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Annihilating The Hillbilly
by Jim Branscome, Appalachian
Author
published in the early 70s
page 1
September CBS began its new television season with the theme
"Let's All Get Together." If you watch television on
Tuesday nights, you know that who got together, back-to-back,
were the stars of three of America's most popular TV programs:
"The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," and "Hee-Haw."
Each week millions of Americans gather around their sets to watch
this combination, which has to be the most intensive effort ever
exerted by a nation to belittle, demand, and other-wise destroy a
minority people within its boundaries. Within the three
shows on one night, hillbillies are shown being conned into
buying the White House, coddling a talking pig, and rising from a
cornpatch to crack the sickest jokes on TV--all on the same
channel, all only a short while after Eric Sevareid has completed
his nightly lecture to the American public on decency, integrity,
dignity and the other great American virtues to which he and his
network supposedly adhere. If similar programs even
approaching the maliciousness of these were broadcast today on
Blacks, Indians or Chicanos, there would be an immediate public
outcry from every liberal organization and politician in the
country and a scathing editorial in the New York Times about the
programs' "lack of taste." The new culture people would
organize marches and prime-time boycotts and perhaps, even, throw
dog dung at Eva Gabor as she emerged from her studio. They
might even go a stop further and deal with that hillybilly-maligning
patriot, Al Capp. But, with this, as all things
Appalachian, silence. America is allowed to continue
laughing at this minority group because on this, America agrees:
hillbilly ain't beautiful.
The treatment given by the media to Appalachia is only one
example of the massive failure of America's institutions for over
a century to meet the needs of the people of the region.
From government at all levels, to churches, private welfare
agencies, schools, colleges, labor unions, foundations,
newspapers, corporations, ad infinitum, the region has received
an unequal share of exploitation, neglect, unfulfilled promises
and misguided assistance. This is not to deny that America
is interested in Appalachia. It has been for some time, in
the peculiar American way--in Appalachia's worth to industry, of
course; only erratically in the plight of the people.
General Howard of the Freedman's Bureau is said to have convinced
Lincoln that he ought to try to do something for the poor
mountaineers after the Civil War. The New Deal brought the
then rather progressive Tennessee Valley Authority to one part of
the region, but TVA's recently developed capacity to burn
lower-grade strip-mined coal brought the hellish human and
material waste of that process to Central Appalachia.
If the ability of institutions to respond to people's needs is
judged on the basis of the federal government's enforcement of
the Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, then the answer to this
question is No! Loud and Clear. The death of the 78 coal miners
in
Farmington, West Virginia, in November 1968 led to the passage
of that Act which is the strictest mine safety legislation ever
to get through Congress and be signed by a President. The public
outrage over Farmington gave government one of its few
opportunities to wrestle successfully with the powerful American
coal-oil conglomerates. But, something did not work; either there
is no will, or desire, by the bureaucracies (the institutions) of
the federal government to go to the mat with the conglomerates.
Perhaps their interests are so inseparable that no contest is
ever possible. In any case: since the disaster, more than 300
miners have been killed in the mines and more than 10,000 have
been crippled or injured. There has been no public outcry to
Moreover, the Social Security Administration's own Bureau of
Disability Insurance provides some statistics which indicate how
the bureaucracy of one fundamental institution--government--deals
with one crisis which the 1969 Act sought to meet: compensation
for miners disabled by "black lung" contracted after long years
and long hours inside the mines. The national average of claims
under the black lung provisions of the Act processed by the
Bureau of Disability Insurance is 43%. However: only 22% of the
claims from eastern Kentucky and 24% of those from West Virginia
had been processed by early November 1970. And: 32% of the
processed claims of West Virginia miners have been denied. The
figure for claims denied for the rest of the nation is
only....20%!
If one reflects on the fact that in the past seventy years there
have been 101,000 mine deaths, a number larger than the total of
miners now working in Appalachia and double the number of Vietnam
deaths, then the inability of the government to enforce
regulations, which are mild by international comparison, strikes
one as not speaking well for the capacity of political
institutions to use the very arena of action which is theirs, by
democracy's mandate, or for the American public's capacity to
care for anything more than the dramatic, never the substantial.
And with the death of thirty-eight men in the Finley mines near
Hyden, Kentucky last December 30, the nation was once again
reminded about the plight of miners in Appalachian coal pits. The
President of the United States himself announced that he would
have visited the scene of the disaster....if it had not been for
"the bad weather." The more important visits, however, those of
inspectors from the Bureau of Mines, were not made to the Finley
mines on schedule some few days before the disaster in order to
check compliance with violations of regulations in the 1969 act
cited on earlier visits. It was the same, old refrain; new
priority guidelines for violations under the new Act had just
come down from Washington to the Bureau's regional office in
eastern Kentucky, necessitating a new schedule of visits; the
office itself was short-handed because some of the inspectors had
taken "Christmas leave"; the mine operators complained that some
provisions of the Act were a peril to the safety of miners and
mines; that no one, not even the inspectors, understood all of
the provisions of the Act, Etc. Etc. In any event, the Finley
mines near Hyden, Kentucky, were permitted to operate up to the
disaster on December 30. They did so in large part because an
inspection required under the 1969 Act was subjected to the
administration of a bureaucracy which, perhaps unwittingly but
in fact, vetoed the will and intention of the Congress
and
the President and--if representative government is still taken
seriously--the will of the people. Thirty-eight men dead. And
the litany of charges: families of the dead miners exploited by
funeral operators, insurance claim men and government officials;
cover-ups and double-dealings and politics involved in the
"hearings" to inquire into the disaster; illegal "primer cord"
and "dynamite" had (and had not) been used in the mines; an
inspector "who didn't want his name used" said a simultaneous
explosion ten times the legal limit was set off when the men were
killed....
The
complete failure of the American corporate structure to
accept even a charitable responsibility for the region
that it has raped so successfully is hardly arguable.
Since men like General Imboden in the late nineteenth
century went before the state legislatures to argue that
"...within the imperial domain of Virginia, lie, almost
unknown to the outside world and not fully appreciated
by their owners, vaster fields of coal and iron than in
all England, maybe, than all Europe," the American
corporate community has wrenched resources estimated at
a worth of nearly one trillion dollars from the
mountains. While these companies pay some of the
highest dividends of any company in the world to their
already wealthy shareholders, the communities in
Appalachia where those resources originated survive on a
subsistence economy, if "survive" is the proper verb
here. Often more than half of the money in circulation
comes from state and federal welfare coffers. This fact
alone tells us something about the American Way, if not
the American Dream. Three months after the June 30,
1970 deadline for reducing the amount of hazardous dust
in the mines as required by the 1969 legislation, 2800
of the 3000 underground mine operators had not
complied. It is these same companies which have
continually opposed severance taxes on coal and medical
benefits for the more than 100,000 disabled miners who
suffer permanent lung damage from poorly maintained
mines. Apparently when these corporate institutions of
American free enterprise become incredibly wealthy, they
cannot be expected to have conscience even to allow
government to pay the tab for the damage they have
caused. Somewhere that "pursuit of selfish interest
accruing benefits to all" went astray in Appalachia.
It has always been asserted with pride that America
takes great interest in its children.
"Dr. Spock"
has been a best-seller for over a decade. But this
"child-dominated" society has interest only in certain
children. Of the more than 925,000 poor children under
six in Appalachia, as estimated by the Office of
Economic Opportunity, only about 100,000 receive cash
benefits in their home from Aid for Dependent Children
or other similar welfare programs. While the national
participation rate of children in
Head Start programs
decreased three percent between 1967 and 1969, the
Appalachia participation decreased fifteen percent. The
greatest decrease in Appalachia, significantly, was in
full-year programs, those regarded as most beneficial to
poor children. What other group in the country received
the benefits from the cutbacks in Appalachia is
unimportant here; that "hillbillies" were not on the
priority list is obvious.
In the area of prenatal and infant care, the
situation in Appalachia is even more alarming.
Examinations of children in several areas of the region
have shown that as many as seventy percent have
"parasitic infestation" (the euphemism for "worms"), one
of the contributing causes of Appalachia's unusually
large number of retarded and "slow" children -- "worms"
abounding in the miserable shacks and grassless yards
American free enterprise has put aside for the
hillbillies. If the Appalachian infant mortality rate
were reduced at the same rate as East Germany's in a
five-year period, as reported by the World Health
Organization, then the lives of more than 1,000 children
a year could be preserved. In certain areas of the
region, as a matter of fact, the situation worsened over
a decade. In Lamar County, Alabama, for example, the
infant mortality rate rose from 32.5 percent to 40.9
percent in ten years. Hancock County, Tennessee's rate
rose from 21.4 percent to 42.2 percent in the same time
period. While increased attention to child development
at the national and regional level promises to better
the situation, for many lives and for many minds the
help comes too late.
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Perhaps if it were possible to estimate
the number of mountain children who would be
alive and healthy if Appalachia had received
and retained a more equitable share of the
nation's wealth, certain institutions could
be persuaded more easily to invest in saving
children. Until the case is made, however,
we all labor under the curse of the prophets
and the admonitions of the poets
(increasingly, it seems, the only sane
people), that the final judgment on
civilizations and their institutions rests
on how well they treat children, who are--in
appeal at least--the "least of these."
The Appalachian child who makes it to
school does not find the institution
American has charged with equipping youth
with basic "survival" skills any better
prepared to serve his needs. The inability
and unwillingness of local governments to
tax the property and extractive resources of
large corporations has resulted in an
educational system in Appalachia that can
only be compared with that in the so-called
"underdeveloped" nations. Add to this the
fundamental resistance of middle-class
teachers to acknowledge the unique cultural
heritage of the Appalachian youth and you
have a laboratory for studying one of the
classic, historical struggles between a
nation intent on erasing a minority from its
midst and a people intent on preserving
their identity and life style at any cost to
themselves. In an Appalachian school, the
middle class aspiring, teacher is just as
insistent that the student be aggressive,
obedient, joyless--in short, everything that
his culture tells he is not--as is the
teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs
school on a reservation. No wonder then
that as many as 65 percent of the students
drop out of school before graduation--a
figure 25 percent higher than the national
average.
Responding to the fiscal needs of the
Appalachian educational system alone is
overwhelmingly beyond the capacity of
government agencies as they are presently
funded. In 1967, for example, the Office of
Education estimated that the construction
needs of the 13 Appalachian states
represented over 42 percent of the total
school construction needs of the entire
country. It would require the additional
expenditure of $363 million annually just to
raise the per pupil expenditures of
Appalachian schools to the national
average. Title I of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, designed to
increase the amount of funds available for
the teaching of disadvantaged students, will
spend more money on an equal number of
students in the schools of Westchester, New
York, where the number of poor students is
about three percent of the student body,
than it will in a county in Appalachia where
more than half of the student body is poor.
Talent Search, a special college recruitment
ad placement program funded by Congress for
high-risk students, spends only 3.8 percent
of its money in Appalachia, compared to the
10 percent the regions deserves. Simply to
make the Appalachian educational system
equal in educational resources to the
national will require a political miracle at
a time when no miracle workers are to be
found.
While Appalachia is heavily populated
with institutions of higher learning
supported by various religious denominations
and state governments, the region's students
are not better served here than in the
secondary institutions. Neither is the
region's needs for professional and para-professional
manpower. No institution of American
society, in fact, is more divorced from
Appalachia than the higher educational
system which resides within it.
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Forced by accrediting agencies,
visiting boards, and hundreds of
other pressures to maintain a
facade of "academic excellence"
and " a sound liberal arts
educational," usually with
Christ thrown in somewhere, the
church-supported schools spend
littler time thinking about the
community below their own
mountainside. Their emphasis on
admitting Appalachian students
is so small, their tuition so
high, ad pressure so intense
from church supporters outside
the regions to admit their sons
ad daughters, that most these
colleges have an inordinately
high percentage of students from
states like New Jersey.
Certainly to these college,
"Christian" education has
nothing to do with serving the
victims of Caesar's educational
system.
The "open door" policies of
state universities are often, in
actuality, "revolving doors" for
the Appalachian student.
Once the student is admitted and
the fees collected either from
him or the state, the more
aggressive and well-trained
student from another section of
the state or nation, and the
freshman composition teacher,
can be
expected to send the Appalachian
student scurrying home. In
January 1968 the National
Association of State
Universities and Land Grant
Colleges summed up the record of
their members in the region
with: "To maintain quality
they raised student charges
substantially, turned away
qualified students, limited
enrollments, and refused
urgently needed public
services."
The regional universities and
colleges place little emphasis
on promoting a regional
consciousness on the part of
their students. In fact, there
is not at present a single
Appalachian studies program in
the region which could begin to
rival the offerings in Far
Eastern studies or astronomy.
One, Eastern Kentucky University
in Richmond (which in reality is
in "Blue Grass," not "eastern,"
Kentucky) prides itself on its
training and research in law
enforcement and police work.
All this continues and
intensifies a channeling process
begun by the elementary teacher
to send the Appalachian student
--ashamed of his background and
ill-equipped to meet the needs
of his region--into middle-class
society outside the needs of his
region. The sixteen-year process
of credentializing that the
student has been subjected to,
becomes finally a ticket to the
world of Dick and Jane
Support-Your-Local-Police and
the affluence of America built
at Appalachia's expense. So, a
region which needs more than
200,000 college graduates--a
minimum of 5,000 physicians,
many more thousands of nurses,
teachers, businessmen,
government leaders, ad
infinitum--finds no help in
another of America's
institutions.
The young Appalachian left
behind by the higher educational
system is destined to be the
object of a number of
complicated channeling devices.
Certainly the male youth, if he
can pass the examinations, is
eligible for one of the more
obvious youth channeling
programs in the country, the
draft, and, too, the volunteer
army. Selective Service
does not maintain records on
Appalachians as a group, but he
number in the service is
estimated to be higher than
their percentage in the
population because the armed
forces represent the only
opportunity available to many
young mountain men to be
assimilated into mainline
America.
For example: recent Department
of Defense figures report that
West Virginia led the nation in
per capita Vietnam deaths.
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Twenty-five
West Virginians per
100,000 population
had been killed,
compared to
seventeen per
100,000 nationally.
For the youth who
seeks opportunity
and training in some
special opportunity
program, such as the
Job Corps, the fate
may not be a great
deal more
encouraging.
Because of the Job
Corps' resistance to
establishing a
Center especially
for Appalachian
youth, they are sent
to camps both within
and outside the
region where the
population may be
largely urban and
black. Combine his
unfamiliarity with
urban life and
blacks with his
affinity for home
and family, and one
can easily
understand why the
Appalachian youth
drops out of the
program in equal
frequency with his
Indian counterpart.
Even if he lasts the
program out,
according to Joint
Action in Community
Service, the agency
which contracts with
the Job Corps to
place and counsel
graduates, it is
very difficult to
find him a job or to
locate a person or
agency willing to
assist him in the
mountains.
For the youth
who has not dropped
out of school by the
ninth grade and who
has no prospect of
attending college,
vocational training
represents the only
channel open to
him. Many find it a
wicked channel
indeed. Three years
ago the Education
Advisory Committee
of the Appalachian
Regional Commission
reported that 50
percent of all
vocational training
programs in the
region consisted of
agriculture and home
economics--areas in
which there were
almost no job
openings. Since
that report the
Commission and the
states have required
all 235 vocational
programs which they
have funded to teach
job-relevant
skills. While only
half of the schools
are now open and no
thorough evaluation
has been reported,
it is expected that
the schools will be
significantly better
than their
predecessors.
As late as
1968, however, the
West Virginia
Commission on Higher
Education reported
that only about 18
percent of the
students in that
state had access to
vocational
training. Given the
fact that post-high
school vocational
training is still
not available to the
majority of
Appalachian youth,
this major channel
of supposed
opportunity still
has a long way to go
to overcome the
serious handicaps it
has represented in
the past. And with
improvement,
vocational
education's role may
be to channel all
the so-called
disadvantaged
students into neat
slots, thereby
diminishing not only
the student, but
vocational education
as well.
Additionally, so
long as vocational
school graduates
must leave the
mountains to find
jobs, the region
will remain a
loser. It is
already estimated
that 900,000 high
school graduates
will have to leave
the region to find
jobs in the decade
of the 70's. They
will thus become the
people the cities do
not want and the
people the region
cannot afford to
lose.
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The
fact
that a
mountain
youth
takes
advantage
of the
opportunity
to
finish
high
school
and
apply to
college
does not
guarantee
that the
tentacles
of the
system
will let
him go.
For
instance,
one of
the
high-risk
students
I taught
in the
Upward
Bound
program
at Berea
College
applied
and was
accepted
last
fall at
that
college.
During
the
preceding
spring
he was
approached
by a
recruiter
for the
"FBI who
gave him
a hard
sell on
the
benefits
of
working
for the
Bureau
in
Washington.
He
dropped
the idea
of
college
and is
now a
low-paid
clerk at
FBI
headquarters.
Since
this
incident
I have
checked
with
school
personnel
in other
areas of
the
region
and
found
that
intensive
recruitment
of high
school
graduates
in rural
areas is
now
carried
out by
the FBI
and
other
government
agencies
who are
not
finding
recruits
for
their
clerk
and
typist
posts in
urban
high
schools.
The law,
it
seems,
does
have a
long arm
and no
qualms
about
modern
forms of
impressment.
Most
high
school
dropouts--except
those
who
marry
and
somehow
find
work or
welfare
payments--and
unemployed
high
school
graduates
eventually
end up
being
forced
to
migrate
to find
work.
In West
Virginia,
for
instance,
70
percent
of the
young
people
leave
before
they
reach
the age
of 24.
Usually
referred
to as
"migrants"
instead
of more
accurately
as
economic
refugees,
these
youth
join the
more
than
2,000,000
other
mountaineers
who have
preceded
them to
northern
cities
such as
Cincinnati,
Chicago,
Indianapolis
and
Detroit.
If they
have a
skill
and
happened
to move
during a
period
of
relative
economic
prosperity,
or are
willing
to
accept a
job run
by the
stopwatch
and a
minimum
wage
employer,
as many
do, then
their
chances
for
survival
are
good.
If, on
the
other
hand,
circumstances
deem
that
they
have to
move in
with kin
in the
"back
home"
ghetto,
then the
situation
is
different.
The
unemployed
and
unassimilated
mountain
youth
finds
himself
in a
bewildering
ghetto
that
defies
description,
and
usually
comparison,
with the
ghetto
life of
other
minorities.
He also
finds
that in
the city
there is
one
thing
more
unacceptable
than a
black
man--a
hillbilly,
a
ridgerunner,
a
briarhopper.
For the
first
time in
its
history
America
has
recognized
him as a
cultural
minority.
If he
ends up
in
juvenile
court
for
stealing
hubcaps,
he is
offered
leniency
with his
promise
to go
"back
home."
Judges
make
this
offer to
youth
whose
families
may have
been in
the city
for
three
generations
and can
only
consider
themselves
Cincinnatians
or
Chicagons.
If he
enters
school,
studies
show
that its
foreign
nature
drives
him out
faster
both
psychologically
and
physically
than it
does his
black
migrant
counterpart.
For the
mountain
youth
who is
unable
or
unwilling
to
assimilate
into the
life of
the
city,
there is
little
help
from the
social
service
agencies
who
understand
much
more
about
blacks
than
they do
about
him. He
is thus
not only
without
help,
but--perhaps
more
appallingly--without
an
advocate
in a
city
that he
does not
understand
and that
does not
understand
him.
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One group of Appalachians who are consistently overlooked and underserved by the institutions of the region are the blacks. As a matter of fact, both government and the so-called "private" welfare agencies refuse to acknowledge the existence of blacks in Appalachia. While the percentage of blacks in the region as a whole is low -- about eight percent -- they comprise the total populations in many small, isolated hollows and ghost coal towns abandoned by the corporations and welfare and poverty agencies. Because the backbreaking jobs that brought black imports into the region are gone and because of the discrimination and competition with the majority of poor white people for jobs and welfare funds, their existence is a poor one, indeed. As yet no agency report or journalist has documented the presence and needs of these people, let alone described the culture of minority group in the midst of another cultural minority.
America's unwillingness to deal with the Appalachian as he asks to be dealt with is probably no more baffling than America's seeming obsession to study and understand his unusual life style and values. Even before the Russell Sage Foundation published John Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in 1921, writers and sociologists were making forays into the mountains to alternately praise, condemn, and collect the mountain culture. The studies are still being made today in the midst of the technological revolution that is, for all practical purposes, making "Middle Americans" all alike. The conclusions of modern studies do not differ from those made in the last century. The Appalachian is different; he is existence-oriented, independent, has close family ties, is fatalistic, cares for his elderly, ad nauseum. If, as Robert Coles and others have written of late, the Appalachian has a life-style, a culture, that America would do well to listen to if not opt for, then why has America failed so miserably at times to meet his needs?
Part of the answer is, obviously, that Appalachia in the main has been a colonial territory for America within her own boundaries. The life style of the region served well the need of the mining and lumbering corporations for a subjugated people willing to be peasants in their own land. Even after the bloody struggles to unionize the mines, the capacity of America's institutions, (including its labor unions) to contain the people's struggle remained intact. So what on the surface appears to be quaint people, to be explained away by their isolation ad independence may, in fact, be more accurately described as the historical reaction of the people to colonialism.
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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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The churchmen, educators, welfare agents, independent do-gooders, journalists and novelists, and the institutions which pay their salaries--that is, those who have made an extraordinarily good living trying to "understand" the mountain man--have studied the Appalachian not to learn from him, but rather to "teach" him, to "school" him, to "doctor" and "save" him by making him into what they already are: Middle American, assimilated into the America of the television and Holiday Inn--the America which Tocqueville and Faulkner warned was founded by those who sought not to escape from tyranny, but to establish one, in their own image and likeness.
Only in Appalachia, for example, have the mainline churches come upon a "Christian" religious expression which stands four-square against what they expect religion in America to "do." The rejection of the "Christian century" by Appalachia has baffled and annoyed the mainline churches, their agencies, theologians and sociologists. And because the Church in mainline America is unable to understand the Church in Appalachia, they have so far been unable to assimilate it. They have failed, in other words, to make it over into another of the agencies of social welfare which stands alongside HEW, Social Security, the Council of the Southern Mountains, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, the Home Mission Board(s), etc. The mainline churches have tried to obliterate the Appalachian churches with demands for expressions which are "progressive," "rational," "contemporary" and "relevant". What more haunting, and in many instances disgusting, examples of the philosopher's "ambiguity of reason" or the theologian's "original sin" could be asked for? The liberal churchmen--Catholic and Protestant--insist that the snake-handling of the mountain man must come to a end (as must the "emotionalism" and "irrelevance" of the Black church). And all the while the mainline, liberal Church ignores the more dangerous "snakehandling" which defines their very efforts to "save" "yesterday's people"-- a phenomena described precisely in the early years of this journal by the contemplative, the mystic, Thomas Merton, in "Events and Pseudo-Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman" (Katallagete, Summer 1966).
next to page 11 (the end)
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The answer to the question of why mountain culture must be destroyed is to be found in the fundamental truth about the technological society: the techniques which undergird all our institutions are assimilating all of us into, as Jacques Ellul puts it, "a society of objects, run by objects." Institutions in the technological society --and this means not only those of the state and its welfare bureaus, but the do-good agencies which include churches, schools and colleges--can respond only by and with the techniques of the impersonalized, bureaucratic means, procedures, formulas. Technique cannot discriminate between right and wrong, justice and injustice. That is why the same technique that gives and takes away the health care from an ailing miner, assimilates the pious mountaineer into the five-point grading system and the Uniform Sunday School Lesson.
The meaning is clear: institutions working in Appalachia today can work for only one end: the extinction of the Appalachian people. The extent to which these institutions have so far failed in the venture is the extent to which this people and culture have successfully resisted the formidable pressures of the institutions of contemporary technological society. Why institutions--political and private, church and business, industrial and charitable--have responded and can respond to the Appalachian the way they have tells us something very important about power--and powerlessness--in the technological society.
For those of us who believe that the struggle is for the soul of man in the technological society, the resistance of Appalachian culture against assimilation into middle America demands earnest, indeed prayerful, attention. The struggle of the mountain man against the institutions of the technological society is the struggle to deny their right to define any man by his relationship to Middle America. The struggle--whether one believes that it comes out of resistance informed by left-wind Protestantism or opposition to colonialism and genocide -- has implications for all who question not only the possibility, but the quality and character of any resistance to the totalitarianism of the technological society.
-the end-
Jim Branscome
www.appalachiacoal.com
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