Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

“Angland” – by which I mean uppity Brits and any other Europeans who like to look down their snooty noses at gun-slingin’ “cowboy” Americans such as myself and the president, can “kiss mah ayass,” as Dennis Quaid (playing Jerry Lee Lewis) so memorably put it in the 1989 biographical flick “Great Balls of Fire.” (The Brits had turned on The Killer after learnin’ that he’d married his 14-year-old cousin, Myra Gale, played by a fetching, pre-klepto Winona Ryder).

In the movie, a reporter at the airport had asked Lewis, as he was headin’ home, if he had anything to say to the good people of England after seein’ his wildly cheerin’ fans turn to stone and his successful concert tour turn into a series of duds after the news broke. He put “Angland” in its place, right under his back belt loops. Don’t know whether he said that exact thing in that exact circumstance. The story as a whole is true, though.

Show me in European history where they have room to talk. They don’t, particularly the French, the line that may have spawned my cultural-intellectual great-great-great-etc.-etc. grandpappy: Charlemagne, king in the 700s, more or less founder of the Carolingian Empire – and progenitor of many things erudite and redneck.

“The Franks were an agrarian people who had no cities worth the name.” Sounds like Oklahoma minus Oklahoma City and Tulsa, most of south Alabam, West Texas, east Colorado, most of the rest of the Great Plains and the South – and every other place in this country really fittin’ to live.

“Charlemagne … built brilliantly on the accomplishments of his wily father and grandfather.” There’s the family tradition.

“He wore Frankish trousers but took the title of Roman emperor.” The Wranglers, perhaps, of the day.

“He understood Latin and Greek but could not write himself.” Not unlike my chicken-pickin’ non-music-readin’ approach to playin’ the guitar.

“Although he prayed with devout fervor, he also discarded wives at will and allowed his daughters to consort openly with their lovers.” Ancient Arkansaw, in other words. (I was born there; I can say that).

In Francia in 700, “Extended families were still important; kin still avenged wrongs through feud … marriage was hard to distinguish from concubinage; and the most basic unit of social organization was the familial household.” It would shock the hell out of the modern French, but Francia would’ve been a “red state.”

“Charlemagne towered over his contemporaries both figuratively and literally. He was 6’ 3 ½” tall, thick-necked and potbellied.” This needs no illumination on my part.

His main biographer was Einhard – dang close to “Earnhardt.” Eerie, ain’t it? Einhard wrote of Charlemagne: “He was not able to withstand from food and often complained that fasts injured his health. … So refrained was he in the use of wine and all sorts of drink that he rarely allowed himself more than three cups in the course of a meal.” This requires some explainin’ since it seems to fly in the face of my hypothesis: “Since Carolingian wine cups were closer in measure to modern pints than cups, Charlemagne’s moderation in matters of drink was relative.”

Finally, Charlemagne, Einhard wrote: “thought that his children, both daughters and sons, should begin their education with the liberal arts, which he himself had studied. Then, he saw to it that when the boys reached the right age they were trained to ride in the Frankish fashion, to fight, and to hunt. But he ordered his daughters to learn how to work with wool, how to spin and weave it, so that they would not grow dull from inactivity and instead might learn to value work.”

Great-great-great-etc.-etc.-Grandpappy Charlemagne: the first Erudite Redneck.

[Direct quotes from C. Warren Hollister and Judith M. Bennett, Medieval Europe: a Short History, 9th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002).]

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