Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  After the Twin Towers fell, many Americans were upset to learn that hundreds of thousands of Muslims live in America, as residents and citizens, but feel no loyalty to the idea of America. They send their children to schools like the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Maryland, where kids learn that the greatest government is an Islamic government and that democracy should only be tolerated, not celebrated.

  In an interview with the Washington Post, one Muslim seventh grader asked, “What does it really mean to be an American? Being American is just being born in this country.” Another Muslim Community School student added, “If I had to choose sides, I’d stay with being Muslim. Being an American means nothing to me. I’m not even proud of telling my cousins in Pakistan that I’m American.”

  This school has 150 students, mostly from middle-class and affluent families. Their parents are educated and enjoying the liberty and opportunity of America. And they are paying good money for their children to learn that this isn’t their country.

  How fascinating it is that these academics have been around for years but until the terrorist attacks of 2001, nobody noticed. Mullahs and imams have been preaching divided loyalties, supporting murderous fatwas, and sending millions of dollars to terrorist organizations abroad like Hamas and Hezbollah. But until 9/11, this radically anti-Western culture, active right in our communities, never caught our attention.

  Five toothless goobers get together in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and rant about establishing a white Christian nation and it’s a full episode of 20/20, but hundreds of thousands of Muslims gather each week to discuss the proper context in which to kill the infidels, and it doesn’t even make the Metro section of the New York Times.

  I’m not making the pathetic “The only group you’re allowed to hate is the straight, white Christian male” argument. I’m glad to see the media hammer fall every time the pointy, empty head of the KKK pops up. But how did we end up with an America so attuned to divisive ideas that calls for tax cuts are denounced on the floor of Congress as racist “code words” by Congressman Charles Rangel of New York, but a mosque full of Muslims can openly support terrorists who target Israelis and nobody notices?

  It’s easy, once you buy the southern notion of cultural exceptionalism, which is, of course, the entire underpinning of the modern multicultural movement.

  Perhaps it’s my inner redneck speaking, by the way, but I have no problem whatsoever denouncing Arab Muslim culture as a whole. I’m not rejecting the idea that there are differences in culture, North and South, or West versus East. I’m rejecting the redneck notion that you can’t tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, the argument that every culture clash must end with “You wear your X and I’ll wear mine.”

  In fact, I would argue that the violent, suspicious, and ignorant Islamo-facist living in Pakistan or Palestine today is the cultural equivalent of the stereotypical redneck of American lore. Modern Arabia is nearly a dead-on parallel to the Appalachian mountain society Mencken wrote about during the Scopes trial. They cling almost blindly to their religious leaders, reject the very idea of rational, scientific thought as being necessary, and view every outsider as a threat to the virtue of their daughters.

  A year after the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks—even after the terrorist Osama bin Laden acknowledged his responsibility—media reports indicate that vast numbers of these Muslim morons believe that the attacks were carried out by the Jews, with the help of the CIA.

  Gee, I have a handful of callers to my radio shows who think the same thing. They also believe in the Illuminati, the Trilateralist Conspiracy, and that the fluoride in their drinking water is a scheme of the United Nations to make their brains more receptive to low-frequency radio transmissions. Oh, and one more thing: Nobody takes these idiots seriously.

  Aha, Michael! You mock Muslim culture for its paranoiacs but acknowledge that America has its own loonies as well. This proves that every culture truly is equal!

  Not quite. In America, people this stupid represent the fringe. In the Middle East, the fringe is everyone else.

  Imagine, for example, if Pat Robertson appeared on tele-vision tomorrow and said, “I just got a message from Juh-EE-sus, and he said for uh-you tuh go OW-ut and kill all the uh-abortion doctors,” every Christian sect would denounce him on the spot. Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, even rural Pentecostals would put down their snakes long enough to say, “Hey. That ain’t right.”

  But educated Muslims around the world openly support jihad terror. Respected imams instruct their followers to kill in the name of Allah. When the leaders of the fifty-seven Islamic nations met in 2002, they couldn’t agree that an eighteen-year-old who strapped herself with explosives and detonated them in a shopping mall was a terrorist. Far from denouncing these homicide bombers who targeted civilians, these leaders of the Islamic world promised thousands of dollars in rewards to the families of “martyrs.” But as the editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune put it in April 2002: “One person’s suicide bomber is another person’s freedom fighter.” And as the southern plantation owners would have gladly told you, “One man’s slave owner is another man’s caretaker.”

  In fact, modern Muslims are in very much the same position as American Christians before the Civil War. Slave owners and their allies used the Bible’s clear and indisputable acceptance of slavery to construct a theology of Christian slavery. They made strong, Scripture-based arguments that slavery not only was acceptable but was, indeed, God’s will.

  In America, this corrupt appeal to religion over justice didn’t work. The argument over slavery was settled at Appomattox, not at divinity school. But the antislavery argument kept Christianity on the side of righteousness, rather than let it become hijacked by self-interested extremists. Will modern Islamists step forward to wage a similar fight?

  If not, then their rednecks will win, too.

  11

  Mario Brothers

  Mario Savio, where are you when we need you?

  Where is the “eloquent, disheveled philosophy student” who, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “kicked off the fiery Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley” in November 1964?

  It could be argued that Mario Savio won the civil rights battle of the 1960s single-handedly. Standing atop a police squad car in Berkeley, unsteady in his stocking feet, urging students to “fight the power,” Savio became the symbol of the most fundamental of the civil rights over which America struggled: free speech.

  And once speech—ideas, arguments, intellectual confrontation—became the battleground, the Old South was doomed to defeat.

  And, oh my, how Mr. Savio must have appeared to Southerners hunched over their corn bread and collard greens watching Walter Cronkite on their black-and-white TVs, sending a shudder through every white southern father with a daughter in a co-ed college.

  There were no Mario Savios down South because Southerners have never cared much for the notion of freedom of expression. As a southern friend once told me when I played the “free speech” card during an argument, “Michael, you got the right to say whatever you want as long as you keep it to yourself.”

  Free speech and good manners are irreconcilable values: Talk long enough and somebody’s gonna get hurt. So most civilized southern households live by the dictum “If you can’t say something nice, shut up and drink.”

  Then again, as a Southerner who never learned either to shut up or hold my liquor, I frequently ran into that other edict of southern conversation: “I may not like what you say, but I will defend with my life the right to give you an ass whoopin’ if you open your big fat mouth one more time.”

  Believe me, I know. I was banned from the South Carolina public radio network for making fun of the state legislature. Banned, as in “forbidden to appear; silenced; censored by the government.” Only in the South, right?

  What annoyed me is that I had done nothing wrong. My (unpaid) job at the time was to provide humo
rous commentary each week for one of the insufferably humorless programs on our government-run radio network. Each week I wrote a commentary, submitted the script for approval, recorded the approved text, and handed it over to be edited yet again.

  One week my comments focused on a new ethics bill just approved by the General Assembly, a body that featured, at the time, at least one felon convicted of election fraud. Any ethics bill he could support had to be topnotch, I opined, and besides: “South Carolinians don’t care about ethics in government. Bar all criminals from the state legislature, and there won’t be enough members left to convene a quorum, much less provide the entertaining election scandals to which we’ve become accustomed.”

  I wrote it, they reviewed it, they edited it, and they broadcast it. And then the South Carolina Educational Radio Network banned me.

  That’s when I found out it’s not public radio, it’s government radio. You know… like Pravda?

  Fascinatingly there was not the least hint of embarrassment that a phone call from a legislator could shut up a critic of the government. There was unanimity of agreement, even from my friends and family, that the incident was entirely my fault. “If you want the government to pay you to insult them,” my fellow Southerners told me, “move to New York and apply for an NEA grant.”

  None of my southern friends were particularly upset that I had been the victim of censorship because (a) I’m a smart-ass who had it coming and (b) stifling dissent is as southern as grits and redeye gravy.

  During the Revolutionary War, Southerners were the most pro-Tory of the colonists, and many southern patriots were happy to keep their mouths shut in exchange for a promise from the British to leave them alone. Loudmouthed agitators were unwelcome. A visit from Samuel Adams would have been as warmly received by Tory Southerners as a visit from the pope.

  During the slave years, Southerners who spoke out against slavery were under constant pressure to keep quiet or migrate North. Pro-abolition newspapers were confiscated, burned out, or worse. After southern forces fired on Fort Sumter, even longtime Southerners who supported slavery but opposed the Civil War were forced to flee.

  In the Jim Crow South, silence was essential to maintaining the status quo. People engaged in demonstrably irrational and indefensible behavior are easily distracted. As soon as someone asks a reasonable question—“Hey, why is it that a black doctor isn’t allowed to vote, but Virgil, the guy who sticks refrigerator magnets to the plate in his head, is our new legislator?”—it becomes tempting to give a reasonable answer. And the one thing the South could never withstand is reason.

  That’s why every Southerner defending some indefensible aspect of life in the South keeps the admonition, “Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?” tucked away like a knife in his boot. This is obviously not an argument, but rather a rejection of the idea of arguing. However, it brings the desired solution of less speech.

  This was the greatest gulf between me and my southern homeland. Of course, people should speak out, it seemed to me, especially people who are challenging us and saying things we don’t want to hear. A place that allows free and open dissent, like the North, is an inherently better place than a society that suppresses it. I would pull my hair and gurgle in frustration every time another Confederate knothead growled at me, “Wuhl, Michael, I-95 has two lanes innit, and one’s always headin’ North. If you don’ lahk it here, you kin jes leave.”

  Aaarrggh! Do you really think that if I leave, you suddenly won’t be stupid anymore?

  “I dunno,” would come the answer, “but it’s worth a try…”

  Civil rights activists coming South to confront the laws and customs of the 1950s and ’60s ran straight into this southern stone wall of silence in the cause of stupidity. Rednecks, reactionaries, law-and-orderers, and love-it-or-leave-it types rarely offered overt, rational defenses of segregation or the denial of basic civil rights. In the South, debates in favor of discrimination were few. Arguments about why you ought to climb your Yankee ass back on the bus and go home were far more common.

  But by the late 1960s, the days of telling people to “shut up and mind your own business” were over. Not only could you not suppress speech about race, politics, etc.—after the Free Speech Movement, it became wrong even to try. The southern value of polite silence was gone, trumped by the new value of free speech and confrontation.

  The symbol of these new freedoms appeared in stocking feet on the hood of a Berkeley police car and on millions of TV sets across the South.

  The North had won.

  And so thirty years later, Mario Savio returned in triumph to Berkeley and celebrated the anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. He was there to remind America how much things had changed since 1964, how the progressive vision of ever-expanding freedom had conquered the political forces of silence and intimidation. The five-day commemoration, in early December 1994, featured “poetry readings, films, panels, rallies, a colloquium, a dance,” and, according to the University of California’s website, “a hootenanny.”

  The only thing missing from Berkeley that day was free speech.

  On the very day that Mario returned to Berkeley to celebrate the freedom to dissent, three Berkeley residents were under assault from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development… for speaking. Three local citizens who had complained about a government housing project were facing $100,000 in fines and an ongoing investigation that would end, they were told, only if they would agree to stop complaining about the HUD development in Berkeley.

  Berkeley, California, whose new motto is “Shut Up or Else.”

  Berkeley—where just six weeks earlier, wacko Holocaust-revisionist historian David Irving was forced to cancel a speech because the school couldn’t guarantee his safety in the face of liberal protests. Irving was forced to an off-campus site, where his book tables were overturned and his property destroyed by Berkeleyites celebrating their free speech traditions.

  Berkeley—where in 2001, students stormed the campus newspaper and looted the paper boxes in protest of a paid advertisement. The editor of the Daily Californian showed his dedication to free speech and a free press by groveling before the protesters and apologizing for printing an unpopular opinion.

  Berkeley—where the number of scheduled campus public speakers who have been disinvited or shouted down by students and faculty members is well into double digits, including former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, conservative organizer Daniel Flynn, U.N. delegate Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and former Berkeley-alum-turned-conservative-carnival-barker David Horowitz.

  You know—Berkeley: home of the Free Speech (for people we like) Movement!

  Mario Savio died in 1996, and his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle contained a sharply ironic bit of unintentional humor: “Savio’s 24-year-old friend Jack Weinberg had violated a campus rule that seems farfetched by today’s standards—a ban against on-campus politics. Weinberg had set up a leafleting table on the plaza on behalf of a civil rights group.”

  Getting in trouble for speaking out on politics at Berkeley is “farfetched”? Where has this obit writer been living? In Mario’s lifetime, Berkeley morphed from the fire wall of free speech to the ivory-towered headquarters of the new P.C. speech police.

  All through the Civil Rights Movement, southern communities tried to keep “outside agitators” from having access to the public arena, from applying their First Amendment rights to assemble and speak. But somehow it wasn’t as embarrassing to see the right to free speech rejected by poorly educated goobers cracking wise about “Martin Luther Koon.” They were idiots—they weren’t expected to know any better. But to see free speech rejected at Berkeley—not once or twice, but again and again as a fundamental shift in values—proves how redneck our nation has become. The old Northern ideal that free expression is a value in and of itself, that allowing unpopular, even disturbing ideas to be expressed is a good thing—this ideal is lost. Instead, we’ve gone back
to the southern standard: If you’re going to say something that might upset people, don’t. Better still, let us shut your mouth for you.

  When Jeanne Kirkpatrick was banned from speaking at Berkeley, students weren’t the only people slamming the door on freedom of expression. Some faculty members also argued that letting her express her opinions wasn’t necessarily a good thing. At the University of Chicago, Professor Cass Sunstein leads an intellectual movement among liberals who argue that freedom to say things people don’t like (especially people like Cass Sunstein) is probably too much freedom.

  Doesn’t anyone remember when “lib”-er-als used to believe in “lib”-er-ty? Does anyone see the eerie similarities of angry white segregationists shouting down civil rights protesters and ripping up their fliers, and foamy-mouthed Berkeley beer-hall Marxists shouting down conservatives and kicking over their book tables?

  Alas, it was the San Francisco HUD offices under the Clinton administration—not Nixon’s—that used threats to silence outspoken citizens. The Berkeley Three, as they came to be known, were locals unhappy about a local HUD decision, and they were doing exactly what you’d expect Berkeley types to do: writing letters, speaking out at meetings, attending public forums, smoking pot… Part of this is conjecture, of course.

  Anyway, the San Francisco office determined that merely complaining about HUD’s activities was in and of itself a violation of the Fair Housing Act. After first threatening the Berkeley Three with large fines and lengthy litigation, the oily folks at HUD then offered a deal: HUD would end the investigation and drop the fines if the three residents just agreed to cease all litigation and stop publishing articles and fliers against the project.

  How nice.

  After five years of legal wrangling, the voice of reason was finally heard. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel stepped in and lifted the Democratic administration’s jackboot off the protesters’ larynx. She said that HUD’s actions “chilled [their] right to free speech and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances…. Any reasonable official in your position would have recognized the constitutional impropriety of investigating purely expressive activity.”