By Peter Galuszka
One of this country’s most popular past times is the constant spinning and re-spinning of cultural stereotypes for profit. I’ve actually only seen snippets of “Duck Dynasty” and have noted the cheap goods on sale under its brand in convenience stores. But it fits the bill.
The supposed patriarch of the A&E show (partly owned by Disney) is Phil Robertson, who told a magazine he regards homosexuality as “bestiality” and his subsequent suspension has been seized by the social right wing as evidence of government takeover.
Let’s get rid of that now. Robertson has the right to say whatever he wants. A&E, a private company, has the right to ditch or suspend the people it employs.
Both entities, however, are cashing in on stereotyping. One example of such profiling is Jersey Shore, which insults Italian-Americans everywhere by casting them as crude, chain-wearing idiots with lots of cleavage. The other beloved stereotype is that of the “Southerner” which takes certain regional and Scots-Irish traits and massages them into a blend of folksiness, racism, independence and pig-headed stubbornness.
For a Virginia version, go no further than former U.S. Sen. and Gov George Allen who affects cowboy boots and Dixie-fried down-hominess when he really grew up in Southern California.
Cable TV is littered with this genre. It includes the duck-call making family, rattlesnake hunters who drive all night from Tennessee to South Carolina to Texas and so on. The only one I have bothered to watch and do like (since it rings true and doesn’t stoop to rank patronization) is the one about the Eastern North Carolina loggers who brave cottonmouths and mud while ruining swamp forests.
Poking fun at Southerners and their supposed characteristics has been around for centuries. The sad part is that people actually believe what’s being portrayed.
Author James Dickey, a former ad writer turned professional Southerner, exploited this in his novel “Deliverance” where four coddled Atlanta guys have a bad canoe trip. They want to brave nature but one ends up dead and the other raped by cretin-looking mountain men.
The reality was that Dickey wrecked his canoe in a Georgia mountain stream and was actually rescued by the mountain folk who made sure he was all right and got him home. He apparently wasn’t raped. But when they filmed the popular movie they carried the stereotype even further. To depict a mountain child rendered to imbecility by in-breeding, they actually went to a local school’s special ed class, gave his family a few bucks and ducted his face with flour. But he did play a mean banjo.
Stereotype sustained and money made.
Now we have right wingers Sarah Palin, the failed presidential candidate, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal seizing the gauntlet thrown down by a thickly bearded reality tv star.
This is what social conservatives regard as important — a person’s absolute right to bash gays.
If you want to see where it leads, look no further than Vladimir Putin’s Russia where he has freed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsy and members of the Pussy Riot punk band from prison to squelch opposition to his extreme policies against gays before the Sochi Olympics.
I don’t know Pussy Riot but I do know Khodorkovsy, having interviewed him back int he 1990s. He’s been in jail for 10 years for, among other things, trying to bring Western-style financial transparency to an oil firm.
No matter, let’s support Duck Dynasty’s right to bigotry in the name of freedom.
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