Jul 03 2008
Is Illinois the Next Kentucky or West Virginia?
Now, before Kentuckians and West Virginians get offended, I’d like to point out that both are beautiful states with wonderful people. But, we all know that they have a certain reputation for red-neck, dumb as a box of rocks hillbilly antics.
To be fair, so do the UP-ers (that’s Upper Pennisula residents to those not from Michigan) and people from just about every other state in the Union.
Kentucky and West Virginia are nice places with nice people. I have visited both often.But they are often the butt of hillbilly jokes.
Now, I think this wreck of a state I live in is vying for the new title of King of the Hillbillies.To people outside the state, it may not be as obvious, but to those of us here in Illinois, another pretty state with decent people, someone has decided that we should act like a state full of red-necks, hillbillies and crooks.
The crook thing is nothing new, I suppose. Chicago and gangster have gone hand-in-hand since long before the days of Al Capone.
The problem now is that we have Tony Rezko, exposing the stink of Chicago politics to the world at large, and Governor Blagojevich who apparently thinks we elected him king.
For the second year in a row, the governor has called the General Assembly into special session for the July 4th weekend because the state is without a budget –again. Last year, the state survived with no budget and no spending authority until well into August.Schools suffered, state agencies suffered and the state economy suffered. Now, we get to do it all again.
Why?
Because the state is somewhere between one and five BILLION dollars in debt and can’t balance the budget. The governor keeps proposing idiotic cuts that he knows will never fly rather than participating in the process. Last year, he threatened to lay off 98 percent of the state police; this year, he is threatening to cut the train service that transports a large number of Illinois college students to their colleges and home again.
Never gonna happen, but infuriating nevertheless. And, as if that weren’t enough of a black eye, Illinoisans themselves insist on doing stupid things to make the news and make themselves look like backwoods idiots dropped on their heads a bit too often.
Earlier this week, near Murphysboro, a community generally thought of as the home of the professors from Southern Illinois University, a woman decided riding her horse at night and in the dark down a country road was a good idea.
She was drunk at the time.
She rode out in front of a pickup truck driven by a local teenager and caused a pickup truck and horse collision. Tell me that’s not hillbilly! She, the drunk that is, and her horse were injured. She was flown to St. Louis for treatment. There is no word on the condition of the horse other that a veterinarian was called to the scene.
The woman on the horse has been charged with drunk driving.
But that wasn’t even enough. In addition to this, after all drunks are idiots everywhere, the local newspaper, and apparently some outdoors television shows, spent yesterday filming a segment about hoggin’ for catfish.
Yup, grown men walking into a lake of spawning catfish and dragging the fish out with their bare hands. Some of these fish weighed up to 50 pounds and the way they are caught, generally, is that you rile them up enough to make them bite and then wrestle them out of the water.
This is what passes for news and entertainment in my neck of the woods.
I figure with publicity like this, it really won’t be long before Illinois is the new butt of all those jokes.
