Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  And this guy is an “anti-racist”? I’d hate to see what you have to do in the papers these days to become a racist. What he and his fellow faux liberals want me to do is exactly the same thing my fellow Southerners tried to get me to do the entire time I was growing up: become a proud member of the white race.

  It is a shame we lack the technology to send the good doctor Hitchcock back to the civil rights era so he could explain to the liberals of the day why the whites agitating for “white identity” in “white citizens’ committees” were right. Think of all the time and trouble it would have saved America.

  Yes, Hitchcock opposes white supremacy, but the rest of the southern agenda is his—namely, white differentiation, a splintered, racially conscious society of segregated ethnic groups, all very self-aware and ever divided.

  I remember once in high school an indignant classmate angered by some comment I made insulting to rednecks asked, “Aren’t you proud to be white?” I was taken aback because, quite honestly, it had never occurred to me that I ought to be. Later, as a stand-up comedian, I got into an argument with a black comedian about why every white person should be ashamed of his race. Once again, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

  Just recently, a family member who had her Irish up (literally) over the politics of moving the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol groused at me, “I’m proud to be part Irish, aren’t you?” In fact, I hadn’t known until then that I was part Irish. But the answer was again no.

  Why would I be proud of my pigment? Where is the joy in the gene pool? Why would I believe I had some significant bond with a stranger merely because we’re both pale, vulnerable to skin cancer, and really bad dancers?

  Instead of creating a community of color, as the “white studies” movement hopes to do, why can’t we stick with a community of ideas? I am a proud member of that community. It’s called America. Anyone who can grasp, agree with, and defend the ideas of liberty, equality, and justice that our nation was founded on (and continues to seek imperfectly many years later) can be an American.

  And being an American is, for me, sufficient. At times, it almost seems a luxury.

  On the other hand, it’s been my experience that people who are the most focused on their group identity are least invested in our shared national interest. Right after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I got an outrageous, angering e-mail from a diehard Confederista celebrating the fact that the terrorist attacks had occurred up North and not in his “southern homeland.”

  At the same time, support for the war against terror was weaker among black Americans than among any other ethnic group—including Arabs. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, one in three black Americans was either opposed to the war against Al Qaeda or undecided. Among white Americans, fewer than one in five withheld their support.

  The Confederate-flag wavers and militant black Americans may despise each other, but they have an important common trait: a divided loyalty to the United States. One states it as “American by birth, southern by the grace of God,” and the other reveals it in his self-identity: “African,” then “American.”

  Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, for example, the president of the Durham, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP announced that the attacks against America “were not an attack on freedom,” since America is not a free country. “Those black males who make it back home alive from war are likely to come home and be discriminated against by the [very] people whose businesses were headquartered in the World Trade Center,” Curtis Gate-wood said. The national NAACP denounced him for these comments, but the local chapter supported him.

  About that same time, the infamous “Florida firefighter flag” flap occurred in which three firefighters announced their opposition to riding on fire trucks draped in American flags honoring the World Trade Center fallen. While the story was wildly misreported at the time, the fundamental facts were that three Americans—black, politically engaged firefighters—voiced their opposition to the flag as a symbol because, according to one of the firefighters, “it represents a nation of oppression,” it is not a symbol of justice, and “because America hasn’t apologized for slavery.”

  This was one week—just one week—after the horrific pictures of the World Trade Center collapse and the deaths of more than 340 of their fellow firefighters. Think of the strength of your opposition to the American flag and your ambivalence toward your fellow Americans for you to stand up that week and say, “I won’t honor the fallen by flying this flag today.”

  This is an inevitable consequence of southern-style racism, including the “good” kind.

  Spend a Memorial Day weekend in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the original Confederate Memorial Day is still observed, not the Yankee one, and you’ll see it there, too. Recall the words of John C. Calhoun, the great white southern hope himself: “Union—next to our liberty, most dear.” That liberty was the freedom of the South to maintain the slave economy and, if necessary, bail out of the Constitution.

  Southerners, especially southern whites, are always ready for a scrap, and we honor and admire military service more than most Americans. But there is at our core, and solidly in our southern character, an ambivalence about our national government and identity. We’re Southerners, by God, and, oh sure, we’re Americans, too. But it is our southern identity that provides our passion.

  Northernism was the rejection of the “American by birth, southern by the grace of God” mentality. Northernism sought to drag the South into the American whole, at least in the realm of ideas: a color-blind society seeking one-size-fits-all justice pursued through powerful ideas that are greater than any sectional or ethnic consideration.

  Today, no idea is more powerful in the public sphere than that of race. Just as it did in the pre-Civil War South and the Jim Crow era after that, group identity and race obsession have trumped all else. Reason, rationality, not even love of country can overcome them.

  And what kind of country is this where race triumphs over all? It is America, the Redneck Nation.

  8

  Without Merit

  Any man can bear injustice. What stings is justice.

  —H. L. Mencken

  One of the reasons I left the South was to go somewhere I could get fired.

  And in the American South, it is nearly impossible to be declared too stupid to keep a job. The typical Southerner might get fired for showing up drunk, for leaving work early, for slipping a hand in the till or under the boss’s daughter’s sweater. But he won’t get fired merely for being intellectually incapable of completing his assigned duties.

  Imagine an entire country run by the Department of Motor Vehicles and you get the idea.

  I mention the DMV for two reasons: It is a branch of government roundly agreed upon to be the acme of ineptitude; and it is the only branch of democracy I know of that has proven concretely that government workers can’t handle shit.

  Literally.

  The proof can be found on the floor and furnishings of a South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles office near Spartanburg. The story began in the fall of 2001 when an elderly man showed up at the DMV to get a new driver’s license. After he and his daughter stood in line for about an hour, the gentleman proceeded to have a bowel movement in the middle of the DMV.

  The man, it turned out, suffered from incontinence. Soon, the hundred or so people waiting in line began suffering, too. There was an unpleasant odor in the air and telltale droppings on the carpet. Apparently this gentleman was too embarrassed to go to the store and buy a bag of Depends, but not too embarrassed to take a dump in a roomful of angry strangers waiting to renew their tags.

  Some people gagged. Others left the building in disgust. Something had to be done, and, according to David Burgis, deputy director in charge of South Carolina’s DMV offices, immediate action was taken. The DMV official on site asked the daughter to take her father to the rest room a
nd clean things up. But because the DMV would not guarantee their place in line, she refused. So the official, faced with nauseated taxpayers and numerous, obvious health code violations, did what any good state employee would do: He walked back to his office and sheepishly closed the door behind him.

  As a result of this brilliant crisis-management strategy, the old man and the feces continued to make their way through the line for another hour, dropping excess nitrogen in their wake. Which meant that every taxpaying citizen who walked into the DMV offices for the rest of the day also had to walk through another person’s poop to do their business (pardon the pun) with the state government.

  Now, don’t get the idea that these state employees did nothing at all as their customers tiptoed through this manure minefield. After the incontinent-yet-legally-permitted-to-drive-heavy-machinery gentleman left, “DMV workers changed the line configuration and taped off a chair where the man had been sitting so other customers could avoid the fecal matter the man spread over several areas of the room,” according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Other employees helpfully suggested that folks getting their driver’s license photos should “watch where you step.”

  Two and a half hours later when the DMV office closed for the day, the poop was all still there. These government workers never cleaned it up. Ever. It wasn’t until the janitorial service showed up that the mess was finally handled.

  Two and a half hours of shit. Two and a half hours of paid employees watching citizens stepping around shit. Two and a half hours of a senior manager not doing shit. But would you care to guess how many of the state employees involved were fired?

  None. Zero. Zippo. Nada. Not only was there not a summary execution, but commendations were handed out. The boss, Mr. Burgis, went out of his way to tell the media that his workers had done nothing wrong.

  “You can’t keep someone from getting a driver’s license for incontinence,” Burgis insisted, missing the obvious point that this old man’s incontinence kept any number of nauseated and disgusted customers from getting theirs. And folks—these government workers aren’t even unionized.

  Now, think for a moment what it must be like for the one competent person (if he exists) at this DMV office. He shows up for work focused, alert, and ready to excel. He wants to perform well and he wants his performance to matter. He would like to think that there are benefits to be earned and punishments to be avoided based on his merits as an employee. Instead, he discovers that it doesn’t matter if he throws his customers’ car registration into the nearest open septic tank, he’ll still have a job.

  That’s the sinking feeling I’ve known so many times as a Southerner, and it is the part of the Mason-Dixon mindset I find hardest to bear. As a radio talk show host down South, I would repeatedly point out abject, obvious failures by the people we citizens pay to serve us, but instead of hearing, “You’re right, Michael! These folks need to shape up or ship out,” most listeners suggest that I’m the problem.

  “Why you always got to be negative?” one caller asked. “Every day I hear you complaining about how schools are so bad and the government is so bad, and there’s all this racism—if you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?” When I asked the caller if he thought I was wrong, if my complaints were invalid, he said that he thought I was pretty much right on. “But you don’t have to talk about it.” In other words, our schools are run by idiots, our lawmakers are buffoons, we’re surrounded by wanna-be Klan members… and I’m the problem.

  I have been forced to conclude that, next to miscegenation and interracial marriage, the most fear-inspiring idea in the South is that people should get what they deserve. Perhaps Southerners have an inferiority complex that causes us to quietly accept lousy treatment at the hands of others. It could be that we think second-rate is all we deserve. Then again, it could be an unspoken contract of Mutually Assured Destruction invoked at every customer service counter: I will pretend not to notice that you can’t make change, and you agree to pretend not to notice that it took me twenty minutes to order a cheeseburger.

  Whatever the cause, Southerners simply will not accept merit as a cultural value. If Karl Marx had dropped “each according to his ability” and stuck with “each according to his need,” the capital of the Confederacy would be Havana, Cuba.

  Our Confederate Communist Manifesto would be sprinkled with ideological phrases like “Who’s your daddy?” and “He’s good people” and “You ain’t from around here, are you?” The social and political system in the South rewards overachievement in the “who you know” category at the expense of those who’ve invested long hours in the “what you know” department. The notion that incompetence or lack of initiative should impact negatively on one’s life is as foreign a concept in the southern states as free love or public atheism.

  I got my first inkling of this anti-merit attitude when I showed up for second grade at Pelion Elementary School. I was reading at the fourth-grade level (thanks to my one year in Los Angeles public schools) and was immediately identified as a problem student. How was this a problem? It turned out that, in order to award passing grades to the larvae of local prominentos, the school system used grading curves so extreme they would make Dolly Parton blush.

  It was a useless enterprise. The dropout rate in South Carolina was above 50 percent at the time, and the South still has the lowest public school completion rate in America. And it was annoying to the handful of us who would blow off the B. J. and the Bear marathon the night before a test and blow the curve.

  I tried to point out to one teacher that giving a passing grade to people who knew less than 50 percent of the material meant that, in her own opinion, half the stuff she was teaching us wasn’t worth knowing. This was greeted by shouts of anger from the other students: “Shut up, Yankeeboy! You’re still gettin’ your A, whadda you care about the rest of us?”

  I had violated one of the DMV rules of southern culture: Never acknowledge that someone else sucks. It won’t matter how stupid we are as long as we agree to be stupid in the same way.

  A-SPERM-ATIVE ACTION

  Just in case I thought the rejection of meritocracy was merely the opinion of ignorant schoolkids, there was U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond.

  Of course, I’m not going to speak negatively of Strom Thurmond. As a Southerner and a South Carolinian, I am bound by oath and office to love Strom. He’s seen so much history being made on the floor of the Senate—the Clinton impeachment, the Civil Rights Act, the stabbing of Julius Caesar—and he’s an amazing physical specimen. Did you know that before he became a senator, Strom Thurmond participated in the Normandy invasion? Yep, he was there, along the Saxon line in 1066…

  Seriously, though, it is a little-known fact that Strom Thurmond participated in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. In fact, he was the oldest American to take part in the attack. That’s right: Sixty years ago he was already the oldest guy in the room.

  When Strom Thurmond turned forty-four, he married a twenty-two-year-old. Miss South Carolina beauty pageant contestant. When Strom Thurmond turned sixty-six, he married a twenty-two-year-old Miss South Carolina pageant contestant.

  When Strom Thurmond turned eighty-eight…. nobody wanted to be Miss South Carolina. They had to cancel the entire contest.

  It’s easy to mock Strom Thurmond for having run for president in 1948 on a platform of keeping the Negro “out of our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation.” It’s easy to mock Strom Thurmond for saying thirty years later that “I have done more for black people than any other person in the nation, North or South.” It’s easy to mock Strom Thurmond for insisting on running for a seventh term at the age of eighty-eight and an eighth term at the age of ninety-four, when his largest campaign contributors were funeral homes and the corporate manufacturers of Depends undergarments.

  It’s easy to mock Strom Thurmond… but down South, nobody does.

  Okay, I do. But the reaction of my fellow South Carolinians
is violently negative. Everybody votes for Ol’ Strom. Just don’t ask them why.

  A political campaign is supposed to be an argument about what is best for you, the voter. “Elect me,” the candidates claim, “and I will make you richer, happier, stronger, faster.” For twenty years, it has been impossible to make such an argument for voting for Strom Thurmond, and for twenty years, my fellow South Carolinians did it, anyway.

  In his last two elections, it was impossible for the Thurmond camp to argue that their candidate was going to do anything about crime or taxes or teenage pregnancy (well, actually…) because it was impossible to argue he was going to do anything at all.

  They were left with campaign slogans like: “Strom Thurmond: Getting Out Of Bed For Over 98% of a Century!” Or “Strom: He’ll PROBABLY Show Up!”

  It’s the ultimate political strategy: presumed incompetence. And it worked.

  Like the drunkard stumbling toward his waiting car or the secretary pulling into the parking space outside her married boss’s motel room, the last thing Southerners wanted to discuss was whether or not what they were doing made sense. It didn’t matter if Strom was capable of doing the job. They were going to vote for Thurmond even if they had to follow him to the graveyard to do it.

  The exclamation point on this telling example of southern-style “meritocracy” in action was when Senator Thurmond’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Strom Thurmond, Jr., was appointed South Carolina’s U.S. attorney. Lil’ Strom, as he is affectionately known, had been out of law school for less than three years when he was nominated for the job. When asked about his experience in prosecuting federal law (he had none), Lil’ Strom could only point to the seven cases he had tried as an assistant county prosecutor. His biggest? Felony shoplifting.