Redneck Nation
Page 17
It’s not the open sexuality that makes the Sex and the City women rednecks, but rather the male-dependent trashiness, the willingness to go spelunking down the deepest, lowest crevices of our testosterone-driven fantasies. A woman who stands before Victorian society and shouts, “I defy your conventions and claim my body as my own!” is a feminist. A woman who lies down on the tailgate of a pickup truck and shouts, “The buffet’s open, boys! Come and get it!” is, well, actually she’s a girl I went to high school with.
Has it occurred to anyone else that the feminist icons of HBO are about as ideological as a meeting of the Republican Women’s Club of Rocky Mount, North Carolina? If these women are advocating any ideas not already openly practiced by the ladies of the Junior League, it hasn’t come to my attention. Samantha and Co. want sex, security, and some love, and they want them delivered to them by someone whose pants zip in the front. How did they become the new Freedom Riders of feminism?
Because the entire feminist movement has gone ‘neck, that’s how. Remember during the Lewinsky story, that parade of northern women proudly announcing that not only were they willing to overlook President Clinton’s perjury and obstruction in a sexual harassment lawsuit but they would also be willing to orally service the man themselves in thanks for his solidly liberal politics. The Warden, who spent ten years with Knight-Ridder, nearly choked on her shrimp and grits when she read the following comment from former White House correspondent Nina Burleigh: “I’d be happy to give him a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”
An admiration for Ms. Burleigh’s devotion to the cause of abortion rights doesn’t dispel the low-rent, white-trash attitude behind the offer. Yes, I’ve known southern women who would “take a knee” in gratitude for services rendered, and, yes, there is a species of Dixie darling who can be overheard saying, “Thank you for comin’ over and fixin’ the air conditioner, baby. Why don’t you lean back and let Mama clean your pipes.” I just didn’t know these women could be found on the faculty of the Women’s Studies Departments at our most prestigious universities.
Forget gender studies, feminists need to go back to Logic 101 and work their way back from the heartland of their new Redneck Nation.
13
Taken to the Extreme
I have seen the future of southern-style evangelicalism and it’s an angry lesbian vegetarian who wants to take away your cell phone.
Of all the bad habits of the Old South that you Yankees could pick up, the last one I expected would catch your eye is Prohibitionism. Folks misspeak when they talk about southern puritans. Puritans are a New England invention. We Southerners are Prohibitionists, a far higher calling. Puritanism, as Mencken noted, is the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. Prohibitionism is the need to track that person down and bludgeon him into submission.
You can find the skeletal remains of the twentieth-century Prohibition movement scattered across the legal landscape of the South: blue laws, dry counties, and—a hometown favorite of mine—minibottles. When people from civilized climes travel to South Carolina, they inevitably stare in astonishment at the little airplane bottles from which their liquor drinks are served. Instead of pouring a shot of their favorite hooch from a liter bottle, the bartender is required by law to crack open a 1.5-ounce mini. The confused tourist glances about to check if his bar stool is locked in its upright position. The minibottles are a hassle for the bar owners, an annoyance for the servers, and—if he’s ordering any multiliquor beverage like a Long Island Iced Tea—wildly exorbitant in price for the customers.
“What’s the point?” thirsty travelers slumped over their Bourbon and branch waters want to know, and it’s a good question. Today, South Carolina clings to minibottles for the added revenue to state coffers these higher-priced drinks generate. But the real purpose was to keep Prohibition alive.
Back in the early 1970s, one of the great debates in southern states was what to do about “liquor by the drink,” which, as any southern Baptist will tell you, is as dangerous to your mortal soul as lottery by the ticket or sex by the hour. These folks were content with the old BYOB bottle-club system and the attendant hindrances that came with toting your own liquor.
It was a royal pain in the neck, and many bars and restaurants decided to take their chances with John Law and mixed drinks, anyway. This was a problem. The law was being flouted and the legislators from these Baptist districts knew it, having spent a few nights passed out on the floors of these speakeasies themselves.
They couldn’t go back home to the voters and legalize their own elbow-bending because the voters wouldn’t have it. But they couldn’t sit back while perfectly good tax dollars poured into the pockets of bar owners, either. The compromise was to continue to force drinkers to still buy their own bottle, as they did in the bottle clubs, only now the bottle would be very, very small.
Voilà—the minibottle. A solution to the problem of public vice that was simple, obvious… and dumb.
The grip of this Prohibitionist spirit continues in the dry counties of Tennessee, the bottle clubs of Kansas, and the minibottles in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. These citizens simply aren’t prepared to accept individual liberty in its many, glorious forms. Southern conservatives love to mock Senator Hillary Rodham and her mantra that “it takes a village to raise a child,” but their willingness to police the corner pub and rural roadhouse shows they agree with her at heart.
This “your business is my business” ethos was ever present in the South of my youth. It never occurred to either the libationist or the little old lady trying to knock the julep out of his hand that his decision to drink and the bar’s decision to serve him were nobody else’s concern. A libertarian down South is as out of place as a hot dog stand at a PETA convention. The drunk leaning against the bar in Gadsden, Alabama, knows he’s going to burn in Hell one day and he’s grateful for the efforts of his neighbors—however annoying—to pull him back from the awaiting fires.
Northerners scratch their heads in confusion at this redneck naiveté. What kind of self-righteous, judgmental people put up such ridiculous roadblocks between a legal business selling a legal product and adults of legal age who choose to buy it? Northerners can’t imagine such overbearing Prohibitionists in the twenty-first century.
They should imagine California.
If you traveled back in time to the 1920s and told the folks in a New York speakeasy that a free, full-grown American in the twenty-first century isn’t allowed to smoke a cigarette in a barroom, they would curse the Nineteenth Amendment and assume that the Bible Belt had somehow gotten wrapped around Uncle Sam’s throat. Banning all cigarettes? The fast fellas and flappers of old New York would curse the Bible-thumpers of the fallen Confederacy and blame the noxious idea on southern Prohibitionists.
And they would be right, at least in spirit.
The Smoke Nazis currently prowling America’s landscape are as redneck in their approach as Carrie Nation with her mighty ax. They have taken the fundamentalist leap from “You ought not do that” to “And I’ve got to find a way to stop you!” The same northern sophisticates who snicker at the very idea of bottle clubs are the ones who support forcing smokers into private smoking clubs to keep their sinful cigarettes from the eyes of children, soccer moms, and other weak-minded citizens.
I know what you’re thinking: “But, Michael, cigarettes are bad! They serve no useful purpose! And they endanger others! We don’t care if some poor soul wants to give himself lung cancer, but he’s got no right to be a menace to others!”
Believe me, I’ve heard it all before. In fact, every Southerner who’s cast a vote for a county option alcohol ordinance has heard it. There isn’t a single new argument from the finger-pointing Prohibitionists, North or South, and none of these arguments can overcome the libertarian (I used to say “northern”) principle that it’s none of your damn business.
You can believe, and rightly so, that smoking cigarettes will kill smokers.
You can further believe—though the evidence is hardly conclusive—that someone smoking a cigarette will kill you. But to get from these two propositions to “It should be a crime for a bar to allow its customers to smoke,” you must make a ridiculous leap of Prohibitionist faith to the idea that grown-ups simply should not be allowed to decide how to get along.
Why isn’t the entire issue solved by letting the bar owner hang a sign outside that says, “Warning: This establishment owned by Satan and his minions in the Republican National Committee. Those who enter are encouraged to smoke, drink, play cards, make jokes about sex, and read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Enter at your own risk!” What more is required? No one need patronize the bar who doesn’t choose to, employment at such an establishment cannot be mandated, and if there is no customer demand, market forces will soon convert the site into a shop for holistic medicines or a retailer of government-issued lottery tickets.
CALLING ALL YANKEES!
There are certain forms of Prohibitionism indigenous to the various regions. In the South, our attention-grabbing antics are more quixotic and entertaining, but they are far less dangerous than the earnest idiocy of our northern neighbors. Take, for example, the decision by the state of New York to ban the use of handheld cell phones while driving. Southerners may be dumb, but we’re not stupid. At least, not that stupid.
When we saw the poll numbers showing that 85 percent of New Yorkers supported a prohibition on cell phone use, we Southerners just shook our heads and muttered, “Only in New York.” First of all, if 85 percent of the state’s drivers really feel that way, they don’t need a law. They just need to put down their cell phones. Problem solved.
But these days it is more often Northerners who allow the government to deny the rights of all because of the foolish behavior of the few, and to be celebrated by the majority for doing so. We aren’t as willing to ban cell phone use down South, where people unable to drive and talk at the same time used to be called dumb.
Now we call them New Yorkers.
Are some citizens incapable of driving safely while carrying on a conversation? Of course. What the new Prohibitionists are laughably unable to grasp—but that we Southerners understand very well—is that stupid people will reveal their stupidity in their actions, not their technology.
If New Yorkers really want safer highways, they won’t arrest people for using a device that might one day distract from their driving. They will arrest people for the bad driving they do while actually distracted. Any driver weaving from lane to lane, running stop signs, and tailgating is a menace to be stopped, regardless of what causes the bad driving. What difference does it make if this dangerous driver is talking on a phone, reading a book, or buttering a bialy?
The South has long been considered a more superstitious, less rational region of the nation. But no southern legislature would approve such a totemic ban on “evil” objects like cell phones. A driver who plowed into a tree and then said, “It wasn’t me, Officer, it was this bad, bad talkin’ machine,” would be laughed right out of Dixie.
But Prohibitionists can’t wait around for you to do something harmful, because they don’t believe you have the right to be bad in the first place. Instead, they see the government as the proper agency to make you be good.
VEG OUT
I truly understand the desire to coerce one’s neighbors into righteousness. Part of growing up in the South is knowing that your neighbors will always be there to comment on what you do, as though it is somehow their business.
One summer during my college years, I came home from the confines of Oral Roberts University and grew a beard—in direct contravention of Oral’s orders. It wasn’t much of a beard, rather thin and scruffy, but I was proud of it. What fascinated me was the willingness of total strangers to comment on it. One older lady whom I had never met actually stopped me to say, “You know, you’d look pretty good if you’d get rid of that beard.” I remember thinking at the time, “What kind of nosy, obnoxious busybodies are we down here? This kind of thing never happens up North.”
Then I met a vegetarian.
I am not saying you have to be annoying to be a vegetarian. Only if you want to be really good at it.
Few people are more unbearable than the Vegetarian of Virtue, the tirelessly evangelical eschewer of flesh. He cannot let a public meal go by without casting judgment on the victuals. As each dish is presented, he issues his pronunciamentos on the congregation of comestibles: “Fish: mild backsliding. Chicken: not for the true believer. Veal—Let the Lord rain fire from above!”
These vegheads are in a class apart from the casual vegetarian who avoids meat eating for reasons of health, nutrition, or weight loss. This vegetarian is, from an animal-rights standpoint, the moral equivalent of a Christmas and Easter Christian: He wants the benefits of righteousness without the disquieting irrationalism of the faith. He is not a true believer.
Neither is the handful of unfortunate souls who claim they just don’t like the taste of meat. I’ve actually met one or two of these people, and they truly amaze me. They insist that meat simply doesn’t taste good to them, that if they were seated at Patout’s in New Orleans and presented with a smoked filet mignon topped with sautéed crawfish and slathered in a cream reduction sauce, they would greet it with a yawn and order a spinach salad.
These people aren’t stupid. They’re ill. They need our help and our prayers.
My disdain is reserved for the moral vegetarian alone. Moral vegetarianism is a form of religious extremism, not dissimilar from the extremism I lived with at Oral Roberts. But unlike ORU, whose dictates were confined by biblical literalism, veganism is a religion without theology, without (to paraphrase Al Gore) any controlling moral authority. The result is a group of radical activists who believe it is wrong to eat a chicken and okay to burn down a KFC to make that point.
Why isn’t it enough for you to stop eating meat? Why must you attempt to coerce me into your dismal, dietary hell? But the spirit of Prohibitionism is too strong. I watch the political battle over public smoking and I see the eyes of the vegans light with hope: today the Marlboro, tomorrow the meat loaf!
Even vegetarians I like are almost unbearable company. Years ago I was having dinner with Kathy Najimy, the wonderfully talented comic actress. We have a mutual friend who introduced us after a performance of the hysterically funny Kathy and Mo Show in New York, and we all met for dinner in Greenwich Village.
I didn’t know Kathy very well, but when my dinner came, she didn’t hesitate to hit me with the Vegan War Cry: “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
I looked down. In front of me was a plate of skewered chicken. On each side, a fork and knife. What other possible outcome, I wondered, did she have in mind?
“You really shouldn’t eat that,” she intoned, exasperated. “Eating meat is so unnatural.”
And so it begins, the Prohibitionist arguments against my choice to slap a rump roast on the barbie. And like the southern Prohibitionists, the arguments of the New Age nannies are uniformly weak.
What, for example, could possibly be “unnatural” about eating meat? Human beings are mammals. We are bipeds. And we are omnivorous. There is nothing more natural in this world than an omnivore (me) sitting down to a heaping plate of flora and fauna. A cursory examination of our species finds incisors at the front end and a large intestine at the back. Baby, I was built for beef!
Still, she wouldn’t stop. I have since discovered that militant vegetarians never stop. They’re like Mormons… except Mormons don’t smell like bean curd and they at least feel some vague, moral duty to be polite.
Not the vegheads. They come straight at you, and it’s almost always with the same arguments, the catechisms of the anticarnivore. I’ve had dozens of discussions with vegans, vegheads, and animal-rights activists of varying passion and intellect, and they always come back to the same questions:
NUMBER ONE: Don’t you know meat is bad for you?
I actually knew one stand-up comic who was a vegetarian alcoholic. He smoked pot and drank beer all day, but wouldn’t eat a hamburger because “all meat is bad for you.” Four ounces of beef aren’t any worse for you than twelve ounces of beer, and the fact that this lush had dedicated his life to the pursuit of cirrhosis of the liver was not an argument for the elimination of alcohol from the American diet. But because vegans are zealots, they insist that you see every bite of bologna as an irreparable moral failing.
NUMBER TWO: Don’t you believe that all killing is wrong?
The second test of the church of Save the Chickens is even dumber than the first. Of course, all killing isn’t wrong. If it were, every house cat in America would be facing the chair (an idea I fully favor, by the way). Animals kill each other all the time. It’s called the food chain, and there is no substitute. Are all the dead mice, fish, birds, and gazelles killed in the wild victims of a crime? If so, what do you vegans intend to feed the millions of fish, fowl, and fast-moving felines who live off of flesh? At this point, the argument inevitably turns to…
NUMBER THREE: Yes, but people don’t have to kill to live. Since we have the moral sense to tell us right from wrong, isn’t it wrong for us to kill?