Country Boys: PBS Exploits White Trash for Left-Wing Agenda

Country Boys, a three-part documentary by David Sutherland, is the newest Frontline special airing on PBS. It tells the story of two teenage boys, Chris and Cody, who are growing up poor in Eastern Kentucky. The film itself is real, gritty, and hard to look away from. It's everything a documentary should be. However, one look at its corresponding website on PBS.com and it is clear that this film is being used for a radical, left-wing agenda.

It's expected that the socially conscious (and government funded) PBS is going to be biased to the left. However, they go too far with the story of Chris and Cody. The film features a menagerie of toothless, lazy, backwoods country folk, feeding into every stereotype the world has for rural life. Sadly, the two boys in this film are depicted as the newest generation of this vicious poverty cycle. Although the film tries to end on a positive note, with the boys graduating high school, it is obvious that they will not go any farther than their parents before them.

Central to the story, other than the two boys themselves, is the government assistance everyone is living on. If anything, this film is an example of a welfare system gone very wrong. Chris' father, a sickly alcoholic, is slowly drinking himself to death. His family talks about it casually and his father receives a monthly Social Security check for his "disease" (the alcoholism!). How is being paid to drink an incentive to find help, get a job, and stop living on welfare? It isn't, of course. Never is there mention of a possible intervention for this man or any kind of government-implemented rehabilitation program. The monthly check might as well be a bullet in his head. (It is disclosed on the PBS site that Chris' father did die the following summer.)

Other characters in the film are living off of workman's compensation and spend the day smoking and drinking on their couch. They don't seem to be injured in any way and when it suits them, they get around fine. Chris, one of the lead young boys in the film, is also receiving a monthly check for what was vaguely described as a "behavioral problem". His mother, another chain-smoking couch potato, exploits her son for this monthly check and gives him the responsibility of paying bills at sixteen. As soon as he stops receiving the checks, the mother no longer encourages him to stay in school, as it no longer has any bearing on the monthly handout.

And that's what it is, isn't it? A handout. It is very clear in this film that no one is held accountable for their actions. When Chris' job becomes too strenuous, he quits. When school expects him to show up on time, he drops out. However, both places take him back after he begs and makes excuses. That isn't making a self-sufficient man out of him. I watched this film and found it to be a great example of the self-defeating "victim" mentality that many people in this country suffer from. If anything, it is a documentary that screams, "Welfare reform!" Obviously, PBS didn't see it that way at all.

On the Country Boys Official website, PBS features a column by author Cynthia Duncan, a supposed "expert" on rural poverty. She proceeds to explain that the poverty these boys are growing up in is due to the lack of investment and interest by the social elite. I'm sorry, what? A community of lazy people skimming money off the government exists because of the heartless bastards on Wall Street? No, she is probably referring to the evil conservatives in the White House. Bush is blamed for everything these days, isn't he? But there's a flaw in that argument because Bush is the one signing the checks!

Don't get me wrong, I really liked this documentary. It was gripping and addictive and David Sutherland was extremely objective in his documenting. However, PBS is heralding it for all the wrong reasons. I don't know if there was any agenda on Sutherland's part other than to show a human story, but the station that distributed it is distorting what I found to be an example of everything wrong with society. Instead of finger pointing at these phantom "social elite" ruining everyone's lives, why won't we stand up and start taking responsibility for ourselves? After all of their strife, these "country boys" still haven't learned this lesson.