WORLD NEWS TRUST: Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy (Joe Bageant)

A Letter from Blue Ridge Bush Country

Bluebird, bluebird
Take a letter up north for me
These folks is fixin' to hurt somebody
And it sure 'nuff might be me.
-- From "Bluebird," a traditional blues song

By Joe Bageant

March 25, 2004 (World News Trust) -- How can the region of America that gave us lynching, Jim Crow, Harry Byrd, George Wallace, Taliban Christianity, David Duke, the KKK, Bible hair, Tammy Fay Bakker, congregational snake handling, the poll tax, inbreeding, and chitterlings possibly take another step back down the stairs of human evolution? Beats the hell out of me. But somehow here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia we have managed it.

Like most modern Southerners who've fled their native states for long periods of time, I have the standard love/hate relationship with my home town -- Winchester, Virginia. On one hand, it is a backward and mostly irrelevant place where the question of whether Stonewall Jackson had jock itch at the Battle of Chancellorsville still rages right alongside evolution and abortion. To be sure, it is the standard venal Southern place, where poverty and ugliness are thrust into one's face daily, with all the gothic family melodramas of greed and intrigue so often written about Southern novels. On the other hand, it is the place that made me who I am, a moralizing, preachy and essentially lazy bastard who likes to drink. I was raised a Pentecostal Baptist, steeped in the gloomy ultra-Protestant assumption that man is a worthless, evil thing from birth and only goes downhill from there. And I still managed to become a raving, socialist heathen. Which proves there's hope for everyone.

But something new and more ominous is afoot down here. Something that scares even a hardened tobacco-stained old toad like me -- a clammy, repressive chill. One that not only dampens all political conversation not Pro-Bush, but can even cost you your job in a small town like this one. I'm serious. When I invite like-minded people for cocktails, the atmosphere is distinctly that of a "safehouse," as the few local liberals all but whisper their opinions and eye one another, judging just how safe it is to speak one's mind. It's spooky, so spooky almost none of us is willing to admit it.

I can remember back in the 1960s when we still had a left, right and center in politics, even here in Virginia. Gawd I feel old. Remembering liberalism here is like being able to remember scrap paper drives and ration tickets during World War II. It feels so long ago. Anyway, contrary to neocon revisionist history, neither left, right or center was particularly seen as some sort of evil booger. The left may not have been popular, but it wasn't particularly demonized either. My kids do not believe me when I tell them that even during the Vietnam War protests America was not so dangerously polarized as now, because there was only one issue at hand -- the war. Now nearly everything is at issue. Whatever the case, today in the Shenandoah we have only a right and a far right, with some very limp moderates that pass for a left.

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The rightwingers are so deluded and rabid
that they hurt not only themselves but
everyone.

It's a sad pass when people can be so
manipulated due to their hates and phobias.

Heck, maybe the best thing I've read in a long time.

Joe's always a delight.

R#5

that Obama reminds them of Abe Lincoln and the thumping Honest Abe put on em about 150 yrs. ago.

has a way with words.

They have a degree of ignorance of the truth that blurs into mental illness. I hope I'm alive when our version of "Rise andfall of the 3rd Reich" is written.

"18-year-old Rambos for Jesus." He may not be making that one up; such an organization may well exist, but I'd bet on it being somewhere in Northwest Arkansas.