The History Channel is part of the A&E system. As you know, A&E is in the middle of a ruckus over the Duck Dynasty show and I have covered that a couple of times already in tthis blog so I won't go there.
What I have noticed is that between the History channel and A&E is that they have had a series of shows about blue collar types in the south.
Swamp people was about alligator hunting, a portion of Axe Men takes place in the south as does the Legend of Shelby the Swamp man (or whatever it's called)
A&E has 'Duck Dynasty', 'American Hoggers' and they're starting another series called 'Rodeo girls'.
I seem to have noticed that the shows that take place in the south tend to try and portray the people down there as backward and uneducated. Truth is, the south really isn't that way.
I sure wouldn't be ashamed to be accepted to Texas A&M like my neice has just been and Georgia Tech is a damned fine school.
Granted one does not need a lot of formal education to hunt alligators but the fact still remains that there are an awful lot of the Hah-vud boys that would get their asses eaten off of them if they tried.
Mark Twain once said that he never let schooling get in the way of his education and I agree with him.
A lot of those people portrayed on the A&E networks may not have spent a whole lot of time in the classroom but they are sure one hell of a lot more competent in life than the audience in New York penthouses that are guffawing at them.
I suppose some of the people in the south chuckle, too because they know someone like the people portrayed in the shows but it's a different kind of laughter. Likely they are laughing at the character's mannerisms and not what he is doing. They probably respect the man for his skills.
There was one of those reality shows where a guy built a perfectly functioning tractor out of accumulated junk. It looked very rough and unpolished but did what it was designed to do and he was in the process of building attachments for it to do other things.
I don't have the skills to do that and I'd just bet that the overwhelming majority of the Yankee boys laughing at them can't build one, either. Yet they sit in their fancy penthouses all smug and looking down on their southern cousins. A lot of these people think the way to rewire a lamp is to call an electrician.
Yet these Big City types will look down their noses at people with skills and a different way of life they are incapable of living. What is interesting to note is that all of the Duck Dynasty people have degrees except Si who has three years and service in Vietnam. Phil has a master's and they privately own a $400 million dollar business they started from scratch.
The ruckus on DD seems to be a case where A&E decided to take a family and make fools of them and it turned on them. Instead of looking like total hillbillies, the Robertsons appealed to the public as decent, intelligent people and it appears to have backfired. They are not portraying the image the A&E people wanted. People are not laughing at the Robertsons, they are laughing with them as they have things in common with them.
It doesn't strike me that a whole lot of people can look down on these guys. They obviously have the skills to make pretty hefty business deals or they wouldn't be as successful as they are.
My first encounter with these types to a lesser degree was when I went through basic training and had to deal with a few Philly and New York types that considered a tree to be a wild animal. It was hilarious watching one of them flip out when he encountered a garter snake while on bivouac. They went into a panic and ran away from it faster than I ran toward it. Snake's pretty good eatin'.
Yet these Big City types tended to look down their noses at some of the country kids that took to the outdoor aspects of soldiering like a duck to water.
A lot of these elites look down on the very fabric that's put them where they are. They look down on rednecks, many of them are the people that fix their cars, their homes and even go to war on their behalf.
It makes me wonder why the A&E elites and their affiliates try and make these people look like they are so different than any of the rest of us. They are obviously $hitting where they eat.
Either that or covering for something. Most likely covering because I just read on another blog where the creator and producer of Duck Dynasty starred in a homoerotic movie called 'The Fluffer'.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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