What is Hick?
Part I of 6: American Gothic and Trumpism -- The early days of the Fall of the American Empire
“I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.
To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history,
requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”
- Susan Sontag -
My great grandfather William H. Hick, son of Ogle, was born to a Cornish family in Brooke, Ontario, Canada in 1897…. His mother Permilla Dempsey was furious that her son had added an ‘S’ to his name to appear more English. Though, like a lot of young men following Horace Greeley’s advice he headed West to build switches for the Canada Pacific Railway and needed all the help he could get. He settled on Arthur West’s farm in Loreburn, Saskatchewan and married Arthur’s daughter, Verna Nettie (presumably because he sound English and not Irish like some “filthy animal pig.”)
Arthur was a Kansas man, notoriously cheap, and soon sold the farm to become an enthusiastically penurious slumlord in Chicago. William moved with the family, became a semi-pro hockey player, a professional house painter, and dry.
Nettie died of ovarian cancer in a similar act of Christian Science protest.
His first son Lyle, after a modest imprisonment in Chicago during the depression, was elected to die over Holland serving the Royal Canadian Airforce. His second son, Ted is my grandfather. And he is a Hick. Well. He is a “Hicks.” His cousin, my great Uncle Allen is a Hick, is still alive and irritated in a nursing home back in Ontario (apparently I live nearby his grandson Justin Hick here in Calgary, Alberta, but he refuses to speak to me on account primarily that he has no idea who I am.)
My mother, Michael, grew up mortified of her surname.
Her second husband (of the four) Bill Case had the preferred patronymic. And though later she had the choice of Hicks, Fruchter, Case, Thorjusen, and Lederer - she liked Case and so stuck with it. Her business is urology recruiting. She is a Hick though, and like all Hicks, scrotal.
She has two brothers, Pete -- a retired steel worker, a lifelong ‘Captain Jack,’ president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Professional Bowling Association, and Pepper -- a certified welding instructor out of St. Louis and illiterate as far as I can glean from his emails. Aunt Robin is a professional driver for Jacko Trucking. The youngest daughter, Aunt Teri elevated and became an ERP program manager at the Texas Dept. of Transportation. Something Sam Lowry might do in the Ministry of Information Registry.
Terry Gilliam Brazil 1985
They are all Hicks though, don’t let the titles fool you.
What is it to be a Hick?
Am I a “Hick,” too?
After my parent’s arrest on conspiracy to distribute cocaine in Detroit in 1975 (The largest bust in City history at that time: such ambition!) I grew up in Central Illinois, aspiring.
I wanted, like my brother to go to Champaign-Urbana for school, maybe a law school, as I had an intense fascination (as a boy) with all things Perry Mason. However, fairly traumatized and quite dumb as a child, I found my voice, finally, in high school in Slidell, Louisiana studying Art. I then went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as that was a city my mom felt comfortable with me going to. This, a provincial decision, fear based on comfort and brand recognition.
Yes… so maybe I am Hick.
What is that though?
We are speaking about Semiotics. Specifically asking a series of questions positioned within cultural critique to determine the meaning of words we use as a public and as avid consumers of media. This is post-structural critique, one whose instrument is oppositional distinction.
Not this, but that.
We want to use cultural signifiers like ‘American Gothic,’ ‘Kara Walker,’ and the works of H.C. Westerman and others to understand the word “Hick,” and likewise, to better define Trumpism or to understand the self.
Who is Russell Case: Russell Altice Case, the Hick?
(Not Russell G. Case the Southwestern landscape painter)
There is a lot to deconstruct here. Be my guest.
A painting I like, American Gothic by Grant Wood (a fellow alumnus at SAIC) speaks to me.
It is ostensibly a painting that could have been relevant to us as a family. But we come from a family of criminals, slumlords, working class Trumpists, and Irish and Swedish detritus. (Dorothy Lund married Theodore Hicks, you see). We’re not good Mennonite and German Gentleman farmers. It is something we aspire to as Hicks.
Aspiration in and of itself, is specifically a ‘Hick trait’ (as is our enormous self interest).
Hick is trying to elevate or be something “classy” while failing miserably.
Hick is a gentleman farmer wearing his sport coat over his overalls. It’s a hashtag #Fail.
Grant Wood American Gothic 1930
The tone of this short essay has already gone a bit snarky.
It is has perhaps drifted towards condemnation of my own ethnicity and culture. Still… there are interesting elements to this painting: the apostolic trinity present in the pitchfork, (that wonderful paradox, perhaps like Shiva’s trident, both demonic and holy simultaneously.
It is such a weird title though. What does he mean by “Gothic” here?
Looking at this painting through the present media you are using to observe (as well as this lexicon of tropes) is terribly reductive. As my painting professor Ted Halkin would insist in Chicago, digital and photographic media convinces young artists they should be perfect in their style and thin in their application.
Paintings are rough, they are the evidence that a pig’s ass was scrapped wet across chalk and denim.
Here in American Gothic there is an interesting syncretic between material and style and intention. These motherfuckers, this Mennonite farming twain look severe. These appear to be unforgiving, unpleasured, ascetics - the trinity of his pitchfork, a reminder of the Lord’s constant judgment. The surface is dry like encaustic or egg tempura.
These are not juicy languid indulgent strokes of wet paint like the hedonists Joan Mitchell and Franz Kline.
The mark matches the man.
Like Botticelli or Andrew Wyeth, an egg tempera painter is Apollonian and intellectual versus Dionysian and sensual. The depiction of the storm boards are as thin and humble as this woman’s lips. Her cameo, a grim indulgence on the sleeve of a barren midwestern farmwife whose sole function is survival, seed, and harvest. Do your job.
The paint does that. It is function over form.
Grant Wood himself and in support of the cause portrayed himself as a ‘Hick hayseed.’
Fragonard would just be terribly amused by his prudish interest. However, it is something of a devilish irony that in his parlor he was known to be gay (though closeted). Critic Janet Maslin states that his friends knew him to be a "homosexual and a bit facetious in his masquerade as an overall-clad farm boy.”
This is fabulous.
His act of being “Hick” is in itself an aspiration. He, like Billy Ray Cyrus, is trying to be something he is not… An Iowa Republican.
He is the inverse of Sarah Palin, who is most certainly ‘Hick’ and yet, trying to appear knowledgeable. This pretension and its consequences are at the heart of this essay.
This is the ‘Hick’ move.
I saw this picture of Kim Kardashian recently in camo jorts on National “NoBra Day,” and I thought, “Yes, that’s a Hick!”
I recognize this sensibility: she performs as a Redneck, that is, every good God fearing parent’s worst nightmare. She is the most obvious example of “Elevated Hick.” She now epitomizes the “American Gothic” as Paris Hilton’s pretense to such set the stage for her ascendency.
In the same vein Gerron Hurt was obliged to win MasterChef 2018 as Joe Bastianich begrudgingly gave his support. “You’ve elevated grits.”
The irony here is that its the shorts that are pretentious.
Gothic is essentially romantic.
It is anti-classical, a response or in opposition to the Classical triumphal – “this exhaustion of content by form” as Barthes said (there is however, nothing exhausted about the Hick… the casual energy is boundless… Ozarkian even).
Though it has its own normative forms, the Gothic seeks elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom. Kim Kardashian is in my top four references for every one of these terms. She specializes, like Miley Cyrus (The Hick de jure) in shocking and assaulting the petite bourgeois moms of the suburban hellscape. These women, so violently offended by the raw animal sexuality of the Kardashians, protest their every act with furrowed brows and the use of ‘parental control.’
Though I suppose she just wants to be pretty. She’s a nice lady.
Kim married a MAGA wearing Kanye West and has a child by him named North.
This is a Hick move, and I am not at all confident they’ve seen the movie. Perhaps they’ve sat through it thumbing through their IG feeds for references to themselves.
Hitchcock orchestrating a train entering a tunnel as a metaphor for the sex act is itself entirely a Hick move, in a film Sontag explicitly marked as camp.
Alfred Hitchcock North by Northwest 1959