Everyone knows by now that Phil Robertson of A & E’s Duck Dynasty said some interesting things about gays in an article published in GQ yesterday.
Most of the media attention has focused upon what he said about homosexuality, which I will admit, is pretty vile:
It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.
I agree with that, but I’m not gay! And who said that sexual orientation was something “logical” anyway?
And he also made some kind of moral equivalence between terrorists and homosexuals, which is probably why he got “suspended indefinitely” from the show.
But there are some other things that Phil said in that interview that are pretty bad.
Here’s what he said about life in the segregated South:
I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
They wuz jes happy negroes singin’ da cotton patch!
This is the old happy South myth, just twisted into a different era. It is normally used to defend the happy times of slavery, but this is the first time I’ve seen it twisted in this way, although I see traces of it in this interview with Shelby Foote. Notice that Phil doesn’t mention any of those black people owning any of the farms. That’s a pretty important thing to understand. These black workers were sharecroppers. They didn’t own the land. They were technically peons–having political rights in theory but no economic rights at all.
I actually find that comment more egregious than the statements about gays.
The Civil Rights Movement was not about sticking to the white man. It was about justice. To twist that around the way Phil Robertson and many other Southerners have is really pretty dangerous.
But most places with nasty pasts cannot deal with the nastiness properly, so they cognitively switch it around to make it more palatable. Indeed, the only country I know of that doesn’t do this– which actually makes such mental twists of recent historical horrors illegal– is Germany.
Now, I do have to say that I have been a fan of this show for a long time. I also admire Phil Robertson’s skills as a naturalist and hunter. I admire some of what he says about the modern world, and his distinct disdain for the “yuppie” world– which he defines as the world of manicured lawns and homeowner’s associations. This is the world where no one knows anything about the realities of the natural world, and it is pretty obvious to anyone who has watched this show that Phil Robertson knows the natural world quite well.
He knows about the ducks and the fish and the frogs and the deer. In some ways, he’s the romantic hunter-naturalist that I wish were on television more– the one we used to celebrate in our literature and popular culture. The Davy Crockett. The Daniel Boone. The Teddy Roosevelt.
But Phil understands the natural world only as it is before him. It is clear from anyone who has watched the show that he is a devout Christian, but the sad thing is that he has allowed his Christianity to distort a real accounting of the world he most deeply admire.
Robertson is a creationist:
The Almighty gave us this. Genesis 9 is where the animals went wild, and God gave them wildness. After the flood, that’s when he made animals wild. Up until that time, everybody was vegetarian. After the flood, he said, “I’m giving you everything now. Animals are wild.”
No.
I find creationism every bit as vile as trying to wax poetic about the happy days of Jim Crow. I find it really disheartening when people who actually do know quite a bit about the natural world give their minds over to ancient mythology as their guide for scientific understanding. Phil Robertson spent years as a commercial fisherman and duck hunter on the Ouachita River. He came to know the ducks and fish as well as any trained field biologist. He made his fortune off the duck call he patented.
But he can never understand that the very birds on which his success are actually very modified theropod dinosaurs.
He can never understand that he’s actually a dinosaur hunter and that his family actually feast on dinosaur meat.
That is just sad.
I must admit that I was not shocked about what Phil Robertson said. Over a year ago, I happened upon this sermon he gave in Pennsylvania in which he calls for Christian dominionism in the US government and the banning of abortion. He also engages in the revisionist pseudohistory that turns George Washington into a raging fundamentalist and Thomas Jefferson into a “bible-believin’ man.”
I knew about this for a long time, and there was a hope in me that no one would find out.
That’s because I really liked a show about people who spend time in the woods and on the rivers and who have made a good living at it.
I admired some of Phil’s ideas, but I knew they were coming from an entirely different place than mine.
But I still admire a man who comes to know the wild, who still reaches out and touches nature, and who still shuns the worst of our society.
But I don’t admire anyone who holds onto the old ways solely because they are the old ways.
And in this I am deeply conflicted.
I am not a believer. I am not a conservative. I’m not really a Southerner either.
I know that Phil Robertson went through a very dark time. He was cruel to his wife and kids. He abused alcohol and ran wild.
The only way he redeemed himself was through becoming a Christian. It saved him.
But in some ways it did not.
So I am not with Phil Robertson, but in some ways, I am.
This is the conflict.
He has the right to say and believe what he wants, but I am not with him on religion.
I love the natural world, and the natural world has saved me.
I am okay with my life being all there is. I have accepted it.
And when it’s gone, my ashes will nourish an aspen grove.
That’s the only eternal life I need– pay it forward into the carbon cycle.
Phil Robertson is an example of how politicians and the media have created a literal caricature of Christianity and pumped that back through Churches to exert control over the “values voters”. Everything he said has been said on Fox News and right wing radio shows a million times. A whole sub-culture people get their religion more from overt political sources these days than the Bible. I’m not defending all of Christian thought, by any means, but Mr. Robertson is such a carbon copy of so many other people of a particular political persuasion that it’s frightening. Guys like him don’t realize that their religious beliefs are coming from political sources at this point.
I cannot watch the 50 minute video at the moment, but does it contain the context for the paragraph about the black folks working for the white folks?
The whole attitude does not surprise me and it’s too bad it took Christian extremeism to save him from alcohol and abusive behavior. Going by the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous that I have heard spewed by members, it seems people who cannot get stable just need to trade one crutch for another.
I think you are right on that, Collie Chick, no one more extreme than a ‘convert’, albeit not in every case, of course.
The video doesn’t contain anything about blacks and whites, but it’s full of Fox News, Tealiban, and Dominionist horsecrap.
Retrieverman, is there really much following in the US for these so called creationists? I mean to say it is such an obviously deluded philosphy that it seems almost cruel to mock them. Presumably they are harmless?
Phil’s show is the most popular reality TV show in the country, and something like 40 percent or more Americans think the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago by God.
That fact of roughly 40% believing ancient fairy tales always disheartens me, I was raised Evangelical and basically became a non-believer by seven (Read too many dinosaur and Ice Age mammal books), I can get why it gets so many people into it. The idea of having a second eternal life with a god who loves you dearly has an appeal.
One of the problems with the idea of eternal life is that it isn’t optional. If you’ve been bad, you still get infernal life, but you spend it where its warm.
Four out of six Americans believe that rubbish?! Now I see why you seem obsessed with refuting it.
mean’t four out of ten, even my maths should have been better than thatLOL
Hi Chervilmeadow, religious extremist are never harmless. Many of them preach hatred.
A couple of my relatives moved, and I went with them as they went to the church near where they moved to. It was a big beautiful church owned by the preacher himself, an independent church.
He preached that married women were “housewives” and should not leave the house, except to like go to the hospital to have a baby.
But that he would ease up on these restrictions because the men in the congregation had complained that they didn’t want to go food shopping, they wanted their wives to do the shopping.
So the preacher gave permission for wives to go to the store one day a week, if they took their children with them and had permission from their husband. Then he preached about how wrong it was for a woman to leave her house unless she needed to shop or work or drive somewhere.
Maybe women in their church had a habit of running away? Gee I wonder why.
BTW, these were deep south olde time white Christians.
You all are barking up the wrong tree, it’s reality tv
Hi Chervilmeadow,
America is not the same everywhere. Most of the cities are modern. But each rural area is different from other rural areas. Many small rural towns were founded by a few families who still live there and own much of the rural area around ‘their’ town. Some areas were founded by just one or two families, and are somewhat inbred.
Yes, a stranger could move to one of these towns, but the local businesses usually hire their own relatives and friends who they have known their whole life. So while you could live there, you probably can’t find work there.
Many of these small towns started out away from civilization. They often started their own independent church. The land and church would be owned, built, and maintained by the congregation, who would advertise for a preacher, who would preach what the congregation wanted to hear or his contract would not be renewed the next year. The sons of the town, who grew up in their church could become a preacher. There are still many of these independent churches – who knows what they believe?
One of my relatives married someone who grew up in a church where they handled poisonous rattlesnakes in church. The idea was that snakes were associated with the devil, and that God would protect them from the devil.
To each their own.
Retrieverman,
You know that there are probably other people who have mixed feelings about Phil too – but they like his political and religious views but not the fact that he is a woodsman. Strange but that has been true in other cases too. People who are a fan of things that I am a fan of, may have nothing in common with me. It is so aggravating when someone praises something you love, but they praise the parts of it that you don’t like.
Movies do that on purpose. They try to give something for everyone. So after a movie, two people can honestly say they liked the movie. But one person loved the violent action scene but hated the love conversation, while the other person enjoyed the love talk but hated the violence.
You can’t match people by what they like, because too often, they like the same thing for different reasons.
In your case, you are like two different people watching Phil. Part of you likes the woodsman Phil, and part of you doesn’t like the extremist Phil. I have mixed emotions about a lot of things too, I think everybody does.
Did you ever watch “oh brother where art thou?” George Clooney. It has religion, but the main character, Clooney, is an atheist. Yet it manages to appeal to both sides. Strange enough, it is loosely, very loosely, based on an old Greek story, Ulysses I think. Set in the Southern US, during the depression, about prisoners yet it is upbeat.
Personally, I’m more bothered by the sexism of this crowd than by their creationism. Sure, creationism is idiotic, and the tribe that believes this stuff has done a lot of harm to US politics. But the notion that women as companion animals, rather than every-bit-as-human as men, has hit on a much more personal level.
http://maureenjohnsonbooks.tumblr.com/post/70511333591/a-few-unnecessary-words-on-this-duck-dynasty-thing
Everyone is allowed their opinion but we don’t have to support what we don’t agree with. Many of us are offended by this man and so we just turn the channel when he comes on the tv. I find him to be of low mental capacity. I have only watched the youtube to find out what he is about but not the show. I have seen all kinds of gifts in the stores with Duck Dynasty on them and was curious so I looked him up. Did not make it all the way through the YouTube video.
I know not one thing about duck dynasty or Phil, but sometimes when someone rants excessively, particularly against gays, it is because they are fighting these urges themselves, like people who smoke for years, then give up smoking, so they rant to people around them about how they hate smoking because if they are around people who are smoking, they feel the urge to join in and smoke too, whereas someone who never smoked would just walk away but say nothing.
like all these “reality” shows, DD is completely scripted and phony as the day is long. Even A&E shows what a hoax it is: http://www.aetv.com/duck-dynasty/pictures/old-robertson-family-photos/young-si-plays-with-nephews-willie-and-jase These aren’t “authentic backwoods” anything. They’re actors in a part.
The GC interview was a setup, designed to elicit remarks that the audience for that magazine would find shockingly offensive. Then the inevitable “oh he’s suspended…..” (but not really of course) vs the bogus “freedom of speech” issue and the “Christians are so persecuted” meme can run full sway.
and the result? MORE millions for the Robertsons and for A&E.
They’re grifters……… and there’s a sucker born every minute.
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