Up against the wall

B is for Bumpkins

By Jacques d’Nalgar, May 13 2014 CE

Back in 1973, Jerry Jeff Walker had a big hit with a Ray Wylie Hubbard song that, 40 years later, is still a favorite with the sing-along bar crowd.  Inspired by memories of that song from my long-ago raucous college days, here then is an humble homage to “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” – dedicated to the regressives among us…

B – is for bumpkins, of the country variety.  Simple folk being spoon-fed “fair and balanced” conspiracy theories about a minor tragedy in a faraway land, a teapot tempest if there ever was one.

E – is for elephant.  The grandiose old (old!) party is deliberately ignoring the proverbial pachyderms in its very own room – the most colossal intelligence failure of the century and, hot on the heels of that little horror show, a trumped-up war of choice.  International war criminals Dick and Dubya are running free.  Thousands are dead in America and hundreds of thousands (at least) in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Millions more are maimed and forever exiled from their homes.  And let’s not forget that Dick and Dubya presided over the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression.  Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi!

N – is for nitwitted nincompoopery.  How many Benghazi hearings do we really need?  Where are the hearings on things that matter, like why our national infrastructure is failing?  Why we can pump sludge from Canada to sell overseas, but not fresh water to our own drought-stricken areas?  (The ancient Romans were quite good at it.)  Why corporations are people but never come home in body bags?  And why the unstaunched hemorrhage of the American Dream, an accelerating transfer of wealth from the middle classes to the richest of the rich, ever since the halcyon days of Saint Ronald of Hollywood?

G – is for God, guns, gays, and greed.  Especially greed, which is worshipped more than God these days.

H – is for haters.  The GOP is really good at hating, especially when there is a black man in the White House.  It’s also for heckuva, as in “Heckuva job, Brownie!” – another forgotten “oops” moment for Republicans, when almost two thousand poor souls perished in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

A – is for asinine, or something that sounds a lot like it.

Z – is for Zoroastrian.  I met one once, up in the great, lily-white Arkansas northwest.  His greatest ambition was to someday have his dearly departed carcass heaved over a holy mountain in India, where buzzards would pick the flesh from his bones.  But I digress…

I – is for Islamophobia, inane, ignorant, and idiotic.  Take your pick.  They all fit.

Photograph of Kinky Friedman and Jerry Jeff Walker at the 2010 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, by Eric Frommer, October 10, 2010.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/armadilo60/5055902589/