Comment from Stan:

The blog-based revelation that Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, a journalisic shill for the Bush adminstration may have worked as an internet-advertised, gay call-guy is reminding me of an old Jerry Jeff Walker song - Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother. This tune, adapted from a song written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, goes:

He was born in Oklahoma,
His wife’s name’s Betty Lou Thelma Liz
And he’s not responsible for what he’s doin
‘Cause his mother made him what he is.

And it’s
Up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised a son so well.
He’s thirty-four and drinkin in a honky-tonk.
Just kickin hippies asses and raisin hell.

He sure does like his Falstaff beer,
He likes to chase it down with that Wild Turkey liquor;
He drives a fifty-seven GMC pickup truck;
Got a gun rack; “Goat ropers need love, too” sticker

And it’s
Up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised a son so well. (so well, so well, so well)
He’s thirty-four and drinkin in a honky-tonk.
Just kickin hippies asses and raisin hell.

Ahhh play it for momma

M is for the mud flaps you give me fer my pickup truck
O is for the Oil I put on my hair
T is fer T-bird
H is fer Haggard
E is fer eggs, and
R is fer REDNECK

Up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised a son so well. (so well, so well, so well)
He’s thirty-four and drinkin in a honky-tonk.
kickin hippies asses and raisin hell.

Yeah it’s
Up against the wall Redneck Mother,
Mother, who has raised a son so well. (so well, so well)
He’s thirty-four and drinkin in a honky-tonk.
Just kickin hippies asses and raisin hell.

What’s that spell ?

Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA

-end-

Now what, you might ask, does this have to do with the Gannon blog-scandal?

Well, for starters, those of us who are old enough and listened to Jerry Jeff - which I did almost daily in the early 70s, when I was l iving in Monticello, Arkansas - a dry country that still had ‘white’ and ‘colored’ written on the crapper doors at the tomato auction barns - this music was considered left-wing country, real workingclass, anti-establishment stuff.

It was the kind of music that let us be for marijuana legalization, long hair, sexual freedom, and all the other wieghty issues of the day, and still not be ‘pussies.’ I’m seeing a lot of that now in the anti-Bush camp (and I am in that camp, I suppose). They are pouncing on this case like ducks on a june bug, proving that they can be just as homophobic and manly as any steak-and-potatoes Buchananite.

The other thing that this Gannon frenzy and Jerry Jeff’s song have in common is woman-blaming. Let me explain.

Jerry Jeff’s signature redneck is not to blame for his lack of culture, his alcoholism, or his penchant for brutality. His MOTHER failed to raise him correctly.

And in the blogger/liberal press dogpile on the Gannon case, the most irresistable humor - aimed at an admittedly craven press and at manipulative politicians - involves prostitution.

“Gannon was a whore, but then so is the corporate press,” etc.

It makes me shudder the same way I do when I hear so-called progressives referring to supply-side economics as ‘voodoo’ economics, with no thought about the racist disrespect this shows for a a maligned religion and culture in a Haiti, and how it gives a pass to the weird ritual cannibalism of Christianity, for example - this is my body, eat… this is my blood, drink.

The racist backdrop that is tacitly accepted here is no different than the patriarchal backdrop behind any reference to prostitution being a woman’s game, with the prostituted woman featured as the ethically challenged guttersnipe.

Progressives, for all their huff and puff about sexual equality, have apparently never seen real prostitutes, the majority of real prostitutes I mean, not Julia Roberts in a capitalist-saves-Cinderella film.

The real women (mostly women), who we don’t see in our cultural mind’s eye, are living dangerous, sometimes deadly lives, controlled by violent pimps and financed by the legions of johns. They are largely living in a state of near-slavery, often kept strung out on drugs, and forced over and over again to be humiliated.

The political and press people we want to criticize are far closer to being pimps, but that’s a male thing which can actually confer some status, so we have to go for the gender jugular. Whores! All whores!

My point is, this is a man’s game. Women are the fodder… women, and men who have been feminized (in the real world, many of them first exploited as minors). But what the hell, let’s put it on the women!

It’s a grand tradition - starting with Genesis, going through Homer and Shakespeare, then Christopher Lasch and Daniel Patrick Moynihan… pile on. Women are to blame!

Gannon is like an unprincipled woman, a ‘prostitute,’ and so is the homo, take-it-in-the-ass press, and Bush is whoring for the multinationals, etc. etc. etc., who are using voodoo economics…

…and we to their left are neither fags, nor pussies, nor backward darkies.

White men still run the resistance.