This obsession with firearms, paranoia about government, racism, nativism and fear of modernity seems to be highly correlated with fundamentalist Protestantism and its accompanying sexual frustrations. The latter, especially, are manipulated by their own culture, which uses these pressures to economically control and exploit them. I know what I'm talking about, I was brought up around people like that. In Florida they're called Crackers. In other places, hillbillies, or rednecks.

This is what much of the population of rural Florida was like when I was growing up, although by now they have been mostly absorbed into the urban culture, or they have been educated, traveled or otherwise grown out of it. Still, in rural pockets, some remain. They are scary people, you don't want to get caught in their neighborhoods after dark. They don't like strangers.

I had a Cultural Geography professor at school who delivered a whole 1-hour lecture on this tribe. (Oh yes, I'm not making this up!) He traced their history back to the Norman Conquest. They are the descendants of Anglo-Saxon yeomanry and minor nobility, once the very cores of their communities, who were pushed into the Border Country of Scotland, some of the more violent and least desirable lands in the British Isles, by the new French-speaking nobility that took their lands. Later, they became mercenaries, and fought in the Irish Wars, helping subjugate the Celtic peoples of Ireland, especially around Ulster. But they were the ones who didn't get paid in land. Eventually they emigrated to the Colonies, but found the most desirable real estate in Virginia, the Eastern Seaboard and New England taken. They were white trash before America became a nation. They wound up in the poorest lands, especially in Appalachia, or were pushed even further west, into the Frontier.

These are the Scotch-Irish. This isn't a racial thing, it's cultural, not all people of Scotch-Irish descent are in this tribe, many prospered and blended into existing communities, and many other lineages got absorbed along the way and in the places they settled, but it has deep cultural roots that go way back. These are the people that kept falling through the cracks and kept getting pushed back further and further into the least desirable hollers and balds of the back woods, mostly in the old Slave South, but some in the West.

There are exceptions of course, but they have a tendency to be bitter, angry, suspicious of strangers, and convinced the world is out to get them. They're ignorant and mean, and worse, they're proud they're that way. And they know their numbers are being diluted and diminished as the country becomes mobile, homogenized, and flooded by immigrants, and they are angry and afraid as a result.

Yeah, I know its not politically correct in these liberal times to apply this kind of analysis to social phenomena, but there it is. Were looking at the last sputtering of a thousand year old melodrama, a tribe doomed to extinction, not by genocide and violence, but by the dilution and absorption of their genes and their culture. They are somehow aware of this, in some dim, brutish and instinctive way, and they will not go quietly.