The Danger Of "Imposter Christianity" In America Today

I received an e-mail this morning with a link from my cousin, more like a brother, Jack Terry which had a link to a news story from CNN on it with the title "An Imposter Christianity" Is Threatening American Democracy".  I opened the link, read about two paragraphs and hit "Reply All" since Jack had also sent the message to some other family members, at least one of which has been a member or a fairly right wing radical church with a twisted interpretation of the Bible.  The message below is what I said to those people including the family member who has been sorely mislead by her church and its minister.

I read the first paragraph of this article and realized I didn’t need to read the rest, not because I don’t agree with what it says but because I knew several years ago what it says and that one of the greatest dangers to democracy in the United States is posed by people who cloak themselves in a distorted, hateful, and evil misrepresentation of what they lie to the world and call Christianity.  These same people supported the TRAITOR Trump, his many co-conspirators who are also running for all levels of offices across the country, and making a well organized attempt to destroy the country under their twisted, criminal, and evil lies which they shield with blatant misrepresentations of the Bible, or at least their selected portions of the Bible.  They are charlatans, criminals, traitors, and enemies of the United States Of America, the US Constitution, and all they represent.  This was already beginning before Putin and Russia stole the US Presidential Election in 2016 in order to install a Russian Owned TRAITOR in the White House.  But Putin and his hackers who managed to steal an 80,000 vote total lead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where smart enough to realize they could use TRAITOR Trump to further mislead these pseudo-Christians into helping them destroy America.  Yes, an American election has been stolen, in 2016, not in 2020 when President Biden became the first duly, legally elected President in four years.  Putin stole that election for a TRAITOR he and Russia had owned for at least 40 years.  And today, especially since the TREASON, insurrection, and domestic terrorism of January 6^th, America is facing the greatest threat to Democracy in our history and it is being driven by these TRAITORS who shield themselves behind their blatant misrepresentations of the Bible. 

Let me give you who claim to be Christians a little reading assignment.  Take a Bible, preferably a red letter edition of the King James Bible which has the words attributed to Jesus in red print, and do the following. 

1. Begin in the New Testament with the Gospel attributed to the Apostles of Jesus and read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and Revelation.
2. Every time you come to one of the sections which is attributed to Jesus or one of the Apostles as a direction to their followers, the real Christians, and ask yourself, did TRAITOR Trump ever do that?  The answer will always be NO. 
3. When you get to Revelation and find those areas of the text which are purported to be the signs of the coming of the Anti-Christ, read it carefully and ask yourself could that apply to the TRIATOR Trump.  The answer will always be YES. 
4. When you have figured this out and realized I am correct, if you still believe you are a Christian or want to be a Christian, take yourself as far away from these charlatans as possible, find a church which does not support TRAITOR Trump and his many co-conspirators and does not engage in politics, and firmly supports the Separation Of Church And State and follow what the Bible actually says.
5. If you ever falter in doing that and need a refresher course in what I have just told you, go to the link below and read it again and doe exactly what it says. 

 

http://myappalachianlife.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-reading-assignment-for-self-professed.html

 

Roger

I'd like to invite all of my readers to do the same thing.  

 

Funeral Home Fans And Funeral Memorial Cards--Two Appalachian Traditions

 I recently posted a small post in Facebook about funeral home memorial cards which was my rapid response to a clue on "Jeopardy" the day before about the poem "Crossing The Bar" by Alfred Lord Tennyson which has been used on the back of funeral home memorial cards in Appalachia for many years.  That post was very actively and positively received by numerous people in Facebook groups devoted to Appalachia.  It had never occurred to me to write a post about these two topics despite the fact that I have been saving/collecting both items for quite a few years.  I have probably a couple hundred funeral memorial cards, all from funerals or visitations I have attended over the years.  I have also recently acquired a small collection of funeral home fans both from funeral homes where I have attended services and from a few small yard sales I have attended.  Both these items, especially the fans, are less often seen than in the past.  Funeral memorial cards were present at nearly every funeral I ever attended until about ten or twenty years ago.  Funeral home fans became less common when the small rural churches across Appalachia nearly all acquired air conditioning.  Nearly all Appalachian funeral homes for many years used the fans as advertising and always left a stack in every church where they held a funeral.  Many of the older Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches across the region still have some number of the fans which are frequently still used even if electricity and air conditioning are present.  But most funeral homes have stopped using them as a form of advertising.  Historically, the fans nearly always had a front side which was some generic religious themed reprodution of a religious painting or photograph in color, sometimes a photo of the funeral home building, but more often a painting of one of the more popular depictions of  Jesus Christ, either on the cross, the Last Supper, as the Good Shepherd, or arising from the tomb.  The reverse side was almost always plain white with the name, address, and telephone number of the funeral home involved.  The fans were usually a thin piece of somewhat stiff paper about 8" x 8" with a flat wooden handle stapled to the fan which was about 1" x 8".  It was also possible to see the same fans from the same printers being used by both local businesses and political candidates but they are less common.  I do have a few political fans in my collection.  

This first fan is from the funeral home with which I grew up as a child, The Hall Funeral Home of Martin, Kentucky, and shows Jesus Christ as The Good Shepherd on the front which is one of the most common scenes to be shown on funeral home fans.  

This next fan is from a funeral home, the Thornburg Funeral Home, and a community, Farmland, Indiana, in which I have never been.  I located the fan at a small yard sale in Stanton, Kentucky, where I also bought several other funeral home fans and a couple of antique books and a corn sheller.  It shows a typical Last Supper scene with a typical advertisement for the funeral home on the back. 

 

The funeral memorial card below is from the funeral of a neighbor, Flora Cook Isaac, and has a photo of the deceased on the front which is a common choice for funeral memorial cards.  

The interior of Flora Cook Isaac's memorial card is a typical two-sided print statement of birth and death dates, survivors, clergy, burial site, etc. and the left side of the print is the 23rd Psalm which is also a very common inclusion either on the inside left of the rear of these memorial cards. 

This next memorial card is from the funeral of my good friend and former auction ring man, Dewey Rogers.  The front is a depiction of the pick and shovel of a coal miner, which he had been in his younger days.

 

 

 

I will be adding several more photos to this blog post over the next few days due to a current problem with converting scans and photographs on the equipment I am using.  If you like what you have seen so far, please return in a couple of days and I will added to the contents of the photograph section. 

Surviving An Endarterectomy, Or A Little Knife Fight I Won!

 

About 4  years ago, I discovered that I had a blockage of about 70+ percent in my right carotid artery which I managed to handle with diet changes, exercise, and a little medication for something like 4 1/4 years.  But annual scans showed that the blockage was steadily increasing despite marked decreases in my serum cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, etc.  So a few months ago, I made the decision to have the blockage removed via the endarterectomy process which laymen sometimes describe as a "rotorooter" on the artery.  This involves making a fairly major incision through the skin and muscles of the neck to expose the artery, clamping the blood flow at both ends of the artery area to be cleared, and, as I understand it, literally scraping the accumulated cholesterol plaque out of the exposed inner surface of the artery.  This is not a surgery to be taken lightly.  But, due to the way I had generally behaved since the blockage was first diagnosed, my doctors conceded that I was in generally better physical condition than the great majority of patients who have such a surgery.  I also trusted my surgical team at the University of Kentucky Hospital absolutely and, if I had not, I would never have consented to allow them to play among my arteries.  

 

My decision was not taken lightly since my wife has been in a wheelchair for more than twenty years and, in the event I had any kind of major catastrophic outcome from the surgery, either my wife alone or both of us together would most likely spend the rest of our lives in a nursing home which is a fate to which no one I know aspires. This issue was further complicated by the fact that I would have to spend at least one night in the hospital if all went according to plan and would have about two weeks of limited physical activity which would make it impossible for me to provide my wife the care she must have on a daily basis.  But her sister, who lives in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, volunteered to come and stay with her/us for a little over two weeks if the surgery could be postponed until after her twelve year old son was out of school for the summer.  My doctor, David Minion, M. D., agreed to the plan and we scheduled my admission and surgery for June 14, 2022, which gave us a few days for my sister-in-law and her son to arrive here and for me to train her in the usage of a Hoyer Lift and the other issues of assisting my wife in and out of bed, shower, toilet, etc.  She adjusted smoothly to the task and I felt safe in leaving Candice at home alone.  

On June 14, 2022, I was admitted to UK Hospital at about 5:30am and the surgery was over by about noon, lasting roughly four hours in the operating room.  The next twenty four hours I had a lot of pain involved in my neck and throat but I was released from the hospital the afternoon of June 15.  I got home uneventfully with massive swelling in my incision area, went to bed as usual about 10pm but couldn't get to sleep.  About 11:30pm, I got up, looked in a mirror, and saw even more swelling in my neck, and came to the conclusion that I had a minor leak from the artery.  Since I couldn't drive at that point, it would have been necessary to have my sister-in-law drive me to the hospital I preferred in Morehead, Kentucky, thirty miles away.  Candice didn't feel safe being left at home in bed when it was impossible to get out and asked me to take an ambulance to the local ARH Hospital in West Liberty where I have not trusted the medical providers and management for several years now.  Against my better judgment, I agreed to go there by ambulance.  I called 911, an ambulance arrived, and I was transported to ARH-ER shortly before midnight June 15, 2022.  ARH has adopted a policy quite some time in the past to contract their ER doctors from some national medical service.  Additionally, about 3 years ago, they ran off the three best prescribing professionals working in that institution, closed the Home Care Store which my wife had used regularly for years, and replaced the medical providers with providers with less experience, credentials, and, in my opinion, at far less pay and benefits which I believe was the primary object of all these actions.  I was admitted, put on an ER bed, hooked to monitors, and left in the room for quite an extended period of time before I was even seen by a doctor.  That doctor finally came in, stood at the foot of my bed looking at me for about 15 seconds, stepped beside the bed and touched my neck, said "that's wonderful surgery", and walked out without saying another word or introducing himself.  Shortly after I arrived, my blood pressure began jumping up and down much like Roy Acuff's yoyo, and little to nothing was done about it.  Finally, after some extended period the doctor came into the room again, looked at me for a few seconds, and left without saying a word.  I was eventually seen by the nurse manager in the ER that night and the next day and she told me that they were seeking a bed for me at UK.  They gave me one or two injections of some short term blood pressure medication which only lowered my blood pressure briefly before it spiked again.  I spent the night in the ER in that cycle with my blood pressure sometimes reaching levels of 190/90 and going as low as 130/60.  Nothing ever came of the alleged referral to UK.  Finally about noon on June 16, I had an exchange with the nurse manager in which I told her I had no faith in the doctor of the upper level management of the hospital and I was considering leaving AMA, Against Medical Advice, since nothing seemed to be happening to improve my condition.  She and the doctor came in at some point for his third encounter with me and I confronted him in her presence about the fact that he had done little or nothing to help me which he denied, stated "you're not going to die", and claimed that the machines could do a far better job of watching my condition than people.  I made a phone call to the Nurse Manager of the vascular surgery team at UK to see if she could facilitate my transfer and she stated she could do nothing.  I then called the office of my primary care provider at Saint Claire Clinic in Sandy Hook, Kentucky, to ask if I could be seen there and she stated, through her nurse, that I should go to UK ER.  At that point, I made up my mind that I was leaving AMA and called my cousin Jack Terry in Louisa, Kentucky, to ask if he could transport me to UK which he agreed to do.  I got out of bed at about 3pm, disconnected my electrodes from my body, walked to the nurses station and asked to have my IV removed, and signed the AMA papers.  I walked out of the ARH-ER after 16 hours of absolutely useless time and traveled to Lexington to the UK ER.  

I signed in there at about 6pm, since it took Jack quite a while to arrive from his house.  The ER at UK is in a major expansion and part of the building is unfinished but in use with patient cubicles on the ground floor with blue tarpaulins for doors and exposed ceilings showing concrete beams, copper pipes, HVAC pipes, no cell phone service in that area, etc.  But the UK-ER team is doing a helluva job in rough circumstances and I respect them a great deal.  They retested every test which had ever been done on me, consulted with the vascular surgery team, and finally I was admitted to a room in the hospital about 4:30am after about 9 hours on site.  They immediately put me on IV antibiotics, and medication to lower my blood pressure.  The nursing staff, lab staff, food service staff, and the members of the vascular surgery team are all wonderful practitioners each of their own personal profession.  They took great care of me, got my blood pressure under control in just a few hours, kept me at least part of four days, and discharged me on June 19, 2022, to return to home.  During the time of my stay at UK, I was told by three different members of the vascular surgery team that I had "done the right thing" by leaving ARH against medical advise.  That is a rare occurrence in health care today to ever hear any member of a medical profession state that other members of their profession have delivered less than exemplary care to a patient.  I really do believe I would have been likely to die if I had remained at ARH and unless I have absolutely no choice, I will never darken their doors again.  What is really sad about this whole situation is that a few years ago, I would have just as strongly defended ARH and their practitioners against all criticism.  But those practitioners are no longer there and most of them left against their will leaving hundreds, probably a few thousand, patients without the quality of medical care they had been receiving from those providers.  I do still have several providers in that hospital in other departments whose work I respect.  But, I have little doubt that they also are on thin ice if they are being paid what they are worth.

This entire episode is an example of how healthcare has often failed in Appalachia.  In this region, we often are served by providers who do not understand our culture, our people, how we think, believe, and live our lives.  Many small regional hospitals in our area are understaffed, underfunded, under governed, and unsafe.  In many ways, large numbers of these hospitals are similar to what was once said by Ralph Nader about the Chevrolet Corvair.  They are "unsafe at any speed".  It is also sad that in the early history of what later became the ARH hospital chain, they were actually owned and operated by the United Mine Workers of America and were shining examples of how health care should be delivered to a depressed area. In explanation of my willingness to openly criticize so large and powerful a corporation, I would point my readers to these two articles on the website of the American Counseling Association which I co-authored with Dr. Heather Ambrose, Ph. D., both of which are rooted primarily in my own work in graduate school.  One of  these articles we delivered at the 2005 National Conference of The American Counseling Association and it is included as a chapter in a book from the ACA on cutting edge advances in counseling.  The other is about culturally appropriate supervision of counselors in Appalachia and is on the ACA permanent website for professionals.  Both articles are frequently cited and quoted in professional articles, books, and graduate school dissertations.  I know whereof I speak both from a personal and a professional viewpoint when I discuss healthcare in Appalachia. 

Take A Real Vacation--Go Somewhere You've Never Been

The photo above is a little bar on US 2 in Northern Wisconsin where we had a spontaneous lunch.

At about this time of year in the area of Eastern Kentucky in which I live, I see or hear people I know who are extremely excited because they are going on vacation to some spot they have been going for the last many years.  Generally, these people have never been on a real vacation to any other spot in the country.  Once in a while they say they "went somewhere else and I didn't like it" or "I went somewhere else and I had to drive all the way to get there" or "I went somewhere else and it was too expensive".  For me, the only one of those statements that has any validity whatever is "...it was too expensive".  But there are dozens of great spots to take a vacation within a reasonable distance at a reasonable price near just about anywhere anybody in America lives.  I love to see places I've never seen, meet people I've never met, do things I've never done, and have new experiences of almost any kind.  Why does anybody want to go to the very same place for a "vacation" year after year, frequently staying in the same hotel or bed and breakfast, eating meals in the same restaurants which are often other locations of the same chains they eat in at home, and often seeing the same attractions year after year?

This photo is on a tour boat in Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin. 

In the area in which I live, there are about a half dozen locations I see people visiting year after year and most of them are not places I would ever want to visit twice.  Those areas include Gatlinburg, TN;  Virginia Beach, VA;  Myrtle Beach, NC;  and Cherokee, NC.  These people come back saying how much fun they had going to Dollywood or swimming at the beach where they have been on numerous occasions.  I do not understand that kind of thinking.  Yes, I have been to Dollywood, Gatlinburg, Cherokee, and Virginia Beach, most of them one time each.  I have been to one of two of them twice.  But I have also been in thirty-one of the 50 US states and can't wait to get to the other 19.  I have been from New York state to Arizona, from South Florida to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Nogales, Mexico, and I loved nearly every minute of all those trips.  I despise going to some place I've seen a dozen times before, staying the same, now deteriorating hotel, eating in the same restaurants, and often seeing the same dull people who are stranded in the same low paying jobs.  I even see a lot of these people I am referring to who could easily afford to take a vacation anywhere they wanted to.  

This photo is at the Alamo in Texas.
 

For me, the ultimate vacation is to get in a good vehicle with my wife, and point it in a direction toward some destination I have never been.  We do usually book a place to stay every night along the route because my wife has been in a wheelchair for over 20 years and has trouble sleeping in ordinary hotel beds.  But we also often schedule little of what we are going to do on these vacations and let the route dictate what happens.  Twice on our way to visit her family in Wisconsin we have taken spontaneous, totally unplanned trips which turned out to be two of the best trips we were ever on.  Once we suddenly decided to go visit the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she went to college which is in the northwest corner of Wisconsin.  Her family have always lived about an hour north of Milwaukee in the southeast portion of the state.  We hung a left in southern Indiana and crossed into Iowa at Clinton, Iowa, and then hung a right and drove up the old US highway along the Mississippi River to Dubuque, Iowa, and into southwest Wisconsin to Platteville.  It was a great trip up the Big Muddy.  We stayed in a little motel in Clinton, Iowa, and had a great pizza for supper from a little pizzeria in that town where, most likely, many of the locals eat every day.  On the other trip to visit her father, after her mother had died, she suddenly said, somewhere in Indiana, "I've never been in Michigan.  Let's go up through Michigan, across the Upper Peninsula and south his house."  That's exactly what we did.  We drove up the western edge of Wisconsin, stopped in Grand Rapids, spent a night in Saint Ignace, Michigan, spent half a day on Mackinac Island, drove across the Upper Peninsula, bought dried fish in a little store with antique coolers just like the ones in my parents' store when I was a boy, and drove down the eastern edge of Wisconsin to her father's house.  We ate fresh cherries from a roadside stand, saw the National Park on Mackinac Island, shot some photos of some Lake Michigan lighthouses, and had a ball.  

This is with friends in Nogales, Mexico. 
 

Once in South Louisiana, when we were staying in an AirBNB in Jeffersonville, LA, we took a day and drove down an old two lane highway to the Gulf of Mexico stopping at a few little restaurants which caught our eyes along the way.  We got the best pork roast I ever ate in a little restaurant stuck between a bayou and the highway, and some of the best fried shrimp and crawfish etouffee I have ever had in another little place with gingham curtains sitting beside the highway in a little town most people never go to if they visit New Orleans or Baton Rouge.  On that same trip, we also toured the LA state capitol, saw the spot where Senator Huey Long was assassinated, and had a fine experience with the security people at the capitol which you could have only had in a southern state before gun violence and bun related domestic terrorism became rampant in America.  We had parked in a free lot on the banks of the Mississippi and walked to the capitol a block away.  I never thought a thing about having my pocket knife in my pocket and when I got to the metal detector I remembered the knife, showed it to the security people, and asked "don't you just put things like this in a box or envelope and hold them till people leave" to which they said "no, we can't do that.  But do you see those bushes at the bottom of the steps.  Just take it out there, pick out a bush, and hide it under the bush till you get done" which is what I did.  You can't have that kind of experience in Gatlinburg or Myrtle Beach.  

The photo above is sitting in the porch swing on the porch of the boyhood home of President Lyndon B. Johnson in Johnson City, TX. 
 

And the beautiful sign below was on a carpet store marquee sign in El Paso, Texas, in October 2017.  I went inside to meet the owner and thank him for speaking out and defending America.  

How Much Did You Waste On Memorial Day Flowers?

 

For all my life, I have watched the majority of people in Appalachia spend a great deal of money, often money they don't really have available for trivial spending, for flowers to decorate graves on Memorial Day.  Let me say, first and foremost, I have nothing against Memorial Day or the reasons for it.  But the waste of much needed money to decorate graves, often the graves of distant relatives, relatives the buyer never actually knew, relatives they didn't really like or get along with, is simply waste, unwise spending, and spending which never should take place. I haven't spent money on grave decoration in many years, not because I can't afford it, but because it is wasteful.  I honestly believe that my own parents and grandparents, now long dead, would tell me if they could that they would rather see me put my money to rational uses in my own family, never put flowers on their graves, and live a useful, productive, honest life in tribute to the things they taught me while they were living in the case of my parents and maternal grandparents, whom I knew, and in the case of the paternal grandparents whom I never met since they were both dead more than ten years before I was born.  

 

I have seen at least one of my siblings spend money they did not have, could not afford, and should not have spent, to decorate numerous graves every year of their life.  I am certain that sibling's children are doing the same thing.  I grew up in a large extended family in which both sets of my grandparents and my father raised large numbers of children under tough, but not totally poverty stricken circumstances.  My paternal grandparents raised ten children in a log house in the head of a hollow in Mousie, Kentucky.  They farmed, hunted, fished, and did whatever was necessary to raise those ten children and I never heard my father or any of my aunts or uncles ever say they went hungry once in their lives.  My maternal grandparents raised eight children to adulthood and lost two as small children.  They were poor but never hungry according to the stories I heard from my mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.  It took several years for my maternal grandparents to rake and scrape to save enough money to buy a small subsistence farm of their own but their children never went hungry due to the hard work of the entire family.  My father raised nine children from his two marriages and worked in the log woods, coal mines, and farmed until he got together enough money in his fifties to buy a small country store when his first wife grew too ill from an unspecified neurological disease to care for a home and the one son they still had at home.  My father remarried to my mother who had one daughter at the time and they subsequently had me and raised us both to adulthood in the country store which he built after he decided to move from his first location.  I never had a hungry day in my life.  I am certain my parents and grandparents would tell me to save my money, put it to good use in my own family, and not waste it on Memorial Day flowers for their graves.  What about your own Appalachian ancestors?  What would they say to you about Memorial Day flowers if they could?  

"Field of Vision" by Kirk Judd--Reflections On Reading His Early Poetry

It is not uncommon for me to either stumble into or deliberately locate great books from earlier times which I should have read when they were new.  "Field of Vision" by Kirk Judd has now joined that ever growing list of such books.  This was published in 1986 by Judd which was considerably after he had published poetry in numerous magazines especially in the Appalachian arena.  The book contains about forty poems and about half of  them had been previously published in a variety of magazines.  I have previously written about Kirk Judd's most recent book of poetery "My People Was Music" which contains much of his later works and some of his earlier.  I liked that book a great deal and I have to say I like "Field of Vision" even more.  It is a widely varied collection of poems covering a plethora of areas of human existence.  In some ways, it is a book of poetry by a young, vibrant, man who still has been able to avoid quite of a few of life's disappointments.  But it also contains the poems "DOA (Sparky's Song)" and "The Death of Her Son" which are about some of those great disappointments even if the latter poem discusses the experience of another, a grieving mother.  "The Death of Her Son" contains the powerful lines: 

"She felt him rise to leave

and through her tears

she saw him

and loved him

and finally

let him go."

In an entirely different vein, "Visitin' Charleston" tells the story in well written lines about taking a trip to the city to throw a drunk and eat breakfast in the bus station "...with steam comin' off your shoulders and nobody wantin' to get within ten feet".  Only  young man who has thrown such a drunk can accurately and poetically describe one.  And, of course, as I have learned from reading two of Kirk Judd's books, he must write about the great outdoors and his love for it in poems such as "Morning High Meadow" which contains the beautiful lines "hanging dropping dew to webs and silver threads and grasses green and golden".  This is a complex book of great poetry which leaves no doubt that Kirk Judd is a complex man and was complex even in those formative years in which parts of this little jewel were written.  But if you feel that you need a further recommendation for the book, simply read the back cover blurb from Pulitzer Prize Winner Gwendolyn Brooks in which she describes Kirk Judd's poetry as "...delightfully amazing and rash and impudent..." What further recommendation could you need, if you can still find a copy of this 1986 publication as I did?  

 

Where Does Appalachia Lie Geographically?

 I have thought from time to time that I should add blog posts to this blog about as many of the counties in Appalachia as I can reasonably write in the limited time I have.  Whenever I think about Appalachia, I always think in terms of the area of Central and Southern Appalachia or, as I prefer to describe it, the portion of the area which is variously called Appalachia which can be clearly identified as being a repository of the Appalachian Culture, or what is commonly called Central and Southern Appalachia, and never do I think of the greater geographic area which includes all of the Appalachian Mountains.  I also never think of Appalachia in the geographic terms which the Appalachian Regional Commission uses to designate as Appalachia.  That last area, as arbitrarily designated by the Appalachian Regional Commission, is an artificially created political designation and many counties are included in it which are not remotely Appalachian in their dominant, and sometimes even in their minority cultures.  Often those counties have been designated by the Appalachian Regional Commission and members of congress purely to enable those people to pull together enough votes in congress to pass funding bills.  Congress members love nothing better than to find ways to gain blocks of federal money for the areas which they theoretically represent.  

In Kentucky where I was raised and have lived most of my life, there is a governmentally created and funded designation, with primary objectives which are economic, called Appalachia Proud.  This name allows designated farmers, crafters, and other local producers to sell their products with the label Appalachia Proud attached to them.  In September 2019, 17 counties were added to the Appalachia Proud region in Kentucky.  Those newly designated Appalachia Proud counties range from Fleming, Robertson, and Nicholas counties in Northeastern Kentucky to Edmonson County in Western Kentucky in an area which is really much more a portion of the Midwestern United States.  I admit that I have never done any in depth cultural analysis of Edmonson County but I have ridden a horse across the county in the time when I worked for the Vision Quest Wagon Trains as the Advance Scout for the program.  In that capacity, I dealt with local landowners, public officials, and business owners on a daily basis wherever the Wagon Trains traveled and I can assure you I never saw any evidence of Appalachian Culture in Edmonson County.  I generally say that, in my professional opinion as an Appalachian scholar and writer, that the area of Central and Southern Appalachia ends in its western boundary along a line roughly equivalent to the line of Interstate 65.  If I am asked to say which county I believe is the westernmost in Central and Southern Appalachia, I generally say that I believe it is Adair County, the county seat of which is Columbia, Kentucky, the home of my alma mater Lindsey Wilson College.  

I also generally dispute the frequently expressed idea that 32 counties in Southern Ohio are in Appalachia.  I cannot think of a more convincing geographic and cultural boundary than the Ohio River.  I sometimes tell proponents of the concept of Appalachian Ohio that they should go stand in the middle of the Ohio River and convince that little puddle that it is not a cultural and geographic boundary.  I freely admit that this response generally does not please those people.  But I also freely and wholeheartedly accept the notion that Cincinnati, Ohio, doe have a sizeable population of Appalachian people living there.  But they are all migrants from Central and Southern Appalachia.  I also believe wholeheartedly that the cultural area of Appalachia does not extend farther north and east than the general area of Western Maryland.  

Yes, I know some of my readers will not like what I have said here.  That's fine with me and it's not my problem.