International terrorists, beware!
What makes this story quintessentially southern is that not a single political leader of either party objected. The kid was clearly and utterly inexperienced but, thanks to a unique job set-aside program known as A-Thurm-ative Action, his gene pool résumé got him the job while folks with twenty years as assistant A.G.s muttered quietly in their cubicles.
Now, I know all you northern readers are laughing at this ludicrous nonsense, as well you should. This is exactly the kind of inbred, good-ol’-boy nepotism I wanted to get away from. So I left the South and went to Chicago.
Yes, Chicago, where city politicians live by the Daley Creed: If you can’t trust your family, whom can you trust?
Chicago, where the cemetery walls are topped with barbed wire each November in a vain attempt to slow down the dead on their way to the polls.
Chicago, where every applicant for city employment is overqualified and underpaid. And if you don’t believe them, ask their cousin, the alderman.
But why pick on Chicago? This machine-style, back-slapping politics can be seen in nearly every major northern city. Its how business gets done, how votes get bought and paid for. That’s different from the Strom standard. In Chicago, Daleys get reelected because they deliver. Thurmond’s repeated elections don’t represent a triumph of constituent services, but rather the triumph of “my daddy knows your daddy,” the ultimate defeat of “what you know” by the forces of who you know. During the military base closings of the 1990s, South Carolina had the largest per capita job loss of any state in the country—and Thurmond was the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee!
WITH A NAME LIKE “KENNEDY”…
Perhaps the best example in the nation of “Who’s your daddy?” politics is the state of Massachusetts, where to be a successful candidate you must either (a) be intelligent, articulate, honest, and capable or (b) be named “Kennedy.”
This rule also applies in Maryland and New York, and it might even have worked in Illinois if William Kennedy Smith hadn’t learned constituent services in a South Florida bar from his uncle Ted.
The poster child for flagrant mediocrity being overcome by family name has to be the congressman from Rhode Island, Patrick Kennedy. To begin with, you know you’re a second-rate Kennedy when you have to carpetbag in Rhode Island. What, is Delaware too big a challenge?
A profile of Congressman Kennedy in the Weekly Standard offers this pithy, insightful comment he made on the issue of eliminating racism in the armed services: “So what happens is, things don’t get reported because, you know, let’s not make much to do about nothing, so to speak. One of the worries I have about, you, a really zero-defect mentality with respect to defect—I’m not talking now—I mean everyone can acknowledge that if there’s a little bit of extremism, I’m not saying that that isn’t just grounds for you know, expulsion from the military. But how do we address the broader issues… Can you answer that in terms of communication?”
Ah, those Irish boys and their gift of the blarney…
Patrick Kennedy’s lightweight status is even the subject of a documentary that has aired on PBS. (Note: When you’re a liberal so dim the folks in public broadcasting feel the need to comment, you’re an idiot.) Everyone who’s seen Taking On the Kennedys, the hilarious documentary on Patrick Kennedy’s first run for Congress, knows what a vacuous caricature he is. Were his name Patrick Smith or Pat Jones, he would be lucky to get elected programs chairman of the Pawtucket Kiwanis. But as a Kennedy, he’s in like Flynn (if I’m allowed to use this expression about a person of Irish descent).
The point here isn’t that the people of Rhode Island have a congressman who’s not too bright. The point is that northerners in Boston, Providence, Annapolis, and Albany have happily joined the ranks of the “who you know” America I fled in my youth. That trend is particularly felt in New York.
The words “New York” are charged with a magic based on the belief that anything can happen to anybody in a city that exists for everyman. New York is a bastion of accomplishment, a tabula rasa town where nobody cares what your last name is or who your husband is or what your connections are. You’re in New York now—you gotta deliver. The City That Never Sleeps calls out across the nation to individuals of achievement and says, “Come show me your best!”
And who to better exemplify that New York spirit of individual accomplishment than U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton!
[Wait for mocking laughter to subside. Continue.]
Before being elected senator by 55 percent of the New York State electorate, Hillary Clinton had a list of personal achievements so impressive it need not be recounted here, even if I could think of one. Here’s a woman who, despite having never held elective office, had a public record so well known she had to run for Senate in a state she’d never lived in, a thousand miles from the people who knew her best. And if there were ever a politician who did not depend on her last name for success, it was U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Rodham What’s-Her-Name.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected in a wave of southern-style, good-ol’-boy, “I-voted-for-her-husband” politicking, of course not! I’m shocked at the suggestion, really. She earned her position of power through merit, experience, and accomplishment. If you don’t believe it, apply this simple test:
Imagine her as Hillary Rodham Jones, wife of prosperous Arkansas poultry processor William Jefferson Jones. All things being equal (money, party affiliation, hairstyle), wouldn’t Senate candidate Hillary Jones—who had never lived in New York, never held public office, worked at a second-tier law firm in a rural backwater state, lost one law partner to a mysterious suicide and another to the penal system, and whose one foray into politics had been a nationalized health care plan so frightening it cost her party control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years—wouldn’t she be just as likely to be elected as former First Lady Hillary Clinton?
Of course, she would. You just roll over and go back to sleep, my rednec—er, northern friend.
MERITLESS CHARGES
Back in my angry, young-southern-man days, if I had been asked why I loved America, my short answer would have been that I loved the idea of a place where being the best was good enough. At the time, that wasn’t true in places like the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and many other points around the globe. Under communism, party loyalty and personal connections mattered far more than ability.
As a Southerner, I felt trapped in the same system. In my mind, however incorrectly, I saw the North as the merit-based alternative to the Bubba-based southern society of low expectations and personal connections. In the most general sense, the civil rights army that marched across the South was fighting for the cause of merit versus favoritism. The Old South customs allowed illiterate whites to cast their ballots while George Washington Carver couldn’t get in a voting booth. The civil rights revolution promised a future where citizens would enter the public arena as individuals, not limited or favored based on their group identity but, rather, given a level playing field in which each man or woman could pursue excellence.
Clearly this revolution failed. America is no more a meritocracy today than it is a libertarian utopia or constitutional republic. I won’t even mention affirmative action, which is an open, unapologetic rejection of merit in favor of racism—the example is too obvious to merit comment. When an Asian student with a 4.0 GPA is denied a spot at Harvard to make room for a Hispanic student with a 3.5, neither one is getting what both deserve. But this is America, and we don’t want them to.
How far are we from the ideal of individual merit? During the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature bemoaning the lack of diversity on the American team. The Chronicle bemoaned the fact that 95 percent of the American athletes were white, and, the writer implied, that meant something must have gone wrong.
What? Is there a more pure example of individual achievement than Olympic sport? Setting aside
the fiasco of figure skating—where it’s still the Commies versus the Capitalists giving gold medals to their homeys—you are on the Olympic team if you skated faster, skied farther, or shot straighter than everyone else. Period. There is no room in the process for diversity, and no need for it, either. A black ice skater and a Hispanic curler could no more be kept off the team by their skin color than they could be kept on it for the same reason. There is—or should I say, was—one standard for the Olympics: achievement.
The 2002 Winter Olympics were marred in a small but significant way by the submersion of merit to considerations of race. But the primacy of group membership over individual accomplishment is so pervasive that the Olympic media coverage at times turned laughable. When Vonetta Flowers became the first black person to ever win a gold medal in a Winter Olympics, reporters were flummoxed as to how to describe her. They couldn’t go on the air and say “black person,” so one commentator resorted to describing Flowers as “the first African American from any country to win gold at the Winter Olympics.”
Think of how proud the many African Americans from other countries must have felt…
A merit-based America would have a flat income tax where everyone pays the same rate. What is a graduated income tax other than a reminder to Bill Gates from the mighty majority of mathematically impaired Americans that we don’t care how smart he gets, we can still take away all his stuff?
A merit-based America would have a national college system that was difficult to get into, but one whose diplomas were truly worth having. Instead, we send everyone who can walk and drink beer at the same time into our higher education system. They may not get much from the education, but most invest heavily in the mastery of the “higher” part. After four years of bad grades and bong hits, a majority of Americans who attend college never graduate. The ones who do graduate end up $50K in debt and have a degree that’s worth about what my dad’s diploma was worth when he graduated from high school in 1959.
College admissions used to be one way of separating the wheat from the chaff. But now that states are throwing money at would-be students to fill up overbuilt campuses, the slogan of higher education has become “All Chaff, All the Time!” Why is it wrong to say to a college applicant, “Sorry, you don’t belong here,” particularly when he clearly doesn’t? Is it because we don’t want to make anyone feel bad (a classically southern trait, by the way)? Well, think about how bad they’re going to feel flunking out of the Feng Shui of Barney Fife: Mayberry as Oriental Metaphysics.
Except they won’t flunk out, will they? Remember those Partonesque grading curves I complained about earlier? Check out this statistic from ground zero of northern liberalism, Harvard University: More than 50 percent of all Harvard students have an A or A-average. It’s the Lake Woebegone Syndrome: All the kids are above average.
They must be using the same math in Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal, some Texas public high schools have ranked 15 percent or more of their students in the top 10 percent of their class. This is because college admissions and scholarships are linked to class rankings, and, well, do you want to tell some kid he doesn’t get to go to the college of his choice merely because he didn’t earn it? That’s so… mean.
The Southerner’s rejection of merit may have found its most extreme expression in the northern, liberal enclaves like Oakland and Boston where, along with some seventy other communities, so-called living-wage laws have been implemented. Businesses who wish to bid on government contracts are required to pay all of their employees a government-ordered “living wage,” which tends to be in the ten-to fourteen-dollar-an hour range.
The premise of the living-wage movement is that you deserve to be paid enough to support a family of four, whether or not you are capable of earning it. I suppose it would be futile at this point in American history to ask why you have a family of four to begin with if you don’t have enough money to feed them. And I assume it would be considered rude to point out that there are millions of Americans who earn at least fourteen dollars an hour and sometimes much, much more, and that their employers happily pay these exorbitant wages without the threat of arrest. These employees get their “living wage” the old-fashioned way: They earn it.
Perhaps it’s my poor upbringing, but I cannot see past the vast chasm between what a job is worth and what a worker is paid to do it. It simply isn’t worth fourteen dollars an hour to pay a recovering alcoholic to sit in a parking lot and watch the cars for eight hours, no matter what the law says. His effort does not merit that reward.
Supporters of living and minimum wages have the mistaken notion that the reason the boss pays you six dollars an hour is that he’s trying to rip you off, that he would pay you less if he were allowed to by law.
This is backward. The minimum-wage law is in place because there are millions of able-bodied adults among us who are incapable of any legal activity that would generate enough wealth to keep them alive. If you are making the minimum wage, it’s not because your boss refuses to pay you what you’re worth; it’s because if he paid you what you deserved, you would starve to death in the building and create a health hazard for your fellow employees.
Think about the term “living wage” for a second: Who is so stupid that they would take and keep a job that doesn’t keep them alive? Either somebody who has a severe problem with math or Darwin’s next scheduled pickup. If you are too dumb, too lazy, too unskilled, and too unmotivated to feed yourself and you die… is this a bad thing?
But America the land of opportunity has become America the place to avoid responsibility. As I write, the newspapers are filled with hand-wringing editorials over the fate of the employees of Enron Corporation. As presented by the media, thousands of naive innocents working diligently for a dishonest company lost everything they had through no fault of their own.
Meanwhile, the story goes, the fat cats of upper management hit the silk and bailed with everything but the towels from the executive washroom. Worse, they fixed the rules so that management could sell their Enron stock while the selling was good, but employees had to hold theirs until it was too late. Employees, good; Enron, bad.
But writer Michael Lewis of the New York Times magazine makes this observation:
… there was a brief period, from Oct. 29 through Nov. 12, in which the 401(k) plan was frozen and Enron’s employees were unable to sell their shares. The stock during that span fell to $9.24 a share from $13.81, a small step in the long plunge from more than $90 to pennies today. The only shares workers were restricted from selling outside that window were those pumped into the plan by the company as a “match” for part of each employee’s contribution. (Those shares couldn’t be sold until the worker turned 50.)
He goes on to point out that thousands of Enron employees had to know that the deals they were working on were losing big bucks, and these employees were pulling down a six-figure salary the entire time. Some of the same employees who are suing Enron for fraud manned the fake trading floor Enron set up to impress investors. The investors didn’t know it was a scam, but the low-level Enronians pretending to sell shares of Siberian crude certainly did.
These folks were part of a scam, they promoted the scam, they rode the wave of Enron prosperity to its profitable pinnacle and crashed with it at the end. But now that it’s over, these same folks—with a decade of Enron-funded big bucks and high living under their belts—want the taxpayers to bail them out. Hardworking blue-collar schmoes who’ve never earned more than $40K a year should chip in to cover the 401(k) funds of a bunch of Volvo drivers because, according to the plaintiffs, they deserve it.
The Enron employees believe they deserve our tax dollars because they believe that life is a scam. They don’t just believe it; they know it—because they were part of a major one themselves. They didn’t know where the money to pay their big-time salaries was coming from at Enron, and they don’t care where it comes from now. They don’t care if the tax dollars poured into their IRAs come from
low-wage workers who spent the nineties sweeping floors while they were living large off the Enron economy.
They don’t care because this is America. And in America, it’s not what you deserve, it’s not what you can earn: It’s what you can get. Or even better, it’s what you can get your daddy, your frat brother, or your favorite uncle—Uncle Sugar—to get for you.
It’s just another lesson in economics from the front row of a Redneck Nation.
9
Darwin Is Dead
(And Is Being Channeled Nightly by
a TV Psychic from Long Island)
In those parts of the Republic where Beelzebub is still real—everywhere in the South save a few walled towns—the evangelical sects plunge into an abyss of malignant imbecility, and declare a holy war on every decency that civilized men cherish.
—H. L. Mencken
Southerners believe in Satan. Northerners believe in Darwin.
This is the Mason-Dixon line of American religion. It isn’t that more Southerners believe in God. Surveys have historically shown that more than 90 percent of all Americans believe in “God, a Higher Intelligence or some omnipotent being who resembles Charlton Heston.”
What makes America a Redneck Nation is the way we believe in God. There is what I used to generalize as the northern approach—temperate, intellectual, and internalized. Northerners attempt to balance faith and reason, Scripture and science. Thus, Darwin is viewed, not as an agent of the devil, but as another truth-seeker whose discoveries must be dealt with directly, head-on. The facts are the facts, and we must trust God that he knows what He’s doing.
Then there was the South, where the true measure of devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ was the willingness to be a complete and utter idiot on His behalf. Nothing is less relevant than the facts, and nothing is more suspect than science and reason. We reject Darwin as unbelievable and maintain instead that Adam and Eve frolicked in the altogether just a short six thousand years ago, living in peace and harmony alongside the dinosaur and the woolly mammoth. In northern Kentucky, for example, an evangelical ministry called Answers in Genesis is currently overseeing a $14-million Creation Museum and Family Discovery Center offering proof that God not only created the world in six days but also brought it in under budget through the use of nonunion labor.
Redneck Nation Page 10
