Redneck Nation

by Michael Graham

  The head idiot—a loathsome troglodyte from Tennessee calling himself Johnny Knoxville—arranged for his pals to lie down on barbecue grills, snort worms up their noses and vomit them back out, get sprayed by skunks, attacked by bulls, beaten with guitars, and run over by various modes of transportation—naked, if possible.

  Jackass was wildly popular. (As of this writing, Knoxville and Co. are producing specials and other programming for MTV to keep the nausea alive.) And, like The Glutton Bowl, the show drew lots of viewers but little comment from media observers… until the ambulances arrived. At least four Jackass imitators harmed themselves seriously during the show’s first incarnation—none of them south of the Mason-Dixon. (There was one report out of Kentucky about a young man asking his friends to run him over, but that turned out to be a local idiot who didn’t need the inspiration of cable television to break his own neck.)

  One thirteen-year-old Yankee Jackass wanna-be dressed up in a fire-retardant suit, covered it with steaks, and lay across a hot charcoal grill. He suffered second-degree burns. Another thirteen-year-old suffered second-and third-degree burns after two friends poured gasoline on his legs and feet and then set them on fire following the show. He was later listed in critical but stable condition in the burn unit of Boston’s Shriners Hospital.

  “Sure, Michael,” I can hear you saying, “but those aren’t rednecks, they’re teenagers. And all teenagers are under constant assault from their glands. The fact that sixteen-year-old boys like watching people acting like idiots doesn’t prove anything. They also think it’s cool to have a metal stud shoved through their tongues.”

  To which I reply, “Pig rectums!”

  No, that’s not an anachronistic southern epithet. I mean, literally, porcine poopers, animal anuses, barnyard buttholes. When NBC’s hit series Fear Factor featured close-ups of folks eating these usually discarded pork products, they snagged their highest ratings of the season. As contestants swallowed the recta down, network ratings went straight up. Not long after that, NBC had folks bobbing for chicken feet buried under a pile of live worms.

  “Hey, Ma—what’s in them TV dinners? Spaghetti and chicken nuggets? Yum!”

  It may sound like a prime-time game show on the Deliverance Television Network, but Fear Factor is a jewel in NBC’s broadcasting crown. It’s a coast-to-coast hit with high ratings and even higher profits. It’s not hard to find contestants, either. Americans from the redneck backwaters of Long Island and Detroit beg, plead, and audition for a chance to flop around in vats of rancid squid or get lowered into a tank of water snakes or lie down in the path of swarming rats (no, not the kind in charge of programming at NBC Entertainment—the short, furry kind).

  In exchange, the players get the opportunity to behave repulsively on national television, demonstrate a complete lack of self-respect, and, maybe, win $50,000. Someone call my old boss Red Winburn, quick! There’s a network that wants to sign you to a development deal.

  Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment, says there is a perfectly good explanation for why this network shows humans interacting with manure during prime time: “The audience wants these shows.” He is absolutely right. And he’s not talking about an audience limited to the residents of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, or the city limits of Beckley, West Virginia, either.

  In the interest of fairness, let it be noted for the record that not everything on television is as bad as Fear Factor or Survivor V: Trapped in the Washington, D.C., Public School System. There are still shows celebrating intellectual vigor, like the syndicated show Jeopardy! and its sister program, Wheel of Fortune, a.k.a. Jeopardy! for Stupid People.

  There are apparently millions of Americans astonished by spelling, who work just as hard finding a place for a “p” in the word “pneumonia” as a typical Jeopardy! contestant taking “Tenth-Century Japanese Poetry for $500.” And which of the two shows is the more popular?

  Please. Wheel of Fortune holds the record for the longest-running game show to hold the number one spot in TV syndication history, nearly nine hundred weeks. Yes, nine hundred weeks of puzzled Americans staring at the missing letters in a common word or phrase and muttering to themselves, “Hmmm, Hunchback of Rotor Dame? No, Motor Dame? Maybe it’s the Hunchback of Boater Dame—that’s it!”

  For a time, however, the monster quiz show in America was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which slammed into the summer ratings like a tsunami in 1999. Those of us longing for more intellectually engaging TV fare took its popularity as a good sign. Sure, the questions were, shall we say, less than challenging—actual question: A person known for their fashion sense is known as a fashion (A) bowl, (B) fork, (C) saucer, (D) plate?—but at least regular folks were trying to show some mental heft. With Millionaire, as opposed to Wheel of Fortune, there was some sense that people who could answer the truly tough ones in the millionaire rounds deserved to walk away with a sack of cash. It was a show where knowledge equaled wealth, and any programming suggesting such a connection is an inherently good thing.

  Not to belabor the point, but this is significant: Folks on Millionaire try hard not to look stupid. While Jackass and Fear Factor and Funniest Home Videos seemed to celebrate the idea of getting rich quick through idiocy, the contestants on Millionaire seem to buy into the notion that it is, in fact, possible to be too stupid. Players on Millionaire didn’t celebrate their ignorance. They were frustrated by it.

  One reason might have been the modesty of the questions. Nobody expects to know all the answers when Alex Trebek whips out the stack of cards for categories like “Infectious Diseases” and “Great Moments in Opera.” But on Millionaire, when dopey lounge act Regis Philbin asks how many U.S. senators each state has, you can see the look of disgust on the puzzled contestant’s face. “Ah, c’mon,” he’s thinking to himself, “I oughta know this!”

  It was a small thing, a thin shaft of light, but many of us seized it as a hopeful indicator. Then Millionaire’s ratings began to slip. The folks at ABC Television started scrambling. What was missing? What would it take to keep people watching a quiz show? Smarter contestants? Tougher questions? Topless dancers? No, wait! We’ve got it:

  Deadly, poisonous spiders!

  And thus the torture chamber quiz show was born: first ABC’s The Chair, then Fox’s The Chamber, and eventually, one assumes, The Spanish Inquisition, a joint venture of the History Channel and the S&M Network, brought to you each week by Advil and the Jesuit Society of America.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, quiz shows featured men and women of letters—college professors, historians, writers—to delight and amaze us with their knowledge. There was some sense that viewers wanted to be entertained by people smarter than the folks back home: Charles Van Doren, Kitty Carlisle, and the like.

  The quiz show challenge today is to keep the viewer from feeling stupid, not easy in a nation where 73 percent of the public think the Gettysburg Address is the name of a new spy thriller by Robert Ludlum. So the questions can’t be too tough. At the same time, watching a bunch of people answer questions like “How many digits are in your phone number… without the area code?” is hardly compelling. That’s where the tarantulas come in.

  On ABC’s The Chair, contestants were strapped to a bit of furniture borrowed from a Texas gas chamber, attached to various monitors, and forced to answer questions like “Which motel chain has the sleepy bear in pajamas as its mascot?” while the producers lowered spiders into their faces or sicced alligators on them. Not only must the victims (“players’ certainly isn’t the right word) answer the questions, but they also had to maintain a low and steady heart rate.

  Finally a TV show that combines the pleasures of a doctor’s visit, the excitement of a trip to the zoo, and the intellectual challenges of your third grader’s homework—now, that’s what I call entertainment!

  Which, actually, it is, if your standard for entertainment is shooting beer cans off your best friend’s head or watching the director’s-cut DVD of Smokey an
d the Bandit 3. This is precisely the dumbed-down culture I fled when I left the South. And now it’s on prime time.

  I remember once as a young teen sitting in our living room watching Woody Allen’s Sleeper on ABC’s Saturday night movie. Some of my dad’s family were in from Horry County—a particularly rural part of South Carolina—and they were all huddled in the kitchen over a pot of coffee and hot servings of the latest family gossip. Whenever one of them came through the living room, he would stop, look at the TV screen for a minute, look at me, then shake his head and say, “What is that junk you’re watching?”

  How could I explain to them that this wasn’t a TV program, it was a lifeline. I had never seen anything like Woody Allen before. My parents would no more have taken me to a Woody Allen movie than to a public circumcision. He was one of “them,” by which they didn’t mean “Jew,” but much worse: “Yankee.” He was some fast-talking New Yorker making fun of God, Country, and My Baby, and represented a kind of art and entertainment we had no use for.

  And I loved it. I was astonished by it. I remember a few times looking around to make sure I didn’t get “caught,” though I couldn’t say what it was I was doing wrong. I felt the way Richard Wright describes following his first encounter with H. L. Mencken:

  Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority.… It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it. Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room.

  I didn’t know who Woody Allen was, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get away with these jokes about famous, important people, about religion, or especially about [stage whisper] S-E-X. And even more amazing, he was on TV. He was actually popular. Somewhere far from my head-shaking family was a place where Woody Allen’s comedy was as well accepted around the kitchen table as “kuntry komic” Jerry Clower was around mine.

  Maybe if we’d had Jackass when I was sixteen, I would have been a fan, who knows? When I was a teenager, I loved idiotic, counterculture, adult-annoying entertainment, too. In fact, I was (and remain) a huge fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which appeared regularly on public television in South Carolina until someone started explaining the jokes to our legislators. I read Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller and John Irving and laughed up my sleeve at the adults around me—teachers, coaches, even my very own parents—all of them ignorant of the subversive movement I had joined.

  I had Steve Martin and Woody Allen and, thanks to a really hip high school band teacher, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. For knockdown, lowbrow humor, the film Animal House was for me a celluloid cry for cultural revolution—hey, the drunken perverts can be the good guys!

  Steve Martin was particularly influential on my decision to become a comedian because he was smart, silly, and wildly successful all at once. Steve Martin was intelligent and irrational and insightful and bizarre and gasping-for-breath funny all at the same time. He filled concert halls, he wrote goofy songs, he told jokes about philosophy, and he changed the life of a lost teenager sitting by a turntable in a small, prefab home in rural South Carolina.

  In 1980, I had Steve Martin. Today, America has Carrot Top.

  Should I slash my wrists now or finish this chapter?

  I will refrain from insulting a fiscally successful member of my former profession other than to say that if you ever see me in the audience at a performance of Carrot Top, call the Office of Homeland Security, because it means I’m being tortured by Al Qaeda and I’m about to crack. Does comedy have to be this bad to be successful? Can’t we go back to just “lame” or “mediocre”? Is excruciating stupidity really mandated by the modern American marketplace? And when did it all get so bad?

  Put it into perspective: During the civil rights era, a radio tuned to a Top 40 station would occasionally play a folk song, a political protest song—even jazz artists like Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton could be heard on radio stations not funded by taxpayer dollars. Sure, the Top 40 charts also featured songs like “Sugar, Sugar” and acts like Neil Sedaka, but it was conceivable—not likely, but at least possible—that the future of pop music in America could be challenging, complex music for thinking people who wanted to party.

  But the future is now, and seven of the top ten selling CDs are either the bastard children of Britney Spears or illiterates playing sampled tracks of other people’s music and screaming alliterative variations of the word “mother-f******.”

  We’ve matriculated from the subtle, sly humor of the “plastics” scene in The Graduate to the graphic, witless comedy of the “porking the pastry” scene in American Pie. The sharp, social comedy of Archie Bunker and All in the Family has been replaced by… actually, there isn’t anything on television today worthy of comparison.

  My family and I watched All in the Family for years before figuring out that Archie was supposed to be the bad guy. I even had an “Archie for President” T-shirt during the 1972 campaign (looking back on the choices of Nixon and McGovern. I’m not sure it was supposed to be a joke). Like all AITF fans, I now constantly complain that there is nothing like it on TV today. I am frequently told by media critics and casual fans alike that—quote—“You couldn’t make a show like All in the Family today.”

  Why not? Because the satire is too edgy, the unflinching honesty too discomfiting for the average American. The political windbags would blow too strongly against a show where the antagonist was stupid, bigoted, and essentially likable. We can’t have three-dimensional characters on TV, especially racist ones. Instead, when it comes to angry white men, we get: “Hello, Central Casting? Send over some swastika-clad Klan members or a Bible-thumping bigot—and make it snappy!”

  What does it say about us that the folks who tune in happily to view hours on end of bug eating, crotch kicking, and skunk spraying can’t stomach thirty minutes of real-life comedy about race, politics, and society? What kind of country is it that can brave the visual onslaught of a roomful of greedy contestants eating cow brains, but is too timid to look into the mind of an Archie Bunker?

  Isn’t that a Redneck Nation?

  Epilogue:

  Confessions of a

  Reluctant Southerner

  What are you?”

  Every Southerner who slips the bonds of Dixie is eventually confronted with this question of ethnic identity, a mysterious query to the one group of Americans who never had to ask. Ask someone back in rural Lexington County, South Carolina, “What are you?” and the answer’s going to be “Baptist” or “Pentecostal” or “Catholic.”

  Okay, so it wouldn’t be Catholic…

  “What are you?” is a Southerner’s question about church attendance, not cultural identity. When a North Carolinian asks, “What are you?” he’s trying to find out if you know Jesus. When a New Yorker asks, he’s looking for another way to insult you.

  The question first came to me from a beautiful blond classmate at Oral Roberts University. I was making particularly ungodly advances toward her at the time, and she responded with a little impromptu Darwinism, casting a critical glance to see what I was packing in my genes.

  “You’re from South Carolina, so… what are you?”

  I answered that I was Pentecostal, like most of the other students at ORU.

  “NO, no, no. What are you?” She was demanding to know my identity, my ethnicity, what stuff was I made of.

  To encourage me, Jackie, my beautiful interrogator, announced that she was Norwegian. Her mother and father back home in Minnesota were both Norwegian and her grandparents on both sides were Norwegian immigrants. “That’s what I am,” she told me proudly.

  “Oh, okay,” I replied. “I,” I said with a flourish, “am white trash. My mother and father were both white trash, my dad’s dad was a sharecropp
er and my mom’s mom grew up living in a railroad boxcar. That’s what I am.”

  “That’s nothing,” Jackie insisted dismissively. “That’s not what you are. Where are your people from? Are they from Ireland, England, Scotland…?”

  “Well,” I offered hesitantly, “we’ve been to Graceland. I’ve even got a set of ‘All Shook Up’ salt and pepper shakers…”

  It was not a satisfactory answer.

  Though Jackie and I began dating—we even talked about getting married at one point—the cultural differences between us were too great. The Norwegian lefse she brought home from Minnesota was pretty good, but lutefisk—the fish soaked in lye—ugh. Oh, and I fell in love with a dark-eyed soprano in the opera program, but that’s another story.

  Nevertheless, Jackie had a profound impact on my personal development. She left me with a question, a question I grappled with for nearly twenty years: In this era of identity politics, of ethnic division and group rights, what is my group? In the divided, irrational, and undeniably Redneck Nation, where do I belong? Whose team am I on? Where are my people? What is Michael Graham?

  I consider that question as I write from my new home in Washington, D.C., the traditional boundary between America North and South. It is ironic in a way that I have been drawn to this area, where the southern heritage of Virginia washes up against the concrete barrier of urban Washington and the liberal enclave of Montgomery County, Maryland.

  Living at this intersection of American culture, I am free to make my own alliances. I could embrace the northern attitudes I encounter on the Metro and in the Maryland suburbs, I could rush into the heart of this dynamic city of D.C., or I could make camp in the northernmost reaches of the Confederacy. The shores of the Potomac would be the perfect place for me to remain close to, but apart from, the South that has nurtured and nearly defeated me.