Ducks, Redux

--Prefer your hunters look like Fernando Fernandez?
by Leonard Nones, GQ (1968)

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, 
with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition,
and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
--W. T. Sherman, Major-General

Now I don't mind choppin' wood,
and I don't care if the money's no good
Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best 
--The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band

~“Officers, what offence have these men done?
~Marry, sir, they have committed false report;
moreover, they have spoken untruths;
secondarily, they are slanders;
sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; 
thirdly, they have verified unjust things;
and, to conclude, they are lying knaves. 
--Much Ado About Nothing; William Shakespeare
_____________________

How embarrassing, predictable and perfectly-scripted is the outrage to the religious and social comments voiced by a character (Mr. Robertson) on the Duck t.v. program. If you played any part in this, you are being manipulated and are perfect pawns of the power brokers. Your outrage to an imagined offense is energy dissipated.

Not that this silly t.v. episode is of any import, save for the fact it shows the hatred, derision and bigotry which has riven our nation.

The producer's shameless manipulation in their construction of the Ducks (=Robertsons) as god-fearin' is a way to conduct a free Nielson-type survey. They -- whoever they are -- are gauging your tolerance for the exercise of your freedoms. Predictably, the good liberals are howling with disdain for the Duck brand of Christianity, which is to say, Christianity. They are persecuting the "dynasty" in their own bloodless and craven way.

Do you want to reform Christianity? Send the Ducks to a re-education camp? If so, what side of history are you on? Are you shocked and awed that Christianity is so judgmental? Outraged? Did you not know that Christian dogma rejects homosexuality, and that this is why a church wedding service for gays makes no sense? Are you Christian and finding yourself drawing into fellowship with these erstaz t.v. bumpkins by necessity?

Do you believe in the Constitution, and find your mouth agape at the insanity of the virtual lynch mob of the supposed best-and-brightest, the compassionate liberals, who are tripping over themselves to show their intolerance and distrust of their own constitutional rights?

The furore which erupted in the liberal commentariat, the palpable anger and hatred towards the actor, a stereotypical redneck, is ridiculous. Hatred is hatred -- it is absolute, and there is no "good" form. It is corrosive to fraternity and cannot survive a genuine impulse to brotherhood, which is the thing we most lack today.

The producers of the Duck program are forcing and revealing your bigotry to you. Is every effort by a white man to express his experience with a black person, without genuflecting, to be condemned? If so, kiss your democracy goodbye. 

What part of freedom of speech and religion is too unpalatable to the mostly white liberals? From whence this white liberal fear and anger, and why the thought that muzzling one's non-hate free speech is the way to a better society? The liberals chomping at the bit to curtail and discredit this character's speech wish to trample our Constitution as badly as do the neo-Cons. 

Our collective movement seems to span the small metronomic arc of a couple of thousand years (if that), and we are now back to persecuting Christians. It all looks very familiar, and we are not past our bloody-minded urges. The bible is the guidebook for Christians, and it proclaims, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22) That's simple and clear. Now, you can deride those you think gulls who believe it's the word of God, but for them, it is.

The nice thing about our separation of Church and State is that one may believe or not, and the State may not intrude into that realm. (Separate is that fact that in a democratic society gay couples in civil partnership deserve all benefits accruing to any legal domestic partnership. You may think Chrisianity is old-fashioned, but most other faith systems aside from from Islam, Baha'i, Mormonism, Urantianism are even older. If you're a totemist, wiccan, pagan, polytheist, polyandrist, etc., you're beliefs are even more antiquated than those of Christians.)

If you're in a persecutorial mode, you can find succor with like minds in The Inquisition and the Joe McCarthy trials, but please do not fancy yourselves enlightened or democratic. What has you in a lather is not hate speech, but the personal views of a member of your society voiced on a television program.

If you are railing against this t.v. character's views on anything (religion, race relations -- anything), you are drawing into a safe community of like-minded bigots who would seek to curb another's speech and try him in the court of public opinion (never a reliable inquisitor.) Who are you to label someone as a cad, fool or liar? Worse yet, a t.v. persona, an unreal thing.

Why does the liberal commentariat feel it is their obligation to protest a white man's declaration that he worked in the fields with black men and did not see his black co-workers singled out for mistreatment? In the quote, Mr. Duck did not use a racial expletive when speaking of his experience ("I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once"), yet the liberals are on him like hyenas (much to the delight of the program producers.) The unenlightened arrogance is unsavory. 

This is the vitriol that creates a polarized society. In the past several years, I have seen Baptist friends who were once proud of and involved with their society's move to inclusivity now too drawing in amongst their own, feeling the burn of marginalization which the Tea Party and their too-ready liberal antagonists fan.

We have lived through ten years of war. Try and let go your anger as a gift to yourself, your country and your world.

I am loathe to call myself "liberal" against such a wave of fetid and naked bigotry.

Walks Like a Duck

 --graphic from RAW friend Alan Cring 

Because you can’t starve us out
And you can't makes us run
Cuz we're them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say grace and we say Ma’am
And if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn 
--Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams, Jr. 
_____________________

Everything represented in the media comes with spin engineered to make the viewer feel one of the basic emotions (sad/mad/happy). Concomitant with this is the catharsis achieved by feeling like one is among the elect for understanding and identifying with the right side (the side to which one chooses to cleave.)

What masquerades as debate today erupted this week over a television character's opinion that homosexuality was disordered behavior, akin to bestiality. The media feigned at being aghast, stating that this point of view was "un-Christian". 

Sadly, no: In fact Mr. Duck was echoing exactly the Christian party line. In fact, it forms one of the pillars of belief in our main faith system in the United States. The problem is, proclaiming one is anti-homosexual is a bit embarrassing today when government agencies are recognizing homosexual partnerships as being a valid route to conferring employment benefits and inheritance. It is a bit démodé, quaint, to be polite.

The offending character was the patriarch of the Robinson family, a redneck family represented by a group of ZZ Top look-alikes who supposedly represent the Tea Party archetype in rural America. To some, they are subjects of derision, others doubt their veracity. Still others identify with them, and find kinship with their guns-and-god stance. Why did some t.v. executive feel these American Taliban look-alikes would make for good programming?

Further, why does anyone watch this? Is this a subtle joke, reflecting America's zealotry and in this way, kinship with the Taliban, back at us? (That seems too subtle a project.) Is it a bone thrown out to the marginalized backwoods of America, egging them on to be just who they are, then flogging them when it seems appropriate to do so? 

Is this spectacle a cultural expiation on a grand scale? Is wearing Mossy Oak tree bark the new scarlet "A"? In a theatrical biblical flogging, Mr. Duck the elder has been banished from his eponymous program -- ostracism and scapegoating for the new American project.

Whatever the Ducks are, the patriarch exactly voiced not just Right-wing zealotry when he disparaged homosexuality, but in fact the stance of mainline Christianity vis-a-vis homosexuality. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, you either are or you aren't. Cafeteria Christianity is no Christianity at all. 

The text for Christians, the bible, is clear in its stance against homosexuality. Therefore -- why would someone be ostracized for being Christian? Or are we so hypocritical that we hold these views, but may not voice them? Does constitutional freedom of speech no longer cover freedom of speech and religion?

Just last week it was reported that a Presbyterian minister was defrocked for wedding his gay son to his male lover. Show me the mainstream Christian church that marries gay couples and I will agree that Mr. Duck Sr. is being un-Christian. Until that day, he is being exactly Christian, and being ridiculed for it. Were he in a Brooks Brothers suit at the Washington National Cathedral, no one would bat an eye. 

New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz hops on by writing in his fake story, "Scalia Calls 'Duck Dynasty' Decision Unconstitutional": 

He warned that the suspension of the "Duck" star would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech in America: "If Phil Robertson can be muzzled for expressing this perfectly legitimate view, what's to prevent the same thing from happening to, say, a Justice of the Supreme Court?

But Borowitz's attempt at satire is not. Mr. Robertson's "perfectly legitimate view" is not only that, but it is the raison d'etre for his hiring by A & E, and the exercise of those American rights which he is supposed to embody (free speech and religion).

It is completely disingenuous to feign disdain over his doctrinal thinking. It's a travesty for the media to yank us about, and for us to spend time doing anything but feeling disgust for the tripe we are mainlined on network t.v.

U.S.A. -- Ducks are us.