Transcription
This one's for the southern men. Not the politicians, not the bootlickers in Washington pretending to know bourbon from Boone's farm. No, I'm talking to the good old boys. The poor but proud. The ones who can bait a hook and throw a punch. The ones who cry at funerals and grin through pain and tip their hats even when the world spits in their face. The ones that sound like me and look like me and were raised like me.
Somewhere out here on this long stretch of American decline, you've lost the damn map. What in the holy godamn hell happened to you? Once upon a time, a southern man was many things, some good, some bad, but almost always real. You could hear it in the callous vows of his draw and see it in the crack of his knuckles. Stood for something. He stood up even when the wind blew hard against him. He didn't need a flag the size of a billboard or a Facebook profile, soaked in eagles and assault rifles to prove he loved his home. He just lived it quietly and fiercely with a bite and a laugh.
Now your heroes are Donald Trump Jr., a taxidermied mannequin and a vast prosthesis, and Eric Trump, a human gaff. JD Vance, who sells Appalachian grit like it's a can of soup. Tom Cotton, poster boy for robotic boot polishers. as your Marbor men. These aren't southern men. They aren't even men in the sense my grandfather meant it. They're simpering little power fetishists in tailored camouflage, chugging masculinity supplements and playing patriot on sound stages built by Wall Street.
If these boys walked into the Queen of Clubs in Helena, Arkansas, they wouldn't make it past the Jeep box. My granddaddy would have squinted at him, growled, and then beat the ever-living dog out of them just out of instinct. He bar fought like it was a second job. And not because he was proud of it necessarily. He actually rarely spoke of it. But because where we come from, there's a language older than words. And sometimes, in a world full of liars and leeches, a fist is just shorthand for "don't tread on me." He didn't fight for ego. He fought to defend the sacred ground between the front porch and the bar stool. And if you walked in greasy, smug, and full of yourself, the kind of man who'd lie to the waitress and kick a dog, he made sure you left different than you arrived.
Donald Trump is just a New York greaseball with hands softer than an overripe peach and a mouth that runs like it's late to a poker game. His sons are worse. Soulless little guys dipped in deer piss and bravado. Junior, with his desperate little beard and his safari outfit, looks like a guy who tries to start fights at little league games and calls security if it gets sideways. Eric, God bless him, is the kind of guy you'd hand a hammer and spend the next hour and a half watching him try to unscrew a nail. They're not men. They're just hair-gelled cartoons playing lumberjack. They don't work. They don't serve. They don't sacrifice. They don't build or fix or do a goddamn thing but inherit money and lie about it. And yet, somehow, these are the new standard by which manhood is measured. My God, how far we've fallen.
They exhibit nothing. Not one thing that we were raised to believe makes a man. Not courage, not humility, not grit, not loyalty, not strength of heart or spine or word. They sweat when it's humid. They pout when it's hard. And they run when it's dangerous. They wouldn't last five minutes under a tractor. They wouldn't know how to change their own oil.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying violence is a virtue or that bar fights make a man. I don't think manhood is some holy grail to be earned through broken noses. That's cheap thinking. That's the kind of thinking they sell now. Package rage, tele-cowboys co-signing each other's insecurities on cable news. Manliness isn't in your fist or your flag decals. It's in the quiet things, the hard things, the true things. And these boys you worship now wouldn't last five minutes in the world you walk through daily.
The part that turns my stomach is this: A southern man, a real one, wouldn't stand for how these clowns behave in public. Not toward his wife, not toward his daughters, not toward his children, or anyone else's for that matter. He damn sure wouldn't let some orange-tinted loudmouth mock a disabled person or insult a widow, brag about assault, or spit vile at working folks just trying to get by. His mother would have slapped his mouth clean off for half the things these men say, and his grandmother wouldn't even have wasted her breath. We were raised by steel and iron women in church dresses who carried casseroles in one hand and consequences in the other.
And now you fly flags with a man's name on them. You worship him like a savior. And you can say you voted for the lesser of two evils if you want. Maybe you did. But when you defend him, when you excuse him, when you wave his banner like it's a Stars and Stripes reborn, you're not just complicit. You've already sold your soul.
And I don't pretend to have the definition of manhood carved in stone. In fact, I think most definitions are too brittle and break under real pressure. But I do know what it's not. It's not inherited money and gold-plated toilets. It's not screaming on a stage while other people fight your wars and pay your debts. It's not throwing tantrums on television and calling it truth. No, a man is what he does when the storms come. A man is how he treats people who can't do a damn thing for him. A man is what he says when no one is looking and how he loves when no one else understands. And these slick-haired frauds wouldn't recognize that man if he offered to help them jump-start their helicopter.
Where are the truth-tellers? The ones who called out even when it came from their own side. The ones who didn't kneel to power or party. The ones who didn't want a king but dared to be goddamn citizens. We have never been perfect down here. God knows the South has blood in its roots and ghosts in its halls. But at least we did have some kind of honor. Raw and flawed, but ours. But now we have cowards playing cowboy and wrapping themselves in Dixie nostalgia while licking the boots of northern conmen.
We told my grandfather that one day southern men would kneel. Kneel, get helpless. Before Yankees with gold toilets and fake tans, he'd have thought you were drunk or possessed by the devil. But here we are. Many once stared down hard times, now waiting in line to be nodded at by a game show host. You've made a liar of my grandfather. He told me we don't bend. We don't cower. We speak truth even when it's costly. That you measure a man not by the flags on his truck, but by the weight of his word. We stand on dirt, not marble. That a southern man, for his sins, never kisses the ring. And now I see you cheer for the ringmaster and beg to be shackled to him.
So let me tell you this, from one of your own, from someone who still walks the same black dirt and still sings the old songs: Stand up. Stop kneeling for fools. Stop praising cowards. Reclaim whatever dignity that once defined you. Not through cruelty, and not through guns or flags or chance, but through truth and courage, through the goddamn backbone that built barns and fought wars and buried family. You used to be better than this. Hell, we used to be better than this. Don't let it die with you. We're Southerners. We're unfit for crowns. We're too proud to bow and too tough to follow weak men with gold names and borrowed backbones. Let the South be known for its integrity and dignity. Let it remember what we claim to be, and not what the world thinks we are. We've proven them right, goddamn often. I'm not sure we know how to prove them wrong, but for the love of God and biscuits, let's try. Define still death.