Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  Oh, came HUD’s reply, we’re supposed to be reasonable?

  It is safe to say that in the twenty-first century, Berkeley has become all but synonymous with the suppression of free speech and the so-called P.C. movement. Too bad that “politically correct” has become such an innocuous phrase, because there’s a powerful, repugnant bit of redneck thinkology cloaked within it.

  The “fight the power” fascists at Berkeley aren’t total idiots. They understand that they’re abusing a fundamental freedom when they keep their political opponents from speaking. How do they defend this obviously bad behavior? By trumping the need for freedom of expression with a more pressing need, like maintaining good order, or keeping hurtful words from causing others pain, or nurturing a political system under assault. If these arguments sound familiar, you’re probably from the South, for they’re exactly what pro-segregation editorialists offered in defense of suppressing dissent during the civil rights era.

  How many towns banned, or attempted to ban, Dr. King or the Freedom Riders from their borders? How many southern judges were asked to overrule free speech in favor of safe streets?

  During the civil rights era, many cities argued that the opinions expressed by some controversial figures were just too dangerous to be allowed in their communities. Southerners didn’t want to hear what the civil rights activists were saying, and, it was argued, the outside agitators had nothing to say worth hearing, anyway.

  Thirty years later, a black Charleston, South Carolina, city councilman proposed a similar ordinance barring all “hate groups” (as defined by the city government) from assembling or speaking in Charleston. “The people of Charleston don’t want to hear from those groups,” he insisted, echoing the sentiment of the white city leaders who would have banned his father’s public protests a generation earlier.

  Maintaining good order is one long-standing southern value often invoked to override questions of free speech. Another is the need to be pleasant, and when it comes to southern hospitality at the expense of free speech, the Confederistas have nothing on St. Paul, Minnesota.

  The people of St. Paul enacted a law making it a crime to say anything that “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender,” thereby criminalizing the Klan, the Black Panthers, the Shriners, the Christian Coalition, Pat Buchanan, Alan Dershowitz, the National Organization for Women, the NEA, and virtually every sketch performed on Saturday Night Live, along with one or two episodes of The Brady Bunch.

  Were this law truly enforced, every comedy club would be shuttered, every politician gagged and every talk radio microphone impounded. What kind of idiot thought this was a good idea?

  Well, a majority of the citizens of St. Paul, for starters. This idea wasn’t foisted on the populace; it was very popular among the citizenry, the vast majority of whom, I must point out, are not Southerners. St. Paul is pink with the smiling, well-fed faces of liberals, lefties, and other usual suspects of America’s northern political tradition.

  And as good, modern American liberals, they absolutely do not believe in the First Amendment.

  Passing a law against impolite speech is the kind of reactionary lawmaking traditionally associated with rural outposts in the Ozark Mountains. It smacks of the days when the state of Arkansas passed a legislative request that H. L. Mencken be deported for insulting the honor of their state in print. After one devastatingly accurate portrait of their homeland in the 1920s, Arkansas legislators took the floor to demand that “the dirty Jew” Mencken be sent to his home country at once. And if Mencken had actually been Jewish and hadn’t been born in Baltimore, they might have succeeded.

  It is now widely agreed that the Arkansans were asses… so what, pray tell, are the St. Paulines? The folks of Arkansas only tried to silence one man, while the people of St. Paul criminalized all speech that arouses “anger, alarm or resentment.”

  What’s particularly southern about St. Paul’s approach to free speech is that it was focused on the reaction to the words, not the words themselves. If I were a citizen of St. Paul and someone began intoning the Lord’s Prayer outside my bedroom window, I could reasonably assert that I was alarmed—he might be a bomb-toting anti-abortionist or a televangelist with a runaway libido. I could furthermore reasonably claim resentment of the King James Version of the Bible, which with its soaring poetry exposed the limited vocabulary of my public school education or the comparatively lifeless prose of my Scientology pamphlets.

  The purpose of the ordinance, in other words, was not to stop the transmission of the ideas but to protect the delicate sensibilities of the hearer. Is free speech really worth letting folks get upset over? Why don’t you just sit down and have a julep—you’ll feel better.

  The St. Paul censorship code was so clearly unconstitutional that even some members of the U.S. Supreme Court noticed, and it was overturned. But fear not, Redneck Nation, for the fight against free speech continues, and with an unusual ally: the ACLU.

  FOOTLOOSE WITH THE FIRST AMENDMENT

  If you’ve seen the movie Footloose, you have my sympathy. But you probably recall how ridiculous the premise was: an American town in the modern era where rock music and dancing were banned and teenagers actually paid attention to sermons on sinful music preached by a balding, middle-aged pastor. The film is unwatchable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s simply impossible in these modern times to imagine such a place in America.

  Well, if Footloose seems beyond the pale, what to make of a state with a list of banned words, words you cannot speak publicly at work to any person for any reason. Does it sound crazy? Does it sound ridiculous? Does it sound like… California?

  In one of the most bizarre judicial rulings ever, the California State Supreme Court voted 4–3 to establish a list of banned words. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by a group of Hispanic workers claiming that their boss used racist slurs and comments when talking to them. In upholding the damages, the court barred “any future use of a list of offensive words in the workplace—even outside the presence of the [Latino employees] and even if welcome or overtly permitted.”

  Worse, the ACLU, whose attitude toward our liberties is getting less civil every day, supported this overt, obvious, and intentional violation of First Amendment freedoms. As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff noted at the time, “the ACLU of Northern California submitted an amicus brief in enthusiastic support of this prior restraint of speech…. [The ACLU] has now allowed itself to be gleefully cited by its opponents as agreeing that certain words can no longer be spoken in certain places before there is clear evidence that any of those words has created discrimination in a particular instance or in a particular context.”

  Making fun of the Old South for policing water fountains and checking who sat in which bus seat is easy. But it’s also history. Right now the state of California has speech police patrolling workbenches and factory floors, listening for the “forbidden words”—a real-life parody of an old George Carlin routine.

  If you think I’m exaggerating about the speech police, you might want to chat with Janice Barton of Manistee, Michigan. The speech police didn’t just catch her, they sentenced her to forty-five days in jail. According to the Manistee Chronicle, Barton was arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime of telling her mother in a one-on-one conversation that “spics,” as she put it, ought to learn to speak English. Now, this is hardly a noble sentiment, but is it a crime?

  The comment, spoken in a crowded restaurant, was overheard by an off-duty deputy sheriff who took down Barton’s license plate when she left. In October 1998, Barton was charged with violating a city ordinance against “insulting conduct in a public place.” The actual law reads like it was written by my grandmother to be read immediately before Sunday dinner. “No person shall engage in any indecent, insulting, immoral or obscene conduct in any public place.” And clean your plate, too.

  Towns all over Michigan have nearly ident
ical laws, it should be noted. It should be further noted that all of these incidents of outrageous limits on personal liberty are occurring in the very heart of traditional American Northernism.

  California, Minnesota, Michigan—these are all bastions of progressivism, leaders in what we Southerners viewed as Yankee agitation. These stories are not isolated incidents from oddball locales like Ottumwa, Iowa, or Moose River, Maine. Cass Sunstein is a prominent member of the University of Chicago’s law school, where he wrote Democracy and the PROBLEM of Free Speech (emphasis added). His rejection of free speech as a near-absolute right was well received, not by far-right proto-Nazis, but by his northern liberal allies who nearly all agree that as long as Rush Limbaugh makes more money than they do, there is too much free speech in America.

  The inevitable—in fact, the only—counterargument those who abandon free speech offer is that some speech is too vile to be allowed. Racist taunts, screams of hateful anger, the music of Celine Dion—what value do these expressions truly have, and what about all the harm they cause?

  But even if we could agree that some expressions of free speech are too much for a society to bear, who gets to decide which ones they are? Inevitably it’s the government that will decide, and these governments (as Mario Savio would surely tell you) cannot be trusted. Imagine how happy George Wallace and Bull Connor would have been to have the power to suppress “hate-filled speech” attacking the good Christian folk of the South and the honor of their heritage. They would have been more than happy to distribute their list of “banned words” to every civil rights gathering in their home states.

  “Ah, but, Michael, that’s the mistake you make with this Redneck Nation nonsense. Northerners don’t abuse power that way. We Yankees wouldn’t suppress political speech or outlaw dissent. We truly are different from those Southerners you compare us with. That stuff might have happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, but it wouldn’t in Waukesha, Wisconsin.”

  Oh, really? From wire reports:

  Waukesha County, Wisconsin, Sued for

  Park Ordinance Prohibiting Free Speech

  MILWAUKEE—Robert Thompson, a resident of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit challenging a county ordinance preventing him from passing out copies of The Bible and the U.S. Constitution in county parks.

  Waukesha County Ordinance Chapter 20 prohibits public discussions on religion or politics within the county parks unless a written permit from the county park and planning commission has first been granted…. The ordinance contains a flat ban on religious or political literature distribution in public parks [emphasis added]. Violating the ordinance can result in fines and up to 90 days in jail.

  This law, a direct, frontal assault on political speech, was the law of the land in an American city in 1999. Not 1899, but on the cusp of the twenty-first century, and in a solid northern community in a solidly liberal state. Such a law in a southern county in 1969 would have been viewed as proof of the oppression and backwardness of the South. How, my Yankee friend, should we view it today?

  Once the law was challenged, the good folks of Waukesha quickly saw they had a court case they couldn’t win and withdrew. It is safe to assume, however, that similar laws still exist, and it is safer still to assume they’ll be found north—not south—of the Mason-Dixon line. For that is the ultimate irony of all of these sad stories of modern redneckery: You already knew it.

  As soon as you began reading this chapter about free speech, you knew what was coming. There are dozens—no, hundreds—of these stories, and they all involve places like Berkeley and St. Paul and Chicago and Seattle, and they all confirm that the modern enemy of free speech is comprised almost entirely of its old champions from the civil rights era.

  If I say “racism,” you still say “South.” If I say “illiterate,” you still say “South.” But if the word association is “censorship,” the natural choice is “North.” When the next Mario Savio appears, he will no doubt return to Berkeley to fight for the cause of free speech.

  This time, I doubt he’ll make it out alive.

  12

  Submit, Hell!

  Radical feminists are bard to find in the South; the great majority of females are not in sympathy with lesbianism; they do not generally dispense with their undergarments or go out in public without their make-up. Furthermore, they reject the notion of an all-encompassing cross-cultural and historical patriarchal plot to subjugate women. If in fact such a plot ever existed, many southern women have been all-too-willing accomplices.

  —Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Daughters of Canaan:

  A Saga of Southern Women

  A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.

  —From the mission statement of the

  Southern Baptist Convention

  I am not silting here standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I am sitting here because I love and respect him.

  —Hillary Rodham Clinton, with her husband, on 60 Minutes

  It was the Tammy Wynette line that really hurt.

  Every northern woman knows what a “Tammy Wynette” is—that downtrodden southern damsel trudging through Sam’s Wholesale Club, a squirming toddler over her hip and a dark bruise under her eye. She’s the one trying to scrape together a week’s worth of groceries from what’s left after paying the tab for her husband’s weekend drinking and his unexplained credit card charges from a local motel. A “Tammy Wynette” is a helpless female, a perpetual victim, an unenlightened sister who has yet to add the word “empowered” to her vocabulary.

  This was the type of woman—the powerless, dependent, prototypically southern woman—that then-Mrs. Clinton denied being. She couched her denial in this language because she knew it would resonate with women from Boston to the San Francisco Bay.

  Working in politics as I have, I’ve had the opportunity to hear the way southern women, particularly the low-income and/or religious women, are viewed by their northern sisters. Listening to northeastern liberals, one would think southern gals spend their days clad in burkas awaiting their next caning. I remember listening to a conversation in Westchester County, New York, in which a liberal, pro-abortion Republican was talking about her pro-life southern counterparts, and I couldn’t tell if she thought they were victims of brainwashing or Vichy-style traitors to the feminist cause. After a particularly heated rant about “telling me what to do with my body” and the lack of government-subsidized day care, she declared, “We wouldn’t put up with that up here.”

  And there it is: what southern women will put up with. Those poor, demure damsels, oppressed by southern culture, utterly lacking in empowerment and unable to sing the “I Am Woman” anthem of the northern sisterhood. We’ve got to get these women a subscription to Cosmo and access to the Oxygen channel—stat!

  In northern eyes, there are two kinds of southern women: If they’re attractive and affluent, they’re vapid, sorority-girl sellouts with big hair and bigger smiles, hanging off the arm of old money or nouveau riche manhood. If they’re poor and pudgy, they’re political prisoners of the trailer park plantation, spending their days with Judge Judy and their nights with Miss Cleo.

  And either way, they’re much too fond of Elvis.

  The defining characteristic of these redneck women is the relationship they have with men. Southern women, so the assumption goes, are either helpless damsels, delicate and genteel, wholly dependent upon men for protection, or they are trailer trash, desperate Paula Joneses who will put themselves through whatever humiliations are required to hold on to their wayward men. A stereotypical southern woman either needs a man to rescue her or needs to be rescued from her man—depending on her economic status.

  I find the northern female’s contempt for the southern belle’s perceived weaknesses deliciously ironic, coming as it does from a group of women who lack the strength to protect themselves from so much as an auto shop girlie calendar, an off-color j
oke, or (as will be demonstrated) the works of Goya. If you are looking for erudite, academically minded women, then the South will be slim pickin’s, I concede. But if you’re looking for strong, powerful women who have taught their men to answer “How high?” when they say “Jump!” you gotta be whistlin’ Dixie.

  WHERE THE GIRLS ARE

  I learned about southern womanhood the hard way, from broken hearts and sore backsides endured during a misspent youth devoted to their pursuit and capture. There was Laurie, a blonde with a soft southern accent so smooth you could spread it on a biscuit, who moved away and left me crushed in the fourth grade.

  There was Georgia, a dark brunet whose every furtive classroom glance my senior year told me, “Not if you were the last breathing biped on planet Earth, Graham.”

  There was Wendy, a singer, an actress, a beauty pageant contestant, and the queen of her corner of Lexington County, South Carolina. She was perhaps the last woman in America to be “courted” rather than dated, and Wendy’s father sometimes took a system of valet parking to handle the crush of suitors awaiting an audience.

  Christine was the embodiment of southern femininity: graceful, demure, and drop-dead gorgeous. We met at a state high school band event, where she stole my heart. When I drove ninety minutes to North Augusta, to reclaim it, I was greeted by the embodiment of southern fatherhood: imposing, inarticulate, and well armed.