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.

Helen, Georgia

 --Helen, Georgia

The note said, "Mrs. Johnson,
you're wearing your dresses way too high
It's reported you've been drinking and a-runnin' 'round
 with men and going wild 
--Harper Valley PTA, Tom T. Hall

________________________

It was good to leave town, and your Ranger team has returned just in time to avoid the Labor Day rush, and to enjoy the balmy 96-degree Florida sunshine and humidity.  My neighbor reported hopefully that it hadn't much exceeded the upper-90's for most of August ("a mild summer"), though it did rain a lot, so Lisa is spending Labor Day diligently removing mildew from wood, leather, fabric, etc. in her abode.

We will be cranking up to speed shortly, but for today, a glimpse into the final days of the trip spent in North Georgia, specifically, the town of Helen in the aptly named county of White, touted as Little Bavaria in the Appalachian foothills.  Helen is the mistake that happens when Germans meet rednecks -- an incendiary combination of ethnocentric ignorance.

Coming from Florida -- home of Alligatorland, Weeki Wachee mermaids and body parts found in auctioned storage units -- little should faze us.  But the absolute tattiness of this town was a surprise.  Disneyworld's Epcot knows how to do the erzats foreign experience; Georgia does not.

Most of the stuccoed, faux timber-framed guesthouses are in varying states of decay, belying their hasty construction 40+ years ago when someone had the cockamamie idea to resurrect a dying Georgia logging town as a Bavarian Alpine town.  Not a bad idea as they go, but the Georgia inclination to decrepitude has taken over.  Now, the Korean "So Me's" lines the main drag, along with places like "Cafe La Pizza", restos with no recognizable cuisine besides that horrid hodge-podge -- "Americana".

We ate first at the Bodensee, arriving at an off-hour in the middle of a photo shoot of the owners and a table laden with the house specialties.  They were all smiles as Ranger overheard them plotting their escape back to Germany for the following day.  The proprietress boldly made for our table and asked us if we would like to enjoy any of the featured dishes, "Half-price!"  

She escorted us to the table and we selected two schnitzels, and were charged exactly half-price as promised and not a penny less; that monetary precision was to be the most authentic German experience of the trip.  We were to discover most actual German influence had made like the owners of Bodensee and gotten the heck out of dodge, or had just faded away.

While dining at one of the "Olde Bavarian" houses, the Southern lass in a non-convincing landhausmode explained that the founder of the joint had once ran a tight ship but was now in his dotage, the new owners obviously not landsmen, Ranger's favorite cucumber salad but a thin veneer of non-marinated cukes covering a bed of iceburg lettuce.

An authentic Hamentaschen was enjoyed at Hofer’s Bakery and Café, but breakfast the next morning disappointed.  

An authentic Bavarian breakfast should have hunks of meat and cheese, butter and marmalade, not little pimento cheese paste balls and thin slices of olive loaf.  Like so much in the Southeast, it was the simulacrum of something substantial.  It is why the Bed & Breakfasts in the U.S. are often such dismal failures: Someone read Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens and scabbed on Paula Deen to render something not-quite filling. (More on Southern food in a later post.)

So it was with most of the town, the ersatz establishments run (feebly) by locals with little care of approximating an authentic feel; the tourist shops could have been on Daytona Beach, selling as they did "Support Your Local Militia" and "WWRD" (What Would Reagan Do) wristbands. The town seems to exist for the three months of Oktoberfest, and the $2 Margaritas at the Alpine Village Inn.

This suits Georgia, as it is the ethos of any good Southern Baptist to not drink at home establishments.  It's all to the good to take a cruise and do the wild and crazy, so long as one lands primly back on one's home turf.  "I didn't WANT to do that" is the call of plausible deniability heard everywhere.  "It's not like me; you made me do it."  And so it goes for generations of maladaptations.

And hence, places like Helen and the Panhandle's Redneck Riviera will always serve a purpose.