Long Time Leaving (10 page)

A lawyer representing Foxworthy called
Spy,
hollered at my editor there, Joanne Gruber, and threatened legal action against the magazine for using material from his client's book, a book that we could not possibly have been ignorant of, he asserted, because it had been quoted from, on the air, more than once, by …Rush Limbaugh.

Well, what I wanted to assert was “You might be a redneck if …you think everybody has heard of your book because it was quoted by Rush Limbaugh. In fact you might be a redneck if …you want anybody to
know
your book was quoted by Rush Limbaugh.” But I didn't want Joanne to get yelled at anymore, and anyway I believe unreservedly in acknowledging sources as I become aware of them, so we ran a little box with my next column, saying that if I had known about those books I would have given them credit.

You probably aren't a redneck if …you sic lawyers on people, but Foxworthy is from Hapeville, Georgia, which happens to be the home of what
used to
be my favorite barbecue place, the Flying Pig. I
used to
take a cab over there every time I had a layover in the Atlanta airport, which is right near Hapeville. When I went to the Flying Pig during the Atlanta
Olympics, however, it had been taken over by new management and the pork sandwich was no longer any damn good. It's a shame in this world.

The grill and the coals and all are right there behind the counter, you can see the meat cooking, and it used to be cooked
right
(I don't know what they were doing to it when I went there during the Olympics; it was a shame), and you'd ask for outside (crispy) or inside meat on your sandwich, or half and half, and you'd watch the man go back in there among the salubrious fumes and cut you the kind of meat you wanted.

“I bet you smell good when you leave here at night,” I told the man once. “Yeah,” he said. “My girlfriend's dogs jump all over me.”

Judging from where he is from, at any rate, Foxworthy comes by his redneck references honestly. You can't say that about New Yorkers. And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure how good an idea it is for Foxworthy to push this redneck thing.

Here is the
American Heritage Dictionary
definition of
redneck:

Both my grandfathers were Southerners who worked with their hands, and the next generation retained a certain salt-of-the-earth savor, I am pleased to say, as it established itself in the middle class. My maternal grandfather died young of dissolution, but all the other relatives I know about—except for one hard-drinking Wylie who served as a negative example—were respectable teetotaling Methodists. My father, who was so good at upward mobility that he became, among other things, head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, was pleased to assert that
his
grandfather was “poor as owl dung,” but that didn't make great-grandaddy a redneck except to the extent that a farmer who worked his own patch of land got burned by the sun.

My father's father did chew tobacco, and so for years did I, from hanging around ballplayers (and because I thought my grandfather was cool), but I have quit, and I'm pretty sure none of my living relatives chews. My parents looked down on country music. I admire it, except that most of it these days is as slick and denatured as that barbecue in Hapeville.
^*

When I was growing up, my mother would often identify herself, only semijocularly, with Dogpatch characters—call herself “Weakeyes Yokum when she was looking for her glasses and quote Pappy Yokum's “As any fool can plainly see. Ah see.” She would also refer to herself (her name was Louise) as Loweezy, after Snuffy Smith's hard-pressed hillbilly wife.

Where does that leave us? Reruns
of Hogan's Heroes
are very popular in Germany lately. Let's talk about that some other time.

In this country, there's a book out called
The Redneck Manifesto.
Its author, Jim Goad, isn't Southern: “My mother was urban Philly garbage, my father was rural Vermont scum. Together they fled to a concrete Dog-patch five miles outside the City of Brotherly Love.”

But I guess Goad's po-white indentured-servant forebears were Southern originally, and he wants to argue that they were as enslaved as any black person. Yeah, well, maybe in the eighteenth century, but I think they've had a while to get over it and mix in. Goad is not a bad writer. In fact, he nicely deconstructs the facile ascription of prejudice to “hate.” Nor is he a stereotypical racist; in fact, he contends, persuasively, that folks who are regarded as white trash are far more likely to hang out with black folks than sociologists are. Some of his protests sound a lot like what I've heard covering Ku Klux Klan rallies, but then
economic
arguments at Klan rallies have made sense to me. Poor people get screwed, and poor white people can't even get any sympathy. Howard Dean tried to get Democrats to consider this, but the
bien pensant
recoiled.

Goad contends that he is not
asking
for any special consideration for having po-white roots, he just doesn't see why he should have to feel beholden to anybody else just because he is white. But he makes such a heated case for rednecks’ special grounds for feeling this way that I'm tempted to say you might be a redneck if …you start waving a whole new
identity-politics flag at a time when everybody is tired of hearing about
any
ethnic group's hard lot. And when Goad gets off into defense of jack-leg militias, he loses me.

At any rate, anybody who puts me forward as a redneck is hard up for one. I spend a good deal of my time in the same neighborhood as
Seinfeld.
Right now I don't even own a dog. I don't want to go
too far
in saying how poor an excuse for a redneck I'd be if I tried, though. I will say this: I am less of a redneck than Michael Jordan was a baseball player. But that doesn't mean I am about to stand up in New York City and
deny
that I'm one. Don Logan, when he was chief executive officer of Time Incorporated, was interviewed by the
New York Post.
Logan is from Alabama. The interviewer asked him, out of the blue, if he'd ever eaten squirrel. If you're from Alabama, you may well have, if there's red blood in your veins, and even if you haven't, you're not going to deny it. You'll come off finicky. Logan said yes he had. The next day, a headline appeared in the
Post
that began like this: “Squirrel-Eating Executive Says…”

Once
a friend
of mine introduced me to a New York audience by quoting a book review that summed me up as “Bubba goes to Harvard.” That didn't set well with me either, but I didn't say anything. He meant well. So did the book reviewer. If only somebody
obnoxious
would call me Bubba or redneck or something….

The closest I have come to protesting has been to write this limerick, for my own amusement:

All I said at the 92nd Y was, “There are a lot more sophisticated rednecks than I am.” (I was trying to think of good examples. Will Campbell? Cormac McCarthy? Somebody told me he saw Cormac McCarthy playing
g
-
olf,
at some literary retreat, in lime-green pants.)

“And one of them is in the White House,” said Queenan, and I just let it go. Humor was the topic. Folks hadn't come there to hear me be ethnically sensitive.

Listen. If I
were
the most sophisticated redneck in the world, I'd be a lot more interesting writer.

W
hy it is that everybody who aspires anymore to head up the U.S. government—a government which the South only grudgingly acknowledges—must either arise from the South, or condescend to it? For instance, John Kerry started out suggesting that the Democrats ought to look away from the South, which made sense as far as numbers went, and the next thing you knew he was picking a Southern running mate and proclaiming himself a fan of NASCAR. And it seemed like every speaker at his nominating convention—all the good ones, anyway—were Southern. Southerners will make a convention, or a funeral, or any other kind of gathering, go.

And yet, the great majority of Southern
voters
looked at Kerry and said,
Plppph.
He was just exactly who they didn't want. For a hundred years, Southern voters despised the party of Lincoln, and now they predominantly love the party of Tom DeLay. So we're not talking good taste here. Or consistency: The Republican South keeps throwing up white national Democrats who get the black vote. “What kind of mojo does the South have working?

Personally, I love NASCAR about as much as I do hockey. The only thing that would get me to watch a car race on TV would be if they ran over a hockey player every couple of laps. But I covered the Atlanta 500 once for
Sports Illustrated,
and I liked the people. I was standing next to Richard Petty at a cocktail party when a diminutive old lady came up and said to Petty, admiringly but teasingly, “Look at you, you're way up there, and the rest of us are way down here.”

Richard Petty could have gotten defensive, or effusive. Lots of icons in other areas of culture would have grunted and turned away. “What he did was, without changing expression, he bent at the knee. He didn't lean over, he didn't hunker down, he just gradually lowered himself about fifteen inches until his and the lady's faces were at the same level. “While passing the time of day with her, he stayed like that, which looked silly and couldn't have been comfortable, but he acted like it was normal polite behavior. The old lady kept a straight face, but you could tell she was tickled. She moved on, and Petty resumed his full height. He didn't wink or anything—it was cool. The South has a feel for the common
touch. But you know and I know, there's more to Southern politics than that.

One night I called in, as scheduled, to a radio talk show in the South. I was taking a break from a bibulous dinner with congenial Massachusetts liberals, and all I wanted to do was promote my anthology of Southern humor. But the host of this show was not amused. He took me severely to task for having written, in the anthology's introduction, that Southern culture had not produced much in the way of abstract thinking. He considered this an aspersion.

Well, I told him, I had tried but failed to come up with a single Southern theorizer of note between Thomas Jefferson and Edward O. Wilson.

“John C. Calhoun,” the host said.

This took me aback. The only idea I had ever heard associated with that craggy old antebellum South Carolinian was nullification—the theory that states of the Union could decline to go along with federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. That seemed to me a stratagem, rather than an idea, in the large, ethereal, egghead sense. For one thing, nullification never really caught on. An abstract idea doesn't have to work: Its proponents can always accuse its practitioners of not getting it right. But to count for anything as an idea, a notion really ought to catch on, for a while. For another thing, nullification was presented as a way to preserve minority rights and (by the way) slavery. I didn't think John C. Calhoun counted much against my feeling that the great majority of Southern homes could have a sign hanging in the parlor saying:

WE DON'T THINK MUCH
OF IDEAS, AS SUCH.

But I read up on Calhoun and learned that he was regarded widely— not just in the South—as the most brilliant political thinker of his day. Personally, he struck people as a thinking machine. Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, called him “a mental and moral abstraction.” He was haggard and unhealthy-looking, too, so who am I to question his bona fides. A century later, political historians argued that Calhoun's critique of Northern capitalism anticipated the thinking of Karl Marx. Maybe that's why Southern intellectualism ground to a halt: the twentieth century would have made even less sense if Communism had been from South Carolina, for the wealthy, and called Calhounery.

Was nullification a blind alley, then? I'd say it was something else, something even less practical and more foolproof than an idea. Nullification was based on the principle of “concurrent majority” rule, which
boiled down to this: that a law, to be legitimate, must be supported not only by a majority of the people who are for it but also by a majority of the people who are against it. “Concurrent majority rule” is nullification's Möbius twist.