The Inner Soul of the Redneck

[Professor Geezer]

I wrote this piece at the other site in defense of the people of Appalachia. I thought this would be a good time to post it after Dr Exile derailed BE's thread with his love of our flag. I have edited it a bit.

I had wind-bagged a bit about using history to look into the inner soul of the people you are studying.

.....Look into the mind of an Arab, and you will hate him less. Look into the heart of the inhabitants of inner Appalachia, and perhaps the negative epitaphs will blow away like leaves on the wind. Let cultural anthropology teach you about the nature of semi-neolithic people, and perhaps you will have more patience with those invaders from below our southern border.

Last night while watching the pouring rain from my front porch I had an epiphany. The words of Edward Gibbon and T. H. Lawrence can also explain the inner workings of the souls of the hollows. Lawrence describes how the denizens of the desert conceived liberty and freedom as a function of the simple life forced upon them by their environment.

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty: ...A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, “this is jessamine, this is violet, this rose’.

But at last Dahoum drew me; ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddy less wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass,to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This’ they told me ‘is the best: it has no taste’. My arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose things in which mankind had had no share or part.

The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. He lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death. He saw no virtue in poverty herself: he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries-- coffee, fresh water, women--which he could still preserve. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God.”

Edward Gibbon eloquently stated that though the boundaries of Arabia my from time to time have a foreign master, the Beduin was free by fleeing to the wilderness. He said “The [Arabian] nation is free, because each of her sons disdains a base submission to the will of a master”.

It occurred to me last night as I rocked slowly in my rocking chair watching the rain, that the very Appalachian forest I was staring into would serve the same function of an Arabian desert, and produce a simple, God fearing lover of liberty and freedom; the same austere disdain for material nonsense, the same contempt for central authority.

As the central authority carves away personal liberty, “sexual freedom” Huxley says “tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom...to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate”.

But is hedonism freedom?

[Egg]

Great piece, Doc.

Hedonism is not freedom it's satiation. Most usually turn to hedonism when their first and second wishes don't come true.

As for the rest, while knowing a culture can help you appreciate it, it doesn't blind me to the parts of it I do not like.

You ask if hedonism is truly freedom, I ask you, is ignorance?

[Professor Geezer]

I would not make the connection between the love of simplicity, and ignorance.

[Egg]

I would not make the connection between the love of simplicity, and ignorance.

No, but you cannot deny that many who say they love simplicity are just plain ignorant.

I could do with far more simplicity in my life. Wanting to be left alone is one thing, turning a blind eye is another.

[Professor Geezer]

In case you missed it,

the very Appalachian forest I was staring into would serve the same function of an Arabian desert, and produce a simple, God fearing lover of liberty and freedom; the same austere disdain for material nonsense, the same contempt for central authority.

And just what are they ignorant of?

[Egg]

In case you missed it,

the very Appalachian forest I was staring into would serve the same function of an Arabian desert, and produce a simple, God fearing lover of liberty and freedom; the same austere disdain for material nonsense, the same contempt for central authority.

And just what are they ignorant of?

They only trade one belief for another. There is no mention of religious beliefs and superstitions in what you wrote. Both of these groups have plenty of both.

It also raises the question, what is freedom and liberty? Is a person's right to freedom and liberty different when there are 100 million people on the planet compared to when there are 7 billion people on the planet?

[Dr Exile]

It also raises the question, what is freedom and liberty?

Freedom is growing and selling your vegetables without some fuckbite fed recalling every blade of spinach from every farmer in the country because one single solitary beaner wiped his ass on a single leaf of spinach. Liberty is shooting said fuckbite in the back with a .45-70.

[IndicusMaximus]

I often wonder if I am blind, or if I am just foolishly stupid. I don't like being left alone, but I don't like being leeched off of. If society left ME alone, that means they would have to leave the rest of the uninterested parts of the world alone, and it's very nature is one of insatiable bloodthirst. But some would say I am completely wrong, and that I am ignorant, and that that I don't see what's happening in society because I don't push myself to contribute to it's grinding.

Are they right? Is society headed towards some righteous goal which the "simple-minded" choose to be oblivious to? Are we just completely useless and selfish, those who have missed the train to the marketplace? Because I gotta tell you, if simplicity is wisdom, that was entirely an accident and I meant to do all those other things, but I became simple by sheer circumstance.

I mean I guess I'm stubborn. I'll end up on the streets, because I just do not have the mind that will fit neatly into a 9 to 5 work-a-day regiment. Now I will work hard for a cause. When I work, I am a hard worker, but I see nothing much to work for in the situation which has presented itself to me these past few years. I've tried and tried to hold those values of society near and dear, but it always ends in complete anger and disgust and rejection.

Why is this? Am I just wrong?

[Pigeon]

Live and let live.

Too many have decided their life depends on taking from, destroying or controlling others lives. And too many others cannot see that simple fact.

[Cartoonsyndicate]

It also raises the question, what is freedom and liberty?

Freedom is growing and selling your vegetables without some fuckbite fed recalling every blade of spinach from every farmer in the country because one single solitary beaner wiped his ass on a single leaf of spinach. Liberty is shooting said fuckbite in the back with a .45-70.

You're for sure describing 'liberty' but not 'freedom.' Freedom is something more profound and purely metaphysical. Sartre describes it as the reconciliation of en soi and por soi- the state of being 'in-itself' and 'for-itself': the ultimate synthesis of the dialectic. It has less to do with 'doing' than with 'being' and so far surpasses liberty.