’s a bit out of it at the moment because of her condition but in her moments of lucidity, it’s funny, she’ll pick up her little TV remote and say “let’s see what’s going on in the world” and she’ll try to turn on the news and I have to just intervene and suggest we watch like, The Price is Right instead. Not ready to have that conversation just yet, but the jig will be up soon. My sister just found out she didn’t have flood insurance and is hoping some combination of FEMA money and SBA grant can help mitigate the financial loss—all this while basking in the afterglow of almost drowning in hepatitis water. At a community level, I mean, I’m from there and it’s wild to see some of the institutions that make the place special being on the ropes—Appalshop especially. It sprang out of the war on poverty in the 60s as a media training institute where poor and working mountain kids and others from all over would come and learn to make films. Eventually they’d add a theater and a radio station. A lot of greats came through there: Ned Beatty, Bob Wisdom that was Bunny Colvin in The Wire, Julian Nitzberg, the great Allison Anders, Harmony Korrine’s dad, Will Oldham, I could go on. And of course Letcher County itself has a lot to be proud of—we boast the world’s tallest couple, Bobby Bare who sang “Dropkick me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life,” Gary Stewart who sang “She’s Acting Single, I’m drinking double” and the guy that invented the hadron collider.

Bobby Bare sings an amazing duet with Roseanne Cash  - No Memories Hangin’ Round. We could crush that at karaoke - can you sing?

From episode one. I had a listener tell me I had no lower diaphragm power after singing Conway Twitty’s Goodbye Time while Tarence went to pee—but Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Frank Ocean, and Frank Sinatra all can’t really “sing” but they sound pretty good. I think we could pull it off.

And Tarence’s place is relatively Ok, but he’s obviously been helping out friends who were not so lucky. One of the things that has struck me from the post-flood episodes on the podcast is how much just literal human feces is present in flood waters, and on objects when they recede. I don’t know if people know about this, and it seems like they should.  

That was true before the flood. Coal companies came in these communities and instead of building solid infrastructure and letting urban development spring up around it like in Pittsburgh or Birmingham, they felt it more advantageous to build these ricketty coal camps with no septic or running water in some cases because they were never meant to be permanent—just needed them to house workers long enough for the companies to get what they needed out of the ground then split. I used to hate talking about this because it seemed like making light of poverty, but it’s truly stark that I can take you to communities that could rival shanties in the developing world that have produced unimaginable wealth for this country and they’re still to this day having to pipe waste straight from their homes directly into the streams. 

This is Tarence talking about the flood on the show:  “It is absolutely beyond belief. Every day you think you’ve kind of got the reins on it, every day you’re encountered with a new anecdote, thing …then he kind of trailed off.  What was your latest thing that you were like, oh shit, this keeps getting worse. 

Tarence took this picture today and sent it to me of a trailer home I think used as a church that split in two and absolutely destroyed with a sign out front that read: “God is good all the time.” The juxtaposition was funny in a dark way. I think we’ve come to the consensus that at best God is only good some of the time. I’d also add just the anecdotal stories I hear from some of the poorest people in the country getting rejected by FEMA for relief money and being directed to other things they can apply to. Having to fill out convoluted paperwork for a crumb of help after enduring a real survival situation and losing everything you’ve ever worked for must be what they mean when they say “a fate worse than death.”

You guys talked today with great humor although of course it’s not that funny, about how Eastern Kentucky’s plans for economic rejuvenation have come to a bit of an impasse. Here’s you, Tom, talking about it: “What they sold a generation of people where we’re at, where we’re from,  is that entrepreneurship, small businesses, that’s the way forward, that this rising tide is going to lift all boats… well the rising tides came but there wasn’t no boats lifted...What makes me mad [isn’t that people wanted to open these businesses] but that powerful people that were able to get everything out of the ground and out of the hills sold people on this horseshit dream.” Then you talked about something called the SOAR initiative, and basically how people were taught that any one who had any hope of having a better world was the enemy, and that worrying about the environmental degradation was “pussy.”  Do you see the disaster changing this way of thinking at all? You said the other day you know so many people who lost everything. What do you see this doing to how they see the material conditions of Eastern Kentucky, if anything. Also — and I don’t know if I really want to know lol - wtf is the SOAR initiative? 

Hahaha SOAR (or, Shaping Our Appalachian Region) is the bipartisan initiative started by former Governor Steve Beshear, father of current governor Andy Beshear (he of “I wish I could tell you why this is happening” tweet fame) and Congressman Hal Rogers (he of “has presided of the nation’s poorest congressional district for more than four decades and was once called by even the National Review a “national embarrassment” fame) that effectively rewards recycled coal barons and a veritable who’s who of hucksters and con men with allowing them to get in on the ground floor of the latest economic development opportunities. These opportunities have been real doozies—ranging from Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos-esqe cons that defy logic and not a few natural laws (ed. note—one such example is mine runoff water to produce nuclear energy—I think we should just on its face avoid nuclear in most forms: energy, war, family, etc. but as a practical matter—I don’t think there’s enough mine runoff water in the world much less Kentucky to make that viable.) to more obvious cons like crypto mining facilities that will hire out of work coal miners as security guards. As far as people’s thinking around climate goes—much like how most people’s politics are a tapestry of different ideas based on their experiences and not necessarily a coherent ideology—you hear a lot of scattershot ideas on the planet warming that don’t quite equal out to climate change denial like a lot of liberals accuse us of, but that also certainly don’t recognize coal’s role in it in an honest and candid way much of the time. 

How did you become a more-or-less communist - meaning, believing that private property sucks, that the unresolvable contradictions at the heart of capitalism, that it’s all about businesses making money selling goods but the only way to make that money is impoverish the people you need to buy those goods, so that capitalists are always trying to strike some kind of weird balance that they really can’t strike…anyway. How did you come to possess the magical knowledge that the way most people think about the economy is utter nonsense. 

I think like most things in my life that proved deleterious to my social climbing and good reputation—Tarence talked me into it. I’M KIDDING! For me three stories proved powerful in my political thinking: the exploits of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the Haitian Slave Revolt. Why? Because all those figures from Fidel Castro (even though he was comfortable to some degree) to Zapata and Villa to Dessalines, who abolished slavery in Haiti were all hillbillies, campesinos! So it started with something as simple as feeling a kinship with figures like that and eventually connecting that to the mine wars and labor struggles of where I’m from. Then in my own life, I (Tarence too) got involved in the prison abolition movement when the Bureau of Prisons wanted to build a $400 million dollar federal facility near a place called Lilley Cornett Woods which is one of the world's oldest what they call old growth forests—I mean there are trees and vegetation here you just don’t see anywhere else—and us and some friends put together a little ad hoc group that was able to mount the only successful challenge to a proposed federal prison in the country’s history. It had never been done before. And to see how an egalitarian and liberatory vision can change hearts and minds was really formative for me. I see a lot of rad libs bag on “old white men” being the cause of every manner of suffering but I can tell you I saw bonafide old, white stuck-in-their-ways men positively transformed and in concert with real radicals once their material conditions were connected to a real struggle where there were big stakes for a community. I’ll never count out anybody again. During this flood thing a mentor and friend of ours, Dee Davis, remarked in his inimitable way, that he hated that the experience has made him have to raise his estimation of people haha. When the chips are down man, people, some you would have never dreamed would, answer the bell and it’s powerful.

Even if you know capitalism doesn’t work, a massive flood is a really good way to see good evidence. Tarence for example was talking on the second episode about how people who lost everything or almost everything are seen as “double dipping” in distribution lines for supplies, and the idea that this is somehow “selfish.” He said: “But the name of the game here is survival. And that’s the fucking rules that you all agreed upon when capitalism became embodied in everything… there’s no planning or coordination in any of this.” Basically the survival of the fittest part of it is fine, until it’s not. It’s weird to me that everyone thinks being devious in business is cool but then when you maybe try to get a little creative about anything that you’re not allegedly paying for, people freak the fuck out. It’s nuts. Comments? 

I mean it’s kind of like that Martin King quote something like: socialism for the wealthy and rugged individualism for everybody else. One thing I saw that kind of blew my mind is a couple who own one of the grocery stores in the county were these huge boosters for the proposed federal prison project I mentioned earlier. They wanted to put it in town because they stood to get a lucrative federal contract if it was built. Their store ended up with seven feet of water in it, and there’s a gofundme and all this. Now, I’m not taking a victory lap on their misfortune, but you can’t dehumanize all these people in prison by supporting prison expansion and have a general air of fuck you I did this the right way, nobody wants to work anymore, etc etc and hope that when misfortune visits you that you’re uniquely deserving of the help because you’re a pillar of the community or whatever.

In our texts we started talking about how there’s a lot of policing around the right ways to feel about, basically, the end of the world. Like you asked me if you could be funny and I was like yes bitch please. I mean, ok, one of the worst things about this flood for me was that I loved being able to tell you about the fires knowing you didn’t QUITE get what it was like to be living in fear. And now you do, and your family got it much worse than I have, at least yet.  And I hate you for joining the club of almost constant terror of climate induced fear/hell. Fuck you for leaving the group of the innocents. I like having friends in that group. 

Hahaha I think I “if you need anything”-ed you a few times in the past couple years. It sucks that we don’t have a better way to communicate our care and willingness to help than saying the requisite “if you need anything let me know.” No, I get it now—or I at least have an approximation I should say—I mean y’all are getting New God, fires God, while we get God Classic, with the floods, I feel cheated! He just plays the hits on us! The Chapo boys had a really great line in their book that came out a few years back talking about climate crisis and how a place like Bangladesh, this very densely populated country that makes a lot of our stuff has this insane monsoon season that’s very destructive and the line is something to the effect of “The End of the World is here, you just don’t live there yet.” And I think about that a lot these days particularly connected to that Mike Davis piece from 2020 about the consequences of the pandemic for the global south—the end has been here for some time for a lot of people. We have to see this flood that destroyed my hometown as just as strongly connected to drought and famine in sub saharan Africa as it is to California wildfires as it is to Bengali monsoons.

Can you end by talking a bit about how “law enforcement” has responded to the floods?

I mean no surprise here but cops everywhere are so dialed in to punishing poor and working people that they can’t just change and actually be public servants in a crisis. Our cops are no different. They had flood victims’ cars impounded at the victim’s expense THE DAY AFTER the flood. They imposed lock downs and curfews, and blew way out of proportion to what was really going on this idea that looters were making off with everybody’s things like there was all of a sudden this robust market for everybody’s water logged shit. The Sheriff put out a statement that he was “going to make an example of these bastards.” And all of it is just to give the notion that they are providing a service when in reality they have no utility—especially in a crisis where they’re a hindrance to people getting what they need.

Finally, if you could let people know how they can help.

Well for more context I think people should read my partner-in-crime Tarence’s piece in The Baffler this week. 

And then I would check out this list of resources/ways to help the people at  Appalshop have put together and donate your money and/or time to any that feel resonant:

https://appalshop.org/news/appalachian-flood-support-resources

Thanks for having me Sarah, if you need anything let me know 😎