The Enlightened Hillbilly
The Enlightened Hillbilly is written by a Southerner who has gotten, to use an old Southern expression, “above his raisin’.” It’s a weird expression. In its derogatory sense (the way it is most often used), it means, “You moved off to the big city, and you just ain’t like us no more, so we don’t want nothin’ to do with you.” In its good sense, it means, “You got educated and made somethin’ of yourself, and we’re right proud of you.”
When it’s applied to me, I hope the phrase is uttered in its more beneficent sense. But I’d be crazy to think that’s always the case.
What got this thing started was my sense that our good Southern brethren and sistren had actually gotten below their raisin’. When I was growing up in the South of the 1960s and 1970s, I was surrounded by Democrats. The Democratic Party was the party of the working man and the fighting man. My daddy survived the Battle of the Bulge, and came home from WWII with the Silver Star medal, and he believed until he died in 2003 that it was the Democrats who protected the little folks and who put us in wars only when it really made sense to do it.
My daddy thought that getting Hitler made sense; he thought that going after Saddam was stupid, because Osama was who blew up the damned buildings.
My daddy was a church-going man, too, the choir director of a tiny wood-frame Baptist church in the Appalachian mountains. And when we were growing up, church and politics didn’t mix. The surest way to get yourself fired from pastoring a Baptist church was to stand in the pulpit and tell folks who to vote for.
So today, when I see “W: The President” stickers on poor folks’ pickup trucks and I hear about preachers telling their congregants that they’re going to hell if they don’t support W, I just think things have gotten way off track.
This blog is for folks who think the same thing. And I hope it’ll irritate the hell out of those who don’t.
Who is the hillbilly?
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