Redneck Nation (19 page)

I wrote it, they reviewed it, they edited it, and they broadcast it. And then the South Carolina Educational Radio Network
banned
me
.

That’s when I found out it’s not public radio, it’s
government
radio. You know… like Pravda?

Fascinatingly there was not the least hint of embarrassment that a phone call from a legislator could shut up a critic of
the government. There was unanimity of agreement, even from my friends and family, that the incident was entirely my fault.
“If you want the government to pay you to insult them,” my fellow Southerners told me, “move to New York and apply for an
NEA grant.”

None of my southern friends were particularly upset that I had been the victim of censorship because (a) I’m a smart-ass who
had it coming and (b) stifling dissent is as southern as grits and redeye gravy.

During the Revolutionary War, Southerners were the most pro-Tory of the colonists, and many southern patriots were happy to
keep their mouths shut in exchange for a promise from the British to leave them alone. Loudmouthed agitators were unwelcome.
A visit from Samuel Adams would have been as warmly received by Tory Southerners as a visit from the pope.

During the slave years, Southerners who spoke out against slavery were under constant pressure to keep quiet or migrate North.
Pro-abolition newspapers were confiscated, burned out, or worse. After southern forces fired on Fort Sumter, even longtime
Southerners who supported
slavery but opposed the Civil War were forced to flee.

In the Jim Crow South, silence was essential to maintaining the status quo. People engaged in demonstrably irrational and
indefensible behavior are easily distracted. As soon as someone asks a reasonable question—“Hey, why is it that a black doctor
isn’t allowed to vote, but Virgil, the guy who sticks refrigerator magnets to the plate in his head, is our new legislator?”—it
becomes tempting to give a reasonable answer. And the one thing the South could never withstand is reason.

That’s why every Southerner defending some indefensible aspect of life in the South keeps the admonition, “Well, if you don’t
like it, why don’t you just leave?” tucked away like a knife in his boot. This is obviously not an argument, but rather a
rejection of the idea of arguing. However, it brings the desired solution of less speech.

This was the greatest gulf between me and my southern homeland. Of course, people should speak out, it seemed to me, especially
people who are challenging us and saying things we don’t want to hear. A place that allows free and open dissent, like the
North, is an inherently better place than a society that suppresses it. I would pull my hair and gurgle in frustration every
time another Confederate knothead growled at me, “Wuhl, Michael, I-95 has two lanes innit, and one’s always headin’ North.
If you don’ lahk it here, you kin jes leave.”

Aaarrggh!
Do you really think that if I leave, you suddenly
won’t
be stupid anymore?

“I dunno,” would come the answer, “but it’s worth a try…”

Civil rights activists coming South to confront the laws
and customs of the 1950s and ’60s ran straight into this southern stone wall of silence in the cause of stupidity. Rednecks,
reactionaries, law-and-orderers, and love-it-or-leave-it types rarely offered overt, rational defenses of segregation or the
denial of basic civil rights. In the South, debates in favor of discrimination were few. Arguments about why you ought to
climb your Yankee ass back on the bus and go home were far more common.

But by the late 1960s, the days of telling people to “shut up and mind your own business” were over. Not only could you not
suppress speech about race, politics, etc.—after the Free Speech Movement, it became wrong even to try. The southern value
of polite silence was gone, trumped by the new value of free speech and confrontation.

The symbol of these new freedoms appeared in stocking feet on the hood of a Berkeley police car and on millions of TV sets
across the South.

The North had won.

And so thirty years later, Mario Savio returned in triumph to Berkeley and celebrated the anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
He was there to remind America how much things had changed since 1964, how the progressive vision of ever-expanding freedom
had conquered the political forces of silence and intimidation. The five-day commemoration, in early December 1994, featured
“poetry readings, films, panels, rallies, a colloquium, a dance,” and, according to the University of California’s website,
“a hootenanny.”

The only thing missing from Berkeley that day was free speech.

On the very day that Mario returned to Berkeley to celebrate
the freedom to dissent, three Berkeley residents were under assault from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development…
for speaking. Three local citizens who had complained about a government housing project were facing $100,000 in fines and
an ongoing investigation that would end, they were told, only if they would agree to stop complaining about the HUD development
in Berkeley.

Berkeley, California, whose new motto is “Shut Up or Else.”

Berkeley—where just six weeks earlier, wacko Holocaust-revisionist historian David Irving was forced to cancel a speech because
the school couldn’t guarantee his safety in the face of liberal protests. Irving was forced to an off-campus site, where his
book tables were overturned and his property destroyed by Berkeleyites celebrating their free speech traditions.

Berkeley—where in 2001, students stormed the campus newspaper and looted the paper boxes in protest of a paid advertisement.
The editor of the
Daily Californian
showed his dedication to free speech and a free press by groveling before the protesters and apologizing for printing an
unpopular opinion.

Berkeley—where the number of scheduled campus public speakers who have been disinvited or shouted down by students and faculty
members is well into double digits, including former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, conservative organizer Daniel
Flynn, U.N. delegate Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and former Berkeley-alum-turned-conservative-carnival-barker David Horowitz.

You know—Berkeley: home of the Free Speech (for people we like) Movement!

Mario Savio died in 1996, and his obituary in the
San Francisco Chronicle
contained a sharply ironic bit of unintentional humor: “Savio’s 24-year-old friend Jack Weinberg had violated a campus rule
that seems farfetched by today’s standards—a ban against on-campus politics. Weinberg had set up a leafleting table on the
plaza on behalf of a civil rights group.”

Getting in trouble for speaking out on politics at Berkeley is “farfetched”? Where has this obit writer been living? In Mario’s
lifetime, Berkeley morphed from the fire wall of free speech to the ivory-towered headquarters of the new P.C. speech police.

All through the Civil Rights Movement, southern communities tried to keep “outside agitators” from having access to the public
arena, from applying their First Amendment rights to assemble and speak. But somehow it wasn’t as embarrassing to see the
right to free speech rejected by poorly educated goobers cracking wise about “Martin Luther Koon.” They were idiots—they weren’t
expected to know any better. But to see free speech rejected at Berkeley—not once or twice, but again and again as a fundamental
shift in values—proves how redneck our nation has become. The old Northern ideal that free expression is a value in and of
itself, that allowing unpopular, even disturbing ideas to be expressed is a good thing—this ideal is lost. Instead, we’ve
gone back to the southern standard: If you’re going to say something that might upset people, don’t. Better still, let us
shut your mouth for you.

When Jeanne Kirkpatrick was banned from speaking
at Berkeley, students weren’t the only people slamming the door on freedom of expression. Some faculty members also argued
that letting her express her opinions wasn’t necessarily a good thing. At the University of Chicago, Professor Cass Sunstein
leads an intellectual movement among liberals who argue that freedom to say things people don’t like (especially people like
Cass Sunstein) is probably too much freedom.

Doesn’t anyone remember when “lib”-er-als used to believe in “lib”-er-ty? Does anyone see the eerie similarities of angry
white segregationists shouting down civil rights protesters and ripping up their fliers, and foamy-mouthed Berkeley beer-hall
Marxists shouting down conservatives and kicking over their book tables?

Alas, it was the San Francisco HUD offices under the Clinton administration—not Nixon’s—that used threats to silence outspoken
citizens. The Berkeley Three, as they came to be known, were locals unhappy about a local HUD decision, and they were doing
exactly what you’d expect Berkeley types to do: writing letters, speaking out at meetings, attending public forums, smoking
pot… Part of this is conjecture, of course.

Anyway, the San Francisco office determined that merely complaining about HUD’s activities was in and of itself a violation
of the Fair Housing Act. After first threatening the Berkeley Three with large fines and lengthy litigation, the oily folks
at HUD then offered a deal: HUD would end the investigation and drop the fines if the three residents just agreed to cease
all litigation and stop publishing articles and fliers against the project.

How nice.

After five years of legal wrangling, the voice of reason
was finally heard. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel stepped in and lifted the Democratic administration’s jackboot off
the protesters’ larynx. She said that HUD’s actions “chilled [their] right to free speech and the right to petition the government
for a redress of grievances…. Any reasonable official in your position would have recognized the constitutional impropriety
of investigating purely expressive activity.”

Oh, came HUD’s reply, we’re supposed to be
reasonable
?

It is safe to say that in the twenty-first century, Berkeley has become all but synonymous with the suppression of free speech
and the so-called P.C. movement. Too bad that “politically correct” has become such an innocuous phrase, because there’s a
powerful, repugnant bit of redneck thinkology cloaked within it.

The “fight the power” fascists at Berkeley aren’t total idiots. They understand that they’re abusing a fundamental freedom
when they keep their political opponents from speaking. How do they defend this obviously bad behavior? By trumping the need
for freedom of expression with a more pressing need, like maintaining good order, or keeping hurtful words from causing others
pain, or nurturing a political system under assault. If these arguments sound familiar, you’re probably from the South, for
they’re exactly what pro-segregation editorialists offered in defense of suppressing dissent during the civil rights era.

How many towns banned, or attempted to ban, Dr. King or the Freedom Riders from their borders? How many southern judges were
asked to overrule free speech in favor of safe streets?

During the civil rights era, many cities argued that the opinions expressed by some controversial figures were just too dangerous
to be allowed in their communities. Southerners didn’t want to hear what the civil rights activists were saying, and, it was
argued, the outside agitators had nothing to say worth hearing, anyway.

Thirty years later, a black Charleston, South Carolina, city councilman proposed a similar ordinance barring all “hate groups”
(as defined by the city government) from assembling or speaking in Charleston. “The people of Charleston don’t want to hear
from those groups,” he insisted, echoing the sentiment of the white city leaders who would have banned his father’s public
protests a generation earlier.

Maintaining good order is one long-standing southern value often invoked to override questions of free speech. Another is
the need to be pleasant, and when it comes to southern hospitality at the expense of free speech, the Confederistas have nothing
on St. Paul, Minnesota.

The people of St. Paul enacted a law making it a crime to say anything that “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others
on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender,” thereby criminalizing the Klan, the Black Panthers, the Shriners,
the Christian Coalition, Pat Buchanan, Alan Dershowitz, the National Organization for Women, the NEA, and virtually every
sketch performed on
Saturday Night Live
, along with one or two episodes of
The Brady Bunch
.

Were this law truly enforced, every comedy club would be shuttered, every politician gagged and every talk radio microphone
impounded. What kind of idiot thought this was a good idea?

Well, a majority of the citizens of St. Paul, for starters. This idea wasn’t foisted on the populace; it was very popular
among the citizenry, the vast majority of whom, I must point out, are not Southerners. St. Paul is pink with the smiling,
well-fed faces of liberals, lefties, and other usual suspects of America’s northern political tradition.

And as good, modern American liberals, they absolutely do not believe in the First Amendment.

Passing a law against impolite speech is the kind of reactionary lawmaking traditionally associated with rural outposts in
the Ozark Mountains. It smacks of the days when the state of Arkansas passed a legislative request that H. L. Mencken be deported
for insulting the honor of their state in print. After one devastatingly accurate portrait of their homeland in the 1920s,
Arkansas legislators took the floor to demand that “the dirty Jew” Mencken be sent to his home country at once. And if Mencken
had actually been Jewish and hadn’t been born in Baltimore, they might have succeeded.

It is now widely agreed that the Arkansans were asses… so what, pray tell, are the St. Paulines? The folks of Arkansas only
tried to silence one man, while the people of St. Paul criminalized all speech that arouses “anger, alarm or resentment.”

What’s particularly southern about St. Paul’s approach to free speech is that it was focused on the
reaction
to the words, not the words themselves. If I were a citizen of St. Paul and someone began intoning the Lord’s Prayer outside
my bedroom window, I could reasonably assert that I was alarmed—he might be a bomb-toting anti-abortionist or a televangelist
with a runaway libido. I could furthermore reasonably claim resentment of the
King James Version of the Bible, which with its soaring poetry exposed the limited vocabulary of my public school education
or the comparatively lifeless prose of my Scientology pamphlets.