From "The Redneck Manifesto' by Jim Goad
The following comes from a book called "The Redneck Manifesto: America's Scapegoats: How We Got That Way and Why We're Not Going to Take It Anymore," by Jim Goad, 1997, Simon & Schuster. I must point out that i do NOT agree with everything Goad says here. i do agree with a good portion of it, though. i won't go through here which parts i do and don't agree with, but basically i thought both the stuff i agree and disagree with are relevant to put here. i find what may be inconsistencies and i suspect Goad has read his Nietzsche (oogly-boogly!) and applied it only to the "priests" instead of both the priests and the underclass, as Nietzsche did.Specifically, this comes from Chapter 10, pages 231-255, called "Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals." Before we begin, i should mention that i myself, Justin Hart, should probably be counted among the white liberals, not because i am all that party-line liberal, but because i am sort of bleeding-heart feed-the-poor liberal hypocrite in instinct, fairly affluent by birth, and a major wuss.
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Goad, Jim. 1997. "The Redneck Manifesto: America's Scapegoats: How We Got That Way and Why We're Not Going to Take It Anymore," Simon & Schuster.
[232] ... I find myself unclassifiable politically. People ask me where I stand, and I say, "Anywhere you aren't standing." I'm not too keen on human nature. I think that anyone, given power, acts like an oppressor. I believe in an equality of corruptibility. I'm not pure. I'm corruptible. What did you have in mind? I have a hunch that the Grim Reaper isn't a liberal, although he is an equal-opportunity employer. I hope I'm wrong about all this. And even if I'm right, I suspect I'll be blamed.I've often wondered how one becomes credentialed to be a social critic. Most writers have extremely poor social skills. That's why they
[233] write. It's true that most social critics have appalling social lives. I am no exception. In my case, it's social criticism from a sociopath. I'm pushing for Enlightened Sociopathy. Maybe that's my political agenda.Part of my job is to ensure that this book gets misinterpreted the RIGHT way. so I'll predict some of the blatant ways that book reviewers will decontextualize my words to fit their framework ...When not accusing me of being a talentless hog-slopper, the criticism will either hinge on my "privilege" or my "bigotry" or my "fear." I'll be called an extremist, but that's not so bad, considering the middle. They'll continually try to ally me with the "right wing," although I steadfastly claim to be wingless ... They'll say I'm merely trying to offend. Why would I have to try? Most people wake up in the morning offended. They go to sleep offended. Trying to offend them would be like trying to make them breathe. I have better things to do
[234] with my time. I realize they'll get pissed off, and yet I blame their sensitivity rather than my obnoxiousness.They'll use whatever tage that makes them feel as if I've been safely defused and pigeonhold and compartmentalized and debunked. They'll ...The only risk, as I see it, is that they'll actually like me. That could be trouble.Liberal bastards.Whoa, hold your horses, Nellie--I realize that the word "liberal" is often booted around in a knee-jerking, reactionary way. When I say "liberal," I'm not using coded speech because I really want to say "gay" or "Jew" or "black" or "female" instead. Your sexual preference, religion, country of origin, and genitalia bore me to tears. If you though I was losing sleep over any of these things, I'm sorry to disappoint. The word "liberal," as I'm using it, isn't meant to imply anything other than someone who identifies himself or herself as a liberal. Since I don't believe in the tangible existence of "left" and "right," I don't believe liberals actually exist. The problem is that liberals believe they exist.Liberalism, like obscenity, is in the eye of the beholder. Because I criticize liberals, some binary brain automatically register me as a conservative. If the marble doesn't fall on the left, it HAS to fall on the right. What neither liberals nor conservatives comprehend is that anyone could be anything other than a liberal or a conservative. Liber-
[235] als and conservatives are two ass cheeks surrounding the same hairy bunghole. Constipervative. Liberrhea. They need each other.Conservatism is a bedtime story believe in only by fat old grizzly bears. I don't identify at all with conservatives. They're varicose-veined manneqins. Blow-dried crash-test dummies. Middle of the roadkill. Walking around as if they forgot to remove the coat hanger from their suit jacket. You had mentioned the huckleberry-pie, fuddy-duddy, Burl Ives, Choo-Choo Charlie, psychoevangelical, anal-rententive, hanging-judge-loving, sex-fearing, missile-worshipping, Satan-obsessed, xenophobic, law-abiding, abortion-clinic-bombing, flag-draping, kill-for-Christ, deport-the-Arabs, bash-the-queers, horn-swoggler type? It ain't me. People think that if you attack liberalism, you must be a straw-hat-and-seersucker-suit-clad old puff of flatulence. I don't think so. Limbaugh is Limburger to me. Reagan was a dopey thespian who nearly nuked the planet. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed are as useless as testicle cheese. I don't like churches or book-burnings or witch-hunts. I don't like crowds, period. I hate both liberals and conservatives. I have plenty of hate to go around.Some people probably assume I was born a shit-kicker and never cleaned off my boots. They presume I've never pondered the liberal platform's glorious wisdom and that I'd see the light if I opened my eyes JUST ONCE. Funny thing, I used to identify myself as a liberal. I used to be one of THEM. I'm a recovering liberal. That's what makes me such a slippery eel. If I seem unnecessarily angry with American liberalism, it's because I feel betrayed by it. I'm mad at white liberalism like I'm mad at Christianity--because it's a lie that I once believed. These days, I hate liberalism with the ferocity of a vengeful ex-lover. I'm a STALKER of liberalism.After a while . . . NO, I just didn't have the same endlessly lachrymose resovoirs of compassion that they did. I had my own problems. But just to be an asshole, I was a liberal throughout the eighties. There seemed to be no other choice during the time. Everyone was a conservative, so I veered the other way. The eighties will go down as one of the worst decades in American history. Everyone pretended. Perceived status was more important than reality. Lifestyles of the Rich
[236] and Famous and infomericals. Greedy and empty. Multiplexes and malls and scented potpourri and ATM machines. A cold time. icy synthesizer dance music, jingoistic flag-waving, and the Moral Majority ... That faceless pestilence known as the yuppies. I hated it all. After working a nighttime job in Manhattan, I'd pass the POVERTY SUCKS posters and smirking preppy society-brat New York magazine covers at newsstands. Down in the basement at Port Authority bus terminal at two A.M. , it was a much different world. Homeless women dragging rags, smelling like barrels of rotted potato peels. A man calmly lighting a crack pipe while waiting for a bus to Jersey. A guy running around waving a needle in his hand, threatening to spike people with AIDS. Realizing there was social chaos beneath all the yuppie pretense, there was no way I'd buy the conservative line of bullshit. In targeting the poor, conservatism pointed a finger at those who weren't to blame. But the liberals eventually lost me, too. They pointed a finger at me, and I wasn't to blame, either. I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come form a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black "struggle" while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke. I've heard ideological Marxists scream about capitalistic exploitation all while gleefully exploiting their parents' economic generosity. City kids living on their attorney parents' trust funds howling that rural rednecks are the oppressors. I tired of "anarchists" whose mommies paid the bills. They can't even kick their coke habit, and yet they claim to know what's best for the world. They still wear the lobster bibs of cultural entitlement, no matter how they try to hide it. With all the intestine-scrubbing granola they ate, they STILL acted as if there was something stuck up their ass. Could it be that CLASS is what's stuck up their ass? Let's take a peek inside a coffeehouse of white liberals. Esspresso
[237] hipsters. Gentrified radicals. Earth Shoe-wearing, burlap-clad conformist shitheels. Bean-sprout totalitarians. Bleeding hearts. Postnasal drio. Diarrhea pudding. Mealy-mouthed macrobiotic mouse-haired mendicants. Insufferable sufferers. Pinched faces sipping chamomile tea. Each anus clenched tightly enough to cut diamonds. So uptight, it's a wonder their heads don't pop off their shoulders and fly around. Major-league victims. Self-pitying pukes. Unethical moralists. Mean-spirited peaceniks. Doe-eyed, self-important drones. Ideologically as rigid as an ironing board. Just a bore. CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING. Close your eyes and deny everything. EMPOWERMENT. Complaining more loudly than usual. NEW AGE. Old superstition. GODDESS IS COMING. She'd better douche this time. VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE. A global lobotomy. PEOPLE OF COLOR. Do you mean colored people? STOP THE HATE. Honey, I ain't even STARTED hatin'. It's Liberal Pentecost--everyone in the coffeehouse has a holy flame dancing atop their head. Meek little worms wriggling on a fish hook of sensitivity. A delicate web of frightened arachnids. Crippled Waster Bunnies bleeding on the roadside. Skateboarders for racial equality. Surfers against hunger. Mansion-owning crusaders against homelessness. It's all flaky pastry and fine cheese. The bourgeois masquerading as the oppressed. Their little marches and candlelight ceremonies and boycotts. Their false, self-generated sense of stylistic oppression. Sitting there with their thumbs in their asses, they've convinced themselves they're making a difference. Over near a huge glass of chocolate-covered coffee beans stands a stack of free alternative weekly newspapers. No doubt ... This week (like last week) the editors are outraged that women workers only make seventy cents compared to every dollar that men make. But they never mention
[238] that rural workers suffer similar economic disparities compared to city dwellers. Or that Southern incomes have always been much lower than those in the North... The artists are clueless. They've never had the slightest idea how to rule the world. That's why they're artists. It's "revolution" as conceived by Hollywood brats rather than the working class. Clove cigarettes and patchouli oil and black lipstick and rubber whips. Smelly
[239] armpits and vegetable breath. Tongue piercings and ironic comments about Saturday-morning cartoon shows. The girls with backpacks and Edith Prickley horn-rimmed glasses. The boys with dirt-blond Julius Caesar haircuts and fuzzball-laden old sweaters. Inarticulate slacker pop-culture inbreds. Crumpled tinfoil and a scab on the lip. Stuttering autism as genius. Compassion as fashion. Meaningful emptiness. Scratch-and-sniff attitudinal posturing. All butter, no potato. All frosting, no cake. The hipsters have been entirely subsumed into the Uber-culture. Their "rebellion" is fashion-ad posery, a million skulls with green crewcuts and no brains inside. Their "culture" is merely a syncretic jumble of received media images. Their ideas of "freedom" are pruely a fashion show--freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing. Consensual enemas and purple hair and iron cock rings are just dandy, but they're kinda hard to enjoy when you can't put food on the table. Yessiree, Buffalo Bob, they really have tamed the post-Woodstock kiddies with bread and circuses. For much longer than I care to remember, the "counterculture" has been ... The rotten produce of post-World War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society--and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative--was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-snapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one-hundred-percent substance-free. And this counterculture congratulated itself on its unbending sympathy for oppressed peoples everywhere--everywhere, that is, but the traler parks across the tracks on the other side of town. White liberals will recycle anythign but white trash. Their "alternative lifestyles" never include being a redneck. Punk rockers, whose entire schtick rested on making people sick, were themselves nauseated by the hilbillies. After the Sex Pistols toured the South in 1978, guitarist Steve Jones lamented that the experience had been "like Deliverance." Iggy Pop's self-mutilation and G.G. Allin's coprophagy were
[240] somehow palatable, but rednecks were just too disgusting. Even thought white-liberal Punky Brewsters proposed grotesquerie as an aesthetic paradigm, white trash seemed just too repulsive for them to stomach. The liberal only goes halfway. Liberal dribbles. Limp noodles. Happy doobles. French poodles. Yolkless eggs. The white liberal wants to be hard-hitting, but he doesn't want to offend the advertisers. He wants to ride the rollar coaster, but he doesn't want to muss his hair. He pretends to enjoy trash, but he won't get his hands dirty. He craves excitement, but he doesn't want to get a heart attack. The white liberal eschews all forms of extremism. It's too bad that he lives in an extreme world. I wonder when a five-mile-an-hour wind will come and blow him away. Children of pain. The enshrinement of the victim. The victim pinned to velvet-covered cardboard like a butterfly in a science-fair project, unable ever to wriggle free. Pity the young white liberal who tries to sleep atop a stack of twenty matresses, flapping and flailing about his Princess and the Pea-sized problems. And it's people such as this who've woven the myth of the Angry White Male and have accused him of whining. That's right--white American liberals, one of the whiniest, most protected classes in earth's history, have the Rocky Mountain-sized gallstones to accuse your average Spam-eating ditchdigger of whining. Listen, Bucky Beaver, I'm aware that anyone can whine, including Angry White Males. I've whined. I can bear to hear my own whining for a while, but even I can't stand it after a point. That's why this is the last chapter. But white liberals really are in no place to cast judgment about whininess. They NEVER TIRE of hearing themselves whine. Liberal muralists will portray the archetypal "whiny white guy" with a fishing rod and a CAT tractor hat. interesting that you don't hear so much about the whiny entertainment lawyer or the whiny civil-rights activist. Or the whiny alternative-weekly writer. Or the whiny art-gallery owners ... They don't think performance artists can whine about being denied NEA grants to stick yams up their asses, but Angry White Males are somehow throwing temper tantrums about being taxed and worked to
[241] death. At least the white boys are "whining" about losing jobs and economic exploitation, rather than naughty words and fashion mistakes ... Complaining is bad enough. Party-line piety is unforgivable. The white liberal is an unsavory hybrid of Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa. Too many rules mixing with too much righteousness... They've somehow convinced themselves that if they aren't members of the "Christian right," this makes it IMPOSSIBLE for them to be uptight, censorious meddlers in others' affairs. Liberalism, for all its self-conscious distancing from Bible-thumpers, fulfills the same sort of masochistic impulse as does classic Christianity. The average liberal's intentions are probably no more or less pure than your average idiot Christian's and about equally as misguided ... Liberals are as simplistically fearful of (and naive about) racism, sexism, and homophobia as Christians are about Satanism, communism, and pornography ... Liberals are right about one thing: "Politically incorrect" is a shopworn phrase that implies that only leftists can be humorless ideologues. So instead of the overused "PC," I prefer "self-righteous" or "ideologically constipated," because such terms can apply to any asshole in
[242] the cosmos. But like all other starry-eyed Pious Creeps, white liberals willsay they're not being self-righteous, they're just DOING THE RIGHT THING. So do the right thing. Go home. Your life is in shambles. Clean up your own nest before you try to save the spotted owl. It'd help matters if white liberals actually WERE correct. But they blame anger when they should blame frustration. They blame whiteness when they should blame greed. They blame maleness when they should blame power. Instead of dismantling the very architecture of bigotry, they merely slap on a new coat of paint ...
[243] ... When you begin slicing through a liberal's flimsy cellophane ideology, his true inner meanness--hardly liberal--is revealed. It would seem strange for a King Crab such as myself to chide ANYONE for being mean. It isn't liberals' meanness per se, it's that they seem entirely unaware of it. Or if aware, they try to bury it under some ennobling excuse. My objection is to their pretense of sweetness. If they came to terms with their meanness, they might actually be fun. But like a stagnant pond is clogged with slime, the liberal is FILLED with hate, because his ideology doesn't allow him to express and release it. There are plenty of things that liberals hate, they just can't bring themselves to use that awful word. The liberal's main problem isn't that he's an asshole, it's that he can't come to terms with it. Liberals aren't evil, they're merely misguided human beings adhering to a code that denies them their humanity ...
[246] ... The Guilty White Male fears admitting exactly WHERE his heartfelt compassion ends and his instinctual self-preservation begins. Because you know it's somewhere ... he projects this fear of protential violence onto the Angry White Male. At the bottom of everything, the Guilty White Male fears confronting the fact that rednecks mostly exist in a social class BENEATH him. Hipness is a luxury. Being white trash isn't. Even by using the rules of liberalism--victims are saints--the redneck beats the white liberal. Ideologically, the Guilty White Male is down with the program; materially, he's still a filthy-rich imperialist Yankee hyena. His "shame of being white" is more a osrt of cutesy atavistic role-playing than anything tangible. He'll write bighearted articles about the homeless, but he won't offer his spare bedroom. He's tortured with guilt about his relative leisure and affluence compared to most indigenous peoples worldwide, yet he's not quick to pawn his cozy condo and Pentium chip in order to air-drop corn meal to the starving Pakistani peasantry. He's outraged about the oppression of blacks, but he isn't moving into the black slums, at least not this year. He feels terrible that the land was stolen from the Indians, but it doesn't appear as if he's giving it back anytime soon. Why doesn't Mr. Multicultural give all his cool toys back to the Injuns? Because that would release him from guilt, and he likes to live in guilt. His guilt serves a definite psychological purpose for him, and he wouldn't ever want to get rid of it. The Guilty White Male takes pride in his own shame. But guilt only serves the guilty. Ever wonder why comfy urban white liberals feel such guilt about history and rural rednecks don't? They whire liberal's guilt pangs have little to do with noble contrition; his guilt reflects an uncomfortable sense of his place in the historic order. If he feels so guilty . . . well, maybe he should. Maybe his guilt is real. Maybe that's why rednecks and blacks feel no guilt, while white liberals are stricken with it. Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, would have
[247] been a white liberal were she alive today. Her problem wasn't that she criticized black slavery in the South, it was that she was a wealthy New England society chippie who ignored all the mangled white factory workers and bruised white kiddie laborers huddled right outside the debutante ball. She was a Northern aristocrat who scolded Southern aristocrats for how they treated their underclass, yet she defecated on the underclass in her own hometown... The modern white liberal is the same way. he can't get along with the downtrodden among his own race, but he wants to prove how open-minded he is by getting along with blacks. It's suffering as viewed through the thick lens of a society matron's monocle. It's just table-lace art patronage, as it's always been. In their eagerness to help oppressed peoples across the ocean, they leapfrog right over white trash in their own pond. Starving children in India. Starving children
[248] in Africa. starving children everywhere but Appalachia. Think globally, ignore white trash locally ... Oh, these liberal kids and their vicarious oppression. Oceans of compassion from the fat-free hearts of trust-fund babies. Their love for Native Americans extends to buying Navajo jewelry and handbags. Their Holocaust reparations consist of a Sunday-morning bialy roll with butter. Their empathy for blacks is represented by an extensive collection of Motown CDs. The Guilty White Male seems to believe that blacks will appreciate his benevolent smile and conciliatory attitude and how much he hates his own skin. The Guilty White Male thinks his Michael Jordan posters and Maya Angelou books are all that's needed for appeasement. His negrophilism seems to be nothing beyond a fashion statement, almost a way of accessorizing. It's black pride without ever having to endure the downsides of being black. Ultimately, it's a way for bland white people to feel connected to the oppressed. Not to BE connected, but to feel it. A safe, packaged form of negrophilism. Freeze-dried instant-coffee negrophilism. It's convenient. He can take it along for a snack. And he'd last about five minutes in a black ghetto. The blunt-edged fact is that most guilty white liberals and proud
[249] American blacks have next to NOTHING in common. Nothing culturally. Nothing economically. Don't live in the same neighborhoods. Different belief systems. Different sensitivities. They find different things funny. They don't even breathe the same air most of the time. The bittersweet truth is that while white liberals may love black people, on could hardly say the opposite is true. That's the classic jokeof white liberalism: the self-negating, shirt-rending white person making clumsy entreaties to a crowd of blacks who don't cotton to negrophiles and might even call him a punk-ass honky to his face. Be careful whom you wish to uplift, for they may just uplift themselves. Many black radicals correctly discern the self-serving tenor of most white-liberal "philanthropy." They're tired of white liberals telling them how to be black. And I'm tired of white liberals telling me how NOT to be white ...
[250] ... Historically, the Guilty White Male has suffered a lot less than has the Angry White Male. So now it's Mr. Guilty's turn. He whimpers so much about an oppression which seems nonexistent in his life, it almost makes you want to oppress him. Being liberated and empowered has only seemed to make him cranky. Why not punish the Guilty White Male with all the angst he so deeply want to feel? The white liberal craves cinematic pain. Literary suffering. I think he deserves better. A bit of true pain to complement his fantasies. The kind I've always known. Pain ain't a thing to me. beat me up, I wipe myself off and walk away. But pain is something the white liberal either fears (when it's near) or fetishizes (when it's someone else's). I say give him a full taste of the oppression he's jonesin' for. Drag him through all the progressive beauty he finds in the Third World experience. Everyone might be happy that way. Therefore, I propose that all white liberals should be forced to pick cotton and tobacco. Chain and stuff them together in the holds to galley ships. Send all white liberals to Africa to work on plantations. They should endure all the pains of slave life except forcible rape, because that would only validate their feminist fantasies. I suggest that white liberals be herded into concentration camps in which they're forced NOT to take showers. In a white-liberal prison camp, they'd all feel each other's pain (and body funk) together. They'd love it. Or just make them WORK for a change. Put them in Moonie jumpsuits and make them pick up trash along the highway. I'd like to see white liberals as apartment-house doormen and elementary-school janitors. White liberals as shoeshine boys and bellhops and migrant workes. The editors of the Village Voice working in a chain gang. Forced all performance artists to work as sharecroppers and lumberjacks. Make drag queens labor as coal miners in the true underground. Make Hollywood liberals DRIVE limousines for a change. They should be forced to live in the hills for a year without electricity and running water before they make fun of hillbillies. Let them plow a farm for a year and then come back with bestiality jokes. Maybe white
[251] liberals should be sent off to die in war while rednecks stay at home and protest. Let's have some sensitivity training that makes sense. And perhaps some humiliating role reversal to complete the treatment. I envisiona 1990s version of Watermelon Man or Black Like Me--an urban liberal yuppie wakes up one morning as a toothless rural hillbilly and finds that he can't change. Maybe white liberals should be forced to perform in whiteface, humiliating themselves to the delight of all-black audiences. I'd like to see a minstrel show where penitent white liberals perform "Puff the Magic Dragon" and other sixties folk songs while rowdy Negro hecklers throw rotted fruit at them. I have nothing against white liberals. Everyone should own one. Maybe it's wrong to wish that they suffer. Maybe that's just what they want. Maybe the most sadistic thing would be to wish them a long, happy life. Maybe they shouldn't be murdered. Maybe they should just walk around saddled with the living knowledge of what shallow pains in the ass they are. They shouldn't be killed, but dog leashes aren't out of the question. They shouldn't be exterminated. But they HAVE to be sterilized. Since they're as literal-minded as your average fundamentalist Republican Elks Club member, they'll probably think I'm REALLY calling for the seizrue and arrest of anyone with liberal politics. maybe they'll think my words constitute actual hate speech that directly incites brutality against white liberals. A man can dream, can't he?
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[After I typed out the excerpts from Jim Goad's book "The Redneck Manifesto," I found out on the internet that Goad got out of prison a while ago, where he had served time for beating his wife and beating his girlfriend. Of course, it's going to make me sound like one of Goad's hated white liberals if I state here that I disapprove of beating women; suffice to say that I strongly disapprove. However, Goad still makes enough good points in his book to warrant the excerpt here and for me to put a link to his website in the "links" section of my blog. -- JH ]
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Goad, Jim. 1997. "The Redneck Manifesto: America's Scapegoats: How We Got That Way and Why We're Not Going to Take It Anymore," Simon & Schuster.
[232] ... I find myself unclassifiable politically. People ask me where I stand, and I say, "Anywhere you aren't standing." I'm not too keen on human nature. I think that anyone, given power, acts like an oppressor. I believe in an equality of corruptibility. I'm not pure. I'm corruptible. What did you have in mind? I have a hunch that the Grim Reaper isn't a liberal, although he is an equal-opportunity employer. I hope I'm wrong about all this. And even if I'm right, I suspect I'll be blamed.I've often wondered how one becomes credentialed to be a social critic. Most writers have extremely poor social skills. That's why they
[233] write. It's true that most social critics have appalling social lives. I am no exception. In my case, it's social criticism from a sociopath. I'm pushing for Enlightened Sociopathy. Maybe that's my political agenda.Part of my job is to ensure that this book gets misinterpreted the RIGHT way. so I'll predict some of the blatant ways that book reviewers will decontextualize my words to fit their framework ...When not accusing me of being a talentless hog-slopper, the criticism will either hinge on my "privilege" or my "bigotry" or my "fear." I'll be called an extremist, but that's not so bad, considering the middle. They'll continually try to ally me with the "right wing," although I steadfastly claim to be wingless ... They'll say I'm merely trying to offend. Why would I have to try? Most people wake up in the morning offended. They go to sleep offended. Trying to offend them would be like trying to make them breathe. I have better things to do
[234] with my time. I realize they'll get pissed off, and yet I blame their sensitivity rather than my obnoxiousness.They'll use whatever tage that makes them feel as if I've been safely defused and pigeonhold and compartmentalized and debunked. They'll ...The only risk, as I see it, is that they'll actually like me. That could be trouble.Liberal bastards.Whoa, hold your horses, Nellie--I realize that the word "liberal" is often booted around in a knee-jerking, reactionary way. When I say "liberal," I'm not using coded speech because I really want to say "gay" or "Jew" or "black" or "female" instead. Your sexual preference, religion, country of origin, and genitalia bore me to tears. If you though I was losing sleep over any of these things, I'm sorry to disappoint. The word "liberal," as I'm using it, isn't meant to imply anything other than someone who identifies himself or herself as a liberal. Since I don't believe in the tangible existence of "left" and "right," I don't believe liberals actually exist. The problem is that liberals believe they exist.Liberalism, like obscenity, is in the eye of the beholder. Because I criticize liberals, some binary brain automatically register me as a conservative. If the marble doesn't fall on the left, it HAS to fall on the right. What neither liberals nor conservatives comprehend is that anyone could be anything other than a liberal or a conservative. Liber-
[235] als and conservatives are two ass cheeks surrounding the same hairy bunghole. Constipervative. Liberrhea. They need each other.Conservatism is a bedtime story believe in only by fat old grizzly bears. I don't identify at all with conservatives. They're varicose-veined manneqins. Blow-dried crash-test dummies. Middle of the roadkill. Walking around as if they forgot to remove the coat hanger from their suit jacket. You had mentioned the huckleberry-pie, fuddy-duddy, Burl Ives, Choo-Choo Charlie, psychoevangelical, anal-rententive, hanging-judge-loving, sex-fearing, missile-worshipping, Satan-obsessed, xenophobic, law-abiding, abortion-clinic-bombing, flag-draping, kill-for-Christ, deport-the-Arabs, bash-the-queers, horn-swoggler type? It ain't me. People think that if you attack liberalism, you must be a straw-hat-and-seersucker-suit-clad old puff of flatulence. I don't think so. Limbaugh is Limburger to me. Reagan was a dopey thespian who nearly nuked the planet. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed are as useless as testicle cheese. I don't like churches or book-burnings or witch-hunts. I don't like crowds, period. I hate both liberals and conservatives. I have plenty of hate to go around.Some people probably assume I was born a shit-kicker and never cleaned off my boots. They presume I've never pondered the liberal platform's glorious wisdom and that I'd see the light if I opened my eyes JUST ONCE. Funny thing, I used to identify myself as a liberal. I used to be one of THEM. I'm a recovering liberal. That's what makes me such a slippery eel. If I seem unnecessarily angry with American liberalism, it's because I feel betrayed by it. I'm mad at white liberalism like I'm mad at Christianity--because it's a lie that I once believed. These days, I hate liberalism with the ferocity of a vengeful ex-lover. I'm a STALKER of liberalism.After a while . . . NO, I just didn't have the same endlessly lachrymose resovoirs of compassion that they did. I had my own problems. But just to be an asshole, I was a liberal throughout the eighties. There seemed to be no other choice during the time. Everyone was a conservative, so I veered the other way. The eighties will go down as one of the worst decades in American history. Everyone pretended. Perceived status was more important than reality. Lifestyles of the Rich
[236] and Famous and infomericals. Greedy and empty. Multiplexes and malls and scented potpourri and ATM machines. A cold time. icy synthesizer dance music, jingoistic flag-waving, and the Moral Majority ... That faceless pestilence known as the yuppies. I hated it all. After working a nighttime job in Manhattan, I'd pass the POVERTY SUCKS posters and smirking preppy society-brat New York magazine covers at newsstands. Down in the basement at Port Authority bus terminal at two A.M. , it was a much different world. Homeless women dragging rags, smelling like barrels of rotted potato peels. A man calmly lighting a crack pipe while waiting for a bus to Jersey. A guy running around waving a needle in his hand, threatening to spike people with AIDS. Realizing there was social chaos beneath all the yuppie pretense, there was no way I'd buy the conservative line of bullshit. In targeting the poor, conservatism pointed a finger at those who weren't to blame. But the liberals eventually lost me, too. They pointed a finger at me, and I wasn't to blame, either. I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come form a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black "struggle" while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke. I've heard ideological Marxists scream about capitalistic exploitation all while gleefully exploiting their parents' economic generosity. City kids living on their attorney parents' trust funds howling that rural rednecks are the oppressors. I tired of "anarchists" whose mommies paid the bills. They can't even kick their coke habit, and yet they claim to know what's best for the world. They still wear the lobster bibs of cultural entitlement, no matter how they try to hide it. With all the intestine-scrubbing granola they ate, they STILL acted as if there was something stuck up their ass. Could it be that CLASS is what's stuck up their ass? Let's take a peek inside a coffeehouse of white liberals. Esspresso
[237] hipsters. Gentrified radicals. Earth Shoe-wearing, burlap-clad conformist shitheels. Bean-sprout totalitarians. Bleeding hearts. Postnasal drio. Diarrhea pudding. Mealy-mouthed macrobiotic mouse-haired mendicants. Insufferable sufferers. Pinched faces sipping chamomile tea. Each anus clenched tightly enough to cut diamonds. So uptight, it's a wonder their heads don't pop off their shoulders and fly around. Major-league victims. Self-pitying pukes. Unethical moralists. Mean-spirited peaceniks. Doe-eyed, self-important drones. Ideologically as rigid as an ironing board. Just a bore. CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING. Close your eyes and deny everything. EMPOWERMENT. Complaining more loudly than usual. NEW AGE. Old superstition. GODDESS IS COMING. She'd better douche this time. VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE. A global lobotomy. PEOPLE OF COLOR. Do you mean colored people? STOP THE HATE. Honey, I ain't even STARTED hatin'. It's Liberal Pentecost--everyone in the coffeehouse has a holy flame dancing atop their head. Meek little worms wriggling on a fish hook of sensitivity. A delicate web of frightened arachnids. Crippled Waster Bunnies bleeding on the roadside. Skateboarders for racial equality. Surfers against hunger. Mansion-owning crusaders against homelessness. It's all flaky pastry and fine cheese. The bourgeois masquerading as the oppressed. Their little marches and candlelight ceremonies and boycotts. Their false, self-generated sense of stylistic oppression. Sitting there with their thumbs in their asses, they've convinced themselves they're making a difference. Over near a huge glass of chocolate-covered coffee beans stands a stack of free alternative weekly newspapers. No doubt ... This week (like last week) the editors are outraged that women workers only make seventy cents compared to every dollar that men make. But they never mention
[238] that rural workers suffer similar economic disparities compared to city dwellers. Or that Southern incomes have always been much lower than those in the North... The artists are clueless. They've never had the slightest idea how to rule the world. That's why they're artists. It's "revolution" as conceived by Hollywood brats rather than the working class. Clove cigarettes and patchouli oil and black lipstick and rubber whips. Smelly
[239] armpits and vegetable breath. Tongue piercings and ironic comments about Saturday-morning cartoon shows. The girls with backpacks and Edith Prickley horn-rimmed glasses. The boys with dirt-blond Julius Caesar haircuts and fuzzball-laden old sweaters. Inarticulate slacker pop-culture inbreds. Crumpled tinfoil and a scab on the lip. Stuttering autism as genius. Compassion as fashion. Meaningful emptiness. Scratch-and-sniff attitudinal posturing. All butter, no potato. All frosting, no cake. The hipsters have been entirely subsumed into the Uber-culture. Their "rebellion" is fashion-ad posery, a million skulls with green crewcuts and no brains inside. Their "culture" is merely a syncretic jumble of received media images. Their ideas of "freedom" are pruely a fashion show--freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing. Consensual enemas and purple hair and iron cock rings are just dandy, but they're kinda hard to enjoy when you can't put food on the table. Yessiree, Buffalo Bob, they really have tamed the post-Woodstock kiddies with bread and circuses. For much longer than I care to remember, the "counterculture" has been ... The rotten produce of post-World War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society--and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative--was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-snapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one-hundred-percent substance-free. And this counterculture congratulated itself on its unbending sympathy for oppressed peoples everywhere--everywhere, that is, but the traler parks across the tracks on the other side of town. White liberals will recycle anythign but white trash. Their "alternative lifestyles" never include being a redneck. Punk rockers, whose entire schtick rested on making people sick, were themselves nauseated by the hilbillies. After the Sex Pistols toured the South in 1978, guitarist Steve Jones lamented that the experience had been "like Deliverance." Iggy Pop's self-mutilation and G.G. Allin's coprophagy were
[240] somehow palatable, but rednecks were just too disgusting. Even thought white-liberal Punky Brewsters proposed grotesquerie as an aesthetic paradigm, white trash seemed just too repulsive for them to stomach. The liberal only goes halfway. Liberal dribbles. Limp noodles. Happy doobles. French poodles. Yolkless eggs. The white liberal wants to be hard-hitting, but he doesn't want to offend the advertisers. He wants to ride the rollar coaster, but he doesn't want to muss his hair. He pretends to enjoy trash, but he won't get his hands dirty. He craves excitement, but he doesn't want to get a heart attack. The white liberal eschews all forms of extremism. It's too bad that he lives in an extreme world. I wonder when a five-mile-an-hour wind will come and blow him away. Children of pain. The enshrinement of the victim. The victim pinned to velvet-covered cardboard like a butterfly in a science-fair project, unable ever to wriggle free. Pity the young white liberal who tries to sleep atop a stack of twenty matresses, flapping and flailing about his Princess and the Pea-sized problems. And it's people such as this who've woven the myth of the Angry White Male and have accused him of whining. That's right--white American liberals, one of the whiniest, most protected classes in earth's history, have the Rocky Mountain-sized gallstones to accuse your average Spam-eating ditchdigger of whining. Listen, Bucky Beaver, I'm aware that anyone can whine, including Angry White Males. I've whined. I can bear to hear my own whining for a while, but even I can't stand it after a point. That's why this is the last chapter. But white liberals really are in no place to cast judgment about whininess. They NEVER TIRE of hearing themselves whine. Liberal muralists will portray the archetypal "whiny white guy" with a fishing rod and a CAT tractor hat. interesting that you don't hear so much about the whiny entertainment lawyer or the whiny civil-rights activist. Or the whiny alternative-weekly writer. Or the whiny art-gallery owners ... They don't think performance artists can whine about being denied NEA grants to stick yams up their asses, but Angry White Males are somehow throwing temper tantrums about being taxed and worked to
[241] death. At least the white boys are "whining" about losing jobs and economic exploitation, rather than naughty words and fashion mistakes ... Complaining is bad enough. Party-line piety is unforgivable. The white liberal is an unsavory hybrid of Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa. Too many rules mixing with too much righteousness... They've somehow convinced themselves that if they aren't members of the "Christian right," this makes it IMPOSSIBLE for them to be uptight, censorious meddlers in others' affairs. Liberalism, for all its self-conscious distancing from Bible-thumpers, fulfills the same sort of masochistic impulse as does classic Christianity. The average liberal's intentions are probably no more or less pure than your average idiot Christian's and about equally as misguided ... Liberals are as simplistically fearful of (and naive about) racism, sexism, and homophobia as Christians are about Satanism, communism, and pornography ... Liberals are right about one thing: "Politically incorrect" is a shopworn phrase that implies that only leftists can be humorless ideologues. So instead of the overused "PC," I prefer "self-righteous" or "ideologically constipated," because such terms can apply to any asshole in
[242] the cosmos. But like all other starry-eyed Pious Creeps, white liberals willsay they're not being self-righteous, they're just DOING THE RIGHT THING. So do the right thing. Go home. Your life is in shambles. Clean up your own nest before you try to save the spotted owl. It'd help matters if white liberals actually WERE correct. But they blame anger when they should blame frustration. They blame whiteness when they should blame greed. They blame maleness when they should blame power. Instead of dismantling the very architecture of bigotry, they merely slap on a new coat of paint ...
[243] ... When you begin slicing through a liberal's flimsy cellophane ideology, his true inner meanness--hardly liberal--is revealed. It would seem strange for a King Crab such as myself to chide ANYONE for being mean. It isn't liberals' meanness per se, it's that they seem entirely unaware of it. Or if aware, they try to bury it under some ennobling excuse. My objection is to their pretense of sweetness. If they came to terms with their meanness, they might actually be fun. But like a stagnant pond is clogged with slime, the liberal is FILLED with hate, because his ideology doesn't allow him to express and release it. There are plenty of things that liberals hate, they just can't bring themselves to use that awful word. The liberal's main problem isn't that he's an asshole, it's that he can't come to terms with it. Liberals aren't evil, they're merely misguided human beings adhering to a code that denies them their humanity ...
[246] ... The Guilty White Male fears admitting exactly WHERE his heartfelt compassion ends and his instinctual self-preservation begins. Because you know it's somewhere ... he projects this fear of protential violence onto the Angry White Male. At the bottom of everything, the Guilty White Male fears confronting the fact that rednecks mostly exist in a social class BENEATH him. Hipness is a luxury. Being white trash isn't. Even by using the rules of liberalism--victims are saints--the redneck beats the white liberal. Ideologically, the Guilty White Male is down with the program; materially, he's still a filthy-rich imperialist Yankee hyena. His "shame of being white" is more a osrt of cutesy atavistic role-playing than anything tangible. He'll write bighearted articles about the homeless, but he won't offer his spare bedroom. He's tortured with guilt about his relative leisure and affluence compared to most indigenous peoples worldwide, yet he's not quick to pawn his cozy condo and Pentium chip in order to air-drop corn meal to the starving Pakistani peasantry. He's outraged about the oppression of blacks, but he isn't moving into the black slums, at least not this year. He feels terrible that the land was stolen from the Indians, but it doesn't appear as if he's giving it back anytime soon. Why doesn't Mr. Multicultural give all his cool toys back to the Injuns? Because that would release him from guilt, and he likes to live in guilt. His guilt serves a definite psychological purpose for him, and he wouldn't ever want to get rid of it. The Guilty White Male takes pride in his own shame. But guilt only serves the guilty. Ever wonder why comfy urban white liberals feel such guilt about history and rural rednecks don't? They whire liberal's guilt pangs have little to do with noble contrition; his guilt reflects an uncomfortable sense of his place in the historic order. If he feels so guilty . . . well, maybe he should. Maybe his guilt is real. Maybe that's why rednecks and blacks feel no guilt, while white liberals are stricken with it. Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, would have
[247] been a white liberal were she alive today. Her problem wasn't that she criticized black slavery in the South, it was that she was a wealthy New England society chippie who ignored all the mangled white factory workers and bruised white kiddie laborers huddled right outside the debutante ball. She was a Northern aristocrat who scolded Southern aristocrats for how they treated their underclass, yet she defecated on the underclass in her own hometown... The modern white liberal is the same way. he can't get along with the downtrodden among his own race, but he wants to prove how open-minded he is by getting along with blacks. It's suffering as viewed through the thick lens of a society matron's monocle. It's just table-lace art patronage, as it's always been. In their eagerness to help oppressed peoples across the ocean, they leapfrog right over white trash in their own pond. Starving children in India. Starving children
[248] in Africa. starving children everywhere but Appalachia. Think globally, ignore white trash locally ... Oh, these liberal kids and their vicarious oppression. Oceans of compassion from the fat-free hearts of trust-fund babies. Their love for Native Americans extends to buying Navajo jewelry and handbags. Their Holocaust reparations consist of a Sunday-morning bialy roll with butter. Their empathy for blacks is represented by an extensive collection of Motown CDs. The Guilty White Male seems to believe that blacks will appreciate his benevolent smile and conciliatory attitude and how much he hates his own skin. The Guilty White Male thinks his Michael Jordan posters and Maya Angelou books are all that's needed for appeasement. His negrophilism seems to be nothing beyond a fashion statement, almost a way of accessorizing. It's black pride without ever having to endure the downsides of being black. Ultimately, it's a way for bland white people to feel connected to the oppressed. Not to BE connected, but to feel it. A safe, packaged form of negrophilism. Freeze-dried instant-coffee negrophilism. It's convenient. He can take it along for a snack. And he'd last about five minutes in a black ghetto. The blunt-edged fact is that most guilty white liberals and proud
[249] American blacks have next to NOTHING in common. Nothing culturally. Nothing economically. Don't live in the same neighborhoods. Different belief systems. Different sensitivities. They find different things funny. They don't even breathe the same air most of the time. The bittersweet truth is that while white liberals may love black people, on could hardly say the opposite is true. That's the classic jokeof white liberalism: the self-negating, shirt-rending white person making clumsy entreaties to a crowd of blacks who don't cotton to negrophiles and might even call him a punk-ass honky to his face. Be careful whom you wish to uplift, for they may just uplift themselves. Many black radicals correctly discern the self-serving tenor of most white-liberal "philanthropy." They're tired of white liberals telling them how to be black. And I'm tired of white liberals telling me how NOT to be white ...
[250] ... Historically, the Guilty White Male has suffered a lot less than has the Angry White Male. So now it's Mr. Guilty's turn. He whimpers so much about an oppression which seems nonexistent in his life, it almost makes you want to oppress him. Being liberated and empowered has only seemed to make him cranky. Why not punish the Guilty White Male with all the angst he so deeply want to feel? The white liberal craves cinematic pain. Literary suffering. I think he deserves better. A bit of true pain to complement his fantasies. The kind I've always known. Pain ain't a thing to me. beat me up, I wipe myself off and walk away. But pain is something the white liberal either fears (when it's near) or fetishizes (when it's someone else's). I say give him a full taste of the oppression he's jonesin' for. Drag him through all the progressive beauty he finds in the Third World experience. Everyone might be happy that way. Therefore, I propose that all white liberals should be forced to pick cotton and tobacco. Chain and stuff them together in the holds to galley ships. Send all white liberals to Africa to work on plantations. They should endure all the pains of slave life except forcible rape, because that would only validate their feminist fantasies. I suggest that white liberals be herded into concentration camps in which they're forced NOT to take showers. In a white-liberal prison camp, they'd all feel each other's pain (and body funk) together. They'd love it. Or just make them WORK for a change. Put them in Moonie jumpsuits and make them pick up trash along the highway. I'd like to see white liberals as apartment-house doormen and elementary-school janitors. White liberals as shoeshine boys and bellhops and migrant workes. The editors of the Village Voice working in a chain gang. Forced all performance artists to work as sharecroppers and lumberjacks. Make drag queens labor as coal miners in the true underground. Make Hollywood liberals DRIVE limousines for a change. They should be forced to live in the hills for a year without electricity and running water before they make fun of hillbillies. Let them plow a farm for a year and then come back with bestiality jokes. Maybe white
[251] liberals should be sent off to die in war while rednecks stay at home and protest. Let's have some sensitivity training that makes sense. And perhaps some humiliating role reversal to complete the treatment. I envisiona 1990s version of Watermelon Man or Black Like Me--an urban liberal yuppie wakes up one morning as a toothless rural hillbilly and finds that he can't change. Maybe white liberals should be forced to perform in whiteface, humiliating themselves to the delight of all-black audiences. I'd like to see a minstrel show where penitent white liberals perform "Puff the Magic Dragon" and other sixties folk songs while rowdy Negro hecklers throw rotted fruit at them. I have nothing against white liberals. Everyone should own one. Maybe it's wrong to wish that they suffer. Maybe that's just what they want. Maybe the most sadistic thing would be to wish them a long, happy life. Maybe they shouldn't be murdered. Maybe they should just walk around saddled with the living knowledge of what shallow pains in the ass they are. They shouldn't be killed, but dog leashes aren't out of the question. They shouldn't be exterminated. But they HAVE to be sterilized. Since they're as literal-minded as your average fundamentalist Republican Elks Club member, they'll probably think I'm REALLY calling for the seizrue and arrest of anyone with liberal politics. maybe they'll think my words constitute actual hate speech that directly incites brutality against white liberals. A man can dream, can't he?
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[After I typed out the excerpts from Jim Goad's book "The Redneck Manifesto," I found out on the internet that Goad got out of prison a while ago, where he had served time for beating his wife and beating his girlfriend. Of course, it's going to make me sound like one of Goad's hated white liberals if I state here that I disapprove of beating women; suffice to say that I strongly disapprove. However, Goad still makes enough good points in his book to warrant the excerpt here and for me to put a link to his website in the "links" section of my blog. -- JH ]
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