Redneck Nation (2 page)

I’ve written two books, been on dozens of TV shows, and debated everyone from Alan Dershowitz to Pat Buchanan on my talk radio
program. I’ve spent my entire adult life critiquing American politics, culture, society, and the arts from virtually every
corner of this country. At every stop, I was looking for that place so far and so distinct from the Land of Cotton, that corner
of America where the old times of the South would finally be forgotten. And guess where I am today, my northern American Yankee
friend?

Right back where I started from, smack-dab in the heart of Dixie.

Twenty years of traveling, tracking, seeking, and soulsearching,
and I have come to the horrifying conclusion that there is no escape. I’m Dustin Hoffman in
Papillon
. I’m never getting out because there is no out to get.

I live in a Redneck Nation.

From Bangor, Maine, to Baja, California; from Washington State to West Palm Beach; from the ever-burning lights of Manhattan,
New York, to the never-ending boredom of Manhattan, Kansas; from the campuses of Hahvahd, Mass., to the cubicles of Chicago’s
high-rises: No matter where you go in this American nation, you will be surrounded, beset, and overwhelmed by redneckery.

Forget the calzone and cannoli; the only real difference between Brooklyn, New York, and Birmingham, Alabama, is that you
can’t get a gun rack into a Trans Am.

Every one of the fundamental southern ideas I spent my life opposing—racism, irrationalism, mysticism, professional wrestling—has
been accepted and absorbed by our nation as a whole. It’s as if Jefferson Davis came back to life to lead a black helicopter
Confederate coup, seized control of the Union, and took command of the airwaves… but everyone was too dumb to notice.

Yes, Northerners and Southerners talk differently, and, yes, we eat differently and vote differently and express our arguments
differently, but the same Old South principles are at work. Somehow—and I’ll be damned if I can figure it out—the South lost
the Civil War of 1860, lost the civil rights struggle of 1960, but has managed to win the battle of ideas.

This is not a good thing. The South is a land of few ideas, nearly all of them bad.

And if you’re a typical modern northern American, they are probably yours.

W
hen Al Gore announced his pick of Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate for the 2000 election, we Southerners felt the
cold, unfriendly glare of the northern media establishment on the back of our necks. The first Jewish candidate joins a major
party’s national ticket, and immediately the editorialists look southward over their reading glasses and demand, “Well?”

The Associated Press headlined a Karin Miller story “How Will Lieberman Play in the South?” Ron Brownstein of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote, without source or attribution, “If there is any backlash against Lieberman, it’s most likely to come among Southern
evangelical Protestants in states Gore will probably lose anyway.”

Al Gore himself, praising his own courage and vision, insisted that by simply nominating Lieberman he would “tear down a mighty
wall of division.” The location of this mighty wall was undisclosed, but it’s a safe bet he believed it to be somewhere south
of Skokie, Illinois.

Joe Lieberman: welcomed candidate in the North, suspected Christ killer in the South. That was the story. But this time, the
media right-thinkers were all wrong.

I say this as an avid practitioner of southern self-hatred who under normal circumstances is more than happy to give my homeland
a swift kick in the crawdads. I know from firsthand experience that racism, ignorance, and idiocy down South aren’t as bad
as you think: They’re worse.

In fact, I am so openly critical of my homeland that the natives have awarded me the premier appellation for disloyal Southerners:
scalawag. (The South is the only region of America with a vocabulary dedicated solely to describing its infidels.) A scalawag
is any white southern male (we would never use such a rude word for a lady) who opposes the official flying of the Confederate
flag, supports the activities of the NAACP, or uses an excessive amount of noun-verb agreement.

I plead guilty. But on the issue of southern anti-Semitism, I must defer to the facts. For example:

Where is the oldest synagogue building in the United States in continuous use? What is the home of the fourth oldest Jewish
congregation in America? Boston? Philadelphia? New York? No, Charleston. Charleston, South Carolina. (The third oldest congregation
is in that northern enclave of Savannah, Georgia.)

Who was the first Jewish U.S. senator in America? Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana. Yes, the home of Dixieland and David Duke:
Louisiana. In 1852—when he would have been kicked out of every “decent” club in Connecticut or Massachusetts—Judah P. Benjamin
was representing the very southern folks of Louisiana as a
member of America’s most exclusive debating society. After the secession, the reviled white Protestants of the Confederacy
went kosher and chose Benjamin to serve in the national cabinet as secretary of war and later secretary of state.

In my home state of South Carolina, the building that houses the offices of our state representatives is the Solomon Blatt
Building. Blatt, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, served in the House for fifty-four years—right through Jim Crow and the
rise of the KKK. For thirty-three of those years, which included the tumultuous era of the Civil Rights Movement, he served
as Speaker. Indeed, when the Confederate battle flag was first raised over the statehouse, it was under the watchful eye of
Speaker Sol Blatt.

According to southern scholar John Shelton Reed of the University of North Carolina, if the American South today were a nation,
it would have the sixth largest Jewish population in the world. Include Jews from
outside
Palm Beach, Florida, and that ranking jumps even higher.

But the point is still made: Jews in America, both at the founding of Charleston’s Beth Elohim temple in 1742 and in the Florida
condominiums of today, have found the South at least as hospitable as the rest of the nation.

And yet northern newsrooms covering the 2000 election operated under the unexamined assumption that the closed-minded South
is an enclave of Jew haters, while the open-minded North is a bastion of tolerance and acceptance. Are there anti-Semites
down in Dixie? You might as well ask if there are anti-Semites in Brooklyn. Or Brookline. Or Chicago. (Just ask Congressman
Rahm Emmanuel.)

My personal experience as a Southerner raised in a strongly evangelical home who attended Oral Roberts University is that
I never encountered anti-Semitism—in word or deed—while growing up in the South. Yes, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman lost every
southern state in 2000 (including Gore’s humiliating loss in Tennessee), but they didn’t lose a single one of these states
because of the senator’s faith in Jehovah.

As for Gore/Lieberman’s faith in big-government liberalism… well, that’s another matter.

With this clear, objective record, why is the South viewed in such a negative light, compared to the rest of America? To the
typical nonSoutherner, we’re still the twenty-first-century equivalent of the swimming club in Great Neck, New York, that
refused to let Groucho Marx join because he was Jewish. (“Well, then, how about my son?” asked Groucho. “He’s only
half
Jewish. Can he go in up to his waist?”)

I stand today and accuse you, my northern friends, not of antisouthern prejudice, but of worse: snobbery. Snobbery and self-righteousness,
both of which are unexamined and undeserved. The typical American Northerner, when considering his Southerner neighbors, suffers
under what can best be described as “delusions of adequacy.”

As a white Southerner who has spent much of his life traveling America, I have repeatedly experienced the immediate, visceral
snobbery that northern Americans, particularly liberals from urban centers, emote when they meet Southerners. It’s an unpleasant
mix of suspicion and condescension. You shake our hands cautiously and, after a “Who bought you the shoes?” glance at our
clothes, give a dubious smile as though you expect us to burst into an
enthusiastic rendition of “Dixie” or start asking questions about how to work the indoor toilet.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of real southern rednecks—a videotape of my last family reunion could have been a
National Geographic
special titled “Swimming the Shallow End of the Gene Pool: Redneck Reproduction in the American Southeast.” And I will never
dispute the notion that the American South is dominated by irrational attitudes about race, religion, and culture. My challenge
is: Tell me what part of America
isn’t
.

This smugness, this condescension, this false sense of superiority that you Northerners feel toward me and my fellow Southerners,
is the reason I wrote this book. Believe me, I grew up believing Northerners were the erudite, rational, antiracist advocates
of achievement and culture you pretend to be. It took me twenty years to find out you were lying.

I know that many readers, Southerners in particular, will reject the idea that there is any significant demarcation of America,
North and South. That the South is the stupidest place in America is obviously, palpably true, but when it comes to the truth,
most Southerners are like the jury in the O. J. Simpson trial. We will not be influenced by mere facts.

But this isn’t a regional conflict between bagels and biscuits. What I thought was happening in the 1960s during the civil
rights struggle was a cultural battle between two worldviews, “Northernism” and “Southernism.”

And there is a distinct southern culture. I lived the southern life, I was enveloped in the southern spirit, I drank from
the deep springs of southern pride, and, at my first opportunity, I ran like a bat out of hell.

Let me be clear: I didn’t just leave the South. I rejected it. As a teenager, whenever I met people for the first time, I
would always try to work in the phrase “Well, I was
born
in Los Angeles…” The fact that I didn’t know Compton from Santa Clarita was irrelevant. It gave me that one measure of distance
from my southern identity.

When I was thirteen, my father played a cassette recording he had made of me speaking to the church. I think it was “Kids
Who Found Christ Through Herbalife” Day or something like that, and I was working the crowd hard—but that
voice
. Ugh! I sounded like an adolescent Jethro Clampett addressing the annual belt buckle collectors’ convention. Imagine a cross
between the basso profundo of Barney Fife and the masculine articulations of Harvey Fierstein—that was my voice.

So I decided not to have a southern accent. I didn’t want to be one of “them,” with “them” defined as pretty much every human
being I knew at that time. Part of this anger was teen angst, and part of it came from the fact that I actually was, and am,
an obnoxious ass, but there was an earnest, legitimate longing, too. It wasn’t just that I wanted to leave the South. I also
had a vision of being a part of something else.

Where I really wanted to go, the home I was truly seeking—even if I never said it out loud—was a place I had heard about all
my life. The North.

There are those who say “the North” is just a direction, while “the South” is a place. They’re wrong. The North exists in
a true and powerful way, and I know it does because we Southerners invented it.

The people I grew up with and live with today talk of it constantly. I don’t know if it’s got a precise longitude or
latitude, but the North certainly exists, if only in the imaginations of suspicious Southerners.

For the devoted, fundamentalist Southerner, the North is any place that isn’t the South. New York, Chicago, Seattle, these
places are obviously part of the North, but so are San Diego, Tucson, and Santa Fe. Ask any Southerner and he’ll tell you
Washington, D.C., is part of the North. We do so for the same reason Northerners say D.C. is part of the South: We don’t want
it, either.

But the North I grew up with in my mind was the place where John Irving and Woody Allen lived. It wasn’t just where Woody
lived, it was where people lived who went to see his movies… and
liked
them. It was a place where a young man stretched askew across the sofa with a book was never asked, “Whatcha readin’ that
for?”

It was a place where people watched baseball, not football, because baseball was more artful, more intelligent, and less violent.
Where a black man and a white woman who sat down in a restaurant together weren’t stared at, or worse.

And for an angry, embattled, out-of-place teenager trapped in a backwood bastion of Old South bigotry and dim-wittery, the
North that called to me was a powerful, compelling place that existed specifically to be not the South.

This is true North. You find references to this North in our most sacred southern texts: T-shirts and bumper stickers. No
philosophy is held by the southern mind that can’t be expressed in an 8″ × 3″ rectangle on the back of a truck, with room
left over for the Confederate flag:

IF THE NORTH IS SO GREAT, WHY DON’T YOU GO BACK? or KEEP THE SOUTH CLEAN: BUY A YANKEE A BUS TICKET
. And then
there’s the ever-popular
WE DON’T CARE
HOW
YOU DID IT UP NORTH
.

This is demonstrably untrue. We Southerners don’t just care about how you do things up North, we’re obsessed with it. We are
painfully self-conscious of our relationship to the North. In part, we resent the snobbery and unearned superiority we sometimes
encounter. We are very aware that you think you’re smarter, quicker, and more cosmopolitan than we are.

But what’s worse—and this is the real source of friction—we often suspect you are right. We just won’t admit it. If he were
being honest, the typical Southerner’s bumper would read:
EVEN IF WE UNDERSTOOD, WE
STILL
WOULDN’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH
, or
IF YOU’RE SO SMART, WHY ARE YOU HERE?