Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  This was not a culture on the verge of national domination. Southern culture was on life support, full of poor white trash and even poorer scrabble-road blacks and a handful of self-declared gentry whose family wealth couldn’t have bought them a midsize department store in Pittsburgh. Fifty years ago, telling people you were a Southerner was tantamount to telling people you were a failure, an oddball, or a rube.

  Then came the 1960s and the American struggle for civil rights, a fight that most of us assume the South lost. Outside agitators, thoughtful white Southerners, and determined black Southerners applied so much pressure that the Jim Crow era finally collapsed on itself. The laws changed. The lunch counters desegregated, as did the schools and office buildings—though the communities themselves did not.

  For contemporary Southerners, the struggle of the 1960s was the battle that defined North and South. The 1960s were when the Confederate flag left the Klan rallies and climbed atop state capitols, when southern instincts were hardened into ideology, and when the stereotypes, North and South, solidified.

  But the fundamental ideas of the South have become the fundamental ideas of America. The ideas that northern progressives went South to fight are now the enervating ideas of America. This is the war the South won.

  I challenge you to name one significant idea the southern states fought to maintain in the Civil Rights Movement that has not become part of the American fabric.

  The most obvious example is the most fundamental: racism. What is the core philosophy of all social life in the South? It’s the idea that race matters, that race is determinant, that race is important, that your neighbors, your employers, and your government should treat people differently based on race.

  This used to be called Jim Crow. Today, its name is Uncle Sam. It’s hard to imagine a nation more obsessed with race and ethnicity than our own. Listen in on a meeting of state legislators in New York or a group of liberal city councilpersons in Wisconsin and it sounds like a beer-hall putsch of Balkan warlords, dividing the spoils between the tribes.

  When I was hosting a talk radio show in Charlotte, North Carolina, the local superintendent of schools attacked me publicly after I pointed out that the magnet school program he supported denied children admittance based on their race. There were approximately five hundred empty desks scattered across the district, but the thousand or more children applying were the wrong color—the magnet programs they wanted were already “too white” or “too black” to accommodate them.

  “This is the same system used in schools all across the Northeast,” he insisted on WBT one day. “How could it be racist?”

  Exactly. Does anyone believe that Martin Luther King, Jr., was marching across the South to ensure that one day a black child would be kept out of a science class because there were already too many black kids in it? Sorting children in public schools based on their race was once viewed as the archetypal southern idea.

  Today, it is the American one.

  But the racism example is too easy, too obvious. The southern idea of race relations—that “race matters”—has clearly defeated the northern notion that it shouldn’t. When Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and the president of Harvard College all agree on something, we have clearly reached a national consensus.

  So let’s roll down the list. Merit? Anyone for the old northern notion of meritocracy?

  As a front-of-the-class, hand-raising bookworm, the idea of merit as a fundamental value to be celebrated is near and dear to my heart. Anyone from “off” who has moved into a small southern town has felt the Stepford wives’ sense of being out of place. There you can find lots of people with lots of the same last names working in the same place despite what appears to be a complete lack of competence.

  As a young man, I knew that half the people working in my rural public school were incompetent cousins of well-placed politicos and midlevel district employees. I lived in the South. I expected it. But if you had told me that 57 percent of the incoming teachers in the Massachusetts public school system failed an eleventh-grade-level general knowledge test—and the state’s solution was to make the test easier—then I would have been surprised. Well, guess what happened in Massachusetts in 1999…

  We’re a nation of people-persons, completely dependent on networking to overcome incompetence. We’re a total “Who’s your daddy?” society where carpetbagging political novices with names like “Kennedy” and “Clinton” are regularly elected by “elitist” Northeasterners to high public offices, while voters on the West Coast give their support to clueless celebrities without a hint of shame.

  Merit? Accomplishment? From the progressive income tax to the minimum wage, we insist that people who excel be punished for their efforts and those who fail be spared the consequences of their actions. From union-dominated public services to a limp-wristed criminal justice system, we are a nation dedicated to the Old South proposition that it’s always somebody else’s fault—especially if it’s someone we already don’t like.

  And if Northernism is the celebration of intelligence and enlightenment, then the Land of Cotton must reach all the way to Saskatchewan. The current generation of Americans is the stupidest collection of humanoid lifeforms to inhabit this continent since the first hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering Strait.

  From the idiocy of the (mostly Yankee) voters in the 2000 election debacle to the popularity of the Survivor TV series to the utter informational vacuum in which the typical American lives, the ignorance I fled in my youth has infected our entire nation. In America today, stupidity is no longer a social ill. It’s a lifestyle choice. I would call it an “alternative” lifestyle, but that would be like ACT-UP describing heterosexuality as the “alternative.”

  If you disagree, consider these facts:

  According to the most recent National Adult Literacy Survey, between 40 million and 44 million Americans are unable to read phone books, ballots, car manuals, nursery rhymes, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, the Constitution, or the directions on a medicine bottle. Another 50 million Americans recognize so few printed words that they are limited to a fourth-or fifth-grade level of reading and, therefore, have all subscribed to USA Today.

  Further survey data reveal that 42 million Americans are able to perform only the simplest mathematical operations, like adding together two multidigit numbers. Forget the infamous butterfly ballot—you could confuse the typical American with a pair of dice.

  Now, I ask you, is the idea of undisturbed ignorance a fundamentally northern or southern idea? I’m not saying there haven’t always been idiots up North—Patrick Kennedy and Barbra Streisand are your problems, not ours. What I am saying is that I always thought that-Northerners had the good sense to think they ought to be moderately intelligent and informed, while my fellow Southerners’ solution to meeting people with more information was to beat it out of them with a tire iron.

  But from coast to coast, the idea of pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is more suspect than ever. It’s no coincidence that there are virtually no world-class universities south of Charlottesville, Virginia, but the South has led the way on state-sponsored vocational and technical education. You can drive from New Orleans to Norfolk and not pass a single state-run institution that can compete with the typical northeastern prep school, but if your car breaks down on the trip, there’ll be ten mechanics with tech diplomas before you can get the hood up.

  Why? Because Southerners have largely rejected the idea of abstract intellectualism, a.k.a. “book learnin’.” Or, in the words of my uncle Teenyboy, “Boy, you got plenty of book learnin’, but you ain’t got the sense God gave a pissant!”

  The idea of “book learnin’ ” is that the kind of information you get from an active intellectual life is somehow suspect, is of less value than real learning, which is what you get from the hands-on experience of working on machines, planting crops, stump-breaking cattle, etc. What can you possibly learn from any book (except the Bi
ble, of course) that’s really worth knowing, unless it’s got photos of a car or a woman’s titties? If it’s got both, you don’t read it: You hang it on the wall of your shop.

  In the 1960s, the most popular college kids majored in the abstract fields of history, political science, or the arts, hoping to expand their minds, explore the mysteries of existence, and get laid. Today, our most elite college campuses are covered over in pre-law and business majors because the students feel the need to be utilitarian. They, too, fear the label “book learnin’” and instead want to show how their education will pay the bills. From Harvard to Stanford, everybody’s in tech school.

  And then there’s sex, a topic that, as a man who’s been married for more than a decade, I can only write about from rumor and vague recollection.

  The hallmark of southern sexuality has always been its intemperateness. The paragons of southern women were Flora and Fauna. Flora, the delicate southern flower whose gentility was ever guarded by her daddy, her Bible, or her Smith & Wesson; and Fauna, the tattooed trailer tramp who knew seventeen home cures for the clap but not the name of the guy passed out on her sofa. The southern women I panted after in my youth were either nuts or sluts. If they weren’t praying to Jesus to send them a husband in the next shipment of touring gospel singers, they were on the pool table under a pile of fraternity brothers. I couldn’t seem to connect with women who were able to maintain a grownup relationship based on engaging ideas, intellectual curiosity, mutual respect, and the occasional use of handcuffs.

  What I wanted, I always thought, was a New York romance, the kind I saw in Woody Allen movies: intelligent, sexual people whose psychoses were fascinating but whose behavior didn’t fall into boorishness. Of course, that was before Mr. Allen—the ultimate Yankee—went southern and started screwing his children.

  And have you seen HBO’s Sex and the City? What is this show except for a collection of well-coiffed trailer trash moved to Manhattan? What amazes me about this show isn’t the shocking sexual content, it’s that I knew of redneck women engaged in all these bizarre, self-destructive behaviors twenty years ago! Who knew that America’s model for modern womanhood would be the Tammy Faye look-alike I heard about in high school who had to be rescued from her mobile home after she got a household appliance irretrievably lodged in her nether regions?

  Every day, in every way, my country is getting more and more redneck. All through high school, I dreamed of getting away from a society where stupidity was celebrated, where achievement was resented, where intelligence was suspect, and where the best way to spend time without taking your pants off was watchin’ NASCAR.

  Today, I find myself surrounded by the cast of a Fer-rely Brothers movie, waiting in line for an ill-educated dolt to screw up my next consumer transaction in a country where, according to the Wall Street Journal, the number one most watched sport is now… NASCAR!

  I can’t buy a break.

  It is simply beyond debate that America is today a more southern nation than it has been at any time since the Civil War. Those of you who are resisting this obvious truth are doing so by hiding behind the thin reed of exceptionalism. You know some smart Southerner or some dumb Northerner or you saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and its overt racist stupidity or you had the most moving moment of your life at a homosexual marriage of a mixed-race couple at an interdenominational church in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

  And, of course, you’re right that these exceptions exist. That’s my point. They stand out for being exceptional. They don’t fit the norm of North and South that you and I both recognize.

  The insipid ideas that southern whites fought for during the civil rights struggle—that it’s okay to stay stupid, that it’s easier to blame those who point out that you’re wrong than it is to figure out how to do what’s right, and, of course, the right to treat people differently based on race—these ideas have overwhelmed by force the principles of merit, intelligence, self-criticism, and antiracism that the North once stood for. We are truly one nation, one giant Redneck Nation.

  I wanted out of the South because it was obsessed with race and ethnic identity, so I went to New York—where a city councilwoman was almost forced to resign after making a joke about Irish people drinking beer on St. Patrick’s Day. The punch line: The woman was Irish.

  I was tired of always being asked, “Who’s your daddy?” I wanted to go someplace where merit counted for more than who you know. So I went to Chicago, a city run entirely on a “who you know” system, down to getting a garbage can from your local alderman.

  The irrational fervor of southern evangelicalism drove me into the camp of the infidels, so I went to California and hung out with crystal-wearing vegan spiritualists, one of whom (I swear it’s true) told me her cat could say “mommy.”

  I thought if I heard Charlie Daniels yowling another redneck anthem about killing all the foreigners, I would join the French foreign legion and volunteer to invade Nashville. So I went to Omaha and watched men spit artful designs of brown tobacco juice out the window of their pickup trucks while sitting at a stoplight.

  Journalists like Peter Applebaum who write that the South is becoming ever more like the rest of America have it completely backward. They see Sun Belt growth, snowbird migration, and New South sprawl and conclude that population growth and immigration are making a South that is “more like America.”

  Wrong. It’s America that is ever more like the South. I’m not talking about the political trends: southern presidents, Senate leaders, and Speakers of the House. That’s not about culture—that’s demographics.

  Does it ever occur to anyone why, if entire boroughs of New York are emigrating southward, the South has gotten more Republican and conservative in the past ten years? Why not the opposite? Why aren’t northern Democrats turning the tide in the South, at least in places like Florida, which, as of this writing, has a GOP governor and state legislature?

  It’s because the folks from Jersey and Ohio were already rednecks when they got here. By that I mean that they already held the essential southern principles of race, irrationality, fear of merit, and a love for the insipid.

  That’s what I mean by Redneck Nation. I’m not arguing that America is turning into a nation of banjo pickers and cousin kissers. I’m not saying that the U.S. is suddenly ready to sing “Dixie” or convert en masse to mustard-based barbecue.

  What I see—and what seems to be undeniably true—is that the fundamental ideas of the South forty years ago are now the fundamental ideas of America. It’s as if the Freedom Riders of the 1960s were all infected by trichinosis and Dixietosis and went back to Minneapolis and Manhattan, inadvertently spreading an epidemic.

  Those beer-bellied rednecks have been telling me all my life that the South was gonna do it again, and I’ll be damned if they weren’t right. The South did win the war. But Americans are just too dumb to know it.

  3

  Where Is the South?

  When I was covering the 2000 presidential election for National Review Online, I wrote: “The only state south of Iowa Dukakis won was the Democratic stronghold of West Virginia—a state no true Southerner will claim.”

  This was a mistake.

  One offhand comment inspired a torrent of indignant responses. West-by-God-Virginians wrote to insist that they were members in good standing of the Confederacy. Haughty Virginians asserted just as strongly that their cousins from the mountains are Yankee turncoats.

  “Someone should tell Michael Graham that West Virginia’s most famous son, Stonewall Jackson, was from West Virginia,” wrote one southern loyalist from the land of Senator Robert Byrd.

  Oh, yeah? “I’m sure General Stonewall would prefer to say he was from western Virginia, since the state of West Virginia wasn’t created by the Yankees until after his death,” was one Virginian’s reply.

  For Southerners, as for the Good Lord, a thousand years is but the blink of an eye.

  So where is the South? In their definitive work 100
1 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed offer several definitions:

  Below the Mason-Dixon line, which is essentially the Maryland-Pennsylvania border

  The official Bureau of the Census definition, which includes Maryland, Delaware, and Oklahoma, but not Missouri (confirming for people everywhere that the federal government is, in fact, run by morons)

  The states of the old Confederacy, a definition that overlooks the Civil War schizophrenia of Missouri, Kentucky, and the Oklahoma territory

  But as any Southerner will tell you, maps don’t mean grits when it comes to where the South really is. Indeed, John Shelton Reed argues that a state is southern if the people who live there think it is. For example, Oklahomans consistently tell pollsters that they are southern and their communities are in the South, even though the typical cowboy wouldn’t know a mint julep if you poured it over his Stetson.

  Or take the peculiar case of the once and perhaps future presidential candidate Al Gore, who repeatedly claimed to be a “true son of the South,” which reinforced the Southerners’ belief that everyone from Washington, D.C., is a liar.

  Despite its location on the Potomac, few Southerners today claim the nation’s capital. John Shelton Reed notes that, before World War II, Washington had the society and spirit (and segregation) of a traditional southern city. It has since become a “company town for the federal government,” and given the South’s contrarian relationship with the national government since, well, 1860, D.C. is now solidly enveloped by the great Yankee Empire.