Honey Boo Boo Nation Undermines Gentlemanly Society To Our Detriment

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – The never-ending quest that we seem to be embarked on for equality is antithetical or anti-nature at its core.  There is no equality.  This holy grail that we seem to be possessed of, that everyone likes to run around and prattle on about their rights and “We’ve got to have equality.”  Why?  Nature is not in balance, it never is.  Nature is always out of balance.  The difference between the night and the day, as the old adage goes, points out that inequality.  It illustrates we’ve come to live with night and day.  We’ve built houses to shelter us at nighttime from wild beasts, haven’t we?  This is a lot of discussion about the natural order of things and about how it was the aristocratic Southern gentleman that showed the highest ideal of what man could be in the South, and I suspect in the North, too, just in a different manner, that others could aspire to.  Where are those gentlemen today?  Are they leading families?  Are they encouraged?  Are they educated to lead families, to be young men of gentlemanly virtue?  Or are they educated to go out and find a Honey Boo Boo? Check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Let’s go to “Honey Boo Boo Nation,” Rod Dreher writing at American Conservative Magazine.  How many of you people have actually seen Honey Boo Boo?  I have yet to watch an episode.  It’s not on my DVR to record.  I have no intention, especially after seeing pictures of Mama Boo Boo.  Rod Dreher suffered through an episode for you.  I think discussing stuff like this is eminently more important and more effective in repairing some of our current pickle than warring over who’s going to win in November.

[reading]

Last night I finally watched an entire episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” the redneck minstrel show on TLC.  It was awful, but I enjoyed it in an Ignatius-at-the-Prytania way.  I won’t be watching it again.  My mother stopped by while it was on, and mentioned that my father won’t let the show be watched in his house.  I know why, too: because it offends him that the show sets up working-class Southern people like him for ridicule.  He doesn’t for a second live like the Honey Boo Boos, or esteem their values.  In fact, just the opposite.  Back in his day, there was a strong taboo among working-class white people against that kind of behavior.  But it’s fast leaving: what used to be stigmatized among white people of all classes as “white trash” behavior is becoming normalized.

[end reading]

Mike:  That reminds me, back in the day, I would probably cue up David Allan Coe’s “If That Ain’t Country.”  [lyrics] People who forgot about poor white trash, if that ain’t country, I’ll kiss your [you know what].

[reading]

Mama June, the matriarch, is 33 years old, and has four children by four different men, none of whom she married (Honey Boo Boo’s daddy, an ex con they call Sugar Bear, is shacking with them now).  She has reportedly been in the welfare system all her life.  What struck me most about this, from a sociological point of view, is this model of family formation — a strong matriarchy, fatherless children, men minimally involved in their children’s lives, the family supported in part by welfare – has long been a black thing.  But as Charles Murray documented so persuasively in “Coming Apart,” this is increasingly the new normal for lower-income white Americans.  Out-of-wedlock childbearing for white working class women was 6 percent of all births in that demographic in 1970; in 2008, it was 44 percent.  [Mike: I’ve covered this statistic before.  Many of you already know this, so just bear with me.]  For college-educated white women, the number today is less than 5 percent, up from 1 percent in 1970.

[end reading]

Mike:  That’s still a five-fold increase, regardless of how infinitesimal the number is.  It is becoming fashionable to pop children out of wedlock.  Why is that?  Because men are not being men any longer.  Women are being men.  The de-masculinization of the men, and the metrosexuals that have gone along with it and are happily going along with it are at least part of this problem here.  This is why, without restoring manly virtue, and without restoring gentlemanly behavior and gentlemen, you’ll never get close to this problem.  By the way, you know what else this means?  This runaway freight train of a tyrannical government that we have is at least partly inspired by and responsible for the Amazonians that we were told if we only let them run the show how much better things would be because women care.  That’s right, men are evil and despicable and knuckle drag and smell.  They’re rude and fight wars and are violent and all this stuff.  Women are soft and pretty and smell nice and they care and they have empathy and sympathy and passion and compassion.  We need to get rid of men.  We need more women running.  How is that working out for us?  By telling men that they’re fired as fathers and not needed as fathers, how is that working out for us?  I think this is at the core of our problems today.  Dreher writes about this.  It’s a wonderful essay.

[reading]

N. and I were talking about Mitt Romney and the 47 percent.  I mentioned that I thought lots of conservatives hear “47 percent” and think “shiftless minorities,” when in fact many working and middle class whites depend on some form of government assistance too.

[end reading]

Mike:  Rod, you could not be more right if you tried to be right.  I told this story when I came back from vacation.  That little town I stayed at near Lake Hartwell in Georgia, the number one sign I saw all around that town was “EBT Accepted Here.”  There were scores of single or apparently single white women pushing entire carriages of baby kids through grocery store, throwing the Rice Krispies treats and all the other unhealthy stuff into the shopping cart.  Where are the men that made these babies?  [mocking] “Mike, maybe they were out working.”  Unless they just don’t wear wedding rings in Georgia.  I think the statistics bear this out, though.  Men have gotten what Neanderthals always wanted, which is all the fun of mating without any of the responsibility of parenting.  Sorry boys and sorry men.  If you’re telling your sons that this is okay, you’re part of the problem.  If you’re not telling your sons, “If you make it, you own it,” that’s even a bigger part of the problem.

[reading]

Then N. said something interesting.  She said that her cleaning lady is constantly desperate for money.  N. said she gives her extra when she can, but the cleaning lady’s dilemma is what you might call a systemic one.  The cleaning lady is not married, and had a number of children outside of wedlock, as is the cultural norm where they live (where I live too).  N. said there’s no way that the woman, hard as she works, will ever get out of poverty with so many kids, and no husband.  N. said the woman’s life is such a mess, and is a mess in large part because of bad choices she has made, and continues to make.

“When conservatives hear ’47 percent,’ they think of people like her,” I said.  “It’s not the whole story by a long shot, but that woman is real.  You can’t deny it.”

“Sure she’s real,” my friend said.  “You really can’t deny it.”

By “you can’t deny it,” we both meant that the cleaning lady is a person who lives, and has lived, in a way that is irresponsible.  But this woman was formed in a culture in which the things that keep her life impoverished and chaotic were normative.  Another friend of mine, a middle-class white woman who taught in an all-black public high school in a poor part of Louisiana, said that what struck her the most about the kids in her class was how they didn’t expect to do better.  They were passive and fatalistic.  All of them, she said, seemed to assume that they were either going to get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, and be involved with the welfare system.

[end reading]

Mike:  Rod, you’re depressing me.  I don’t even want to read the rest of this.  Let’s go to Richard Weaver.  Let’s tie this together with a little Richard Weaver from “The Southern Tradition at Bay“.  As I said, as I was reading this, I was blown away.  Where has this book been?  This is necessary reading, totally necessary reading for the aspiring Southern gentleman.

[reading]

It is a maxim that in every society education will ultimately serve the needs of the dominant class, and in the South this consisted of gentleman planters, who contemplated lives of ease and independence.  The plantation system, with its patriarchal administration, and the presence of slavery, which drove a wedge between the leisure class and those compelled to toil for a living, kept at the top of society a small group whose immediate tasks called for duties of a political nature.  The Southern planter, although his ancestors might have been tradesmen or yeoman, became, once he had perfected his material establishment in America, an aristocrat by calling, upon whom there devolved the work of keeping harmonious the efforts of a stratified and fairly complex community.  The question of noble lineage, which usually gets much attention, becomes largely irrelevant when it is understood that once in the new world, these settlers created and maintained a class society.  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the populace was effectually divided into a lower class of slaves and tenants, a middle class of yeomen, or small independent farmers, and an upper class of planters.  The aristocracy of the Old South was small in number, and it was found in restricted areas, but such is the nature of aristocracy that if it is genuine—and that means if it earns and receives respect—its relative number is of little importance.

[end reading]

Mike:  Then he goes into some more stuff about the Southern aristocracy and why it was a good and necessary thing at the time.  Now he gets to the subject of public education and educating young gentlemen.

[reading]

The Southern ideal of education rested on those traditional principles which may be traced to Aristotle by way of the Elizabethans.  Because it was designed to produce the well-rounded gentlemen, its basic features are fairly easy to distinguish.  Education beyond the most elementary, it was believed, is adapted only to those whose minds are previously disposed to the virtuous and the honorable—in other words, to the aristocracy.  It is not adapted to the masses, who appreciate only the utilitarian, and who are condemned to lead lives of service.  According to a writer discussing public education in the Southern Literary Messenger, “To enlighten all classes most effectively we should begin with the upper one first.  Light should be set on a high place so that it may truly dispel the darkness that surrounds.  A few men truly and thoroughly educated would shed more light around them and awaken a desire for improvement in a greater number, than in any other single way in which we could diffuse it.  This diffusion, however, did not mean that equality was to be sought.  There are many things in which the attempt to introduce the principles of equality must end in the complete deterioration of all parties concerned.  God made the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser to rule the night; and this principle was through the whole of creation, and all attempts of man to subvert it must end, as they always have, in the manifest injury to all parties.”

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, the never-ending quest that we seem to be embarked on for equality is antithetical or anti-nature at its core.  There is no equality.  This holy grail that we seem to be possessed of, that everyone likes to run around and prattle on about their rights and [mocking] “We’ve got to have equality.”  Why?  Nature is not in balance, it never is.  Nature is always out of balance.  The difference between the night and the day, as the old adage goes, points out that inequality.  It illustrates we’ve come to live with night and day.  We’ve built houses to shelter us at nighttime from wild beasts, haven’t we?  This is a lot of discussion about the natural order of things and about how it was the aristocratic Southern gentleman that showed the highest ideal of what man could be in the South, and I suspect in the North, too, just in a different manner, that others could aspire to.  Where are those gentlemen today?  Are they leading families?  Are they encouraged?  Are they educated to lead families, to be young men of gentlemanly virtue?  Or are they educated to go out and find a Honey Boo Boo?

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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