Thanks, MAGA, For Ruining My Childhood
By: Simon Black
Tags: Humor, Movies, Culture, Political Satire, Election 2020

Thanks, MAGA, For Ruining My Childhood

Rural Americana has lost its charm

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

When I came to this country in first grade in 1967, I was quickly introduced to the folkloric magic land called the USA. In school I learned of Paul Bunyon and Babe the Blue Ox, gleefully deforesting the landscape, Johnny Appleseed whimsically skipping here and there planting a billion apple trees, and my favorite, John Henry, with superhuman strength pounding in railroad ties in some vast, flat stretch of the country that was blessed by God, but which has recently been rechristened Magastan — that flyover red swath of insanity that somehow refused in the last election to repudiate the Orange Huckster.

Back then there was something called Saturday Morning cartoons, populating the imagination of every young American with country-fried characters like Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, and Rocky and Bullwinkle. No, the cartoons weren’t about boring urban or suburban life. They were centered in the mythic rural hallucination called “the country.” And they were awesome. Anybody my age has etched in their unconscious the image of Elmer Fudd saying, “Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits.”

Bugs Bunny, of course, with his New York accent was a fish out of water in these rural environs. Yes, the implication was that the sophisticated city slicker would outwit the rube, but the affection we all had for the hick was unmistakable.

This happened on the other TV shows as well. On Green Acres the charming Zsa Zsa Gabor was forced to relocate to the sticks. On that show our favorite was Mr. Haney, a snake oil salesman who spoke with a broad accent with the occasional squeak that lent his lies and chicanery a harmless and delightful quality. Then there was the reverse Green Acres, a show called the Beverly Hillbillies where the hillbillies strike it rich and move to the big city, bringing all their country-fried charm and inanity with them.

Even more than folklore and comics, country music made an even deeper impression on my young psyche. A man like Johnny Cash was the epitome of cool. And in the 70s we used to smoke pot to a music that was called Southern Rock. You’re most familiar with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Sweet Home Alabama, but our favorites were people like Dickey Betts and the Allman Brothers Band, electrifying and rocking out the country sounds and generally spreading country mirth.

Rural music was a huge part of the treasure that is the American Musical. “Oh, the farmer and the rancher should be friends!” sang the theatre kids in the high school musical of every single high school in America. And Annie got her gun in a bunch of auditoriums of our youth.

In the movies, too, the countryside was the place where true heroes emerged. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we rooted for the rakish and the outlaw. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, we encountered the apotheosis of individualism and manly strength in Clint Eastwood. And in Easy Rider, a drive across the country on a motorcycle was basically an acid trip that we all wanted to go on, because the countryside was magic.

In literature, too, the magic continued with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the two prototypical American white boys. Yes, they were hicks, but they were awesome and clever. Falkner and Hemmingway, the two gods of the countryside, further enshrined the American rural as the place of genius. Later, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Tennessee Williams and so many other great voices made the American redneck into an everyman, and elevated his or her struggles to the level of the cosmic.

But somewhere along the line, the mythology of the countryside took a wrong turn in the United States. The joyous silliness of the rural became bitter and twisted. The racism rose to the surface. Unfortunately, the idiotic Constitution of the United States, which allocates the same number of senators to a state with a population of 700,000 (North Dakota) as a state with 40 million (California), gives the rural states an outsized influence over government. And they haven’t been polite about exercising that outsized influence. Under their main guardian, the heinous Mitch McConnell, they have succeeded in dictating public policy in a seriously redneck way for the last decade or more. And under the influence of Trump, the separate, angry and righteous colony has solidified its identity as Magastan. It is best symbolized by an 8-wheel pickup truck with three flags flying from it, one for the USA, one for the Proud Boys, and one for the Confederacy.

The countryside isn’t fun any more — it’s frightening.

Let’s go for a drive in the country!

That used to be what we did on Sundays. When you drove past the farms and the rolling hills, you did imagine that the place was populated with charming hillbillies and loveable rednecks. Maybe you stopped in at a general store and bought an ice cream from a loveable rube. And then you drove back to the suburb or the city where the less charming and less loveable people lived.

Not any more.

When you go for that drive in the country, you sense that you are entering an alien land, filled with religious maniacs and proud boys with automatic weapons who might at anytime overthrow our democracy and force us into some crazy Handmaid’s Tale.

The countryside no longer bears any resemblance to the Hee Haw, where small towns were Suh-luted every week and a country woman named Minnie Pearl forgot to take the price tag off her hat. No, the countryside is now closer to Bavaria. I went to a beer garden in the South of Germany a couple years ago and listened to some men in lederhosen playing the oom pah pah and I couldn’t shake the stench of Nazism still lingering almost a century later.

The stench that is filling the rural byways of America is not going to go away soon — that much was made clear by this surprising election. We expected some of the hillbillies, at least, to reject the man of 20 thousand lies, the idiot who botched the COVID and screwed our people so royally, the conmen of all conmen — Mr. Haney with the Bugs Bunny accent. The biggest jerk on the face of Planet Earth. The SORE LOSER!

Now the countryside is filled with 70 million sore losers who refuse to bow to our nation’s institutions and traditions. Who refuse to let the election stand. Who refuse to…be cool.

No, no matter how you slice it, country folk, you are no longer cool. You were once the coolest, but now you suck ass.

That’s exactly what the myth of the country was — a myth

The cult of Trump has woken us up, maybe, from a naive dream. Of course the country was racist and xenophobic and so on.

But what About these Fun Reality TV Shows about Hicks?

I mean, how am I supposed to enjoy Duck Dynasty, or Swamp People any more. Yeah, it’s fun to watch Bayou folk try to catch snakes, but you just get that creepy feeling they are part of the MAGA cult and it sucks the joy out of the whole thing. Even that Bayou accent is started to sound less charming and more scary.

Town versus country

Of course, this isn’t really a matter of red states versus blue — it’s red counties versus blue ones in every state of the union. So it’s not simply a problem for the backward “interior” which is painted pure red every election cycle — it’s a problem for every state. The country has gone crazy. You can blame Trump, but the roots run much deeper. He just united the rubes into a Hicktatorship of Deplorables.

This hateful streak among the American rustic was first painted way back in 1919 by the underrated American genius Sherwood Anderson, who in Winesburg, Ohio described what he called the American grotesque. But by grotesque he didn’t mean Halloween grotesque. His definition of grotesque was different. According to Anderson, people become grotesque when they begin to imagine that their opinion is true.

There is nothing that describes our current malaise better than that definition. Maybe it’s reciprocal — maybe the libs are equally grotesque. Matthew McConnaughey made some headlines this week talking about how libs patronize and talk down to conservatives.

Sure, that’s probably true, but the libs have not united like loyal nazis 70 million strong under a “dear leader.” We might have elected Biden, but he’s not our cult figure. We can take him or leave him.

Biden portrayed the election as a battle for the soul of the nation. Well, it clearly ended in a draw. The town tied the country. Both lost, in a way. The town lost its last hope that the country would ever be redeemed. And the country lost all self-respect by crying no-fair and being such a damned sore loser.

The soul of the country is aching.

I miss my childhood naivete when the hicks weren’t hicktators and hickhaters. When they were Americans, just like me. And we shared something in common — some universal humanity.

The new capital of Magastan

If by some fluke Trump succeeds in overturning the election and gets to serve 4 more years, I suggest that the capital of this new red nation Magastan be moved from DC. The president was put there by the country folk — he doesn’t deserve to live in a city.

The new capital should be in East Bumfuck in the middle of nowhere in some red state.

The White House will be just a shack with a junk car on cinder blocks out in front with a couple of abandoned refrigerators and some barefoot kids running around in the mud.

And a talking chicken named Foghorn Leghorn will be the Secretary of State and Mr. Haney the Secretary of Commerce. Yosemite Sam will run the military. And Rocky and Bullwinkle will head the Senate and House, respectively.

And if we city folk choose to visit this backwater on our Sunday drive, we will have to remember to be “vewy vewy quiet.” Because Porky Pig our President will be hunting wabbits.

But if we know what’s good for us we’ll stay the fuck home in our Antifa cities and autonomous zones where the police have been defunded and our reality is a socialist hellscape.

The battle for the soul of our country? No, that ain’t over yet. Not by a longshot.