Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  Not surprisingly, Al Gore did very well in D.C.

  But does anyone in America even acknowledge the North/South boundary anymore? Does geography or regionalism even matter? The idea is often dismissed by academics and political observers who see a bland and blanched America. They are wrong.

  For those who insist that we live in a homogenized, supersized America whose significant regional differences have been washed away beneath a tidal wave of Coca-Cola and cable TV, I offer the following from Northerner Mark Strauss:

  Imagine then, for just a moment, the North as its own nation. Trent Lott and Dick Armey would be foreigners. We would no longer be subjected to round-the-clock TV commercials for Dale Earnhardt commemorative plates. [A] new liberal majority would be able to pass tougher gun laws and legislation barring discrimination against gays and lesbians…. We could implement “Plan South Carolina” to convince tobacco growers to develop alternative crops. Northern observers could ensure democracy in Florida polling places. Peace Corps volunteers could teach… Southerners to pull themselves out of poverty and illiteracy while simultaneously promoting a better understanding of American values.

  When these words appeared in Slate.com, Mark Strauss was senior editor at the prestigious but unread Foreign Policy magazine. His essay, “Let’s Ditch Dixie: The Case for Northern Secession,” made the funny, satirical, and painfully truthful argument that the economic, cultural, and political standing of America’s northern states would be immediately improved if Southerners were granted the independence we fought for in 1861. Should we Southerners be so ungracious as to decline this belated but generous offer of reverse secession, Strauss recommends that his fellow Yankees give us the boot. Among Mr. Strauss’s more compelling facts:

  More people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in all of the Northeast and Midwest combined.

  You are three times more likely to be murdered in parts of Dixie than anywhere in New England.

  The South has the highest infant-mortality rate, the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, and the lowest SAT scores.

  The Confederate states rail against the tyranny of big government, yet they are the largest recipients of federal tax dollars.

  Mr. Strauss’s facts were straight, his logic impeccable, and his humor dead-on:

  Economically and socially, secession will be painless for the North. The South is a gangrenous limb that should have been lopped off decades ago. They steal business away from the North the same way that developing countries worldwide have always attracted foreign direct investment: through low wages and anti-union laws. The flow of guns into America’s Northern cities stems largely from Southern states. The tobacco grown by ol’ Dixie kills nearly a half-million Americans each year.

  In fact, the only obvious downside is that the South would almost certainly insist on keeping the 3,150 nuclear warheads that are scattered throughout Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia. Maybe we could strike a deal to get those nukes back, the same way Russia did with Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke up. If not, then perhaps national missile defense might not be such a bad idea after all.

  I enjoyed the article so much that I called Mr. Strauss’s office to arrange an interview, but I barely got the request out before his assistant on the other end of the phone shut me down.

  “Mr. Strauss has no further comment on this topic. His article was intended as satire.” Click.

  Strauss’s assistant had hung up on me. For a moment I thought, “Great, another rude New Yorker.” But something in the tone of the beleaguered voice at the other end of the line sounded… familiar. I jumped on the Internet, checked a few Confederista websites, and, just as I suspected, Mark Strauss was under siege, pinned down by incoming fire from the last soldiers of the Lost Cause.

  Southern partisans were outraged by Strauss’s comments and thrilled that a Yankee had finally admitted what Southerners long suspected: Y’all want to get rid of us at the first opportunity. So the tireless, obsessed Confederateflag wavers who make up the Confederacy of Dunces were letting Strauss have it with both barrels.

  Is there any man more pathetic than the Southerner still defending the Confederacy? The Confederista spends his days calling radio talk shows, arguing that the “War of Northern Aggression” had nothing to do with slavery; he drifts to sleep each night dreaming of taking Washington after the Second Manassas; occasionally he can be found dressed in a hot, scratchy uniform of gray wool, bathing in the re-created glory of some minor victory snatched from a collective past dominated by crushing defeat.

  Satire? Satire expended upon the contemporary male Confederate has the same effect as a sexual advance from another man: It’s got to be pretty obvious for him to realize what’s going on, and when he does, he’s not likely to appreciate it.

  What these baleful Southerners wish to return to, I cannot say. Who wants to go back to feudalism, where a handful of feudal lords prospered from the toil of the masses of poor, uneducated serfs?

  Alas, the modern Confederistas are like California New Agers who believe in reincarnation: They were all Napoleons in a previous life.

  One of America’s most prominent Confederistas is Michael Hill, head whackjob at the loony League of the South—an obscure organization which has already declared southern cultural independence. After the Strauss piece was published, Hill jumped at the chance to defend his “southron” heritage. He promptly published a rebuttal claiming that all the benefit of secession would be accrued to the South: “A Southern nation composed of only the eleven States of the former Confederacy would have 74 million people, the thirteenth most populous in the world.” Its economy, Hill noted, would be the world’s fourth largest, behind the (newly shrunken) U.S. of A., Japan, and Germany.

  “God willing, after [secession] we Southerners will be busy enjoying the sweet fruits of a free and prosperous republic,” Professor Hill wrote, “founded on private property, free association, fair trade, sound money, low taxes, limited regulation of business, equal justice before the law, secure border, gun rights, protection of the unborn, and an absence of entangling foreign alliances. In other words, Mr. Strauss, we’ll have a civilization and you will not.”

  It’s just a suggestion, but somebody may want to double the guard at Fort Sumter.

  What this tempest in an iced tea glass reveals is the strength of the idea of North and South, and the opposition of attitudes they represent. The South exists strongly enough for Northerners to mock it and Southerners to defend it. Its ideology is clear enough for Mark Strauss to fear it and Professor Hill to advance it as superior. The differentiation of the two cultures, North and South, is so apparent to all observers that they can be analyzed and debated.

  And, as the great Southerner Fred Nietzsche observed, cultures cannot coexist. They collide. They struggle, they battle, until one has been vanquished and the other has triumphed. So we come back to the question: Who won? Which of these two cultures dominates America as a whole? Is Southernism limited to the lower right-hand corner of the map, or does the Confederate banner (or the ideas it represents, at least) fly from sea to shining sea?

  To find out, let’s take the Where Are You? quiz. Please answer each of the following questions with the word “North” or “South”:

  You take your young son to enroll at the local public school. The principal refuses to enroll him because he’s black. Where are you?

  You live in a place where 80 percent of your neighbors will read just one book (or less) this year. Where are you?

  You are outraged by an action taken by a Republican politician. You head to the copy shop, whip up some fliers denouncing the lout, and head to the local public park to pass them out. You’re arrested by the sheriff, who tells you that your town doesn’t allow any disruptive political speech in public. Where are you?

  You turn on your TV and the most popular show of the week is a boxing match between has-been sit-com celebrities. The number one CD at the music store fea
tures the illiterate rantings of gold-toothed wanna-be pimps looking for yet another word that rhymes with “bitch.” Where are you?

  Your local newspaper reports that one-third of all the children in your area are born out of wedlock. But it won’t matter, since 40 percent won’t be able to read their own birth certificates. Where are you?

  Since you’re smart enough to be reading a book, you’ve figured out that all of these incidents come from the North. More accurately, they apply to America as a whole. The stereotype of a racist, illiterate, well-censored collection of tasteless dopes has expanded beyond the confines of the Confederacy and encompasses the entire nation.

  While there is a clear difference between Northernism and Southernism, there is no significant difference between America’s North and South. Northern liberalism, in its modern form, is indistinguishable from the Old South ideology that Northerners fear and mock.

  After reading the debate between Strauss and Hill, what is the real difference between the two sides? Yes, Dr. Hill is right that the South could exist as a separate nation, and yes, Mark Strauss is correct in noting that the per capita wealth, health, and intelligence of the remaining United States would increase immediately. But the supposedly conflicting sides actually represent nothing more than a balance of power between different applications of the same ideas.

  The Confederistas would love to abandon the confines of the U.S. Constitution and the protection of individual liberties found therein. In fact, these liberties are viewed by Southerners as mere annoyances.

  But with the exception of recently deceased Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms (What? They’re not dead? Check again, please!), who wants a resegregated South where the rights to assemble and speak are trumped by the majority’s right to stomp “outside agitators”? Certainly not the 30 percent of the South’s population that is non-white, not to mention the one in seven Southerners born outside the South.

  On the other hand, Mr. Strauss’s argument for a Southfree U.S.A. is just as repellent. In his vision of America, he celebrates the potential triumph of central government, of “a new liberal majority” that could get to work gutting the Second Amendment without a bunch of yay-hoos complainin’ about it. We could end all this nonsense about the government having to compensate you for turning your private property into a protected habitat for the spotted snail darter. And we could finally pass some real hate-crime laws—you know, the kind that throw people into jail for expression of any non-state-approved opinion.

  What smug Northerners like Mr. Strauss cannot see is that they are advocating the same fundamental principals as their southern counterparts. Northern liberals merely apply these principles from a different angle. Is Strauss saying that dumping the South would also let him dump the Second Amendment of the Constitution? How is that significantly different from his belief that evangelical Southerners are constantly trying to dump the First?

  Would a Northern America adjust each citizen’s legal status based on his skin color or whom he has sex with? Gee, the South was doing that for years until the North intervened.

  Tired of those NASCAR ads on TV, Mark? You need to talk to the folks in New Hampshire and Chicago, where they are building racetracks as fast as they can.

  And if it’s southern illiteracy he fears, he should drop in on the public schools in Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—perhaps the worst in the nation. Good northern liberals are the most impassioned opponents of an educational voucher system that would let the children in these schools escape to the private sector tomorrow. Perhaps it’s because, like the bigoted Southerners they look down on, they don’t want their kids going to school with poor black kids, either.

  In other words, the difference between Mr. Strauss’s North and Dr. Hill’s South is one of mere geography. Same ideas, applied from a different direction. And nearly all those are ideas happily supplied by the solid American South.

  4

  North vs. South: A Primer

  In the South, white people hate black people and black people hate white people. In New York, it’s the other way around.

  • In the South, race is the single most important public issue in people’s daily lives. In New York, ethnicity is the single most important issue. Which means, in South Carolina, people can hate each other on sight, but in New York, they have to wait until they’ve been properly introduced and know each other’s last names.

  • In New York, my support of the Second Amendment and opposition to legalized abortion made me a right-wing zealot. Down South, my support of free speech and opposition to the death penalty make me a commie.

  • Southerners understand that the War Between the States was caused by many factors and that slavery was one of the complex issues that must be looked at in the political, economic, and social contexts of the time, which means it is difficult, if not impossible, to say what one issue caused the war. In New York, nobody cares who started the damn war. We won. You lost. Get over it.

  • In New York, the fact that I used to go hunting—with an actual gun—made me a Neanderthal. In the South, the fact that I stopped makes me a homosexual.

  • In New York, I was expected to be impressed by the local Italian cuisine, which was often one fistful of garlic away from Chef Boyardee. If I didn’t say that a mediocre meal of shells and sauce was molto bene at least five times, my hosts were insulted.

  • In South Carolina, people aren’t expecting you to be impressed by the food, they just expect you to eat it. If I said, “Man, this is great,” more than once over a plate of to-die-for chicken and mouthwatering homemade dumplings, my host would assume I was there to sell something.

  • In New York, the assumption was that, in any conversation not involving frog gigging, any Southerner was the dumbest person at the table. If I was sitting in the backseat looking at a map and telling a New Yorker which Manhattan street to turn on, he would ignore me, take the wrong turn, then scream profanity at me because I got him lost.

  • In the South, the assumption is that, in any conversation, we Southerners are the dumbest people at the table. That’s why we don’t want to hear how you do it up North. Thanks for the help, but we’d rather screw it up ourselves.

  • New Yorkers pretend they’ve read books they haven’t. Southerners deny reading the ones they have.

  • Down South, it’s impossible for a person to be too quiet. In New York, it’s impossible to be too loud.

  • In the South, you’re a racist if you send your kids to an all-white private school instead of the integrated public one. In New York, you’re a racist if you support vouchers, which would allow black kids to attend the same all-white private schools your kids do.

  • In southern restaurants, there is no such thing as “too much.” The same is true in New York, except it applies to the price.

  • Southerners consider Woody Allen a sick, perverted weirdo who makes movies for New York Jews. In New York, nobody ever calls Woody a Jew, but they don’t call him a pervert, either.

  • Down South, a great Saturday means you never had to go inside. In New York, it means you never had to go out.

  • In the South, locals tend to resent people they meet who are smarter than they are. In New York, locals never meet anybody who is.

  • In New York, the Yankees can win back-to-back World Series, and the fans say, “Yeah, but whaddaya bums gonna do this year?” In South Carolina, the local college team can lose twenty-one straight games, and the fans say, “Yeah, but remember back in ’89 when they almost had a shot at the national title?”

  • In the South, it’s okay for a kid to handle a gun, but giving him a condom might inspire inappropriate behavior. In New York, condoms are in middle-school vending machines, but dodgeball is banned from playgrounds for inspiring inappropriate behavior.

  • In the South, a woman who stays home with her children while her husband works is called a hero. In New York, a woman who stays home to raise children is called a nanny.

  • In N
ew York, the most commonly heard phrases at showings of foreign films are “He’s no Fellini” and “It breathes with ironic pathos.” Down South, the most commonly heard phrases are “Subtitles? What’s that?” and “Baby, you ever bring me to another one a these readin’ pictures, I’m gonna whup you.”

  5

  Rednecks and White Whine

  The Southerner who is chiefly heard from is apparently all toes; one cannot have commerce with him without stepping on them. Thus he protests hysterically every time northern opinion is intruded into his consideration of his problems, and northern opinion, so often called to book, now prudently keeps out. The result is that the Southerner struggles alone, and that he goes steadily from bad to worse.

  —H.L. Mencken

  Meet Fudgie, a symbol of our new All-Redneck Nation.

  Fudgie, a fifty-two-year-old retired baker, is from Ohio, not down South. He’s a proud member of the Independent Bikers’ Association, Cincinnati chapter. That’s “biker” as in Harley, not Schwinn; cycling is an archetypically northern activity. In the South, real men don’t ride anything that can’t be floored, gunned, or whipped—which may explain the condition of our women.

  So how did Fudgie—a.k.a. Carl Campbell—come to represent the newly southern America? It’s not because he rides a Harley, an honorable avocation on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. And it’s not because he weighs more than three hundred pounds, though we Southerners do like a man with a figure. No, Fudgie and his biker buddies became true soldiers of the Confederacy when they bravely rode their hogs into the nearest courtroom and burst into tears.

  The motorcycled members of Ohio’s citizenry have officially claimed victim status. They are beset by antibiker discrimination, they claim. Restaurants shun them, bars ban them, and pedestrians fear them. And, the bikers say, it’s starting to hurt their feelings.