Redneck Nation (22 page)

“What’s their problem?” my mind wondered. Why weren’t they stunned, stammering, and amazed? Then I realized: David is nude.
Nakkie. Here is the towering image of the majesty of humankind, but these tender Christian
girls with their mega-church delicacy cannot look upon it because you can see his pee-pee.

I tried to ignore them, to reenter the internal mists of euphoria the
David
inspires, but I couldn’t. I had let them ruin the moment.

Finally I stomped over to them and in a whispered shout asked, “Okay, so if I hang a hat on it…
then
can you look?” They scampered red-faced to the gift shop, never to return.

There is no difference between these cowering college girls intimidated by the marble manhood of David and the doctor of gender
studies screeching from under her desk that somebody better get the latest Hooter’s Girls calendar out of the janitor’s closet
before she calls the cops. I take it back—there is a difference. The feminists have a self-righteous sense that they’re stronger
and more independent than my ORU friends. But in fact, they’re just another bunch of rednecks. They just have better résumés.

What the new feminist woman lacks in courage, however, she makes up in libido. That is my conclusion after watching a few
episodes of HBO’s
Sex and the City
.

The first time I watched the show, I experienced a vague feeling of déjà vu. The show celebrates the total, uninhibited balls-to-the-wall
pursuit of sex by four women in New York. The most popular character is Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, on whom I’ve
had a low-grade crush since her star turn as Lassie in
Porky’s
.

Samantha is the most talked-about character on this
very popular show because her sexuality has no limits. Every episode features a “What fetish will she flirt with this week?”
subplot for Samantha. Straight sex, lesbian sex, machine-operated sex, multiple-partner sex, there was even some talk of cross-species
interaction, but, as of this writing, HBO has yet to figure out how to get it past the folks at PETA.

Enlightened, urbane American women absolutely love this show. They are obsessed with these women, who, in turn, are obsessed
in each episode with men: getting them, pleasing them, and, most important, being pleased by them in ever more exotic ways.
If these four women think about anything other than their naughty bits, they do so only off camera.

What was it about these women that struck me as familiar? I have never knowingly been in the presence of a nymphomaniac, and
I have never known anyone, male or female, in such desperate need of a fashion rescue as Sarah Jessica Parker. Still, I kept
thinking, I know these women from somewhere…

Of course! The mobile home ho’s I knew in high school! How did Jim Carville put it? “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer
park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.” What you’ll find is the cast of
Sex and the City!

Their escapades are ripped from the diaries of dirt-road, white-trash women who lurked along the edges of my social circles
back in South Carolina. They weren’t as affluent, attractive, or educated as Samantha and Carrie, but they operated on the
same phallocentric principles as their city cousins. I would see them blowing past me on Harleys, their arms (almost) around
the waists of their biker escorts; at roadhouse bars in West Columbia, South
Carolina, migrating around the pool tables from man to man—all the moves lateral ones. Where Samantha Jones might have a tag
team with three lawyers in a Midtown hotel, she could be found wrasslin’ the Shealy Brothers in the bunk of a big rig in the
Flyin’ C parking lot.

When asked about her character on
Sex and the City
, Cattrall says, “I don’t consider her a slut, no. Slut has a negative connotation, and I don’t think of anything that Samantha
does as uninformed, not a joyous celebratory way of living.” As a man of only modest morals, I say “Viva la celebracion!”
But a woman whose self-image is grounded in frequent sex with random partners in ever more contrived and uncomfortable positions
is clearly a slut, whatever her other attributes. And it is just as clearly the case that if you took these same four women,
stuck Confederate flag ball caps on their heads, and dropped them in a West Texas truck stop, they would be indistinguishable
from the hardworking local gals.

It’s not the open sexuality that makes the
Sex and the City
women rednecks, but rather the male-dependent trashiness, the willingness to go spelunking down the deepest, lowest crevices
of our testosterone-driven fantasies. A woman who stands before Victorian society and shouts, “I defy your conventions and
claim my body as my own!” is a feminist. A woman who lies down on the tailgate of a pickup truck and shouts, “The buffet’s
open, boys! Come and get it!” is, well, actually she’s a girl I went to high school with.

Has it occurred to anyone else that the feminist icons of HBO are about as ideological as a meeting of the Republican Women’s
Club of Rocky Mount, North Carolina? If these women are advocating any ideas not already
openly practiced by the ladies of the Junior League, it hasn’t come to my attention. Samantha and Co. want sex, security,
and some love, and they want them delivered to them by someone whose pants zip in the front. How did they become the new Freedom
Riders of feminism?

Because the entire feminist movement has gone ‘neck, that’s how. Remember during the Lewinsky story, that parade of northern
women proudly announcing that not only were they willing to overlook President Clinton’s perjury and obstruction in a sexual
harassment lawsuit but they would also be willing to orally service the man themselves in thanks for his solidly liberal politics.
The Warden, who spent ten years with Knight-Ridder, nearly choked on her shrimp and grits when she read the following comment
from former White House correspondent Nina Burleigh: “I’d be happy to give him a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion
legal.”

An admiration for Ms. Burleigh’s devotion to the cause of abortion rights doesn’t dispel the low-rent, white-trash attitude
behind the offer. Yes, I’ve known southern women who would “take a knee” in gratitude for services rendered, and, yes, there
is a species of Dixie darling who can be overheard saying, “Thank you for comin’ over and fixin’ the air conditioner, baby.
Why don’t you lean back and let Mama clean your pipes.” I just didn’t know these women could be found on the faculty of the
Women’s Studies Departments at our most prestigious universities.

Forget gender studies, feminists need to go back to Logic 101 and work their way back from the heartland of their new Redneck
Nation.

I
have seen the future of southern-style evangelicalism and it’s an angry lesbian vegetarian who wants to take away your cell
phone.

Of all the bad habits of the Old South that you Yankees could pick up, the last one I expected would catch your eye is Prohibitionism.
Folks misspeak when they talk about southern puritans. Puritans are a New England invention. We Southerners are Prohibitionists,
a far higher calling. Puritanism, as Mencken noted, is the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. Prohibitionism
is the need to track that person down and bludgeon him into submission.

You can find the skeletal remains of the twentieth-century Prohibition movement scattered across the legal landscape of the
South: blue laws, dry counties, and—a hometown favorite of mine—minibottles. When people from civilized climes travel to South
Carolina, they inevitably stare in astonishment at the little airplane bottles from which their liquor drinks are served.
Instead of pouring
a shot of their favorite hooch from a liter bottle, the bartender is required by law to crack open a 1.5-ounce mini. The confused
tourist glances about to check if his bar stool is locked in its upright position. The minibottles are a hassle for the bar
owners, an annoyance for the servers, and—if he’s ordering any multiliquor beverage like a Long Island Iced Tea—wildly exorbitant
in price for the customers.

“What’s the point?” thirsty travelers slumped over their Bourbon and branch waters want to know, and it’s a good question.
Today, South Carolina clings to minibottles for the added revenue to state coffers these higher-priced drinks generate. But
the real purpose was to keep Prohibition alive.

Back in the early 1970s, one of the great debates in southern states was what to do about “liquor by the drink,” which, as
any southern Baptist will tell you, is as dangerous to your mortal soul as lottery by the ticket or sex by the hour. These
folks were content with the old BYOB bottle-club system and the attendant hindrances that came with toting your own liquor.

It was a royal pain in the neck, and many bars and restaurants decided to take their chances with John Law and mixed drinks,
anyway. This was a problem. The law was being flouted and the legislators from these Baptist districts knew it, having spent
a few nights passed out on the floors of these speakeasies themselves.

They couldn’t go back home to the voters and legalize their own elbow-bending because the voters wouldn’t have it. But they
couldn’t sit back while perfectly good tax dollars poured into the pockets of bar owners, either. The compromise was to continue
to force drinkers to still buy
their own bottle, as they did in the bottle clubs, only now the bottle would be very, very small.

Voilà—the minibottle. A solution to the problem of public vice that was simple, obvious… and dumb.

The grip of this Prohibitionist spirit continues in the dry counties of Tennessee, the bottle clubs of Kansas, and the minibottles
in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. These citizens simply aren’t prepared to accept individual liberty in its many, glorious
forms. Southern conservatives love to mock Senator Hillary Rodham and her mantra that “it takes a village to raise a child,”
but their willingness to police the corner pub and rural roadhouse shows they agree with her at heart.

This “your business is my business” ethos was ever present in the South of my youth. It never occurred to either the libationist
or the little old lady trying to knock the julep out of his hand that his decision to drink and the bar’s decision to serve
him were nobody else’s concern. A libertarian down South is as out of place as a hot dog stand at a PETA convention. The drunk
leaning against the bar in Gadsden, Alabama, knows he’s going to burn in Hell one day and he’s grateful for the efforts of
his neighbors—however annoying—to pull him back from the awaiting fires.

Northerners scratch their heads in confusion at this redneck naiveté. What kind of self-righteous, judgmental people put up
such ridiculous roadblocks between a legal business selling a legal product and adults of legal age who choose to buy it?
Northerners can’t imagine such overbearing Prohibitionists in the twenty-first century.

They should imagine California.

If you traveled back in time to the 1920s and told the
folks in a New York speakeasy that a free, full-grown American in the twenty-first century isn’t allowed to smoke a cigarette
in a barroom, they would curse the Nineteenth Amendment and assume that the Bible Belt had somehow gotten wrapped around Uncle
Sam’s throat. Banning all cigarettes? The fast fellas and flappers of old New York would curse the Bible-thumpers of the fallen
Confederacy and blame the noxious idea on southern Prohibitionists.

And they would be right, at least in spirit.

The Smoke Nazis currently prowling America’s landscape are as redneck in their approach as Carrie Nation with her mighty ax.
They have taken the fundamentalist leap from “You ought not do that” to “And I’ve got to find a way to stop you!” The same
northern sophisticates who snicker at the very idea of bottle clubs are the ones who support forcing smokers into private
smoking clubs to keep their sinful cigarettes from the eyes of children, soccer moms, and other weak-minded citizens.

I know what you’re thinking: “But, Michael, cigarettes are bad! They serve no useful purpose! And they endanger others! We
don’t care if some poor soul wants to give himself lung cancer, but he’s got no right to be a menace to others!”

Believe me, I’ve heard it all before. In fact, every Southerner who’s cast a vote for a county option alcohol ordinance has
heard it. There isn’t a single new argument from the finger-pointing Prohibitionists, North or South, and none of these arguments
can overcome the libertarian (I used to say “northern”) principle that it’s none of your damn business.

You can believe, and rightly so, that smoking cigarettes
will kill smokers. You can further believe—though the evidence is hardly conclusive—that someone smoking a cigarette will
kill you. But to get from these two propositions to “It should be a crime for a bar to allow its customers to smoke,” you
must make a ridiculous leap of Prohibitionist faith to the idea that grown-ups simply should not be allowed to decide how
to get along.

Why isn’t the entire issue solved by letting the bar owner hang a sign outside that says,
“Warning:
This establishment owned by Satan and his minions in the Republican National Committee. Those who enter are encouraged to
smoke, drink, play cards, make jokes about sex, and read the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
. Enter at your own risk!” What more is required? No one need patronize the bar who doesn’t choose to, employment at such
an establishment cannot be mandated, and if there is no customer demand, market forces will soon convert the site into a shop
for holistic medicines or a retailer of government-issued lottery tickets.

There are certain forms of Prohibitionism indigenous to the various regions. In the South, our attention-grabbing antics are
more quixotic and entertaining, but they are far less dangerous than the earnest idiocy of our northern neighbors. Take, for
example, the decision by the state of New York to ban the use of handheld cell phones while driving. Southerners may be dumb,
but we’re not stupid. At least, not
that
stupid.