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Hicks Fer Jesus

by digby

I just watched "Red State" yesterday. It's very well done. The narrative seems slow moving and kind of meandering at first and then everything just sneaks up on you until by the end you are truly creeped out.

At first I thought it was a slightly unfair portrayal because he was only showing a very particular kind of red state person. By the end I knew why --- he had a point to make and it's scary as hell. He let these people make it for him. There are way too many Americans who truly believe that the government of the United States should be a theocracy. And throughout this film you see how that idea has so permeated a certain constituency that there's almost no way to get through to them.

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My favorite moment was when Mrs Gill, the Mississippi director of Concerend Women For America, gets upset that she's been "worked over" by this interviewer who had just asked her what she believed in. It's clear that when the totality of Mrs Gill's racism and intolerance became manifest in the few minutes that she spoke, she suddenly realized that she had given herself away as a white supremecist and Christian nationalist. Naturally she claimed victimhood and ended the interview.

One of the things that's obvious in this film is that these people are practiced phonies too. They say things like "we took us a trip to California and couldn't believe what we saw out there!" like it's 1952 and they're Andy and Barney. You can't tell me these people don't watch TV. There's a good part of their schtick that's pure poseur --- the "heartland hick fer Jesus" is very often a thoroughly modern American who's playing just as many games as anybody else. Taking their "moral concerns" at face value and thinking they can be persuaded by tweaking issues and changing rhetoric is to be a chump. This is a tribal game.

Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia