When Good 'Ol Boys Rule - The Confederacy Comes To Washington

Billy Ray Hoskins was a good ol' boy and proud of it, of pure old English stock, a ragged, drunken lot loaded aboard whatever ship sailed for the New World, but courageous since they knew that no one but naked savages would greet them at Plymouth or Jamestown. 

  

His ancestors made their way up the Rappahannock and to the borderlands of the Cumberland Gap, then headed south to more prosperous climes, tobacco in Virginia and North Carolina, and eventually rice in South Carolina and cotton in the Mississippi Delta. 

It was a journey of two hundred years but the Hoskins family was proud of their heritage and their entrepreneurial spirit.  True, they were the ones behind the plow and not in the Great House, and ate cornpone and fatback not foie gras and pheasant, but theirs was a virtuous, plentiful life in the new land, and they never regretted leaving their English homes. 

The years of settlement and colonization were not particularly prosperous ones for the Hoskins family.  Although they had hoped to profit from the great plantation economy of the Delta, they ended up in the hills, poor, marginalized, and largely forgotten.  They were to become crackers, hillbillies, a lost generation. 

During the punitive years of Reconstruction they regained their footing, became enforcers of Jim Crow as henchmen of the new post-plantation bourgeoisie. For decades they were key to the restoration of the old South, fought desegregation with ax handles and attack dogs for their patrician cavalier patrons, and were rewarded with land and opportunity. 

They were taken for granted by most Washington administrations which in a desultory pro forma kind of way solicited their squirrel hunting, gun rack, bass boat political support but had no real interest in them as the heart and soul of America.

Finally and at long last, they were taken seriously by Donald Trump who counted on them for their votes, and vote they did in lockstep for the President who promised to give them their day in the sun, a day for white, hardworking, patriotic Americans. 

 

These good ol' boys had languished under Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton who were all for black this, black that; and chose to raise the uncultured, primitive, Paleolithic savage to the top of the American social pyramid, leaving true Americans who were on American land far before the first African slave ship arrived in Charleston.  

Now under the leadership of a true white, originalist, patriotic president, they would have their day; and quite a day it was when a contingent of Southern conservative patriots were invited to the White House for a celebratory supper. 

Trump and his legions had ordained the death of woke and DEI.  The black man was no longer to be the icon of America, on every television serial, in every ad, on every podium, and always in the public eye. He was to be reverted to his 12 percent demographic representation, his predominantly imprisoned, pimping, ghetto self; and the white majority was to be once again championed for its Christianity, Europeanness, and republican patriotism. 

The supper was not the patronizing, dumbing, expected barbecue of ribs and bacon; but something both in keeping with Southern populist tradition and higher aspirations - barbecue, yes, but filet mignon; drinks yes but fine Tennessee whiskey.

 

The Old South was back, although of course the new President could not fly the stars and bars without political damage.  Everything happened under the stars and stripes, a reconciliation of North and South never possible under woke, DEI, black-loving Washington. 

The keynote speaker at the Inaugural supper was the Reverend Cletus Moss of the Third Baptist Church of Indianola, a renowned, respected exponent of Southern Christian values.  Reverend Moss began his sermon gently with great respect for America, its history, and its traditions; but in only thinly veiled language he praised the Lord for the rebirth of the white American nation, a European evolved nation, an entrepreneurial, proud nation. 

 

Although the liberal press who observed from the dumpster alleys of the banquet shouted 'Racist!' their cries were ignored, so patently predictable and inane were they, and the Reverend went on to say that his people were the salt of the earth, God's chosen people, and the heart and soul of this great nation of ours, America!

Billy Ray Hoskins was chosen to be the poster boy for the New Confederacy, or rather the New Southern Patriots of America, and selected to give the secular invocation - a manifesto of Southern, capitalist, nativist rights - to follow the preamble of the Reverend Moss; and he did not disappoint.  Counselled to keep to an approved text, to avoid racial epithets, and ill-considered although true characterizations of the African diaspora, he still was electric in his limning of American originalist values. 

In his inimitable Southern drawl, he recalled the best of the Cavalier tradition, the tradition of manners and gentility, the sophisticated ease of his patrician forbears, and the rough-hewn, frontier spirit of hill country whites like himself and his family.  He hadn't even begun to tell of the greatness of English kings and courtiers, the anti-papist defiance of Henry VIII, or the magnificence of British common law before he was silenced by raucous cheers and hoorahs. 

Abraham Lincoln had insisted on the integrity of one, collaborative, patriotic union, a dream never realized in successive contentiously separatist governments; but Donald Trump had managed the impossible and finally given credence and recognition to Southern history and tradition.  America was not a black nation as Biden, Harris, and the liberal Left contended; but a white Christian one; and in so proclaiming, the Confederacy was given the legitimacy it had long sought. 

'Cracker Power' shouted one of the signs waved on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House when President Trump was celebrating the Southern patriots who had come to Washington not to demand, but to plead for final acceptance into national history. 

The addresses of both the Reverend Moss and Billy Ray Hoskins went viral, taken by the liberal press as the most vile, bald statements of endemic racism the nation had ever heard but championed by conservatives as a final reckoning and putting to rest the insensate, absurd demand for reparations and black supremacy. 

At least Billy Ray had a home to go to and enjoy grilled squirrel and biscuits while these progressive head-in-the-sand naysayers had nowhere, no familiar, accommodating, welcoming place of solace.