Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" If you're just joining us, you picked a good time. Supper's on. We've got bean soup, corn bread, peaches that were canned last summer, and shoo fly pie.
If you'd rather have pistachio-encrusted tilapia served on a bed of organic baby romaine, finished with a warm cilantro-chipotle infusion, move the hell on. You are way off track.
Today's topic: Black and blue hillbillies.
We're not talking here about a couple of rednecks who've had too much Jim Beam and are disagreeing on the merits of the local high school football team. They're gonna be black and blue in the morning, but it'll pass.
What doesn't pass is the pervasive notion that people who live in the mountains, specifically West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and parts of North Carolina, are ignorant sister-screwers who can't get any better job than to dig coal.
Coal mining is a dangerous operation, particularly if your shop is not unionized.
It is not now, nor has it ever been, a job for lazy dummies. Particularly in this mechanized age, but even before that, your coal miner had to be proficient with all sorts of tools and a keen, quick thinker.
Nobody infers by their location and employment that policemen are dummies. Or soldiers. Or those guys fighting the brush fires in Texas.
Poor coal-blackened hillbillies get the bad rap.
Is it any wonder they're blue? I mean, Blue?
Even though they go to church every Sunday, they vote Democratic. In they go to the booth, flick the switch for Robert Byrd. They vote just like all those liberal college professors at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. You know the ones. The pistachio-encrusted tilapia crowd.
Stupid knows no boundaries or geography. If you don't believe me, stop by the Oval Office and take a peek in the door.
Enough, already. My soup's a-gettin cold. And before you dis that "a-gettin," please be advised that linguists believe this inflection to be authentic Elizabethan-era English.
See? We even talk better than y'all.
PS - If you read me, if you really read me, I'd appreciate a nod for a "Bloggie" award. Okay, I'm not as funny as that Foxworthy dude. But I'm not as well paid, either. Not by a country mile.
ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS
1 comment:
Right on, sister!
It's nice to see some Appalachian pride like this in the Blogosphere. Keep up the good work. I, for one, hope you'll reconsider and do a few more hillbilly rants in the future. It's about time we start speaking up.
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