Slate--Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo really says about American culture.

[MadHound]

59. I come from a long line of hillbillies, probably one of the first in this country,

Started out in Virginia, wound its way through Kentucky and Tennessee, with the majority finally winding up in the Ozarks. Branson is named after an ancestor of mine.

When I was a kid, I was embarrassed and ashamed of my heritage, especially the fact that the family tree looked more stump-like than anything else, if you get my drift. But as I grew older, I grew to embrace that heritage, for a number of reasons.

First, these people aren't dumb, just uneducated. Up until about sixty years ago, life was extremely hard in the backwoods hills. Kids were needed to help keep the crops coming in, to keep the family alive. My father was the first in our family to graduate from college, not because he was smarter than others, but because the family finally had enough free time to allow him the opportunity to pursue an education.

In fact, given how hillbillies are notorious for being able to make anything run with baling wire and spit, one would have to see that they have an innate intelligence.

Second, people damn them for their stand offish ways and clannishness, well that attitude developed for a reason, being constantly persecuted by not just the government, but corporations, railroads, and any trickster looking to make a quick buck. It simply became an easier policy to shoot first than get ripped off later.

Third, the culture, the art. I know, musical tastes vary, and I wasn't a big fan of hillbilly music when I was a kid, mainly because it was overplayed in my house, but as I grew older I grew to love it. It is real, it is beautiful in a way that reminds me of music in a brook or the sun coming up over the mountain.

Fourth, the comfort of belonging to a group, a clan, that supports you to the hilt. I know that if I ever got into seriously deep shit, I could make one call and within an half hour have a hundred family members here armed to the teeth, with more on the way, all to protect me, my wife and my property. That's serious familial loyalty there, something that not all families have going for them.

Yes, these people are, for the most part, racist to some degree or another, but that is slowly changing. Yes, they distrust government and virtually every other outside institution, for a good reason, their contacts with them have generally ended badly, very badly. Land seized, people thrown in jail, people killed. It is better in their eyes to keep everybody and everything that isn't family at shotgun's distance than trust that somebody outside of the family will do right by them. And yes, these people are uneducated, but that is changing as well. High school dropout rates are down, graduation rates are up, and starting about forty years ago, a movement began to get their kids to college. My dad used to sponsor these kids coming up from the hills and hollers, poor, scared freshmen who had never been outside their community much less in what they thought of as a "big" town of 50,000. Yeah, they spoke funny, and had poor dental work, but you know what, that would slowly change, and these kids turned out to be some of the best in their classes. They took their degrees in veterinary medicine and agriculture and medicine and education and business back to where they came from and put them to good use.

And now those kids are the leaders now, and though they may still talk with the same twang, they are whip smart, smart enough to sell a millions of city slickers into coming from all over the country to a little town in the Ozarks and spend billions of dollars annually. So who's the fool, the guy selling the hillbilly illusion, or the rube who is buying it?