Posted on 12/17/2002 7:40:37 AM PST by machman
December 16, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Yanks Go South
The rednecks take over the country.
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Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War by Michael Graham (Warner, 239 pages, $23.95)
n the late 1960s, Willie Morris left Dixie for the lights and litterateurs of New York City, and wrote a celebrated memoir, North Toward Home, about finding his place among the intellectual elite in Yankee Babylon. Forty years on, another conflicted son of the South, conservative radio talker Michael Graham, has discovered there's no point in lighting out for the North to deliver oneself from rustication. The whole damn country has done gone redneck.
So he claims in Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, a laugh-out-loud funny rant that twits the north for its hypocrisy while mercifully steering clear of sentimentalizing the southern way of life. You might call Graham a self-hating southerner, but this is a man whose Menckenesque scorn for boobery happily knows no geographical bounds. He is appalled to have found that the worst elements of traditional southern culture — the kinds of things thoughtful Yankee liberals rightly opposed a generation ago — have been reinvented in the contemporary north as liberal virtues.
"From my vantage point, Northernism represented meritocracy, the celebration of individual ability and achievement over race, class and family connections," Graham writes, of the North he grew up admiring from afar. "Northernism held high the standard of reason, and demanded that all traditions and superstitions and heartfelt prejudices be judged by that standard."
That was then. Today, Graham sees that the "essential southern principles of race, irrationality, fear of merit and a love of the insipid," which he calls "the fundamental ideas of the South of forty years ago, are now the fundamental ideas of America." (In case you miss this thesis the first time, he repeats it on two or three more occasions in the first chapter or two).
Graham takes a swipe at trendy educational theories that maintain that students learn differently because of their ethnicity, and that therefore black students have to be treated differently from whites and others. "So let's see if I've got this straight: We run a public school system where the districts are drawn based on race. We use education theory based on the idea that black and white children are inherently different and cannot be taught the same way. Black children need to be taught in separate (but equal?) schools from white children where they can learn the principles of racial loyalty. And all this is happening in public schools outside the South? Somebody owes Governor [George] Wallace an apology."
The idea of Southern exceptionalism ("It's a Southern thing, you wouldn't understand") was used back in the day as a rhetorical device to combat criticism of institutions like Jim Crow. Northerners refused to be cowed by the "that's the way we do things around here" argument, and pressed their reasoned moral case for equal justice under the law, using the force of law when necessary. Nowadays, says Graham, exceptionalism has become the philosophical basis for multiculturalism. Here he is on media hypocrisy when it comes to criticizing Islam in America:
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?
That's Redneck America, a place many people consider the province of wild-eyed Bible-thumpers with a prohibitionist streak. They're not far off the mark, as Graham, an Oral Roberts University graduate, attests. But here too, argues Graham, what Yankees see as redneck primitivism is hardly different from what they accept as enlightened thought among their divines. Writes Graham: "It's not uncommon for Northerners, especially those who like to use the word 'spirituality,' to believe in all manner of metaphysical events, while not believing in the Big Guy. 'Religious' people go to church and read the Bible, and Northerners view them as intolerant, ill-educated saps. 'Spiritual' people go hiking, read Shirley MacLaine or L. Ron Hubbard, and are considered rational, intelligent beings." Who, then, is the real redneck?
Graham is particularly entertaining when he mocks American popular culture, and quite sensibly observes that many contemporary cultural icons, when they're not NASCAR drivers (stock-car racing is the fastest growing sport in the country), are rednecks manques. Woody Allen, the cerebral Ur-Yankee, used to be worth admiring, says Graham, "until he went southern and started sleeping with his children." HBO's Sex and the City may be the last word in trend-setting drama, but to Graham, Carrie Bradshaw and her horndog pals are just well-groomed sluts (not that he has a problem with that). "And it is just as clearly the case that if you took these same four women, stuck Confederate flag ball caps on their heads, and dropped them in a West Texas truck stop, they would be indistinguishable from the hardworking local gals." Yup.
Though Redneck Nation is smart-mouthed and light-hearted (you will not be surprised to learn that Graham once worked as a stand-up comic), and it doesn't pretend to be a serious political book, its author does make some sober points between the riffs and jibes. On the subject of race, he says that today's left-wing neo-segregationists are morally worse than the white Jim Crow supporters, like his grandmother. "But she didn't grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn't benefit from forty years of intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession. You and I have," he writes.
In the end, I don't know that Graham is right that America has become a redneck nation because it's become southernized, or if we've simply become a more democratic culture. Most people in the world, from Greece to Ghana to Gatlinburg, Tenn., are rednecks, at least by Graham's definition. What's changed is that the (non-southern) cultural elite in this country lost faith in classic American ideals just as those ideals triumphed over redneckism in its most aggressive and unabashed form. It's more ironic than tragic, but history is filled with more ironies than tragedies.
Take Sen. Trent Lott (R., Yoknapatawpha County), who was inadvertently making Graham's case the other day when he said that America would've been better off if it had voted for Segregationist Strom for president in 1948. Well, that did it. Now Lott is being instructed in righteousness by the Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane of black America. I refer, or course, to Jesse Jackson and his not-so-bright disciple Al Sharpton, the most notorious racialist hornswogglers north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Few media people seem to find this objectionable, or even particularly funny, because hey y'all, we're all rednecks now.
Isn't that an oxymoron??? ;^)
Hehe, me too. Susanna certainly endured a lot--nineteen children. Gah...I'm not sure I want one, let alone nineteen.
Isn't that an oxymoron??? ;^)
No, just a historic anachronism. ;->
To cite the late, great Lewis Grizzard: "I never saw anybody from the South retire so they could move to New Jersey".
We in the South tried to leave voluntarily once, and y'all got pissed.
Mexico can have California back; they've almost got it anyway.
A great book. Funny enough to help keep the fear under control. In a generation this country will be far more segregated than the Old South ever was. I also decided to invest in voice recognition research, because in another generation no young people will be able to read or write.
So9
I sell books on Ebay and you find lots of things tucked into books. I recently found 2 passports for yankees coming to the south. It is an envelope with a lot of cute instructions written on it and a few 'confederate bills' tucked inside - just in case.
We in the South tried to leave voluntarily once, and y'all got 'ticked' (sorry about the editing_.
That is so true.
Mexico can have California back; they've almost got it anyway.
They just about have Texas also.
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