Say Anything Blog

This speech on the senate floor by Byrd is a few years old…but if you want a good laugh…

Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, for more than a century now, national commentators of one type or another have stereotyped, mocked, and ridiculed the people of Appalachia.

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    Television has certainly been a part of this Appalachian bashing. ``Green Acres’’ featured farming mountain folks conversing with a talking pig. The ``Dukes of Hazzard’’ featured stereotypical mountain folk jumping into and out of cars, without bothering to open doors, and a car horn that played Dixie.

Even ``The Waltons,’‘—remember the Waltons?—a series with numerous morally uplifting episodes and storylines that promoted hard work, love of family, honesty, patriotism, and spirituality, can be faulted for its beautifully romanticized version of poverty. It portrayed poverty as a way of life that nurtures, rather than inhibits, that builds character rather than denies opportunity.

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    Incredibly, the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, is planning to air a new program, ``The Real Beverly Hillbillies.’’ For this program, the brainchild of the CEO Leslie Moonves, CBS plans to pluck a poor, rural family from the hills of Appalachia and plop them down in a mansion in Beverly Hills so the Nation can laugh at them as they try to adjust to big city life. I have read that CBS is already conducting so-called ``hick-hunts’’ in which they are searching for the perfect stereotype Appalachian family to amuse a national audience.

    While I am outraged, I am even more curious about just what kind of brain power went into proposing this show. I cannot help but chuckle when I picture these highly paid, supposedly educated television corporate executives sitting around in a plush, ornate boardroom and thinking of such a stupid program. I am sure most of these fellows earn at least a six-figure income. Some of them probably went to Ivy League schools. And this is what they come up with?

  But these CBS executives think it will be funny for city folk to sit back and watch country bumpkins try to blend into the culture of the ``beautiful people’’ of Rodeo Drive. Their anticipation is that Americans will tune in and watch and just howl and howl as they watch a poor family from Appalachia adjust to the glitz and glamour of Beverly Hills, to modern appliances, Gucci shoes, and Rolex watches. Boy, I can hardly hold back my laughter, being one of those people from Appalachia, being one of those country bumpkins.

  I have to ask, Is this the best they can do? Is this the best television has to offer?

  Just when you think the television standards can get no lower, they do. Just when you start thinking these bottom feeders have cleansed the bottom and might try to move up the food chain, they find more garbage at the bottom to keep them there.

    (Disturbance in the Visitors’ Galleries.)

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warner.) If the distinguished leader would indulge the Presiding Officer to give the usual admonishment to those privileged to sit in the gallery of the Senate, they are not to enter into vocal expressions or disaffections.

  Mr. BYRD. I congratulate the Chair on upholding the rules of the Senate.

[Page: S9990]  GPO’s PDF
Let them laugh. I am laughing, too.

  If these executives are looking for new ideas for television reality shows, may I suggest a few. We could take highly paid, well-groomed television network executives and relocate them to the sticks, where they’d have to try to find a job with health care and pension benefits and enough pay to support a family, and adjust to everyday life in rural America. Now that would be funny! And, as the president of the UMWA, Cecil Roberts, has suggested, we could put them to work digging coal from a 30-inch seam in a non-union coal mine. That too would be funny!

  Or we could watch nightly news programs featuring episodes of journalists embedded with a Marine battalion comprised of the sons and daughters of Bush administration officials as they are being shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  That, of course, would not be funny, but it would make an important point that war is a lot more glamorous and macho when it is someone else’s kid you are sending into combat.

    I yield the floor.

Maybe, Mr.Byrd, you could…just yield…everything.