Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  According to the New York Times, Ohio’s motorcycle enthusiasts feel that their rights as citizens have been trampled upon. So these delicate flowers, still stinging from being made unwelcome by the maître d’ at the Four Seasons, asked State Representative Sylvester Patton of Youngstown to sponsor a bill levying a five-hundred-dollar civil fine against any business found guilty of discriminating against people “because they operate motorcycles or wear clothing that displays the name of a motorcycle-related organization or group.”

  The same cycle riders who oppose Big Brother’s efforts to force them to wear helmets want that same government to force restaurants and hotels not to notice when they wear those helmets into the building.

  How big a problem could this alleged antibiker discrimination be? It’s hard to imagine the shop owner or tavern keeper willing to walk up to a three-hundred-pound leather-clad biker with “Born to Violate the Laws of Nature” tattooed across his biceps and say, “We don’t serve your kind around here.” It’s even harder to imagine Fudgie as a victim of, well, just about anything, except maybe a massive coronary.

  At the risk of offending Fudgie’s delicate sensibilities, might I point out that one way to prevent business owners from treating you like a thug is to stop dressing like one? If a guy walks into a restaurant wearing a pillowcase with eyeholes and carrying a rope with a slipknot, he really shouldn’t complain if some folks don’t want to sit in his section.

  There’s also the wimp factor. When did bikers become babies? I expect tough guys on Harleys to display a quiet stoicism, not to go running to the state legislature crying, “A big bully just made fun of my nose ring!”

  But that’s precisely what bikers have done. They have staked their claim on the American gold mine of victim-hood. And in a nation mesmerized by the gratifying self-righteousness and soothing powerlessness that come with victimhood, the exemplar of this whiny, complaining, easily insulted, put-upon, sore-toed groaner is the southern white male.

  Before there was the NAACP or GLAAD or NAAFA (the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance), there were rednecks. As Mencken noted, they are a notoriously thin-skinned bunch.

  Southern white males have a long tradition of kvetching Confederate-style. The first Europeans reached Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670 and promptly began whining that Plymouth Rock was getting all the attention. Southerners proceeded to pout their way through the entire Revolutionary War. The South was a hotbed of Toryism, the locals constantly attempting to make deals with the British and blaming the entire mess on the Yankees in Massachusetts.

  After holding the Constitution hostage over the issue of slavery in the 1780s, Southerners spent the next 170 years complaining about being picked on over the issue. Listening to slave owners and their political allies of the day, you’d think they were the victims of the slave economy: “Slaves are expensive, they eat so much, they keep trying to run away (those ungrateful bastards), and the only reason we have them is that Northerners force us to keep selling cotton for huge profits. It’s all their fault.”

  So the South started a war and then complained because the Yankees fought back. They established Jim Crow segregation, then whined when blacks rose up to protest it. They created a two-tiered education system designed to lower education standards for working-class citizens, then complained of anti-Southern bigotry whenever someone noted the South had the dumbest population in America.

  During the Civil Rights Movement, Americans largely rejected this idiocy and sided with the real victims of southern racism. The rest of the country understood that white Southerners felt put-upon and out of sorts, but Northerners rejected these feelings as delusional. Americans of the 1950s and ’60s, watching the prejudice and violence of the southern establishment, saw for themselves who the victims were and who they weren’t. And America told the ever-whiny rednecks to stuff a sock in it.

  In fact, I would argue that at a fundamental level, the Civil Rights Movement was a wholesale rejection of victim status as a good in itself. Young black southern men who sat down at lunch counters knowing they would soon be locked up and beaten down weren’t whiny crybabies. They took their lumps and came back the next day. And this they did to generate anger, not pity.

  Dr. King and his allies who marched toward the barking dogs and water cannons weren’t worried about hurt feelings. They had concussions and contusions on their minds, but they kept marching. They weren’t claiming victimhood, they were accepting consequences.

  I can’t see the people who suffered and fought back against Jim Crow as victims. To call them so would be, in my opinion, an insult. “Victim” implies helplessness, neediness, an inability to defend oneself. Black Southerners who challenged segregation were nothing of the sort. I would no more call Martin Luther King a victim than I would call Mother Teresa a pauper. It’s demeaning and misses the point.

  That’s the impression the Civil Rights Movement left upon me. But something happened between Selma, Alabama, and the creation of the white man’s Southern Anti-Defamation League today. Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, being a victim isn’t an insult, it’s an honor. From the incompetent mom-’n’-pop shopkeeper on the corner (a “victim” of corporate interests like Wal-Mart) to the idiot spokespeople for various special-interest groups (even fat people have the aforementioned NAAFA, a lobbying organization opposed, one assumes, to gravity) to entire nationalities (the Serbs and Palestinians come to mind), everybody wants to be a victim—southern-style.

  WHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE

  America is now a nation where nothing is ever one’s own fault. And, my northern brethren, you learned it from us. When the NAACP was boycotting South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag on the capitol dome, I used to mock my fellow South Carolinians for claiming they were “victims” of an unfair boycott. “C’mon, gang!” I told them. “For nearly a hundred years, that flag has flown over Klan rallies and civil rights counterdemonstrations. What’s the NAACP supposed to do? Add it to their letterhead? It is our statehouse over which that flag flies, and it is our elected legislature that keeps it there against all reason and good counsel. Of course, we citizens are going to suffer. We’re supposed to!”

  Listening to thick-necked white guys whine about the “bullying tactics” of the NAACP was an absolute laugh. As young men, many of these same flag supporters overturned school buses, blocked restaurant doors, and shouted “nigger” as the freedom marchers passed. Today, these same men, older but no wiser, wish us to believe that they are now the victims of a black power juggernaut.

  So like I said, I used to make fun of these simpering Southerners constantly. Then, dear Yankee, I met you.

  I met the aforementioned National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, a group so painfully fat-headed it has to be headquartered in California. NAAFA’s position is that fat people should not be victimized by their excessive mass or high-calorie lifestyle. No, the rest of us should suffer for their obesity instead.

  I must confess that I find it difficult to take the full-figured flaks at NAAFA seriously. The first time I heard the name of the organization, I thought it was some sort of agricultural advocacy group, like the Dairy Board or Beef Council. You know, with catchy slogans like “Fat: It Keeps a Body Warm!” or “The Other Other White Meat (or meat-like substance).”

  According to NAAFA, fat folks are the victims of biology, genealogy, gastroenterology, and, for all I know, archaeology and Scientology, too. People are fat because they are oppressed by the evil diet industry, the evil pharmaceutical interests, and the What Are We Going to Do with All These Lime-Green Stretch Pants? cabal.

  In other words, if it weren’t for all the diet products, low-cal foods, and social emphasis on good looks and health, these people would be skin and bones by now. Instead, the spokesperson for the NAAFA I spoke with weighed 375 pounds, due entirely (she claimed) to failed diets and an insulin imbalance.

  Claiming to be a victim because you spend your days flo
pped down in front of General Hospital with Dr Pepper, Colonel Sanders, and Little Debbie—yep, that’s southern, all right. But seizing victim status while making everyone else suffer—that’s redneck!

  And so NAAFA and its allies have mounted a campaign to end the “discrimination” against obese people. You own a tanning salon and you refuse to hire Wanda the Whale to welcome your customers—you get sued. You own a health food store and don’t think a four-hundred-pound employee fits into your marketing scheme—get a lawyer. And if your house catches fire in California and a ladder truck rolls up out front staffed with sumo wrestlers who can’t climb the ladder—that’s America’s victim culture at work.

  In the old, evil, bigoted days before NAAFA, a fire safety employee had to be able to do certain things, little things irrelevant to public safety like, oh, climb a fire truck ladder without breaking it. Some fire department employees were even expected to be able to climb up this ladder and back down again while carrying another person.

  The problem is that when you’re 5’10” and 350 pounds, you’re already carrying the equivalent of another person around every day of your life. Three wouldn’t just be a crowd, it would be a hernia.

  These expectations of mobility and strength prevented some obese fire department applicants from being hired. Bigotry, oppression—and the old-fashioned belief that it’s stupid to hire people for a job they are physically incapable of accomplishing—combined to deny these Super-Sized citizens their rights. So these husky would-be hose pullers went to court… and won. And thanks to a court ruling, obese people are no longer victims. Instead, the victims now are the taxpayers who have to pay the salaries of these rotund fire truck riders. The taxpayers must also pay normal-sized firefighters who are actually competent and able to do the lifesaving work.

  Then there are the potential victims, the people in the burning buildings or emergency situations who cannot be served by these public safety employees.

  An America infused with the values of self-reliance and objective justice as championed by the old Civil Rights Movement would laugh these lard-butted loons out of court. But in a truly southern America, these self-declared victims are as at home as a pig in slo… Uh, you know what I mean.

  And only in a Redneck Nation dominated by “it’s not my fault” Southernism could people who smoked three packs a day for thirty years have the nerve to appear before a jury and blame the cigarettes. In 2000, CNN reported that a San Francisco jury awarded $20 million to Leslie Whiteley, a forty-year-old smoker who admitted she never, ever smoked a cigarette that she didn’t know could hurt her. How, how, HOW can a woman who has picked up a cigarette, put it in her mouth, set it on fire, and smoked it—then repeated the action fifty times a day, every single day, for twenty-seven years—how can that woman look at a jury and say, “But wait—it was an accident”?

  This is a claim of victimhood that ranks up there with Bill Clinton blaming his pants problem on Ken Starr (true story) and former Symbionese Liberation Army bomber Kathleen Soliah claiming to be a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (true and sickening story). You could only get away with this nonsense in a Redneck Nation.

  Worse than the “victims” of the right to smoke are the Smoke Nazis who dream of living in a world where we have no rights at all.

  Across the Great Northern America, liberal communities like Los Angeles and Montgomery County, Maryland, have banned smoking outdoors at public parks. Why? To protect the “victims” of secondhand smoke, of course. Only one problem: When it comes to smoking outdoors, there are no victims of secondhand smoke. Outdoor smoking may annoy you, but not even the most extreme Smoke Nazi has presented evidence that the dangers of secondhand smoke extend into the ionosphere.

  Not to be outdone, in 2001, the same Montgomery County (an enclave of northern-style liberalism) passed an ordinance that would have essentially banned smoking in the privacy of your own home. Under this new county regulation, if you were sitting in front of the TV having a cigarette and your neighbor could even smell it, he could call the county EPA and you would be exposed to a fine of up to $750.

  After a bombardment of international mockery, this ludicrous law was laughed into oblivion. When folks asked how any legislative body could criminalize smoking in one’s own home, an angry Montgomery County councilman insisted the law was perfectly reasonable: “This does not say that you cannot smoke in your house. What it does say is that your smoke cannot cross property lines.”

  In other words, oxygen tents make good neighbors.

  Now, I know that if I smoke enough cigarettes, they could kill me. And I know that if someone locked you and me together in an unventilated room, my smoke might—I repeat, might—kill you. But nobody has ever demonstrated that if I wrap myself in Red Man chewing tobacco, sit down in my fireplace, and set myself ablaze, it’s going to give you so much as a mild cough in your house across the street.

  Who is the victim of a smoker lighting up in his own living room? Whom are the self-righteous Smoke Nazis protecting this time? Aha! This is where the southern victim value system really kicks in. In the world of rednecks, you don’t have to prove you’re a victim. You simply declare yourself one, and the wheels of the world grind to a halt.

  What a warped sense of justice we have when the working stiff sitting on his sofa watching All in the Family and smoking a Lucky is the oppressor, and the paranoiac upstairs sniffing the air vents and calling the cops is the victim.

  And if the guy upstairs feels victimized by my neighbor’s cigarettes, wait until he smells my Macanudo. Or my mother’s corned beef and cabbage. Or me, after eating my mom’s corned beef and cabbage…

  Then there’s my dad’s cheap aftershave, my baby’s poopy diaper, and my dog’s various odiferous events. (I don’t actually have a dog, but I could get one if you keep calling the cigarette cops, you jerk.)

  All of this, inspired by hypersensitive simps who never once had to demonstrate that, by reasonable standards, they had been victimized in any way.

  Right down the street from Montgomery County is our nation’s capital. It was there that a government employee lost his job for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence. A couple of fellow employees—who happened to be both black and blessed with a limited vocabulary—did not recognize the word. Worse, they assumed the guy said something all-too-familiar. They complained, and the literate worker was summarily fired.

  What makes this incident so perfectly southern and, therefore, perfectly American is that an investigation by rational people quickly got to the truth. The man had said nothing wrong. The word “niggardly” is a perfectly good word, the offended employees were told. It comes from the Scandinavian word nygg and predates the African slave trade. And guess what: The guy still lost his job.

  To D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’s credit, the victi—er, “fired person” in this case was offered a different city job, but some black Washingtonians complained regardless. “I still find the word offensive, I don’t care what it means,” one D.C. resident said. Keith Watters, former president of the mostly black National Bar Association, raised the possibility of a conspiracy. He was quoted in the New York Times asking, “Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?”

  Now flash-forward to a story in the Sacramento Bee in 2001. Robert Pacuinas appeared before the city council to oppose red-light cameras being used to ticket drivers. He believed, as many other citizens did, that these cameras were just another way for the city government to make money. “It is time to call a spade a spade,” Mr. Pacuinas insisted, “and acknowledge that the city wants these cameras because they increase revenue, not safety.” When his three-minute comment period ended, he received this reply from City Councilwoman Lauren Hammond:

  “You… made an ethnically and racially derogatory remark and I hope you think about what you said…. It is not appreciated. It is no longer a part of modern English. The phrase just isn’t used in good company anymore.”

  The remark at issue was “c
alling a spade a spade.” Councilwoman Hammond, who is black, went on to tell reporters, “It’s an old racist analogy and I’m sick of hearing it. This is 2001.”

  Ms. Hammond claimed to be the victim of racism, which is hardly news. But Mr. Pacuinas, hardly a member of the White Anglo-Saxons Club himself, was simply unwilling to be labeled as such. He went to reporters, who then went to Ms. Hammond, with irrefutable evidence that the phrase “calling a spade a spade” was nearly five hundred years old and had everything to do with gardening and nothing to do with race. Mr. Pacuinas had not been speaking about race, he said nothing about race, he had implied nothing about race, and everyone present agreed that the only color he referred to in any way was the red in the red-light cameras. The accusation of racism was totally and utterly false.

  To which Ms. Hammond’s reply was, essentially, “So what?” She argued that since she felt like she was a victim of racism, she was entitled to be viewed as a victim, regardless of the facts. For good measure, she added that she still considers “niggardly” to be derogatory. “Any word that has that base word refers to black people, the darkest people on earth.”

  Once you untether victimhood from the realm of reality, who knows where it will float next? Will Mexican Americans boycott the makers of Spic and Span? Will gamblers be tossed out of politically correct casinos for welshing on a bet? If Councilwoman Hammond ever called the Maryland Smoke Nazis “morons,” would that be a case of the pot calling the kettle black? And if it is, am I allowed to say so?

  For the existence of these and other questions, you can thank the American South. We invented the idea that offended people have no duty to be rational. If white-supremacist Southerners can be victimized by black citizens claiming nothing more than their right to vote, then any group anywhere is entitled to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

  There’s no end to the examples of the spread of southern-style victimhood, but one more must be told: the day they banned Santa Claus.