The Very Rich have always found some way to make the Poor eat their own chances of upgrading their lives through infighting, Black v White was and still is typical of the division they exploit. Sans-culottes = without underwear. An earlier configuration of the Duopoly had it as “pressing the flesh of the Great Unwashed”

That was in the days when virtually nobody had running water, it had to be drawn from the well or, if you were just getting started, from the pond or creek. And heating water involved cutting a LOT of wood first. Farm people and industrial bondservants (who St Peter couldn’t call, cause they couldn’t go, they owed their soul to the company store) worked long hours, had large families and most of them had to work to support the family.

No time for chopping wood or drawing water. So they rationed their bathing for special occasions. To get cleaned up for Church on Sunday, there was the institution of The Saturday Night Bath.

Strange that it’s still in our lexicon, even though it’s supposedly been eliminated.from our reality. Bondage through low wages and high rent, I mean.

The other aspect of it was that in that Saturday Night Bath, you’d scrub so hard, your neck would turn red.

In counties and municipalities where there was one industry, one person or family owned everything in the county, the mill or mine or plantation owner also owned the General Store and the “elected” officials.

Until the reforms Reagan and Gingrich and the rest condemn as “entitlement nanny state mentality” like Federal underwriting of local public education, the only base for funding was through property taxes.

Which of us would be so plantation ignorant to believe that a Mill or Mine or Plantation or similar Slave-operation owner would actually out of the goodness of his heart finance Public School?

Apparently the Palin crowd. Compulsory school attendance is one of their hot-button issues. They’d rather the electorate remain as Ignorant as possible.

But the Beverly Hillbillies had a “joke” in it about Jethro Bodine having a Sixth Grade education. At the time it was a powerful political statement. Barefoot and pregnant, another statement.

Kids typically, in the mining and mill towns and of course the “share” cropper plantation Slavery-in-all-but-official-name operations, didn’t have shoes most of the year. If there was a public school, you had to have shoes to go. Their diet was so hideously non-nutritious that infant mortality in some areas of the South is STILL at 19th century levels.

Kids would reach the age of 18 with malformities of the spine and joints caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Rickets, scurvy, teeth rotted out to the point that they were unacceptable as candidates for the Draft. Or not being a Genuine Sixth Grade Graduate. Another requirement for the Draft.

For what it’s worth, right or wrong, that was the basis for the Great Society the modern Redneck goes to a Tea Party and rails against as having been “imposed” on them.

It speaks volumes to the morality of our Body Politic that taking care of the kids and elderly, providing Education and Nourishment and Health Care and protection from Predatory Capitalist Big Piggs who used kids in the mines and mills and cotton fields because their small size made it easier to put their body parts into moving machines to make adjustments, crawl into the new digs at the Mine, the part that wasn’t braced yet and if the kid got killed in the mine, no big deal, the Mine Owner had already given him a “decent burial”, their small size makes them good crop pickers because they don’t have to bend as far to reach the cotton or other crop.

That’s the kind of Slavery the Modern Redneck wants to revisit.

In the name of “Freedom”.

I escaped that fate due in large part to the “tyranny” of having to go to school and actually learn something, the “tyranny” of having health care and nutritious meals as a kid.

I call on my Redneck Brethren, shake off those chains you willingly wear. They’re demeaning to you and the Rich Bitches are telling you that they’re actually “Liberty”.

In the immortal words of Joe Wilson, THEY LIE! and hope that you’ll be so willfully ignorant, that you won’t look behind the fact that the Lawfully elected President of the United States has dark skin and a non-English name. The first step in shedding those chains of Ignorance and Racism is to just open your eyes and look at them. See them for what they are, and just how flimsy they are.

Your Masters like Palin and Gingrich and Fox News, they truly hope that you won’t.

They’ve added a New Class to your required Hate-list, you’re now required to Hate anybody who tells you these things, as being “Elitist”.

Mrs Palin is going to be on a year long book tour beating the drum of Racism and Fear, hoping that you’ll be so distracted that you won’t look at your change, and you won’t realize that the “Liberty” they promise you is the same “Liberty” they’ve always promised the Poor when they wanted the Poor to fight their battles for them. The “Freedom” of the Very Rich to take away the freedom of anybody else, arbitrarily.

They’ve even got a bunch of you going to the Tea Party hate-fests packing that ridiculous Confederate Flag, to celebrate and recreate another time when they DUPED the poor into fighting for the “Freedom” of the Rich to Own Other People As Property.

Don’t do it. You’re embarrassing yourselves and Southerners as a class. Including ME.