Dear Bubba:

While the rest of the country prepares to remember the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I have been up to my neck (only faintly red, I’m afraid, from painting my house this week) in comments and observations about rednecks. Books, newspaper articles, television shows, personal conversations—every time I turned around this week, someone was there giving me an opinion on you, Bubba.

I regret to say that, despite Jeff Foxworthy, NASCAR, and radio show personalities John Boy and Billy, your image among the illuminati (that’s Latin, Bubba, meaning enlightened ones, which is how your self-appointed betters think of themselves) is tarnished. Some people just plain out don’t like you. Crackers and good ole boys like you are “those people” to the illuminati.

In the last week two weeks let me tell you what I have heard or read about you.

° A local politician told me that religious fundamentalists are basically idiots. He also stated that Christianity is just as violent a religion as Islam.

° This fall the University of North Carolina required incoming freshman to read a bowdlerized version of The Koran. A young lady who writes for this paper defended this position, basically telling those who disagreed that they could go off to a conservative Christian college. The University of North Carolina: Love It Or Leave It — this is the liberal ideal of education. In other words, shut up or get the hell out.

° In defending euthanasia — this means having the right to bump off granny when she starts to drool — another columnist for The Smoky Mountain News basically stated that when his time came to die he would leave our conservative, Christian, and backwards state and move to Oregon, where he would be gently helped along the way to the happy hunting ground by means of lethal injection. (Given the anger some of his columns have provoked, I doubt he would have to spend the money on a move. He could simply run an ad in this paper and undoubtedly find some volunteers who would be willing to lace his tea with arsenic.)

° One evening a whole group of illuminati had you in their sights, Bubba. These were people who make quite a bit of money without having to wash the grease out from under their fingernails every night. Under discussion was the possibility of a prison coming to Haywood County. Told that the prison would bring much-needed jobs to Western North Carolina, your community intellectuals were befuddled. “What’s wrong with them just working at Wal-Mart?” asked one woman. When told that there were few jobs paying a livable wage for the young here in the county, another woman said, “Well, can’t these people move somewhere else?”

° This week I read that a new show will appear on television. Titled The Real Beverly Hillbillies, the show will feature a stupid backwoods clan of Appalachian grills who will be taken to Hollywood to mix with big money and big shots. The idea here is to create a real-life Jed Clampett and then watch him make a fool of himself.

Even as I had begun to despair for you and yours, Bubba, I received a book to review called Redneck Nation: How The South Really Won The War. The author Michael Graham, who is depicted on the cover peeing against the side of a pickup, appeared as if he could have easily worn Pisgah red to last week’s football game. He looked like the great defender of yahoos and peckerwoods everywhere.

Unfortunately, Bubba, Mr. Graham doesn’t like you any better than all the other illuminati. He claims to be one of you, Bubba, but he’s more like that cousin who disappears up North for 30 years, retires, and then moves back home to tell you how they do things “up there.” Like everybody else, Bubba, Michael Graham is out to get you.

Graham is an amusing man, a clown out for laughs, but after a while he wears on you. He tells the same old jokes about the South and about rednecks — we marry our cousins, we don’t wear shoes, “we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground,” as Randy Newman once wrote in his satirical song “Rednecks,” a song that incidentally made a whole lot more sense than Graham’s book.

Graham’s primary point is that all of America is a redneck nation now. Believe it or not, the man is blaming you, Bubba, for fascistic feminism, radical vegetarianism, the tobacco Nazis, bad television, the decline of baseball, the ruination of popular culture, and the decline of the nation in general. It is you who helped create these things, not Hollywood or New England Puritanism or our left-wing universities. According to Graham, Bubba, you are now the driving force behind the direction of American culture.

What conclusions can we draw from all this information?

First, no one out there cares about you, Bubba. You already know that no one since Huey Long has cared about you, so the good news here is that nothing has changed. Some additional good news is that you will soon be a minority in this country. You can then attend redneck studies programs at the universities and ask for pickup truck reparations for your forefathers who died dirt poor working in some damn mill town down east.

Second, some of your leaders hold you in contempt. You might want to start asking them some questions like: Do you favor jobs for our county? What are you going to do to bring jobs here? Do you favor the rights as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights? What was the hardest job you ever pulled? Did you ever flip burgers or crop tobacco or cap tires for a living? Keep in mind that whether your granddaddy voted Democrat or Republican doesn’t mean diddly-squat; those two parties don’t mean what they once did and they certainly don’t give a rat’s whisker about you. Ask for answers.

Finally, refuse to take the rap for Michael Graham’s baloney. If someone ever has the gall to tell you that rednecks are responsible for feminist studies at Vassar, just look him dead in the eye and say, “I think it was New England transcendentalism and the suffragettes that gave us that sweet potato, buddy.” These critics will be stunned into silence by your wit and vocabulary. If not, the butt end of a bottle of Bud usually impacts an argument as well.

Rednecks of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose. Period.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)