Wealth & Money Quote by James Welch

Welch skewers a familiar American reflex: people with very little reach for the one thing still available to them, a rung below. The line lands because the “superior attitude” isn’t framed as a grand ideology; it’s petty, ambient, almost recreational. He calls it “kind of funny,” but the humor is scalpel-sharp. It’s funny the way a contradiction is funny when it’s too blatant to dignify with outrage: marginality masquerading as dominance.

The context matters. In and around reservation border towns, poverty and precarity don’t automatically generate solidarity. They often generate hierarchy-by-proximity, a system where whiteness (or non-Native status) becomes a kind of currency when actual wealth is scarce. Welch’s townspeople are “on the fringes of society themselves,” which exposes racism less as confidence than as compensation. Their contempt functions like a psychological stimulus check: it momentarily inflates the self without changing material conditions.

The subtext is also about visibility and blame. Reservations are routinely treated as adjacent, not integrated - close enough to police, ridicule, or exploit, far enough to ignore structurally. Welch points to how colonial narratives trickle down into everyday social life: the poorest non-Natives inherit the posture of superiority as if it were property, even when they own almost nothing else.

It’s a quiet indictment of how American status is often maintained not through achievement, but through exclusion, a small-town theater of dominance staged by people who can’t afford the ticket.