THE HILLBILLY WAY
A BRIEF PATRIOTIC MESSAGE BEFORE THE INTRO:
As a reminder of this country’s values, it’s worth noting that June 4, 2020, which saw the big protest marches in most of our big cities, was the 31st anniversary of Tienanmen Square, where the brief dream of freedom in the China was crushed by massacre and prison camps. And by information control. To this day China forbids even the mention of Tienanmen. Still today, the forced ignorance of China’s population makes its current generation unaware that such a thing ever happened. Small wonder that they are appalled, like children, at the spectacle of social disorder in America fed to them by their Orwellian “news” media.
Having no experience of the freedoms of information we enjoy, they have no concept of how it works. Sometimes citizens rise up in outrage at wrongs, real or perceived, it doesn’t matter, it’s our right. And sure, there’s always some trash that shows up just to vandalize and loot. Still, authorities are forced — by constitutional rights of the citizens, with the eyes of the world watching via free media – to be more moderate in their responses than the machine-gunning of the crowds that would take place in a totalitarian society. Inevitably, amends are made, concessions are made, for grievances to be addressed, for wrongs to be righted. The cycle repeats periodically.
Sure, it’s a messy process. Certainly better, though, than what goes on in places like Russia, Iran and China, where their slave media are gleefully feeding their populations images of our imagined downfall. What sad places they are, these places where protesters simply “disappear,” and their friends and family have no right or ability to find out where they’ve been taken, whether they’re even dead or alive – or ground up into Soylent Green, for all they will ever know.
OKAY, so much for the preaching. Here’s the:
INTRODUCTION TO HILLBILLY HIJINKS
Hollywood is still making money by selling the idea that Hillbillies are the dregs of the human gene pool. Just look at the movies coming out of that Sodom of of the southwest. “Nebraska” was a fairly recent one, and “August: Osage County.” Something’s got to be said, and our hillbilly reviewer sets the record straight in our Media-Bad section.
No sir, we don’t take that kind of thing lying down, and that photo up above, from a driveway gate on a back road in the southern edge of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, says a lot. Hillbillies, wherever they stand on this issue or that, even when their highway postings leave you wondering what the heck exactly they are ranting about, tend to have strong ideas of right and wrong and a patriotic streak on top. My own family is all over the social and political map and has all kinds of interesting notions. Cousin Jim, for example, is a mining industry guy who has published his own book, Mines & Madness, on the mining industry and how it’s under attack by environmental hucksterisim. Cousin Bob writes articles about about medical topics, even has a Web page on foot problems called Foot Pain Solutions. If you have gout or plantar fasciitis or some such, it’s pretty handy.
But we all grew up “billy.” I don’t put last names in because I don’t want the Nature Nancies, Safety Nancies, Weeping Wandas, Bleeding Hearts, Coasties and other assorted billy haters to look us up on the Web and annoy us with negative comments. This is a positive Web site, supposed to be a friendly place, and one thing we won’t do is call people names and run them down just because they don’t agree with us.
Y’all git! This here place is our’n!
Haw! Just kidding about that photo on the left, there. That’s cousin Jim at the mining camp up by Noxon, Montana. Everybody is welcome at this Web site, but we’re here to have a little fun too. At any rate, by way of an example of the Billy that lies within us all, I ordered frog legs at a Vietnamese restaurant the other evening, and the little girls at the table all went eeww like I’d ordered a plate of bugs and giggled and grinned like they thought I was putting them on. Listen, I said, frog legs are great, and I told how I already knew how to hunt frogs for dinner when I was their age. Me and my cousin Rick would grease up with mosquito repellent, I told them, and go out in the swamp at night with flashlights and frog gigs and wade real slow, to sneak up on those big harrumphing bullfrogs, with the muck sucking at our legs up to the knees, until we’d get the flashlight beam on a big one, move forward even slower while it sat there hypnotized by the light and then spear it. Put it in a plastic bag and sneak up on another one. We’d come back with a whole bag of frogs, then go out by the trees and cut ’em around the waist and then pull the skin down off the legs like we were peeling the tights off a bicycle rider, then cut the frog off at the waist. We’d fill Ma’s griddle, she’d sizzle them up, and there was no delicacy finer.
The little girls were gawking at me with expressions that said, “Who ARE you?” And I realized how misunderstood and unappreciated the hillbilly culture is becoming in this increasingly urbanized world. And how desperately the world stands in need of a good educational Web site on the hillbilly way and hillbilly fun. “And the Hillbilly Hijinks Facebook page!” my brother’s yelling at me. “Don’t forget that, you old fool!”
By the way, all you frog giggers, here’s another fun way to catch frogs. When you’re fishing a good frog swamp by day, along the shore where the tules give good cover, put a fly on the end of your line. Do a good job of sneaking up, and you can move that pole out real slow over or through the tules so that fly hovers right in front of a bullfrog’s nose. He will sit real still as it comes close and then do a fast mouth-snap on it, and you have caught yourself another frog.