Redneck Nation (27 page)

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has been replaced by… actually, there isn’t anything on television today worthy of comparison.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?

W
hat 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 sharecropper 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.

But I am not content to continue avoiding this question. I am ready to cast my lot. Twenty years, two thousand comedy club
appearances, forty-one states, three years in New York, approximately 250 pounds of mustard-based barbecue, and some seven
thousand gallons of tea (sweet and un) later, the answer is clear:

I am a Southerner. A reluctant one perhaps, but a Southerner nonetheless.

And I will stay one whether the South likes it or not.

I could tell you that I was a Southerner by coercion, that like Othello I wanted to deny my birth. But I am not a Southerner
by fiat. In fact, most decent Southerners won’t claim me. They find my Confederate credentials quite suspect. For example,
I was born in Los Angeles,
where my mother, an Oklahoman, grew up. My father, who sharecropped with his father just a few miles from Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina, joined the navy out of high school and was sent to Long Beach. Therefore, it could be argued, I am not a Southerner
but am instead bicoastal—except that you can’t tell people from down South you’re bicoastal, because they think it means you
have sex with men on the beach.

And I’ve never really acted southern. I talk fast. I ask rude questions (actually, most questions are considered rude in the
South, other than “How’s your mama?”). Growing up, I read books that weren’t assigned by a teacher or given to me by my pastor.
I listened to bebop and opera, and I’ve never lost a tooth opening a bottle.

No, I am not a Southerner at the insistence of the South. Trust me, most Southerners would be happy to buy me a bus ticket
and point me toward Toronto.

And I don’t have to be a Southerner. During my lifelong struggle against Southernism, I’ve lived in Chicago and New York.
I liked them both, and unlike most Southerners, easily fit in. I could “pass.” In fact, once while living in Scarsdale, New
York, someone asked me if I was Jewish.

It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

But in the ongoing discourse of my life, the painful moments of self-observation, the acute moments of selfrevelation—the
evidence is clear. I am a Southerner.

I am a Southerner in the same way that the Reverend Jesse Jackson is black… and in the same way he is a Southerner, too. I
am a Southerner the same way that Flannery O’Connor was a Southerner and much the same way she was a Catholic.

I am a Southerner not because I claim it, desire it, or have somehow achieved it. I am a Southerner because after years of
resistance and denial I have discovered that it is my true nature.

I confess my Southernism to underline the point that my criticism of the southernization of America is not based merely on
self-loathing or the smoldering resentment of a redneck without honor in his own land. What annoys me is not that America
has become more like the South, but that it has been overcome by the worst the South has to offer.

Meanwhile, there is much about the South to love, and much to my surprise, I do.

The first inkling of my deviant southern tendencies came when I was invited to lunch at the historic Chicago Racquet Club.
A local whom I met through the local GOP was fascinated by my exotic Southernism and wanted to show me some true northern
pride. The Chicago Racquet Club is an impressive, imposing building. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was once a member
of this club, and my host went to great pains to have us seated beneath the general’s portrait in the dining room. I always
enjoy a good joke and tried to play along as best I could, given that, had I been at the burning of Columbia, South Carolina,
in 1865, my one comment to Sherman would have been “You missed a spot.”

But as the lunch dragged on, I found myself getting more and more defensive about the South. My host’s witty put-downs, which
would have won my applause back home, were suddenly raising previously unworked Confederate hackles here in Chicago. By the
end of the lunch, I actually found myself beginning a sentence with the
words, “Well, what the Confederate flag means to me is…”

I stopped at two bars on my way back from that lunch.

It may be that absence makes the heart grow fonder, or it could be that I was experiencing the inverse of “familiarity breeds
contempt.” Whatever it was, I found myself speaking out in behalf of the South more and more. When Hurricane Fran blew through
the Carolinas, a Chicagoan snickered at me, “Who wants to live in a place where you wake up one morning and your mobile home
is a submarine?”

“Oh, yeah?” I shot back. “Maybe it’s people who are tired of having to use butane torches to defrost their derrieres after
taking a winter walk.”

The low point came one day as I read the
Chicago Sun-Times
. I ran across two brief articles on the same page. The first, headlined “Anthem Anathema to US,” reported that Nicaragua
was considering a change in the lyrics of its national anthem for diplomatic reasons. One line giving American diplomats pause
is “The Yankee is the enemy of humanity.”

The next article listed South Carolina among states that have not given our nation a president. I read the article several
times, and as I did, something snapped. Some vestigial Confederate organ in my brain, some recessive redneck gene, overtook
me. By the time I regained consciousness, the following had been e-mailed to the
Sun-Times:

As a South Carolinian temporarily residing in Chicago (my visa expires in November), I must respond to the scurrilous column
in your vile and disgraceful
rag which stated that South Carolina has not given this great nation a president. Sir, that is an
outrage!
You have cast a shadow upon the honor of the Palmetto State. South Carolina gave America its last great (true) Democratic
president, Andrew Jackson. He was the greatest president since Jefferson (another Southerner) and far superior to the butcher,
Abraham Lincoln.

The honor of the South must be restored! South Carolina has given this nation John C. Calhoun, Dizzy Gillespie and Lee Atwater,
not to mention hickory smoked barbecue, secession and the Shag. The South shall rise again!

Now excuse me while I freshen up my julep. Yours respectfully, etc. etc. PS: And what’s
wrong
with the Nicaraguan national anthem anyway?

The
Sun-Times
published a portion of my letter, and I remember reading it in disbelief a few days later. Had I really written these words?
After years of denying all things southern, was I still so completely lost in the Land of Cotton?