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"Annihilating the Hillbilly:
by Jim Branscome
page 9
What on the surface may strike Jack Weller,
author of Yesterday's People (published jointly by the University of
Kentucky and the Council of the Southern Mountains) as ignorance which
keeps people from taking polio shots even when they are offered free
transportation, may, in fact, be better explained by Frantz Fanon, a
physician himself, who argued (in the Wretched of the Earth) that the
Algerians resisted "modern medical techniques" so long as the French
were in control of them, but adopted the new practices immediately when
they felt themselves to be in control. I have seen parents who
refused to have their children vaccinated at the public health
clinic, willingly have them vaccinated when it was "our" medical
students who were giving the shots.
One has to understand how the medical profession in Appalachia
operates to appreciate fully this phenomenon. He has to sit with a
young father in the mountains and hear the story of his his
pregnant, now deceased, wife was turned away from the hospital because
he did not have the hundred dollars that the doctors demand as a down
payment for those who do not have medical insurance. It is these
same compassionate doctors who have, rather than reform their own
practices to meet the needs of people, turned the Medicaid program into
a thriving business. The potential earning from the health support
programs is so great that a recent government report on physician
manpower in Appalachia suggested that it was one of the most lucrative
enticements to get doctors into the region--another colonial
characteristic. A largely overlooked article in the Louisville
Courier Journal in the Spring of 1970 described how doctors and
pharmacists have turned Medicaid recipients in eastern Kentucky into
addicts and junkies. It repeated reports from law officers and
nurses who had seen "whole families lying around in a stupor"
and "glassy-eyed teenagers and small children wobbling or passed
out along the roadside" because they took narcotics prescribed by
their physicians. One eastern Kentucky pharmacist admitted that 65
percent of his business came from Medicaid dues. "The poor
people are substituting pills for faith," he explained. He
went on to describe why the abuses are allowed to continue:
"It would cost the pharmacist a great deal in time away from work
to keep a check on abuses. They are just too busy."
By and large American institutions can be said, then, to have held no
respect for the mountaineer other than for his use as an object.
Richard Davis notes in his recent The Man Who Moved a Mountain (Fortress
Press), large metropolitan newspapers used the notorious
Allen feud of
the second decade of this century in my hometown of Hillsville,
Virginia, to interpret the Appalachian to their urban readers. said
one: The majority of mountain people are unprincipled
ruffians. They make moonshine, 500 horsepower, and swill it down;
they carry on generous and gentle feuds in which little children are not
spared, and deliberately plan a wholesale assassination, and when
captured either assert they shot in self-defense, or with true coward
streak deny the crime. There are two remedies only--education or
extermination. Mountaineers, like the red Indian, must learn this
lesson.
Another editorial in a northern newspaper on the same event went on
to conclude:
The Scots-Irish mountaineers are more ignorant than vicious, victims
of heredity and alcohol, and now that their isolated region has been
invaded, must change or perish.
One of the often overlooked aspects of the outsiders' fetish for
Appalachia has been the premises which underlie their own prescriptions
for the people's future. One finds in Jack Weller's influential
writings, for instance, comments such as these:
There is little in the mountain child's training that would help him
develop self-control, discipline, resolution, or steadfastness.
Thus the way is prepared for future difficulties in the army or at work.
Since the culture inadequately prepares its members to relate to
"outsiders," there is a great need for "bridge"
persons, who can help the suspicious and fearful to respond more
positively to persons and institutions which will increasingly be of help
and resource--doctors, psychiatrists, clinics, hospitals, government in
the form of agency officials, policemen, public health nurses, welfare
workers, and recreation leaders. The mountaineer's suspicion of
these persons limits his use of them to crisis occasions, when, in fact,
their purpose is to be understanding that government and other
institutions cannot be run in person-oriented ways but must be conducted
in great measure on an impersonal objective basis. He needs help
in seeing that a certain amount of bureaucratic organization is a
necessary thing, and that a government does not exist for an individuals
person's benefit (Yesterday's People, pp.157-158).
Responding
to the Appalachian culture, outsiders are sometimes incapable of
interpreting the evidence because
of
their own training in research procedures. One, for example,
while, of course, repeatedly enjoining his readers that he is passing no
judgment on the culture--described mountain music and literature as
"regressive looking", "nostalgic and melancholy,"
over all, "repressive." Thomas Merton, on the other
hand, after hearing some mountain music for the first time at Abbey of
Gethsemane, gave the correct interpretation and exclaimed, "It's
apocalyptic!" Perhaps the only fair hearing the culture
of the people of Appalachia will receive is from persons, like mystics
and contemplatives, who do not assign ultimate importance to the things
that the modern State and today's seminarians have blessed as divine.
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