HILLARY Clinton's recent claim that the president's legal troubles are the result of prejudice against Arkansas surprisingly may make more sense than when she blamed them on a vast right-wing conspiracy. Hillary exposes
state of prejudice"They wouldn't do this if we were from another state," she said.
I think she might have something here. Statial prejudice is one of the great, ugly secrets of American culture.
You just can't ignore the fact that certain states have certain reputations, rightly or wrongly.
Montana, for instance, is rapidly becoming the homicidal loner state. No one cares that Montana is one of the most beautiful states in the country. People just wonder why it manages to turn out so many heavily armed weirdos.
Hillary's suggestion that people are prejudiced against Arkansas refers to the perception that Arkansas is one of the country's Hick States. This is not to be confused with Rube States, such as Tennessee and South Carolina. Hick States are states that allegedly have a high number of residents most kindly described as unworldly. You can dress people up from Hick States, but you can't take them out.
Both Bill and Hillary clean up well, but they still feel that the East Coast elite secretly considers them hicks. Bill did not help matters when he said that during his younger days, he covered the back of his pickup truck with Astroturf. Turning your pickup into an Astroturfed passion pit is extremely hick-like behavior. See, cool people are prejudiced against Astroturf, pickups AND people who have sex in the back of pickups on top of Astroturf. It is triple-header on the hick-o-meter.
Washington, D.C. residents and New Yorkers consider many of the southern states hick states. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana constitute the Southern Hick Corridor.
I lived in the south for many years so I do not share this assessment. I'm just passing on the information. Hillary isn't the first person in the White House to feel statial prejudice.
You'll recall that Jimmy Carter was branded a hick by the Washington press corps, while his brother Billy, who liked to urinate in public and swill beer on the porch of his gas station, managed to reach the rare status of being both a hick and a rube.
Although Florida and Texas are in the South, they aren't considered Hick States. But many people are prejudiced against them for other reasons. People are prejudiced against Florida because it gets more sunshine than the rest of the country, the implication being that it is hogging other states' sunshine.
As you move west, you hit the Bumpkin States, such as Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. As wily as Lyndon Johnson was, he was still considered a bumpkin in Washington.
There is little prejudice against states in the West, such as Arizona and New Mexico, because most people on the East Coast assume those states are principally deserted. If anything, East Coasters feel sympathy for residents of the southwest. They think all southwesterners live in little trailers in the desert and sit outside in the evenings on lawn chairs drinking gin and tonics.
California is the heart of statial prejudice. Californians are prejudiced against every other state in the union except Hawaii, which they consider a suburb of L.A.
We don't have room to go through all the states. There are the Northeastern Nitwit States, the Great Plains Cracker States and New Hampshire, which is actually nothing more than a large strip mall. You get the idea. Hillary is right. People are prejudiced against Arkansas, even though Bill never actually laid down Astroturf in the Oval Office.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
http://starbulletin.com/lite