Hillbilly Allegedly

When ambitious attorney and Yale law grad J.D. Vance wanted to make a splash in literature he wrote a book about his meth riddled neighborhood. It got a lot of attention as a New York Times Bestseller. When Vance now an ambitious US Senator who rode the book Senate in a seven-way race to the Senate wanted to win the favor of America’s first would-be dictator (only for a day) there’s nothing better than accusing Donald Trump’s adversary
Sleepy Joe” of inciting the 20-old-Registered-Republican, would-be assassin to an attempted regicide. (I used big words. regicide means murder of a king)

Vance’s book is actually titled “Elegy” (poem of nostalgic sadness). It is about the hard life the Tech multimillionaire suffered on the way to the Vice Presidential nomination. His quote tells you he will do whatever it takes to curry favor.

The first hillbilly I recall was the professional wrestler Haystack Calhoon who’s car was crossing a bridge in Missouri just ahead of my family’s on a summer vacation. My Dad pointed the driver out. Warner Brothers and other cartoon factories lampooned hillbillies all the time. Kids from the Appalachians grew tired of the name. My Mother-in-law whose family settled in Iowa from North Carolina was sensitive about this. She made a point of calling herself a “mountain william.”

There’s nothing surprising about a stable of prostitutes showing their wares. Another VP hopeful, Florida’s Marcus Rubio, who came over on a boat with the rapists and cutthroats released from prison by Fidel Castro in the “Marial Boatlift,” had this to say about Sleepy Joe when he was auditioning for Veep: “Our current President is a demented man propped up by wicked and deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power.” Apparently Mario hasn’t seen the legions of Democrats who want to ease Joe out of power. And apparently he didn’t notice himself in the long line of timid Republicans poohbahs kowtowing to Trump at the Milwaukee GOP convention.

And “Demented?” There is a parable in the Bible Rubio ought to read. Its about a guy with a log in his eye who could see the splinter in another person’s eye.

The political tradition that is the best springboard to a Trump vice presidency is the Democratic party’s Civil War era gang called “Copperheads.” They were Northern Democrats (long since converted to the GOP by Goldwater and Reagan) who raged against the Emancipation Proclamation. Their particular fear was that if black slaves were given their freedom they would compete with white laborers for jobs. Such concerns fueled a century of white race riots up to the Second World War. The complaint that white people are losing jobs to illegal aliens fails to acknowledge that Republicans were the prime advocates of job exportation over the last thirty years which included the Chinese ties that were a signature product of the Trump empire.

I doctored the front book cover of Vance’s paean to Hillbilly pain. I didn’t doctor this civil war era cartoon about the Copperheads who wanted to protect white laborers from competition with freed slaves. There were a lot of them in Vance’s hometown near Cincinnati. Tradition!

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