Each week millions think they’re tuning in to watch the crazy and entertaining antics of a bunch of hirsuit, rich rednecks... What viewers are really watching are the Bitter Clingers candidate Obama so famously disparaged at a San Francisco campaign event back in 2008, and the Makers that President Obama denigrated in his “You didn’t build that speech” of 2012. If anyone in America clings to God, guns and religion, and did build that, it’s the Robertson clan.....in a reliably Republican redoubt in rural Louisiana. Good for them, but what does that have to do with America in general? Well, to hear Vicker tell it, it's aspirational:
If annual sales, endorsement deals, and TV ratings are any indicator, the brand of Americanism these swamp rats are peddling is white lightning in a bottle. Down on our luck, out of hope, and sick-and-tired-of-change Americans can’t get enough of Duck Dynasty’s message, or its messengers. They take us back to the ideals that really work in this country.The paterfamilias of this duck-call dynasty is worth about $10 million, in a parish where the estimated median household income in 2009 was $32,777. (Percentage of residents living in poverty in West Monroe, Louisiana in 2009: 25.3%.) And apparently the Robertsons are looking for a raise from their TV show.
Again, good for them; anything the traffic will allow, as the old song says. TV's currently full of Duck Dynasts and Real Housewives and such like; they're the modern equivalents of the swells and toffs whose adventures impoverished Americans have enjoyed following since the screwball comedies of the Great Depression. But nothing in our history suggests these entertainments mean the American People didn't mean what they said when they elected a President last November who was less than duck-dynastic.
Fantasies like Vicker's remind me of hippies who thought the country was really with them because Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were big at the box office, despite the electoral returns. Counterculture's a fun game to play when you're losing, but if culture, counter or otherwise, is meaningful to you, then its effect on electoral results -- actual or mitigating -- will not be so important. Decades later, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are still worth watching, though. Can we expect the same of Duck Dynasty? If so, then politics is the least of our problems.
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