In addition to desegregation and civil rights another burr in the south's ass was the hated feminist revolution/women's rights movement that dared to offer up the heretical concept of equal rights for women, this was a slap in the face to southern men whose strong daddy sense of self was living in a world where the definition of a `good woman' who shut the fuck up, knew her place, cooked dinner, laid on her back and was content to live a life of subservience and deference to the lord of the `plantation', or to otherwise be barefoot, pregnant and slavishly obedient. Given the regressive hostility of the south and the willingness of the Republican party to capitalize on southern desire to drag the country back to the good ole' days of Jim Crow, religious intolerance and a gross renunciation of intellectualism is only too deserving of a descriptive term from days past be resurrected for these folk and that word is PECKERWOOD
A peckerwood is a rural white southerner, usually poor, undereducated or otherwise ignorant and bigoted, the term gained popularity in the deep south during the early twentieth century and was meant to be derogatory. It is a reversal of the name of the red bellied woodpecker which had a patch of red on the back of it's head and neck, therefore a peckerwood is a redneck, terms that describe similar groups of people are trailer trash or white trash but neither of those have the same effect or ring to them as peckerwood does.
The Peckerwood era in the south were good ole days for southerners, or at least as good as it got after Lee's crying uncle and throwing in the towel to the hated Yankees. They still had the Negroes to kick around and could freely exercise their domestic version of Apartheid, (`least till dose meddlin' hippie college boys began stickin' dere noses where day didn't belong and stirrin' up a ruckus) until that long avowed day when the south would rise again, and rising is just what it is doing in 2005 with the help of Jesus and the GOP (Good Ole Peckerwoods). Karl Rove and the party operatives threw logs into the furnace of the hate machine that was Nixon's Southern Strategy, utilizing focus group tested PR campaigns, insane fundamentalist clerics and faux Texans bearing gifts of nationalist renewal through `patriotism' while stoking the fires of red staters' indignation, vengeful and seeking to repudiate the last forty years and poised to reap their revenge at last, the last vestiges of American democracy soon to fall to the haters of the red states and the oligarchy that laughingly pushes all of the right buttons on these rubes, increasingly amused at just how effortless and easy that it all is.
These are Americans who believe that shopping at Wal Mart is patriotic, far too ignorant to realize that by doing so that they are contributing to their own entrapment in the underclass as well as to assist in building China into a world economic powerhouse and a nation that holds the majority of the paper on this debtor nation. Willful ignorance is both honorable and symbolic to southern culture, what better way to renounce the despised intellectualism of the liberal elite? Nowhere is the Peckerwood a more dominant indigenous species than in God's own dumping ground for mass ignorance, racism, incestuous relationships, general intolerance, filth and outright pure stone age bigotry than in the state of Alabama, home of Judge Roy Moore and his giant stone paean to the very idolatry that it specifically condemns. Alabama has been in the news for several reasons recently, it is the home state of famed missing teen Natalee Holloway whose disappearance mesmerized the MSM last summer, it is the home of the aforementioned Roy's Rock, Toyota last year decided to locate a plant in Canada rather than the KKK state mainly because the inhabitants (aka illiterate peckerwoods) were too fucking stupid to operate high tech machinery. Toyota finally threw up their hands and made a run for the northern border after even pictorial training aids were beyond the local yokels ability to comprehend and recent data showed that Alabama was the fastest growing state in America....regarding waistlines that is! A 2005 study of CDC data found that a whopping 27.7 percent of the population (well above the national average) the Yellowhammer state gives a new meaning to crimson tide: the gallons of ketchup that the lard ass peckerwoods pour over their buckets of deep-fried food. Not surprisingly fellow peckerwood meccas Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee were among the runners up as national repositories for the obese.
This is the reality of the situation: deep south bible belt whites, mainly poor, increasingly hostile and always Republican now own a disproportionate amount of political power in America and they are determined to wield it. They will use it in order to drag the country backwards through time to a dark place in our history that had apparently been buried in the past. They seek to return to the days where the American south was mired in the smothering blackness of a festering, hateful and corrupt parallel universe to the more progressive states above the Mason Dixon Line, trapped like a dinosaur in a tar pit. It was only through the courage of the civil rights movement and federal anti discrimination laws that the roaring beast was able to be semi-tamed to a point where it would be able to interact with decent folk. With the ascendancy of a red state evangelical movement the south is back for blood revenge, thundering a bastardized version of Christianity from pulpits, preaching hatred and bigotry and the end times and drawing the masses of the disenfranchised into ever growing mega churches and mobilizing armies of activists. The southern regressive fervor has infiltrated the United States government itself, controlling both houses of congress, the executive branch and now is on the precipice of seizing control of the supreme court as well, engulfing all of our democratic institutions like a malignant strain of alien kudzu.
The red staters have risen to power by harnessing the resentment resulting from a nearly century and a half long litany of grievances with the northern, godless, liberal, elitist damned yankee establishment or more aptly put, anybody who does not think as they do. This long running rage at northern society and progressive government has simmered like blackstrap molasses ever since the day that the signature of the hallowed General Robert E. Lee was affixed to the document of surrender at Appomattox and the confederacy was no more. This was a monumentally grievous injury to southern pride-far more sorrowful to many than even the cost in blood paid by loved ones on the battlefields of the Civil War. There was a bitterness that stuck in the craws of southerners, being passed down through subsequent generations as surely as Israeli or Palestinian hatred is taught from the earliest of ages. The Confederate battle flag became a revered symbol to the red staters.
This flag is flown by the descendents of the very cannon fodder mobilized on lies and racial hatred to fight a treasonous war against the legitimate government of their own country. Today it flies from suvs, trucks, cars, homes and statehouses in Dixie. It is emblazoned on hats and t-shirts, displayed by country music stars as they warble their jingoist ballads to adoring masses, it is a commonplace sight at the gross orgies of noise and intoxication that are NASCAR events or the rural fairs and carnivals that serve as a gathering place for those who are unable to afford the races due to lost jobs, government services and educational opportunities but who nonetheless are holding their own in the war on Roe v. Wade and Darwin. If you can't get to Talladega you can always haul your fat ass brood around for dollar rides on the tilt a whirl, cheap corn dogs, elephant ears, cotton candy and fried okra. There are ring throwing and shooting games but nothing that would tax the mental retardation that home schooling induces on your little progenies who will one day grow up to be employees of the peckerwood emporium: Walmart. The titanic struggle against progressive society ensures that the ability to elect politicians who will advocate policies to provide well paying jobs, affordable housing, health insurance and quality schooling is sacrificed to empower only those seeking to transform America into a theocratic police state.
They vote to elect manipulative free market ideologues who build the party through their ability to utilize those enthralled by the modern hellfire spewing tent preachers as pawns with which to wage economic terrorism, threatening boycotts to companies and institutions seeking to rise above intolerance and bigotry and in turn force their compliance through targeted boycotts. They use their churches as platforms from which to wage a political war, the most powerful members of both the House and Senate recently appeared at coordinated rallies that targeted members of the judicial system and denounced as traitors those who did not march in ideological lockstep, these so called Justice Sundays are used to mobilize resentment and overthrow the existing order as surely as Hitler's rallies ever were, only now with the advent of satellite technology the ugly bacchanals don't have to draw mass attention and fearful comparison that may bring much needed scrutiny by being visible, there is no need to march through the streets waving flaming torches, hoisting standards and symbols and chanting fealty to the leader when it can all be conveniently transmitted into millions of living rooms across the land or distributed on DVD. They are more concerned with using religion as a bludgeon, a crude and brutal instrument which those who wield that club can utilize its intense potency to lay waste to the wall of separation of church and state. They not only want to renounce the liberals of the north but to destroy the very society that was borne out of the humiliation of defeat and reconstruction.
While the peckerwood peasants constitute the sheer numbers of the base that keeps the GOP in power there are of course the party power brokers these are the country club Republicans, the free market fanatics, the rich and richer who are only concerned with increasing their wealth at the expense of others entrapped in the dregs of the lower social classes. They eat cake and leave few crumbs for those left to scavenge at their feet. These are the speculators, the investors, the captains of industry and their lieutenants, the elitist upper class. These Republicans vote their economic interests, their patriotism is their personal bottom line, these are the outsourcers of American jobs for increased profit, the downsizers, the privatizers, the tax cheats determined to use all means at their disposal to weasel out of paying for the very infrastructure that they utilize to reap their gains.
Their wealth maximization schemes and determination to roll back the hated New Deal of the even more hated FDR in favor of the oxymoronic free market of their beloved father figure, Ronald Reagan are laying waste to the very fabric from which the American Dream has been woven from, creating a permanent elitist class of robber barons and wealthy elites who are able to pass their massive wealth from generation to generation, it is a modern version of the Gilded Age, of mansions and tin shacks, of haves and have nots. Those who will never know the meaning of enough or fairness to all are sowing the seeds of their own eventual destruction by creating a permanent, resentful underclass. For now they are content to hide behind the walls of gated communities situated well away from the rabble. A rabble that they are locked into a symbiotic relationship with, a rabble whose increase in rage must be harnessed in order to maintain the political majority that will allow for them to maintain their wealth and stature but has its own designs for the future.
With their intentions to return America to the days of fire and brimstone raining down from pulpits, vowing eternal damnation to all who would seek to stray from the path that the church had deemed to that which was righteous, to the days of colored drinking fountains, seats at the back of the bus and segregated schools and restaurants, the days of burning crosses and back alley abortions.And George W. Bush, just as Jefferson Davis is only too willing to utilize the hatreds of others as means with which to further his own nefarious ends.
To the financial elites who tolerate these people so as to personally profit I offer one word of advice and that is beware.When you stoke the fires of hatred in others and nurture their ignorance so as to gain you are only empowering those who one day will become powerful enough to turn on you as well. The ignorance of the red state evangelical movement only ensures one thing, that on the day that your common enemy is neutralized and YOU become the next enemy there will be no reasoning with the hordes that will be laying siege to your gated communities
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