Trailer Park Privilege

by Fergus Downie

Guilt is a great aphrodisiac and to judge by the hysterical antics of those privileged white brats haunting Murphy Donovan ’s hood it’s a pick me up that just keeps giving. And why shouldn’t it?. To self-flaggelate for something you’ve actually done is an important indicator of moral health and maturity and if you feel better for having righted a wrong so be it. It’s hard earned pleasure.

But what about another’s sins? Now there’s unearned high pitched emotion on a big scale, particularly when you can kick down on the great unwashed in the process. White privilege you’ll note is usually held most tenaciously by the poor, and Hollywood can’t get enough of them. I saw a half decent film yesterday night after YouTube ran out of clips of Americans bass fishing in slipways, and it centred on a tired old trope involving a redneck trying to get out of a drug debt by killing his sluttish mother for her life insurance. The dad wore shit stained long johns circa the John Wayne era, his stepmother wore tight leather jeans and his mentally ill sister had to be pimped out to a bent psycho cop who wore a Stetson and made the stepmother perform a sex act on a chicken wing. In the culminating scene all bar two were graphically beaten up and murdered in a trailer after they realised the insurance (a whopping 20 grand) didn’t go to them. The sister announced she was pregnant in a bad Texan accent. It was well acted, the jokes were good and I had no real problem watching it. Still, we all know with a film like that they’d have to be white trash. It takes a triumph of the will to see the world as a mirror image of the Jerry Springer show and it shows how deep the prole porn fetish is amongst artsy Americans that they can churn this prole porn out with decent budgets. They like most savages but these ones ain’t noble. After that I watched the ever uplifting ‘Tennesse catfish kayaker’ and felt a lot better with the world.