Values!

When we were fairly new to the insurance business, our boss was a loyal member of Ducks Unlimited, an organization that raises money by selling memberships and auctioning off stuff in order to establish wetland breeding grounds in Canada so that there would be a never ending supply of ducks for hunters in the United States to shoot. We thought it was a worthy cause so we contributed and belonged for a few years. We have an acquaintance who has a relative who makes ducks calls for a hobby and sells them in her business. And, as we travel the roads of southern Illinois, we occasionally see a flock of ducks resting on the many waterways that dot the area.

We have never seen a full episode of Duck Dynasty and we suppose that we probably never will. It is supposed to be a show that follows the Robertson family as they make a not so small fortune manufacturing duck paraphernalia down in the Pelican state of Louisiana as they also peddle Jesus before the ever watching cameras that film all of it for their cable television show. There are estimates that this enterprise brings in upwards of half a billion dollars a year into the state but we have no way of knowing the validity of that.

For those who do not know, the family patriarch--Phil Robertson--gave an interview to an American print magazine--Gentleman’s Quarterly, or GQ--in which he made some interesting remarks about both homosexuals and blacks in his native state and his relations with one of them before the civil rights era came into being. Mr. Robertson stated that he had some commonality with blacks in the pre civil rights era and he thought that they might be as happy or happier during that time period when they sang while picking cotton. Phil Robertson noted that he and his family were as dirt poor as many of the blacks had been during that period of time and he could not see the reason for all the fuss that had been stirred up through the decades since the fifties. In point of fact, Phil Robertson may have been partially right when he said that he and his kin had more in common with the Louisiana blacks than they might have had with the more affluent white population that controlled the state’s economy. All across the south both before and after the Civil War, dirt poor whites--often share croppers--were not all that far removed from their black brethren except for one very important reason. And that reason was that they were white. If the white population of the south had had their way, no black would have ever approached the status that any white held in southern society. That is why the civil rights movement came about in the first place. In his interview, Robertson calls himself “white trash�, but, he is still white!

Phil Robertson and his family have made a not so small fortune with their enterprise and the fame it has brought them on the cable network Arts and Entertainment (A and E) with their weekly show. They have made the jump from poverty using that Horatio Alger mystic reserved for enterprising white folks that has been around almost since this nation was formed. The idea has always been that forward looking immigrants could come to this country and through their hard work and street smarts, make a name and a fortune for themselves. At the same time that they were doing that, however, forced slave labor, mostly black, was providing the foundation for much of that enterprise across the south, and, before the American Revolution, through the entire thirteen colonies that made up this nation at that time. Slavery died out in the north but, as we know only too well, it only died a violent death due to the aforementioned bloody civil war. And even after that time, across the south, Jim Crow laws and other segregationist efforts kept blacks in check for all of the remaining nineteenth century and most of the first half of the twentieth century as well. As Phil Robertson speaks glowingly of the peaceful blacks across the south, he neglects to mention all of the lynching’s that commonly occurred across the region and the activities of the Klu Klux Klan to intimidate black people and to keep them in line and in their place and out on those fields picking that cotton and singing away because that was the only release that they had other than church services to publicly vent their feelings. Robertson grew up close to the Missouri boot heal and escaped his poverty through his ability to throw the football which earned him a scholarship at a Louisiana university where he stayed all of one year before he quit and headed back to the sticks.

In point of fact, Phil Robertson’s apparent values were established on the rotten foundations that had existed for decades before he was born! And, in another point of fact, he would apparently like to roll back all that has been accomplished across this nation to achieve the false idyllic life of his youth. And, he is using the fame that has come his way from his television show to achieve that goal. And he doesn’t seem to realize that the sponsor dollars that pay his way have come frequently from the pockets of minorities who want nothing to do with this value system from his past that he his trying to foist on the rest of us. The sad thing is that too many Americans already believe as Phil Robertson does and if he wins this fight to stay on the airwaves he will probably begin to incorporate this type of diatribe even further into his television show, thus feeding the already simmering hate that readily exists out there using space regulated by the federal government to do so. Robertson and his family hold deeply held and often hard won religious Christian beliefs but, in the case of the GQ article, they get mixed up with his feelings about gays and the feelings that his fellow hard working blacks might have held about their condition in life. In the case of blacks, one could almost see him making the case for blacks being better off on the plantations than they are now. It is a belief that pre Civil War white plantation owners and their false benevolence would have loved to hear.

We have not discussed Mr. Robertson’s feeling about gay and lesbian people but, suffice it to say, he quotes the Christian Bible in defense of his opinion about them. It is best remembered that the Bible condones slavery both in the old and the New testament as well as making several statements about the status of women in the society that it was written during and reflects attitudes that were prevalent at that time. No one is questioning Mr. Robertson’s views on these issues except that he has chosen to make them public and make an issue of them in the process of doing so.

There are those who have stated that Phil Robertson has every right to go public with his views due to free speech issues as espoused in the Constitution of the United States. However, Mr. Robinson is, as well as being a free speaking citizen of this nation, also is an employee of a corporation and we have never seen one of them that did not have prohibitions about speaking with the press and espousing issues using the platform provided by what the corporation has, with its resources, provided for them. In other words, if Phil Robertson did not have A and E as a platform, no one would care what he had to say in the first place. He would be just another face in the crowd.

There is no question that we, as a nation and a people, are going through a profound period of backlash, redefinition, and changing perceptions of the values that we profess and espouse. There is also no question that there are those who see a great deal of financial gain in questioning and changing those once established value systems. Homosexuality and slavery abolition and women’s rights and the rights and pay of workers are part of a constellation of hard won beliefs held during the latter half of the twentieth century that have come under increasing attack as we proceed further into the twenty first century. And it is apparent that the once almost economically slave bound Phil Robertson has chosen his side now that he is old and rich. Robertson believes in God and Jesus and spreads the faith through his efforts on his show and around the country but he has perhaps forgotten, if he ever knew, the Jesus who hung out with the very poor and discarded of society that he seems so happy to see remain that way.

There is a seduction to Phil Robertson’s mix of ecology and faith and his definition of mixing history with religion to create a world on his 20,000 acres in Louisiana that is strictly his own. But this nation was founded on the idea that minorities could do as they please within the law and singling out certain groups for attention is just one step along the road to finally getting around to doing something about them. But Robertson’s world is not his own. He has invited over fourteen million others to share it with him. And they may be among the ones who get around to the doing if that time of cleavage ever comes.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.