Rulers & Rednecks

Okie Dokie. I almost didn't get to the blog today. I finished up both of my targeted resumes today and began searching the job banks for places to post them. Got real caught up in that, forgetting also to stop for lunch. Too late now.

Found out yesterday that putting ear drops in your eye, even accidentally, sucks most heinously. Verily.

I got my book today. BORN FIGHTING HOW THE SCOTS-IRISH SHAPED AMERICA by James Webb. Hardback, like I said, for reading and re-reading. Here's the opening page:

Rulers and Rednecks

Of all the different racial strains that mingled their blood with the earlier English - Irish, Huguenot-French, German, Scotch-Irish - the last was by far the most important... They were desperately poor; the available lands near the coast were already preempted; so armed with axes, their seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic. thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the material out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned, the creators of that western type which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type.
- Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought