User:Aleister/Jed Clampett's wallet
Come and listen to a story, an economic story, bout a kind and principled man and the land that he rose from. It's a story 'bout a man named Jed Clampett. A poor mountainer from the American Ozarks.
It's about how Mr. Clampett found a golden ticket and struck it rich right in front of his own eyes. It tells us that he escaped becoming one of the mainstream rich, a copycat of a selfish and unskilled stuck-up who habitually manipulate, compel, and simplify the world, and whose standard operating procedure consists of earth-destroying capitalism and cronyism held fast and true by the boys at the top and the girls in the middle (although even those kind of rich have to scratch their heads with something gold when they meet Jed Clampett).
Jed Clampett has a family. He loves his family, and gladly provides sustenance to them and their critters. He sits and unselfishly listens to their daily episodic observational-rants, outright ramblings, other nonsense, harebrained schemes, imaginary recipes, and the outrageous delusions which don't fit any present psychological category other than possibly eyeball turner.
He listens to them go on and on with a smile on his face and a whittlin' knife, a jug of something forest-made, and a tree branch in his hands. Yet, truth be told, and double-crossed at the lightning, Jed barely kept his family fed. It shamed him deeply. This happened because not one of his godforsaken nitwitted fallen-far-far-away-from-the-apple family twigs would hunt the prey, either with him or goin' out by themselves to cover a different territory, doubling or tripling their slaughtering chances.
But Jed always hunted alone. Each and every day he awoke before dawn, grabbed his ancient freshly oiled rifle, and went out to provide food for his family. Food that he'd find living in trees and burrows, creatures that he'd hunt to put them out of their misery. Jed did this because he was much too proud, and too much of a man, to go on vittle stamps - something that Granny, Ellie Mae, Jethro and all the kin had been receiving for years but vowed never to tell Jedediah.
Then one day he was just meandering along peacefully, walking here and there within his healthy Missouri forest, enjoying spring air and the thousand and seven sounds of the woods. Jed was out and about shootin' at some food. What he'd do when he got home was literally throw dead bodies into a pot and onto the table, a primitive practice that his daughter Elly Mae abhorred and hated him for. Eventually she convinced him that going vegan was also a golden ticket to paradise, which he now understands on a body-level, and after he gave it a go ever time he eats vittles it's a feast, "It's all got to do with the seasonings," Jed explains nowadays on the yearly lecture tour.
But that day in the woods, Jed was in a lazy mood. The key event, one of those things that movies are made of and Jed later reenacted for the cameras, started when he stopped to admire the wings of a translucent blue butterfly alit on a flower. He watched it fan those naturally-developed artistic masterpieces in the sun, opening and closing something like a Renoir every few beats, was just about to mutter "WOOOOOOO doggies" real loud when he sensed, rather than saw, movement ahead and over to the left. A rabbit! Hot diggity dog!
Jed swiveled, aimed, fired! BAMMMMMMM... ... ... but this here hare was a fast hare that dodged away at the sound of Jed's thumb rest on the trigger.... and Jed missed by a half-a-hair.
"Off to the doggone right again." Jed cursed his luck. He licked his thumb to fire the 80-year-old heirloom rifle a second time. He oiled it to perfection at least three times a week, and treated it like it was his only son. But lo and behold, it was actually providence that had stepped up, gave a big ole wink, and blessed his and the hare's luck that day - a blessing laid upon a human and a hare once every in awhile called, at least in the oriental and para-scientology circles, "The luck of the fast rabbit". Because when Jed stared at the spot where the bullet had gone, squinting to see if maybe a leaf blowing around had knocked it off track, "When suddenly," Clampett recalled later to 60 Minutes star reporter, Mike Wallace, "up through the ground came a bubblin' crude".
People I know usually wonder at this point "You know, I wonder what's the first thing ol' Jed did when he saw all that oil?" Well, the answer is obvious. Jed Clampett took out his wallet.
That's what Jed did the moment he discovered black gold. Texas tea. Because he knew what oil was, and he knew what the Rockefeller's and their bunch had done with a sea of it. He knew that he was probably going to be doing a lot more stuff in the world within a week or so than everyone in his family had done on their shopping trips to all the big cities within 70 miles combined. He instantly knew that in a short spell not only the nosy people yonder in town with their gossip, yackety yack fueling their every moment of free time, but those blunderbusses in the high windowed offices of the Houston, New York, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabian oil cartels - not to count the independents and the free-wheeling operators - would be telling each other and their Boards of Directors, "Well, the first thing you know, ol' Jed's a millionaire!".
Seeing all of this in his mind right then and there, Jed whispered to himself "Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm doggies, snake-tie me down and seven coontails-tie me up", took his left hand, reached deep into the side pocket of his decades-old jeans, and took out his wallet.
He wanted to look at what he, a poor mountainer, did not have.
Jed opens his wallet[edit | edit source]
When Jed Clampett opened his wallet he realized that neither he nor his family had ever been graced with the dignity of wealth. That you-know-it-when-you-see-it unabashed freedom to explore and play, to have fit vittels on the old tiny red table every day, to at a whim fly over to Paris for lunch and down to Moracco for a bite of dinner. And then to take in a moonlit dance (if not the entire scene from "Eyes Wide Shut") on one of Canne's many private properties.
No, Jed's ancestors did not have the kind of money that acts as a springboard over time and area, a springboard which can actually fuel the giddy-up-and-go attitude and ability to unlimitedly plan extraordinarily good things which will act for the resounding benefit of mankind and the planet (on which, Jed figured out one day, we all live, breath, and multiply) that resides in the hearts and true nature of the best of the wealthy. So at that moment Jed started in gathering in the knowledge that very few of the very rich have experienced: realizing what this kind of wealth would mean if handled by an honest man.
Jed Clampett then sat on a log, took out his whittlin' knife, and started a whittlin'. He watched the black oil ooze and gurgle from his land, like a cut bandaged by hot mud. "You know", Jed thought, "this land has been in the Clampett family since we chased the last injun screaming like a banshee into Oklahoma." Jed looked at his land, and fully and soulfully realized that by growing up in the mountains he and his family had spent a lifetime living with the cleanest rivers and plushist forests on the North American continent. They lived in a land which held the most amazing critters that the civilized world (i.e. undisturbed by humans, still has trees that nobody cleans under) has to offer.
It struck Jed that he'd never really thought about it. He'd just accepted the fact that the crystal clear river flowing a hundred steps downhill from where the front door usually was had the finest water to drink and to swim in that anyone would ever need. Jed looked around at the forests, and thought of how the trees and undercover that spread out for dozens of miles in all directions consisted of nature's best creative work. He'd always instinctively knew all of this, just as he inherently knew that the sun and wind and the clear water and air were his birthright.
Jed Clampett, his kin, and all of his friends, had grown up that kind of rich. That other kind of rich. And boy, were they loaded.
Well, after watching his oil ooze up and around and stain the higher ground for a good spell, and then finally beginning to pond up in a really big puddle, a black lake for a black swan, Jed stood up to again watch the butterfly. Its wings were still a'flutturin and a'flappin in the sun, nothing in the Louvre like it. He knew he had to get moving, to take a close look at this new thing, tell his kinfolk about it, and get on the horn over to the oil barons.
Jed Clampett's wallet is a 1922 swamp bottom possum leather faux Tiffiny model based on the Kama Sutra, with containers for cash, coin, viddles, leaves, scrapings, stone-age tools, and a few pockets cleverly sewn in which contain lots of other pockets. There specific areas for spiritual enlightenment. The wallet's loading capacity is far-superior to other models of that era (or this, truth be told), and whenever Jed pulls it out, both men and women can be heard to ooooh and ahhhh something awful.
The wallet, brown with age spots and rubbed patchy where bird droppings soaked in on it and left their juice, is also covered with spit smears from chewin' tobacco, brow sweat from many a good days work, and the pawprints of generations of dogs, each and every one of them named "Stormy".
Where did it come from?[edit | edit source]
Owing to good fortune and the luck of the Irish, the majority of Jed Clampett's wallet was made about 180 years earlier by an American Indian. His name was "Big As Blue", and he was Jed's great-great-grandparent. That's why the wallet contains a secret compartment that only Jed, in this generation, can open.
And he can open it in a New York minute.
Within this hallowed Native American hollow, a catcall whisper-in cave rock artwork in space, Jed keeps his secret bird whistle, a bone from a hillbilly saint, pictures of two french hens, and that thing that his grandfather - the King of the Hillbillies in this neck of the river - left Jed on his deathcouch: the historic Clampett family recipe for some mighty fine viddles.
Back to the story. So as Jed walked the outside of the enlarging mirror-black seeping liquid puddle, listening to the gurgling of the earth excreting oil, looking at the central bubble, he lifted the wallet to his mouth and blew some kernels and crumbs and biscuit coverings from its exterior. He maneuvered it open, smoothed-out the secret pouch, and got it and the wallet ready to hold the deed to one of the richest oil fields in the world.
"Kinfolk said...[edit | edit source]
...Jed, move away from there!" Jed had been there about 15 minutes, told them what had happened, and was now rocking in his rocking chair whittlin'. He listened to them cite chapter and verse from their own unfulfilled dreams - dreams which, by the way, he'd make come true for them within a few moons - and relaxed on his frontporch. He slowly lifted up his hat and scratched his head. As more time went by he was starting to really really get it.
By hearing the words of his kin, Jed started to clarify and clarity-visualize what the money would do. What it would do for his clueless mountain-girl step-daughter, for his illiterate cousin's illiterate son, and for his dead wife's mother who keeps hanging around.
The kinfolk kept gibbering like chimps, like usual with 'shine in 'em, and when Gem, his dead wife's semi-biological niece said, "Californy is the place you ought to be, Jed's nervous system triple-dosed right into the learning curve of the hormonal barrage it was under and finally started to fully connect with his brain's reality-acceptance limit, which on a good run takes about 90 minutes until its neurons begin to make sturdy and growing pathways connecting the new input to the old. When his open neuronal passageways adequately adapted to the chemicals-of-shock-and-change and the immense male-hormonal uptick that comes with such unexpected success that Jed's entire body was now awash in the real stuff. He was thunderstruck.
"Whooooooo00000000000000 doggies, Californy!!!" Jed exclaimed, suddenly feeling simultaneously at peace and at action. Since he'd grown up with nature, Jed knew that this zen-like feeling was a chemical reaction produced by connecting fun with consciousness levels. He felt a little like he did when he has coffee and 'shine surging through his veins while the widow woman from the forked tree property over the hill jabs at his pecker. Jed quickly made up his mind. He'd do it!
So they loaded up the truck with the prizes of a poor life well spent. An old chair. Dogs. Raccoons. And lots of other odds and ends and nothing similars. A couple of generational-stained heirloom mattresses were thrown on top the pile and inexpertly tied down to the nearest solid. Assorted rocks, animal skulls, whittlings, empty bottles, ephemeral, and things like rags were stuffed between other things and loaded up. Much of what was on the truck was of sentimental value to Granny. Most of it was falling apart.
And they moved to Beverly...,[edit | edit source]
...Hills, that is, Jed said, and he and Elly Mae and the rest of them soon found out that Beverly Hills has corner stores where you can walk in and spend a life savings for most people just by buying a scarf, a sparkly rock, and something ivory to scratch your balls.
The Hills, as the locals call it, is filled with residents whose idea of a good time includes cocktails, cocaine, and a guided tour of the newest starlet. It's where every home and hotel room has a history of movie stars overprimping, overposing, and overdosing. Decorated with modern art hanging haphazardly on walls in halls which are worth more than the walls and halls combined, the grounds of the big houses are awash in designer fountains filled with designer water which flow into His and Hers swimmin' pools. And if you - Claudette Colbert forgive - don't have the proper maids and butlers - the good ladies and gents who live to put your socks on in the morning with their teeth - you might as well just hang it up and move back to Omaha.
Well, when Jed got to The Hills he noticed that what separates the Beverly Hills men from the Beverly Hills boys is a really good swimming pool. Pools which, when Jed saw them, he instantly knew were man-made holes that were trying to imitate real rivers and ponds. So Jed took off his hat, scratched his head, and using the common sense that God gave him figured he might as well spend a few million dollars to move a mountain stream onto his property.
Beverly Hills was in a way very familiar to Jed. Yes, it had movie stars. Jed had to admit this excited and stimulated him somewhat awful. "C'mon, don't skunk me," Jed had said, "This place has picture lightshow ghosts walkin' the aisles of the general store? You can actually walk up and touch them? You're putting me on." Jed started to wonder which movie starts would visit just to swim in his cement pond and mountain stream, and which would come over to screw Elly. Lots of them, he reckoned.
Production crew[edit | edit source]
Jed loved moving pictures. When he opened his wallet and bought a massive home with so many acres of land that he thought he was back in the hollow, he also plunked down a few more barrels of cash to pay for half a dozen moving-picture cameras to be permanently mounted around his house and grounds. He'd hired an entire on-site studio crew, production and editing staff, techs to process the footage, the best lighting pros in the business, and he put a few cameras and cameramen on the payroll to travel with him when he visited sites like the bank or a squirrel. Jed wanted to document his new life. It was something, it seems, he "always wanted to do".
The Clampett home had a wide driveway and a Kennedy-sized hallway. So permanent cameras and elaborate sound and light systems were mounted and maintained at those locations. There was also a permanent camera mounted in the kitchen, where Granny had staked a claim, another down by the cement pond to record Ellie May frolicing with her critters, and one in the dining room where the family ate off a fancy green felt table complete with pocket holders for their drinks. Jed had payed the film crews to keep the film running all day and night, no matter if anybody was in the room or not.
The TV series[edit | edit source]
One morning Jed woke up with a grand grandiose money monkey swinging down the hollow idea. He called a meeting, and he asked all of his people to gather up all of the video and audio tapes and then cut them together to form a series of stories. To put together a package of 22 of these, and to do it quickly but well. "Surprise me," he said.
Eventually, the idea snowballed, and a television series hosted by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television network began airing under the name The Beverly Hillbillies, the name Jed's clever way to keep a promise to Bouncy Bev, a waitress down at his favorite pancake house in Tarzana. The show was a very funny situation comedy. America enjoyed it immensely and watched it every week. Jed wanted the show to be a dramatic series, and didn't say it thinking it was implied. He had no idea until the premier that he looked and talked like a backwoods backwards buffoon.
Nothing in the show's premise or storyline was as it seemed. A single shot in a scene may have actually occurred two to six months after the scene preceding it, with the dialogue and action cut-in to fit the narritive. Cuts between shots usually meant a few hours of editing, and those who knew the lives and personality quirks of the Clampetts the best suddenly got the premium seats at the Director's table. Coherent comedic stories were made up and pieced-together by some of the best writers and film editors in the business.
For example, cameras had been mounted in Mr. Drysdales reception room where Jane Hathaway, a homely spinster whom Drysdale thought of as his right-hand man - and who ran the bank without Drysdale knowing it - was always plotting to win Jethro's heart. This old bat, Hathaway, had fallen totally in cougar love with Jethro, something he's never had a clue about and won't unless he reads this article. But her cavecougar-crush, enhanced by good editing, made for some terrific comedy. Every once in awhile you'd see her see a spider in her office and make her surprise-spider face, which would be used in the edits as an erotic come-on, with Jethro's laugh and reaction spliced into the scene. Parts of a sentence Hathaway uttered on Thursday about a boiled egg and why it took so long to cook would fit dog-eared into something Jethro said on Sunday about seeing a blind man climb a palm tree. Do this enough, add in a laugh track, stich in some shots from the roaming cameras (some of the first experimental hand-held equipment in the business), and you've got yourself a show.
American viewers loved it for years, and when the French took a bite of it they couldn't put it down. But almost nobody knew about the outtakes.
The Gods of the Ozarks[edit | edit source]
The Gods of the Ozarks are the true Gods, and thousands of Goddesses to boot. There they are, just lounging about the Ozarks. You can find them in on and within logs, hollow trees, big piles of leaves, jimmy crack-corn and don't forget to check the wind. Minutes before he'd loaded up the truck to move to Beverly these Goddesses had found their way into Jed Clampett's wallet by the boatload! assuring that the charmed-life thing stuck around and had kittens.
The Beverly Hillbillies, outtakes[edit | edit source]
Jed's constant meetings with heads of state, captains of industry, and doers of deeds kept the Clampett estate awash in doers and shakers, and each and every one of them loved Granny's particularly peculiar stews and greens. Amid deals and economic treaties that shook the world's greedy to the core, Ellie Mae was courted by Princes and Princesses and ignored every one of them. She only had eyes for Jed, who she knew wasn't her real father but a guy who her mother married on the rebound before accidently killing herself with 'shine.
Jed Clampett was fucking every hooker within a few hundred miles. The gals in Vegas found out about the gig, and the Clampett cement pond took on much of the flavor and a bit of the persona of Hef's. Women were bringing their boyfriends by to six-way with Jed, Ellie, and Granny. The network sent in a censor to help edit the show.
Watching over and editing the final product like a hawk, the censor, Susan T. Anthony, and the network executives she let in on what was going on assumed that these Clampett's were nuts. But the reality of the situation was that whatever world they were living in in their heads was fit and proper for experiencing and shaping the happy life of living in the back woods of the Ozarks - Gods, Goddesses, elves and the shine and all - and nothing changed when, by the hilarious virture of money falling into their laps via the luck of the fast rabbit, they fit their Ozark mentality into a Beverly Hills lifestyle so perfectly that they never did or said anything they couldn't have done or said to a neighbor in the next glen over. Everyone was their friend, and the nation beat a path to their door. As did the hookers, the hustlers, and the other bankers.
That's because Jed Clampett had a bank account so big that it actually choked one of his mules (Ellie Mae performed the Heimmich on the critter, and he was fine).
If the wallet could talk...[edit | edit source]
...oh, the stories it would tell.
There was this one time in the hollow that Jed took out his wallet and threw it at a mangy dog. It turned out to be Granny! "Granny," Jed called out with that exasperated look on his face that viewers love, "What are you doing down there?" "Leave me alone Jed, I'm masturbating." After watching for awhile Jed exclaimed "Whooooo doggies!", then picked up his shotgun and wallet and wandered off.
The wallet remembers the morning that Jane Hathaway, Mr. Drysdale's tireless but homely right-hand man, showed up to stuff another billion dollars into it. Hathaway cursed and pushed and sweated until she finally shoved all the bills into its pockets, and by the time the cash was tucked away the wallet was fifty pounds heavier and looked like a beached whale. Good times!
When the wallet ran for Governor, it recalled to a political historian from University, it campaigned on a platfom of two chickens crawling around every pot and three stills per acre. By the time Jed learned that wallet was running, wallet remembers that it had already promised lowlifes and high-rollers alike cushy jobs, carnal pleasures, and would receive kickbacks, mostly in the form of vittles. The wallet lost by and to a backhill-country-cemetery landslide, with just shy of no votes, and, trailing a mule who lives up the road in the final tally for non-human candidates, Jed Clampett's wallet came in last.
That's what the wallet would say, if it could talk, and it would be lying, "Truth is, I seldom have a life outside of Jed's pocket except when Granny rifles though it for a condumm."
Cultural off-air events[edit | edit source]
Jetro Bodine once found the wallet on the dirt floor of Uncle Jed's house in the faux hollow, and smiled like a fool-hyena. He clapped his hands, jumped up and down, up and down, up and down, like the illiterate hillbilly he was. And then he was interrupted when a chipmunk distracted him. The people watching the rushes rolled on the floor and laughed their asses off.
Mr. Drysdale once found the wallet in a seat cushion, opened it, and fainted dead away, to the delight of the lighting crew.
Jed initiated the Clampett Famous Artists Limited Editions (Dali had the gig for six years), a series of painted invitations to the annual You're All Invited Back Next Week to this Locality Ball and Gown Gala, the "It" party at the Clampetts. People come from Europe, the Falklands, and the Abbdo Dabai on leased planes just to break bread with Jethro, Granny, and Ellie May, and maybe even grab half-a-minute somewhere in there to pitch the man himself. When Jethro spots a coupon for mighty fine fried chicken tucked within their pockets, he knows it's a gift for him, and every year on this day he's so proud that he could just burst. It's become a tradition, a social necessity, and a trip on the merry-go-round for one to carry such a coupon when attending one of Jed Clampett's sourires, and then watch as Jethro sits on it like an egg.
Although Jed thinks the name of the event leaves nothing to the imagination, he waits in vain, year after year, for somebody to come back the week following the party and accept that invitation too! No one has ever figured it out, and Jed thinks the lot of them aren't too right in the head.
The wallet, especially the hidden shaman pocket, has nothing whatsoever to do but admire the heart of this man, a man who would make, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in at least one of his eyes, the promise of what his guests would receive from his family, and why if someone ever did they will lap it up like a newborn poodle...if only someone would think to come back to that locality the next week to have a heapin' helpin' of their hospitality.
Jed Clampett addresses the United Nations General Assembly, November 3, 1986[edit | edit source]
(picture of Jed in his hat and old clothes standing at the podium in the General Assembly room)
"It does wonders for my ego and super-ego, both of which I keep fighting like scorpions in a homemade peanut butter jar, to be here this afternoon. Granny told me to give her a wave 'Hi Granny' (Jed takes off his hat) It's me!
That should hold her while she drinks herself to sleep.
When I was asked to address ya'll, and I see lots of presidents and queens and the like out there, I thought to myself 'Jed, you should write some things down'. So I've been wandering the back ponds and wooded places this past week to scratch down some of my ideas on things. I'll start with something from Wednesday.
(Durng the speech Jed is seen pulling things from his wallet at irregular intervals. All of them appear to have writing on them. TV viewers and historians have ascertained that Jed pulled out, in order, a Kleenex with a phone number on it, a piece of shower curtain, two twigs whittled into the shape of a Goddess and a Godhead looking very First Peoplish to the untrained and trained eye, a coupon for fried chicken, a piece of someone's underwear, dried toast, and a cucumber.)
I feel lower than a possum with its head between its legs puking on a tinier possum, its own mother.
Feelin' this way, and poking myself in the ribs, because I haven't yet spent every dime I have to try to save and grow back the environment. The forests and the oceans and the ponds, so bullfrogs and things can have places to talk in. The oily wells on my land keep pumping out over a million barrels a day, and then is burnt up somewhere and put in the air. There used to be plenty of plants to catch and digest it. People then went all destructo - Jethro asked me to include that word - on the life of the planet, and so many did so many things to so much of it that whoops!, what are we gonna do now?
"Whoooo doggies, cash money!"
I washed all my hands (which are hung up outside to scare off the neighbors, like a windchime with fingers that you can only hear if the fingernails click together).
..and while Jed Clampett's marriage had a giant seashell of a pseudo-religious holiday reigning enjoyably over it...
The most truest hat in the world.
Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Jed. The poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. Then one day he was shootin' at some food, and up through the ground came a bubblin' crude...
Oil that is...black gold...Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol' Jed's a millionaire. Kinfolk said, "Jed move away from there!" Said "Californy is the place you ought to be." So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly...
Hills, that is. Swimmin pools...movie stars.
Closing-
Well now it's time to say good by to c2h6o.uncyc@hotmail.com Jed and all his kin. And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin' in. You're all invited back next week to this locality - To have a heapin' helpin' of their hospitality.
Hillbilly that is. Sit a spell...Take your shoes off...
Y'all come back now, y'hear?