Town Institutes Nation’s Toughest “Hate Crimes” Legislation To Combat Shocking Regional Social Injustices

The town of Lamont, a humble berg nestled in the loving arms of the forbidding, spooky, primeval “Scablands” in the otherwise beautiful Palouse in Eastern Washington, has finally said ‘enough is enough’ and enacted a stringent set of punishments for a hidden sub-set of the nation’s inherent bigotries – the troubling and oftentimes hilarious propensity for people to make fun of hicks and rednecks, not to mention that whole ‘Hillbilly Culture’ thing. “Well, this is 2011, for crying out loud, so this blatant verbal, cultural and interpersonal discrimination against 8th grade drop outs, people who have dozens of junk cars in their yards and who often fail to shower even after working with cows for a couple of weeks, must now stop!” said Jethro Snopes, 56, a local farmer and regional president of the NAACF (National Association For The Advancement Of Country-fied Folks!!) “Sure, our kids don’t work or go to school and just drive around town all day long on stolen gas, gunning their engines and yelling grammatically incorrect diatribes out their open car windows (that are blaring out Rap music, which really doesn’t make any sense if you think about it! Where are Hank and Willy and the boys, for crying out loud?), And sure, we throw garbage in our yards and have about a dozen dogs each that have never darkened the door of a vet! And, oh yeah, all of us have a passel of kids out of wedlock that are on County assistance and all, but that don’t mean them fancy people need to go calling us hicks and rednecks and all of that. And them very same people will never hire us for them jobs that we do not even have the basic work ethic to complete successfully and where all the tools from the jobsite would likely come up missing if they did hire us, for crying out loud! That’s just so wrong! This is America! We have our rights! One of them rights, the first one, I think, is that we deserve things that don't belong to us and people need to lavish praise on us for never doing anything of import!! It's in that there Constitution, ain't it?” he whined/sniveled pathetically/ignorantly, somehow forgetting about the responsibilities that quite naturally go hand-in-hand with the actual rights we do indeed have!

“Well, this is our town and we make the laws here, and I’ll be dadburned if we got to go letting a bunch of snooty, brainiac people with them fancy high school diplomas go telling us that our ways that worked just fine in the mountains of West Virginia and Arkansas before even them people kicked us out (one step ahead of the Law!!) ain’t good enough for the local delicate sensibilities!” (They had to go somewhere when they got run off from back there in the hills, we guess! But why Lamont? Why is it always Lamont? Oregon is nice, ain't it?) said Skeeter Bodine, 52, an area rancher, church board member and former president of the NAACF before he was forced to resign in disgrace after his daughter somehow managed to miraculously graduate from the local high school, thanks in no small part to unwarranted social promotion and the fact that she was, in fact, 23 years of age. “Heck, just the other day my momma was looking for a new spit cup to match her apron, so she asked the girl in that fancy college town store in Cheney for some assistance, and I’ll be dadburned if that girl just didn’t break out laughing right in my momma’s face and whisper something under her breath as she showed my sweet momma to the coffee cup aisle! First off, any dern fool knows that a real lady don’t use no stinking coffee cup to spit tobacco juice in, and second, you would think that a woman in the somewhat tarnished and tattered ‘Golden Years” of her life had never asked for a dadburn color coordinated spit cup before! I mean, come on! That is blatant discrimination! It's fine when we do it to other people, you know what I mean, but its just plain wrong when its done to us and ours! Heck, my momma was treated differently because of her complete and total lack of social and cultural mores and for the fact that she raised about a dozen felonious kids that never managed to assimilate into the larger culture with all of its fancy laws and obligations and all that nonsense! Like that is a bad thing! I thought we had moved past that as a nation!” he fumed indignantly!

“So yeah, for a first offence, we now have the right to ‘tar and feather’ any person who mutters a disparaging word against hicks or rednecks or somehow implies that getting an education is a good thing. And yeah, repeat offenders will basically be treated like horse thieves of old, although we really never understood why people back then would go getting so excited about one man stealing something from another man, even if it was a horse! Heck, that is half the fun of living in this here America!” he beamed patriotically, discolored saliva running down is chin. “We just ain’t going to go tolerating that bigotry around here no more, and we got most of the town folk, the area farmer/rancher community and area hick churches behind us, too! Come on, people! Hicks are Americans, dadburn it, and the few among us who ain't convicted felons got the doggone vote, so it is about time that that there high-fluting Supreme Court and all them Legislaturers (sic) started sticking up for us, ain’t it?” he stammered with true Jeffersonian solemnity while wondering if that forgetful Mrs. Jenkins left the locking gas cap off her minivan again since his tank was getting kind of low. “So listen here, Mr. Fancy-pants Foxworthy, you ain’t welcome in these here parts, unless you have a hankering for the sweet aroma of tar with a generous helping of yard-bird feathers thrown in for good measure!” he concluded with what little dignity he could muster while still wondering where he could get his momma the perfect spit cup.

(Editorial Note: Although painful to remember and easily flushed from long-term memory for sanity preservation sake, it is necessary to recount that Lamont's only park is, in fact, named after the original mountain home of that iconic American family, the Beverly Hillbillies. Yes, although shocking, Lamont's park is called "Bug Tussle" which, not coincidentally, is where Uncle Jed, while looking for some food, missed an easy shot, and up from the ground came a bubbling crude and all of that. We will leave it to our loyal readers to garner the appropriate response to this troubling and somewhat disturbing point of historical fact. Thank you!!)