‘Yoked by Woke,’ and other sad tales from satirists these days

It is so very difficult to be a satirist in a time in which ever more sub-groups of humans claim a superior right not to be made fun of. Yoked by Woke. I spent 45 years making affectionate fun of whites, Blacks, women, Indians, every category in the LGBTQ string, people only suspected of being in that string and Minnie Moore, only to recently discover there are almost no sub-groups you can write about without offending them.

It is still safe to print religious myth on pages normally reserved for opinion even if this offends 22 percent of Americans and growing who don’t believe it. The total who take offense from being preached at is a larger group than is usually protected from hurt feelings.

You can still make fun of white men, but not white women. We deserve it.

You can still make fun of hillbillies. That became official at the annual Hillbilly Convention where all we hillbillies get together and decide how we are to be considered and what aesthetic we shall assume, and whether or not we can be depicted. These sort of things are done nowadays by group and so we got those notices with too many apostrophes and here we came.

You should have seen the parking lot, cars up on blocks, ATV’s teeming with Trumpery, big old long pick up trucks that cost what a bulldozer used to, with dogs tied to them and “Free Born Man” blaring past the AR-15 out the windows.

In the convention hall, the talk turned to how much money hillbillies could make off of reality t.v. just by being themselves, or at least what the outside world wants them to be, with some training on how to pull off the Popcorn Sutton aura. But to make that money, you sort of have to let people make fun of you, and besides, people have been making fun of hillbillies for seventy five years now and it hasn’t hurt us a bit. What’s more, anybody who wants to pull out of being a hillbilly, or lie and claim they are not one, is free to do so at any time. Hillbilly is a voluntary condition.

That you can make money on, especially if you are a real one and not like this guy J.D. Vance who is running for the Senate as a neo-Trumpist because he explained us to the world from a Yale out of Southern Ohio, and once in a while Breathitt County viewpoint. He claimed hillbillyhood and became our interpreter because he went to see his mamaw some.

Vance is not untypical of mountain families gone north. Every mountain family has a member who went north in the sixties, stayed and comes back to the reunion with their nose in the air with their children who speak Ohio or Michigan and act like they have polished out the hillbilly.

So it was voted to not only to allow people to make fun of hillbillies, but to encourage it. “We can take it!” was the rallying cry.

Larry Webster is a Pikeville attorney.