“Payback’s a Bitch”: Rural Wisdom and the Gathering Storm

Guest Post by Fred Reed

The furor over the Confederate flag, think I, has little to do with the Confederate flag, which is a pretext, an uninvolved bystander. Rather it is about a seething anger in the United States that we must not mention. It is the anger of people who see everything they are and believe under attack by people they aren’t and do not want to be—their heritage, their religion, their values and way of life all mocked and even made criminal.

The talking heads inside Washington’s beltway, in editorial suites in New York, do not know of this anger. They do not talk to people in Joe’s Bar in Chicago or in barbecue joints in Wheeling. They are cloistered, smug, sure of themselves. And they are asking for it.

We are dealing with things visceral, not rational. Confusing the two is dangerous. Hatreds can boil over as syllogisms cannot. The banning of the flag infuriates, for example, me. Why? Although a Southerner by raising, I would far prefer to live in New York City than in Memphis. Yet I value my boyhood in Virginia and Alabama. My ancestors go back to the house of Burgesses, and I remember long slow summer days on the Rappahannock and in the limestone of Athens, Alabama.

When the federal government and the talking heads want to ban my past—here, permit me to exit momentarily the fraudulent objectivity of literature—I hate the sonsofbitches.

A lot of people quietly hate the sonsofbitches.

To them, to us, the Confederate flag stands for resistance to control from afar, to meddling and instruction from people we detest. It is the flag of “Leave me the hell alone.” And this Washington, Boston, and New York will…not…do.

A surprise may be coming.

What is the anger about? Most visibly, but far from uniquely, race: the illegals, the Knock-Out game, and Washington’s protection of both. The racial hostility that pervades the country today is largely the doing of the talking heads and its perverse social policies. The rancor is unlike anything I have seen.

Curious. When I was a lad ages ago, I thought well of Brown vs. the School board. Southerners said that integration would never work and they were right, but what came before was just wrong. I thought so then, and I think so now. I favored the civil-rights acts. I reluctantly favored affirmative action (I was very young) thinking it meant a hand up instead of an entitlement. I wrote hopefully of the prospect of educating blacks.

But look what happened. We now see forced hiring of the incompetent as a right, endless accounts of blacks destroying shopping malls, burning cities, brutally attacking whites in gangs, and the giving to blacks of anything they want because they are black. You don’t like the Confederate flag, Jesse? Why then, it must go. Whatever you say, Jesse.

It wasn’t this way, but it is now. It is getting worse. But there is far more than race.  We now are compelled to live in a national sexual-freak show. Day after day after day the media are full of trans-this and trans-that, of homosexual marriages, all thrust in our faces, a parade of prancing peculiarities demanding and demanding and demanding. People who dare not say so are sick of it.

It isn’t viciousness. I don’t know anyone who wants to persecute the erotically baroque. Poofters in particular are usually bright, productive, decent people, and do not attack whites in wheel chairs with hammers. Yet I weary of their endless tedious concerns. I say, go. Go with God, but for God’s sake go. Or just shut up. That would do as well.

I, we, will be told, “But Fred, homosexuality is natural.” So is hemorrhagic tuberculosis. So is sadism. So is genocide.

Any sexual predilection can be called natural, and arguments can be made for all of them: Polygamy, or marriage with a sheep, or copulating on a public bus, or sex with girls of nine years. (How about, “Sex is natural. Children are erotic: Don’t they play doctor? Little girls are only afraid of it because of puritanical conditioning by society. Oral sex feels good, and adults do it, so why not…? Why shouldn’t her father gently teach her….” And so on.)

And crime is out of control, protected by a President and Attorney General with whom we, so many Americans,  have nothing in common, who dislike us,  and who want to disarm us and flood our country with illegal and incompatible aliens.

Do  you think that wanting a gun is silly? Last week I started getting emails: “Chuck got shot.” On Breitbart I found that Chuck De Caro, a journalist and friend for so long that I forget how I met him, had checked into a motel in Albuquerque with his wife, whereupon an armed dirtbag tried to rob them and perhaps worse. I suppose that a white couple in their sixties must have seemed a soft target. Oops. It wasn’t a swell career move. Chuck is ex-Special Forces and a longtime war corresponden. Threatening his wife doesn’t fly well with him.

Anyway, Chuck apparently had other ideas about being robbed and perhaps killed.  He also had a handgun. In the ensuing gunfight, he was hit several times and rushed to the hospital. Chuck will be okay, the dirtbag less so. He escaped to the parking lot, where he decided to lie down and bleed to death. A good choice. The news stories didn’t describe the perp, which meant…. 

This gem, Tomorio Walton, is, or was, a career criminal and was, of course, on parole. Can you guess why so many of us want guns and carry permits? Characteristically I had to find the photo in  the Mail Online, an English paper.

Then there is the de-Christianizing of the country. Religion, both historically and currently, is a potent thing. Play with it at your risk. It is not always  really a matter of religion. Many of us, I among them, are not believers but value Christmas and its traditions. But no. We must not have nativity scenes or sing Christmas carols on public streets. Easter-egg hunts are unconstitutional. Mommy Washington doesn’t like them, and we have to do what Washington says.

Unless, of course, one day we don’t.

We are winding a spring.

Standard beatdown of white man by black mob at Fourth of July in Cincinnati. Almost a daily occurence. The media will hide it. This is not a part of my culture. Why do we put up with it?

Stoking the flames under the pressure cooker is the unending, ever-tightening control of every aspect of life by Washington. People inside the city’s beltway, a venue I know well, do not understand what they are playing with. They are sure that they know best, and they are going to make us toe the line.

Federal bureaucrats  tell people in Casper, Laredo, and Knoxville what they can and cannot teach their children in the schools, what religious practices they may have and what their children may eat. They set curricula, determine to whom bakeries must sell cakes, decide who can marry what, and with whom we must associate.

I could go on. There is quiet fury about open borders, the forced acceptance of criminal aliens, of 100,000 Somalis by Minnesota, the endless wars, the declining standard of living, the insane censorship (say “nigger” and your career of thirty years ends) and the ungodly surveillance. Washington pushes, pushes, and pushes, thinking that with just enough pressure, we will all come to kowtow.

What if one day we don’t?

And there is governmental corruption, the sense—“realization,” I would say—that Washington is entirely in the hands of the arms manufacturers, of the Israeli lobby, of big pharma and ethnic lobbies and, well, anyone who bribes Congress. Elections are a sham, serving only to decide the division of the spoils for eight years. All decisions of importance are carefully kept out of the public’s hands.

Maybe Washington will always get away with it. Maybe it won’t. White Americans are an obedient and passive people, easily cowed, but maybe enough will prove enough. Maybe things will blow. Maybe jurisdictions will just ignore the feds, as begins to happen.

But it is dangerous. The economy declines, people out of college can’t get jobs, the ghettoes simmer, automation surges across the board, and one day soon we will have cutbacks in the entitlements. When groups begin competing for dwindling resources, things will get ugly. It could explode. It really could. You might be surprised how many people out there think, “Bring it on.” Not a good idea, but we go that way.

Tick Tick. Tick.