The Capitol Hillbillies
The Capitol Hillbillies
Plus: space travel and liberalism.
This much must be said for politicians who like to be seen as ornery SOBS: They want us to think they are loyal only to their own high moral principles and sometimes, just maybe, answerable to the voters. That being the case, they once in a while say something worth saying. The Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, the ornery SOB in this case, has apologized for our bombing of a girls’ school in Iran and thinks it’s high time the Trump administration figures out how to end this war and get on with it.
Mostly, though, Kennedy’s act is increasingly hard to watch without wincing. A former Democrat—he endorsed John Kerry over George W. Bush in 2004—Kennedy now affects an embarrassingly over-the-top yokel routine that invites comparison to Foghorn Leghorn of Looney Tunes fame and other cartoon characters from the 73-year-old’s boyhood. It’s like he’s not sure whether he represents the good people of Louisiana or those of Dogpatch—the “menfolk,” anyway.
This act might mislead the uninformed to think Kennedy really did wander off the set of Petticoat Junction, if not Hee-Haw” What this performative nonsense attempts to conceal is the fact that Kennedy is by no means the country bumpkin he portrays. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt and a law degree from the University of Virginia, and he did postgraduate work at Oxford. Whether, like Jethroe Bodine, he ever had ambitions to be a “double-nought spy,” is not known, though he might well have gussied up his resume in hopes of securing a position at the State Department.
It doesn’t take three minutes to find clips of the way Kennedy spoke back when he was a Democrat. Then he sounded like what he was and is—an educated man whose hundreds of acres of farmland has been passed down through his family since before the Civil War. His family was once among the richest in Louisiana. If Kennedy operates a still behind the Russell Office Building and carries a flintlock blunderbuss to keep the “infernal revenooers” away, that would be as much a shock as the self-circulated rumor that he finds indoor plumbing a wonderment and a challenge.
Why this act seems to work, with some of our fellow citizens, is a subject unto itself. Fewer and fewer Americans live and work on farms—especially small farms—but more and more of us seem to fantasize about it. Millions of college-educated office workers who’ve never gotten anywhere near a tractor sit in their cubes at the office or before their laptops in their subdivision homes and listen to “country music.” The songs invariably mention dirt roads, pickup trucks, swimmin’ holes and long-legged gals in cut-off jeans.
There’s even a number in which two of these singers, Alex Miller and Emily Ann Roberts, argue about which one is “more country.” What makes it so revealing is that one way these two make the case for their superiority is by dropping brand names. Alex “can stack bales of hay in a barn loft all day” but, better still, he wears a Bass Pro hat and likes a Copenhagen chew.
Emily Ann, not to be outdone, knows how to boot-scoot in her Lucchese footwear. Alex and Emily Ann, put differently, are dependable consumers of just the right products, and if that doesn’t make them “authentic,” it’s hard to imagine, in the America of our day, what would. The more I see of Alex Miller’s schtick, I’m beginning to wonder if he is not a product too, AI-generated like the soulful R&B singer Eddie Dalton, whose music topped the charts this spring.
Something else that has topped the charts this spring is Kennedy’s book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will, which has become a New York Times best-seller. Chockablock with the senator’s “zany turns of phrase,” as a Times news story about the book puts it, it has sold half a million copies, which isn’t bad for a work he “dictated using a hand-held recorder at his kitchen table.” Not in his Capitol Hill office, his home office or even his dining room table, mind you: his kitchen table. You know, the one with the Formica top, where he carves up his chitlins.
Here too, his studied candor is on display. He seems to adore his fellow cracker Lindsey Graham. “If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Kennedy writes. Invite him to dinner, “and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fishbowl. But that’s why I like him.”
President Donald Trump “can be cruel,” Kennedy writes, “sometimes he is wrong, and he and I are unalike in many ways. I’ve acknowledged that. But we are alike in our appreciation of candor.” Well, maybe not. Trump seems to have no idea what will come out of his mouth at any moment. Kennedy’s candor, if it can be called that, always sounds so calculated that you begin to wonder if he is not an AI concoction himself.
Further questions can be directed to Kennedy’s chief of staff, Claude Hopper.
The Artemis II moon shot was hard enough to fathom without NASA confusing us with jargon that none of us outside the Mission Control Center probably understand. Acronyms, too. ICPS, apparently, refers to interim cryogenic propulsion stage—whatever the means. When the thing takes off and power cables are disconnected, that’s umbilical separation. Until this, most of us would have guessed that would have something to do with childbirth.
Even weather reports are hard enough to understand, now that the people who tell us whether it will rain or not call themselves meteorologists. Rain they call “precipitation,” and when they want to tell us to expect it or not, it’s “probability of precipitation.”
But they aren’t all stuffed shirts, these meteorologists. When they want to be informal or cute, they call snow “that white stuff.” At least we won’t have to hear that for months to come.
How could this happen? Why all this support for the MAGA movement? Why this recent explosion of right-wing populism? John Gray, late of the London School of Economics, had something to say about the subject in an Institute for Arts and Ideas presentation in December.
Populism, Gray explained, “is a word liberals use to describe the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their own policies. They don’t understand that what they have done or failed to do has produced or helped to produce [these] morbid phenomena that we now see. It has nothing to do with them. The only things that they will admit to is they weren’t liberal enough.”
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