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Some responses to “Night of the Living Redneck.” CounterPunch. Dec. 1, 2007.–gm

“Are you a hypocrite or a racist?” asks a reader. “You throw around the racist slur ‘redneck.’ Do you also use [here he mentions some terms that I do consider to be racist in print]?”

Another email provides a link to an interesting and informative website dedicated to “resisting defamation” of European Americans. See resistingdefamation.org where “redneck” is defined as a slur:

redneck (a showing of contempt for rural dwelling mechanics, farmers, merchants, and farm workers, especially by urban dwellers)

The website offers food for thought, and I asked the writer of the email if he listens to very much country music. I am reflecting back on those smoky nights at the Dixie Chicken when we drank longnecks by the tableful and sang “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” I am thinking about the George Jones song, “Hi Tech Redneck.” And let’s not forget Alan Jackson’s “It’s Alright To Be A Redneck.” Oh, and down there closer to my spinal cord is a lyric from the original “longhaired redneck” David Allen Coe.

So I’m going to think a little bit more about what Redneck means to me when I write it. Am I, “expressing [my] claim to supremacy to those so named as well as to smother the diversity of those so-named into one little label”? I have to think about that.

As the first approximation to what is admittedly a slightly defensive response, let me suggest that in my article below, “redneck language” is presented as a crossroads between what is “dead” and what is “proper” or “authentic”. What remains possible in the article is an “authentic” redneck language that begins by giving the answer to the closing question. That answer would lead “redneck language” away from from the “dead and buried” kind of language that nobody really needs explained to them very much anymore.

Of course, none of this was very carefully considered prior to publishing the article. Redneck is a term that I have learned to play with, thanks to Coe, Hubbard, Jackson, and Jones, and none of us attempts any supremacy, I don’t think. Although it’s not like we are ever intending to accept “redneck” exactly as we find it.

i don’t have permission to identify the author of the following email, but I wish I did:

OK.

I know … some people don’t get it … how a redneck can also be a leftie.
Easy. Go to war and be assigned the grizzly task of burying the bodies
of the Vietnamese dead. And finding certain duties and assignments very
disturbing, such as pushing bodies into mass graves. The bodies would
fall apart, the smell was unforgettable.

I still have vicious
flashbacks. The bodies were treated with absolute disrespect: picking up
these same people we just killed–pick up their bodies and search them
for intelligence information. That was kind of hard, handling dead
bodies which were significantly decayed and often ‘oozing goop’ onto the
ground. And still, I did my job.

Or, go to war and be assigned the grizzly task of bagging the bodies of
the American dead. And finding certain duties and assignments very
disturbing, such as pushing various body parts into the closest bag and
making sure there weren’t any dog tags in the slop of what used to be a
soldier. The bodies would fall apart, the smell was unforgettable.

I
still have vicious flashbacks. The bodies were treated with absolute
disrespect: picking up these same people we just killed — friendly fire
— pick up their bodies and search them for intelligence information.
That was kind of hard, handling dead bodies which were significantly
decayed and often ‘oozing goop’ onto the ground. And still, I did my job.
That was 40 years ago … and I turned left with a vengeance. Protective
coloration is the only thing that has kept me out of prison, off the
streets as homeless. That plus a mean streak that causes me to focus on
surviving just to spite the money whores.

The problem is that most rednecks have been lied to so much they have
trouble keeping their heads on straight. It ain’t because we’re dumb …
it has to do with the fact that the people we trust are so busy twisting
us around we haven’t figured it out yet. When we do? I suspect the
French Revolution will look like child’s play … especially once your
average redneck admits there ain’t no gawd and the bastards in charge
need a little beheading for all the lies they’ve told.

Anyways, thanks, I reckon.

In fact, I do understand how rednecks can be lefties. After all, I have lived among them for decades, and why else would I think that a crossroads is possible? Speaking to the violence in the letter above, I certainly worry about what will simmer to the top of the pot if the legislative leadership of this state continues to turn up the heat of conflict between peoples.

Which brings us back to the Resisting Defamation web site. Under the Glossary section, you can find a definition for “Ordinary European Americans”:

These are the European Americans who are called upon to die in other peoples’ wars, and dishonored while at war and on return home in many ways by our government and society. More on these points here, here, here, here, and here.

I highly recommend that you go to the website, find the definition and click on the links. Not only is a crossroads possible, it is surely necessary.

PS From the Redneck Leftie: I suppose you can post it, anonymously would be best … like I said, protective coloration and all that.

Besides, there is more to the story … and no, you can’t hear/read it. Though maybe one day.
I live in New Mexico … in one of those down at the heel oil towns where the only hope is in the fall when we put our kids up to distract us from the grinding daily shit of our lives by watching them play football. Where the town spends most of its time either talking about this season or in hibernation waiting for next fall … and some still
talk about when they played football. Pity the poor chump who only sires daughters … there is no glory in that.

You can print this … just leave my name off.

PPS: New Mexico? Isn’t that where Ray Wylie Hubbard wrote Redneck Mother right after having his ass kicked at a beer joint?–gm

Notes for further reading:

Redneck Rock by Jan Reid (University of Texas Press)

Redneck Joke of the Day at Jeff Foxworthy dot com

Therefore it’s a sad and shameful agenda that the Texas Speaker has announced for next year. And we can only hope that some ghost of Christmas future will rattle him into night sweats for as many hours as it takes to see the violence he is conjuring for all of our grandchildren in the decades to come. Because if the Confederate heroes of Texas died for anything useful, at least they could teach us that when you pretend to ignore the humanity of people whom you put to work on a daily basis, then you only keep adding to the price that justice will require you to pay back in pounds of flesh.

Read the complete article at CounterPunch or click read more.

Night of the Living Redneck:
A Texas Horror Show

By Greg Moses

Beware the language you walk yourself into; it will teach you how to talk. The Texas Speaker of the House says that lawmaking committees will spend the next year preparing a colossal language of criminalization, citizenship, and state exclusion. With such a language ready to go by January, 2009 the Texas legislature will then be able to talk up a distance between citizens and migrant workers, throwing the whole scheme over the state in the form of police-hungry law that will erect little fences everywhere to keep our migrant neighbors caged wherever they happen to live.

In order to walk themselves more deeply into this language of them illegals versus us citizens, the legislative committees will only have to keep circling around well-marked gravesites where Southern redneck language lie buried and yet ever gracious to apparate at the tiniest glint of a ring. A proper redneck, you may recall, is the kind who goes wherever he damn well pleases, including down to the Alamo if that’s what it takes to get a farm he can call his own.

So you might think that a proper redneck would show some respect for anybody who goes wherever she damn well pleases, certainly despite any finger waving from men who wear suits or tin stars. In fact, I think, today’s proper rednecks, I mean the kind who don’t lie down in graveyards, are very likely to be the same people putting migrant labor to profitable use on an hourly basis doing all kinds of necessary work.

In a famous Fourth of July speech Frederick Douglass once asked white Americans how they can deny the humanity of people who are everyday being asked to do human work. And so the authentic redneck of Texas is in no position to deny the humanity of migrant workers who everywhere provide that “first tier” labor without which proper redneck existence would have no roads to travel, and few farms to travel between.

Therefore it’s a sad and shameful agenda that the Texas Speaker has announced for next year. And we can only hope that some ghost of Christmas future will rattle him into night sweats for as many hours as it takes to see the violence he is conjuring for all of our grandchildren in the decades to come. Because if the Confederate heroes of Texas died for anything useful, at least they could teach us that when you pretend to ignore the humanity of people whom you put to work on a daily basis, then you only keep adding to the price that justice will require you to pay back in pounds of flesh.

In any state that speaks a language of democracy, we find every reason possible to take down fences and barriers between peoples. Wherever in Texas people are working, shopping, and paying rent, they are quite often paying federal income taxes. They are always paying sales taxes. And let’s not forget that unless their landlords are philanthropists their rent includes property taxes, too. Now, in ordinary redneck language we have a phrase that describes a system which takes all these things from a person and yet denies her the right to vote. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, what that phrase is?

Dear Greg,

I am a former school psychologist who was a teaching assistant in
Individual Intelligence Testing while I was a graduate student at
Harvard
GSE. I cant speak to all the issues you raise about the situation in
Texas; but i do know something about what does and does not affect
school achievement. Learning is a psychological process and is affected
by any emotional experience with the power to interfere with logical
thinking. The creators of NCLB seem to have simply chosen to ignore
any
basic understanding of how kids learn; in fact, they seem to imply that
it is all a matter of Will Power— a concept as antique as it is
unhelpful. ( In fact, learning is a basic trait. No newborn animal is
going to survive if it does not catch on pretty quick to how the world
works. )

I am now 70 years old and in my lifetime I have seen the discipline of
psychology (and especially psychoanalytic theory) deliberately trashed
in a manner which forshadowed the way Cheney now attacks those who
point
out his lies. We are up against an opponent who believes that the best
defence is a good offense. It is so easy to keep people confused by
publishing lies faster than they can be refuted. Why is this important? Because the average reporter now lacks the tools
to refute current lies, such as that the achievement gap can never be
closed. Orwell was right. We have forgotten even the vocabulary and
concepts which we need . In order to fight the deception, we have to
back
up and reconstruct some fundamental axioms. And this takes time and
worse, people dont know what we are talking about and dont want to pay
attention. It takes the willingness to pay attention to nuance and
qualification, instead of the black and white simplicities we have
been
fed for years.

If you are interested, here are some references that I have found
helpful:

One Little Boy , Dorothy Baruch. An account of play therapy with a
typical child who was declareded to be of below average intelligence;
after several years his IQ was measured at about 120.

Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase. Pages 253-80 explain what
happened to psychology after WW2.

The Magic Years , Selma Fraiberg. A good introduction to the theories
of
ego psychology and how they apply to child development. Very readable
and
a good counter to our current simplistic obsession with the brain. One
lack is that she does not explore what goes wrong when the "average
expectable environment" is dysfunctional.

Much observation about the psychological aspects of learning has been
published in the almost 60 annual volumes of "The Psychoanalytic
Study
of the Child". I dont expect you to read all these, but it is helpful
to
at least know that they exist, even though they have been ignored.

A professional psychologist should know better than to claim that an IQ
score measures what the subject’s intelligence "IS". What it does
measure is the level of intellectual functioning at the time of the
test,
and under those conditions.

Some children are truly congenitally of very poor intelligence, and
will
never catch up, no matter how hard we try. But others thought to be
"retarded" have more probably learned to act in "pseudo-imbecilic"
ways.
Some have been neglected or abused such that they never learned to
learn in academic ways.( Another journal about rehabilitation uses the
term "orthogenics". That is, the process of correcting mis-learning can
be compared to the process of orthopedic rehabilitation.)

The bottom line is that it takes serious money and programs to bring
the
second group up to speed. For some reason, the judgemental ethics of
the
Right lead them to oppose such intervention. Therefore , when asked to
do
the obvious thing, they are touched in the quick and flare up in all
the
absurd arguments that we are now hearing, for instance, in the current
issue of Forbes. Like Cheney, they can not BEAR to be caught in the
act.
I guess they actually have some remnant of shame.

As I write this, I am burning over a new irony. When the right catches
on
that early intervention. social programs, and early childhoood
education
are important, they find a new way to pretend that stone equals bread,
offering us unscientific faith-based programs, superficial "counseling"
rather than sophisticated therapy, and early childhood programs that
incorporate all the abuses of NCLB and authoritarian boot camps.

I hope that this is helpful to you. Our democrary can not survive based
on ersatz education.

"Good night and good luck",

Nancy Rader
Massachusetts

gratefully posted by permission of author

Mike writes: The Texas Legislature will never give more $$$ to the poor school districts,

that is unless hell freezes over, and Republicans turn into some kind of ‘compassionate

conservatives’ who want to educate the poor masses instead of dumbing them down and exploiting

them.

Texas ain’t Massachusetts. Poor Texican kids in the Great Republican State of

Texas should be happy that DeLay and Company aren’t moving yet to toss out child labor laws. They

might find themselves working for $2.50 an hour instead of going to underfunded Texas public

schools.

Editor Replies….

You might be right, um, I mean, correct. The trial

judge in this case happens to be a Democrat. The Republican Attorney General promises to wage a

vigorous appeal. The Governor, while handpicking a new Chief Justice, also spoke harshly about the

trial judge’s judgment. So the first question is: will the Texas Supreme Court uphold this ruling?

Back when Republican judges helped the TSC to lay down the school funding rulings, it was a Democrat

legislature that they were embarrassing. Now that it’s a Republican lege, will the Republican court

find a way to evade the issue? I agree that the Republican lege won’t do much more than what they are

forced to do, just like the Democrat lege before

them.