The first porch monkey
It’s gotten rather difficult for me lately to muster up any great surprise over the startlingly racist bile spewing out of the right, since the frequency and proud frankness is enough to make anyone’s already dizzy head spin. Listening to a Republican on TV lately is not unlike listening to my Grandmother, Etta, back in the 70′s, talking about “darkies” “knowing their place,” or worse, not. And just as embarrassing.
Just when I thought that the hillbilly hate fest would either have to wind down or declare itself a farcical sitcom like “All in the Family,” along comes a GOP activist from South Carolina who actually made me waste some perfectly good booze and several pilfered Starbucks napkins wiping up the monitor, while gasping helplessly.
The story begins innocently enough; a gorilla escapes from the Riverbank Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, causing some local consternation. Then, and I couldn’t make this up if I tried, SCGOP activist and perennial GOP candidate Rusty DePass (his real name) declared, before the media, that the escapee must be a relative of First Lady Michelle Obama. Unable to immediately reach Jonah Goldberg or Rush Limbaugh by telephone for a revisionist history escape hatch, this proud Confederate-American “recovered” by saying that he meant only that the First Lady’s misguided belief in evolution led him to conclude that, she was in fact related to the errant ape. He helpfully provided a made-up quote to bolster this odd thesis, which was instantly debunked. Whew, that was close. What might have been rightly thought both racist and idiotic therefore became both a sop to the anti-evolution right and a “dark” hint at yet another liberal conspiracy.
Those righties can certainly think on their feet.
Hag, two things.
Item one: “hillbilly hate fest”. I wish that you could find another epithet.
“Hillbilly is a term referring to people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas of the United States, primarily Appalachia and the Ozarks. Due to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term is frequently considered derogatory, and so is usually offensive to those Americans of Ozarkan and Appalachian heritage.”
It really, really offends my wife to hear the term used. To call her a hillbilly is akin to calling an African-American a “nigger”. You get the same emotional response.
I was shown a movie in a college class in 1974 that was from the 40s, I think. It showed whites in NYC sending blacks (portrayed in that horrible way they did back then) to capture some hillbillies to display in the city zoo. The message was there was only one class lower than the black and they were not human but rather, animals fit only to display in a zoo.
Item two. The fellow did not have to think on his feet as “a monkey’s uncle” and so forth are common terms in that state — the cop-out was just sitting there for him.
Anyway, good post. I hope the hillbilly criticism is not taken as some sort of an attack — meant as a reminder that even we mountain folk are still people.
As a left-coaster, I use the term metaphorically, and am only disparaging values rather than geographic origins. My own father, from Montana, embodies the racist, hillbilly hate-fest mentality as much as anyone, and spent most of his life with sagebrush and tumbleweed. Not a hill in sight, nearly as I could see.
Attitudes, not origins, are damning. I guess in the future I should use a more inclusive metaphor.
I’m sheltered here, amid the sword ferns and slugs, and rain until July 5.
Hag,
Sorry to hear about your father. My own believed that there was part of God in every person and was the perfect Union Democrat of his era.
It is a shame that group hatreds are passed generation to generation in many families, I have seen it myself. I hope that at some stage, the empire will fall and we will all get another chance to see that we have a world full of human individuals who are not “the other”.
Paradoxically, my beliefs hold that we are all one. We live a separate existence for a while, but we return to the source. So, in a way — I am you. Spooky, ain’t it?
That is a little spooky. Fortunately, none of Dad’s traits were passed to his four children, at least politically. That probably had to do with routine dozen-year absences without so much as a phone call, as well as his embarrassing qualities thereafter. I consider him an artifact of sorts.
I genuinely hoped this story had been poorly reported, but:
At least one person commenting got it right,
And, in an intelligent move,
DePass’ Facebook page has also been deleted.
Clearly, Mr. DePass does not posess adequate skill to ‘drive’ a Facebook page. Glad someone convinced him to hand over the keys and surrender his license.
Id like to say I had a difficult time believing it, too, but I didn’t. The whole bunch of them has crossed over into Glenn Beck-cuckoo-land. DePass is just a symptom of the larger disease.
DePass may have quit Facebook but he’s still got a profile on Linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/william-depass/9/917/a60
DePass went to boarding school and college and now he’s a broker at Grubb&Ellis.
Not a hillbilly! Certainly not! What an absurd notion.
Here’s an admiring profile of him in a local newspaper
http://www.thecolumbiastar.com/news/2007/1116/business/028.html
And here he is, 22 years ago, getting quoted by Tom Edsall:
Washington Post, June 3, 1987:
DePass is nothing like those unrefined aliens!
DePass doesn’t drink at that kind of a bar scene.
DePass drinks at a proper country club.
And, you know, sometimes goes back home and gets on the internet before sobering up.
Alas, rumpled plaid golf slacks or no, DePass wasn’t on the computer, but rather Channel 10 TV, prattling about primates. That 19th hole must have been a doozy.
In vino veritas.
Kind of like Breitbart the other day….
The Uptown area of Chicago where I worked for 14 years is one of the most diverse communities in the U.S. It became after WWII the first place refugees/immigrants were housed because wealthy Jews left their mansions to move further up the North Shore to even bigger mansions. The question: What was the first group that used those empty mansions for apartments?
The answer, Hillbillies. Actually the term is Appalachian Whites who when the coal fields shut down in West Virginia and Tennessee, due to increased use of oil and gas, emigrated to Chicago for jobs. They settled in Uptown not only for the cheap apartments, but also because the Red Line ran right through the area they moved into.
Wow!
You mean you have evidence of a hillbilly looking for honest work. Will you be publishing?
Oh sure, that’s noteworthy and all but, isn’t Alan Keyes’ running-primate’s comment on Fox Radio likely to eclipse anything of’n the sort purdy quick?
I mean ‘praying for God to kill the president’ has to attract some DHS/NSA/FBI attention(as well as the entire ‘intelligence’, er, ‘community’ alphabet soup). ‘Imprecatory prayers’, it turns out.
I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation and this will be all cleared up by this time tomorrow.
Why, even Little Green Shitballs should oughta have their knuts in a knot over this clerical lone wolf. Dang!
Well, well…sho nuff turns they they do!….got thur li’l green knuts in a knot, I mean.
Don’t bother browsing to the comments, though, They are closed to all but the faithful.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/33885_Wiley_Drakes_Imprecatory_Prayers
FYI: DHS angry right-wing white American terrorist emergency hotline: 1-800-WIN-GNUT
I always wondered what the secret password was….