Welcome to Appalachia

Land of Ignorance and Want.

From “A Christmas Carol” by Mr. Charles Dickens.

…
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.

And abide the end.'

Over at the Group News Blog, the noble LowerManhattanite has penned an eloquent plea for understanding and patience with the Sons of the Soil.

Proving once again that LowerManhattanite is a better person than I am, and that we could use about a million more like him.

For myself, when I read something like this for the umpteenth time (from the Chicago Tribune) --

To many white voters, race still matters
Rural Kentucky points up a difficult reality for Barack Obama

By Rex W. Huppke

MUNFORDVILLE, Ky. — Mike Rife is white, a semiretired factory worker with a high school education and a 2-foot-square sign on his lawn that makes friends and neighbors flip him the finger as they drive by.

The sign reads: "Obama for President."

"I think I almost know what it feels like to be a black guy," said Rife, his voice gravelly and defiant. "I take heat every day. I got an Obama sticker on my car, and I catch hell for it."

…

"They won't vote for a black man," Rife said of the people he has lived around all his 57 years. "That's all there is to it. They just can't bring themselves to do it."

…

Terry Jordan, 47, who runs a year-round garage sale in front of an old filling station on Main Street, put it simply: "It's his color."

A weighty reality

The Munfordvilles of America — and there are many—present a troubling reality for Obama's campaign, as his lopsided loss in neighboring West Virginia showed. These are the places where lofty talk of transcending race is dragged to earth by a weighty reality that has nothing to do with Obama's position on the federal gas tax, Clinton's tenacity on the campaign trail or even the off-putting rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

"Right now it's not that Hillary attracts the white vote," said Jack Bunnell, 79. "It's that Obama's black."

…

Rife knows of no more than 10 other people who, like him, will vote for Obama. Still, he doesn't view people in his community as mean-spirited. Few will express any particular dislike of black people, he said, but asking them to vote for a black man for president is simply too much of a leap: "They just aren't ready for it."


Kentucky was a border state in the Civil War. It eventually sided with the Union, but much of the populace either joined or supported the Confederacy. Munfordville was the site of a major victory for the South, one that marked a high point of the Confederacy's westward push.

'Lots of factors'
…

Tim Carter lives on a narrow, crescent-shaped road called National Turnpike, a block or so off Main Street, an area known as "the black part of town." He's an Obama supporter, though he knows his man stands no chance in Kentucky.

"He shouldn't even bother to fly over," said Carter, who was born and raised in Munfordville and has spent 35 of his 56 years working in a nearby factory.

…

Rebel flags on walls
Webster Rogers, 23 and also black, said that in high school he felt welcome visiting the homes of white friends. But often he would spot Confederate flags hanging on the walls, reminders of differences that still linger.

That divide has provided fertile ground for Obama conspiracy theories. Residents opposed to Obama seem inclined to latch onto false rumors about the candidate or negative exaggerations about his views.

"I believe that he's a Muslim," said Susan Horton, 56 and white. She leaves her living room whenever Obama comes on the television. "I think that if he gets into office, there's going to be another bombing."

"He's not patriotic," said Brandy Trulock, a 21-year-old mother of two. "If you can't salute the American flag, I don't think you should be allowed to run for president."

At his never-ending garage sale, Terry Jordan sells secondhand bluejeans, ceramic tchotchkes and anything else he can get his hands on, displaying his wares on a flatbed trailer and a few rickety folding tables. He makes about $100 a week to supplement his $720 monthly disability check.

He's all Democrat, all Clinton and, if Obama wins the nomination, all for Republican John McCain. He doesn't trust Obama, has serious questions about the Muslim rumors and truly believes a black man will not survive long as president of the United States.

…

-- I realize I am done conceding one more fucking millimeter to the great- great-grandbastards of an ideology that should have been universally denounced two generations ago and then unceremoniously sealed like Chernobyl under a million tons of concrete.

Instead, far from repudiating ignorance and racism -- burying them at the crossroads with a stake through their rotting hearts -- for as long as I have been alive they have been the Republican’s cash crops; their carefully cultivated political opium poppies.

So rather than denouncing the mutant offspring of our nation's Original Sin, they hire professional race-baiting gunslingers like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to dog-whistle its shambling electoral corpse back up from unquiet graves in unholy ground every two years with magic conjure words like “Southern Pride”, "Confederate flag” and “state’s rights”.

Because it works. It fucking well works.

For far, far too long, tossing this toxic red meat to Red State chuckleheads has been the tent pole that kept the GOP viable.

Now if the denizens of Trailertrashylvania wanted to live out their lives gamboling safely around inside of some razor-wire enclosed theme park -- some Antebellum Confederacy-land where they can harmlessly get their bigoted ya-yas out smacking around robot hippies and showing uppity audio-animatronic Negroes who’s boss -- I'd say fine.

I'd say great.

I'd say, hoo-fucking-ray and God be with you.

But outside of the studios of the Jerry Springer Show, on any given day we have no such Federal Mulletarium where they can be assembled and harmless contained.

If it were only their own fates and futures they consistently and suicidally vote to sabotage, then they would have my pity and my patience. But like the young man who decides to relieve me of my wallet on some dark and dodgy street, the minute he flashes a weapon is the minute I lose any interest in the socioeconomic circumstances that put him in my path.

Instead, in that moment, he moves from fellow citizen perhaps in need of help to a threat to be neutralized.

Only when he stops pointing a weapon at me does he regain the right to be treated as anything other than an enemy.

And now that they have been stripped of their Confederacy, their Jim Crow laws, their dogs, their fire hoses and the noose, the ballot box is one of the few weapons the sons and daughters of Jefferson Davis have left.

In the general election 2000, Al Gore lost to George Bush in Kentucky by 15 points.

In 2004, Kerry lost by 20.

And in 2008 there is no reason in the world to think they're going to go Democratic in the Big Show, so I really don't give a good god damn what the results of their primary might be.

I will be more than happy to welcome these people as equals into the Big Tent for a seat at the Round Table…once they spit Jesse Helms’ dick out of their mouths and stop voting against their own interests, against our national interests and for whatever smells most like Caucasian Jebus and their beloved Confederate States of Murrica.

But so long as the hunger for their votes means they're pandered to instead of punished...so long as they are allowed to rage unchecked and unchallenged like a disease through our body politic -- decade after exhausting decade -- warping our national debates, demanding that their atavistic values be accommodated...I say fuck ‘em.

Without the guns of the Union Army, the Confederacy would never have fallen. And without the massed might of the federal government, the courts, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens putting their necks on the line, Jim Crow would never have been smashed.

And so unlike Lewis Carroll’s “boojum” in “The Hunting of the Snark”, I have absolutely no reason to believe that, having endured proudly intact century after century, our surviving enclaves of American bigotry will ever “softly and suddenly vanish away” without the aid of a fleet of cultural and political bulldozers.