Q. What are the final words of a redneck before he dies?
A. Hey, yall! Lookie here!!
What makes a hard-core redneck what he is, is his utter lack of a modicum of sober judgment. These are the guys who think they can cook them up a bunch of methamphetamine in the trailer (with children present), and that nothing bad will happen--to them, the children, or the trailer. Trailer blows up, children end up dead or injured for life, and Billy-Bob (Bubbah's second cousin, twice removed by three divorces) is memorialized on camera saying, 'Sheeut-fahr! I tode him this might happen, but he tode me he knew whut hee'z doin', so thar'-ye-go!' Billy-Bob has a better idea--he goes to a local motel to cook up his meth, thus rendering the property uninhabitable for anyone, and forcing the owners into bankruptcy. The owners end up fleeing the state, and the local bank president is left with twenty homeless people (residents of the motel) to care for. Really, it just happened here locally, this year.
Or the guy who burns his house down Thanksgiving Day, attempting to deep-fry a turkey on his wooden-deck back porch, using one of those liquid propane gas burners/fryers. Call goes out the local fire department, who show up in a jiffy, only to find the house gone, and discover that the owner and failed chef is the recently retired chief of their city fire department. Really, it happened! Can't make this up, it's just too stupid not to be true.
OS used to believe that redneck-dom, the state of being a redneck, was only confined to the American South, and perhaps parts of the Midwest. He has since taken a more expansive view, given events of the past couple of decades. Rednecks come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, income and education levels. There are rednecks walking around with Oxbridge and Ivy League degrees, ya'll! It's downright chilling to contemplate.
So, in honor of the phenomenon, OS has decided to launch a new competition: The 'OldSouth Hey-Lookie-Here Award', for outstandingly stupid behaviour by people in places of high responsibility who have every reason to know better, and every incentive to act better (not the least because their decisions mean life or death, survival or starvation for so many people they never meet).
Of course, for the 1990's, Bill Clinton wins hands down. 'Nuff said there.
George Bush takes the 'oughts', for starting a war with Iraq without a clue as to what he might do if the US actually won. Tens of thousands of deaths later, it occurs that perhaps it would be good to come up with some sort of plan.
This year's nominee list could go on forever, but Dominique Strauss-Kahn enters as the first nominee. (He gets the 'EeeewGross!' ribbon, in any case.)
Second nominee, and it may be hard to beat him, is Ahnuld (I'll be back!)Schwarzenegger, the Styrian stud, da Gubbernator, etc. etc. Turns out he fathered a child thirteen years ago with the housekeeper, under wife Maria's nose, and maintained the fiction all along that the child was fathered by the housekeeper's husband, while paying for support of the child.
Sweet. This is televangelist Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart sort of stuff. It's Jesse Jackson sort of stuff. It's an Eliot Spitzer moment, a Governor Paterson moment, it's a Ray Blanton episode (look it up, too long to detail). It's, it's, it's...well, words just fail after a while.
All this occurring while California was burning down, browning out, melting down, going broke, descending into fiscal and cultural chaos, with businesses fleeing the state to avoid the havoc. His wife was StandingByHerMan, and his legitimate children were being raised in the same house with the housekeeper who held the secret that could blow up their lives at any moment. This could be, well, a source of stress for someone attempting to govern Kuhlifornia. Why would one run for governor of one of the largest economies in the world with a skeleton like that in the closet? These things have a tendency to blow up on one's face. Just sayin'...
OS is not ranting about Ahnuld's sexual ethics, proclivities or misbehaviors. That stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, the symptoms of a deep, narcissistic stupidity, where the impact of one's behavior on the world around never occurs to a person like Ahnuld, or Dominique, or Bill, or George, or Jesse.
This is just as stupid as the redneck cooking meth in the motel, or frying the turkey on the back porch. Problem is, as tragic as the motel closure is, or the embarrassment of the destroyed house, at least that damage is localized.
People like Ahnuld create damage that reaches into the lives of millions.
Hey, lookie-here!
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