Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  And yet northern newsrooms covering the 2000 election operated under the unexamined assumption that the closed-minded South is an enclave of Jew haters, while the open-minded North is a bastion of tolerance and acceptance. Are there anti-Semites down in Dixie? You might as well ask if there are anti-Semites in Brooklyn. Or Brookline. Or Chicago. (Just ask Congressman Rahm Emmanuel.)

  My personal experience as a Southerner raised in a strongly evangelical home who attended Oral Roberts University is that I never encountered anti-Semitism—in word or deed—while growing up in the South. Yes, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman lost every southern state in 2000 (including Gore’s humiliating loss in Tennessee), but they didn’t lose a single one of these states because of the senator’s faith in Jehovah.

  As for Gore/Lieberman’s faith in big-government liberalism… well, that’s another matter.

  With this clear, objective record, why is the South viewed in such a negative light, compared to the rest of America? To the typical nonSoutherner, we’re still the twenty-first-century equivalent of the swimming club in Great Neck, New York, that refused to let Groucho Marx join because he was Jewish. (“Well, then, how about my son?” asked Groucho. “He’s only half Jewish. Can he go in up to his waist?”)

  I stand today and accuse you, my northern friends, not of antisouthern prejudice, but of worse: snobbery. Snobbery and self-righteousness, both of which are unexamined and undeserved. The typical American Northerner, when considering his Southerner neighbors, suffers under what can best be described as “delusions of adequacy.”

  As a white Southerner who has spent much of his life traveling America, I have repeatedly experienced the immediate, visceral snobbery that northern Americans, particularly liberals from urban centers, emote when they meet Southerners. It’s an unpleasant mix of suspicion and condescension. You shake our hands cautiously and, after a “Who bought you the shoes?” glance at our clothes, give a dubious smile as though you expect us to burst into an enthusiastic rendition of “Dixie” or start asking questions about how to work the indoor toilet.

  It’s not that there aren’t plenty of real southern rednecks—a videotape of my last family reunion could have been a National Geographic special titled “Swimming the Shallow End of the Gene Pool: Redneck Reproduction in the American Southeast.” And I will never dispute the notion that the American South is dominated by irrational attitudes about race, religion, and culture. My challenge is: Tell me what part of America isn’t.

  This smugness, this condescension, this false sense of superiority that you Northerners feel toward me and my fellow Southerners, is the reason I wrote this book. Believe me, I grew up believing Northerners were the erudite, rational, antiracist advocates of achievement and culture you pretend to be. It took me twenty years to find out you were lying.

  I know that many readers, Southerners in particular, will reject the idea that there is any significant demarcation of America, North and South. That the South is the stupidest place in America is obviously, palpably true, but when it comes to the truth, most Southerners are like the jury in the O. J. Simpson trial. We will not be influenced by mere facts.

  But this isn’t a regional conflict between bagels and biscuits. What I thought was happening in the 1960s during the civil rights struggle was a cultural battle between two worldviews, “Northernism” and “Southernism.”

  And there is a distinct southern culture. I lived the southern life, I was enveloped in the southern spirit, I drank from the deep springs of southern pride, and, at my first opportunity, I ran like a bat out of hell.

  Let me be clear: I didn’t just leave the South. I rejected it. As a teenager, whenever I met people for the first time, I would always try to work in the phrase “Well, I was born in Los Angeles…” The fact that I didn’t know Compton from Santa Clarita was irrelevant. It gave me that one measure of distance from my southern identity.

  When I was thirteen, my father played a cassette recording he had made of me speaking to the church. I think it was “Kids Who Found Christ Through Herbalife” Day or something like that, and I was working the crowd hard—but that voice. Ugh! I sounded like an adolescent Jethro Clampett addressing the annual belt buckle collectors’ convention. Imagine a cross between the basso profundo of Barney Fife and the masculine articulations of Harvey Fierstein—that was my voice.

  So I decided not to have a southern accent. I didn’t want to be one of “them,” with “them” defined as pretty much every human being I knew at that time. Part of this anger was teen angst, and part of it came from the fact that I actually was, and am, an obnoxious ass, but there was an earnest, legitimate longing, too. It wasn’t just that I wanted to leave the South. I also had a vision of being a part of something else.

  Where I really wanted to go, the home I was truly seeking—even if I never said it out loud—was a place I had heard about all my life. The North.

  There are those who say “the North” is just a direction, while “the South” is a place. They’re wrong. The North exists in a true and powerful way, and I know it does because we Southerners invented it.

  The people I grew up with and live with today talk of it constantly. I don’t know if it’s got a precise longitude or latitude, but the North certainly exists, if only in the imaginations of suspicious Southerners.

  For the devoted, fundamentalist Southerner, the North is any place that isn’t the South. New York, Chicago, Seattle, these places are obviously part of the North, but so are San Diego, Tucson, and Santa Fe. Ask any Southerner and he’ll tell you Washington, D.C., is part of the North. We do so for the same reason Northerners say D.C. is part of the South: We don’t want it, either.

  But the North I grew up with in my mind was the place where John Irving and Woody Allen lived. It wasn’t just where Woody lived, it was where people lived who went to see his movies… and liked them. It was a place where a young man stretched askew across the sofa with a book was never asked, “Whatcha readin’ that for?”

  It was a place where people watched baseball, not football, because baseball was more artful, more intelligent, and less violent. Where a black man and a white woman who sat down in a restaurant together weren’t stared at, or worse.

  And for an angry, embattled, out-of-place teenager trapped in a backwood bastion of Old South bigotry and dim-wittery, the North that called to me was a powerful, compelling place that existed specifically to be not the South.

  This is true North. You find references to this North in our most sacred southern texts: T-shirts and bumper stickers. No philosophy is held by the southern mind that can’t be expressed in an 8″ × 3″ rectangle on the back of a truck, with room left over for the Confederate flag:

  IF THE NORTH IS SO GREAT, WHY DON’T YOU GO BACK? or KEEP THE SOUTH CLEAN: BUY A YANKEE A BUS TICKET. And then there’s the ever-popular WE DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH.

  This is demonstrably untrue. We Southerners don’t just care about how you do things up North, we’re obsessed with it. We are painfully self-conscious of our relationship to the North. In part, we resent the snobbery and unearned superiority we sometimes encounter. We are very aware that you think you’re smarter, quicker, and more cosmopolitan than we are.

  But what’s worse—and this is the real source of friction—we often suspect you are right. We just won’t admit it. If he were being honest, the typical Southerner’s bumper would read: EVEN IF WE UNDERSTOOD, WE STILL WOULDN’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH, or IF YOU’RE SO SMART, WHY ARE YOU HERE?

  Southern scholars like C. Vann Woodward insist that this southern inferiority complex is rooted in the fact that (if you ignore that Vietnam thing) we’re the only Americans to lose a war. Not me. I trace the southern ethos and its struggle against Northernism to the civil rights battle of the 1950s and ’60s.

  Let’s turn again to the example of Senator Lieberman, who in 2000 bravely traveled across the South (those parts directly between Connecticut and Miami, anyway) as a liberal, Democratic, somewhat obs
ervant Jew. Despite the predictions and hand-wringing before the campaign, there were in fact no more cross burnings or synagogue bombings or yarmulke snatchings in Macon, Georgia, than in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

  Nevertheless, Senator Lieberman’s southern campaign was instructive. It offered some interesting symbolism for the astute observer of history, for this wasn’t Joe Lieberman’s first tour of the old Confederacy. He made another important trip in 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement.

  According to the New York Times, “Mr. Lieberman was among 67 Yalies who formed the first large group of Northern white students to travel south for the cause of civil rights.” Lieberman also participated in the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., shared his dream with America.

  One of the things I like about Joe Lieberman is that he hasn’t attempted to exploit his youthful stand for civil rights. “I’m very proud that I went. It was a very important experience in my life. But, you know, there were others who were there much longer and did much more than I did,” Lieberman told the Times.

  His efforts were modest and, to his credit, so is he. It wasn’t until Al Gore and Donna Brazille—the Slobodan Milosevic of the Democratic Party—revamped his résumé that Lieberman was offered to voters as the Harriet Tubman of the 2000 election.

  Lieberman and the thousands of other Northerners, black and white, deserve credit for traveling to the Jim Crow South, and for all the right reasons. They didn’t go there to learn from it or study it, but to defeat it. These “outside agitators” were waging a war against the southern culture of the time, and rightfully so.

  What these civil rights warriors brought with them wasn’t just a specific view of social justice or the rule of law. They brought a philosophy: Northernism. They saw up close the evils of racism, cronyism, anti-intellectualism, irrational religiosity, and general bad taste. They heard Southerners make claims of ethnic exceptionalism, arguing that what appeared unfair or irrational up North made perfect sense down home, and rejected them. These civil rights volunteers fought repeatedly against legal restrictions on the freedom to speak and to dissent. They would eventually support the creation of a federal television and radio network, in part to bring something resembling culture and enlightened entertainment to the region H. L. Mencken immortalized as “the Sahara of the Bozart.”

  We Southerners fought back—hard. We defended our traditions of racism, irrationality, and good-ol’-boy opportunity. We fought to keep things bad, and the Northernists (including some white Southerners) were pushing for changes to make things good. That’s how it seemed to me as I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights struggle.

  From my vantage point, Northernism represented meritocracy, the celebration of individual ability and achievement over race, class, and family connections. It represented culture, people who listened to jazz and attended operas without the word “Ol’ ” in the title. Northernism held high the standard of reason and demanded that all traditions and superstitions and heartfelt prejudices be measured by that standard.

  These are broad generalizations, and many Southerners will no doubt scramble through their recollections of the Jim Crow South for the contrary example. But the fact that we can see and articulate this culture clash is proof that the two cultures, North and South, exist. And thanks to the efforts of people like Joe Lieberman and millions of others, the America of the 1960s and ’70s was as northern as at any point in my lifetime. Southernism as an idea and practice had been defeated, dismissed, and discarded.

  And today, watching and listening to one of those advocates of Northernism—now a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut—championing the ideas of the modern, twenty-first-century American liberalism, the question immediately comes to mind: What happened to the real Joe Lieberman, and is the man on my TV set a pod person from another planet?

  Virtually every idea he came to the South to fight in 1963, Joe Lieberman now champions forty years later. The old Joe Lieberman and his liberal friends fought against racial segregation in public schools. Today, those same liberals support race-based school admissions in places like California and Massachusetts that keep black children out of public schools because of their skin color.

  The old Joe Lieberman opposed restrictions on free speech and fought against attempts by southern communities to squelch or suppress public debate. Today, northern liberals support restrictions on campaign ads under so-called campaign finance reform, and their children are the first people on liberal campuses to burn school newspapers for printing unpopular opinions.

  The old Joe Lieberman reviled the claims of Southerners who said that their Confederate heritage and traditions could not be judged by northern standards. It was wrong to call southern institutions good or bad, Southerners argued, they were just different. Today, those same northern liberals promote multiculturalism, the belief that no culture—not even the barbaric culture of Islamic fundamentalism—can be judged by the West. There are no good or bad cultures, just different ones.

  As for politics, much has been made of the infamous red/blue map of America in the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush (a Southerner born in Milton, Massachusetts) and Al Gore (a Yankee from Carthage, Tennessee). George W. Bush won a massive victory over Al Gore when measured by square miles but lost the popular vote by 500,000 or so.

  But to see the North versus South cultural divide, ask yourself this question: Which presidential candidate in 2000 ran a campaign most reminiscent of old-style southern politics? Was it the campaign appealing to voters based on their race or religion? Was it the candidate who ran on a strategy of targeting uninformed voters through churches and bringing them into the polls to cast ballots based on instructions from the pulpit? The candidate who largely rejected intellectual appeals based on political principles and instead tried to connect with voters by using superficial shows of emotion and the good old-fashioned southern technique of pork barrel “What’s In It For Me?” campaigning? Was this the true candidate of the South?

  No, I’m not talking about George W. Bush. This race-based, lowest-common-denominator campaign was inflicted on America by Al Gore.

  Gore ran a quintessentially southern campaign for president: race-based politics, antirational populism, playing the religion card (albeit from the kosher end of the deck) with his choice of Lieberman—who did everything but serve seder at his campaign events. Everything about Al Gore’s presidential campaign was southern because all the essential ideas of America are the ideas of the Old South.

  The only reason Gore and Lieberman lost the election was that they weren’t quite southern enough: In a national election that was, essentially, a tie, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the thirteen states of the old Confederacy by 3.5 million votes. That’s a larger margin than Ronald Reagan’s entire margin over Jimmy Carter in 1980.

  The Joe Lieberman generation supported government-funded radio and television to bring quality programming and access to fine arts to Southerners still enamored of drag racing and cockfights. Today, the children of the Civil Rights Movement from Boston to San Francisco Bay have made NASCAR America’s number one spectator sport and spend their evenings glued to TV shows featuring has-been celebrities beating each other up and shame-free citizens wolfing down unmentionable pig parts for fun and profit.

  In other words, the northern idealists of the 1960s like Joe Lieberman who once envisioned an American melting pot of opportunity, meritocracy, rationalism, antiracism (in theory, at least), progressivism, and individual enlightenment have devolved into acolytes of the United States of the Confederacy—a country of race-obsessed, ethnic clans dedicated to the proposition that it’s not what you know but who you know; a society where intellectualism, if not actually feared, is looked upon as suspect; where superstition has so trumped reason that popular TV shows feature “psychics” talking to the dead victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks; where baseball—once the most popular sport of the American masses—is now considered “to
o intellectual.” Instead, the modern American sports fan ensures that eight of the top ten most popular cable TV shows each week involve grown men wearing masks and hitting each other with folding chairs.

  America, the Redneck Nation.

  2

  How the South Really

  Won the War

  When I say the South “won the war,” I don’t mean the war. The defeat of the Confederacy was total. In fact, the Civil War was a classically southern enterprise: A handful of clods—without an army or a navy—come up with the lousy idea of starting a war, and their fellow Southerners are too polite to tell them how stupid they are. After attacking Fort Sumter, the South proceeds to get its butt kicked from Appomattox to Yazoo City, then announces, “We never wanted slavery, anyway,” and blames the whole thing on the Yankees.

  Before 1860, the South was one of the most wealthy and influential regions of America. From 1789 until 1856, nine of our nation’s fourteen presidents were Southerners. America wouldn’t elect another Southerner president until JFK was assassinated and Texan Lyndon Johnson was able to run as an incumbent in 1964. *

  After 1865, the South was a destitute backwater on the verge of collapse. The wealthiest state in the Union—South Carolina—became the poorest. The southern intelligentsia, such as it was, was decimated or discredited. The blended Euro-Caribbean culture that was so alluring to nouveaux riches Northerners collapsed with the slave economy that maintained it.

  The devastation was so thorough that sixty years later, H. L. Mencken wrote his classic commentary Bozart of the South, which noted the painfully obvious truth about the American South of the first half of the twentieth century: “In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate, there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays.” Most southern poetry and prose was drivel, he charged, and “when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf.” Nor, Mencken added, a historian, sociologist, philosopher, theologian, or scientist.