Southern
Rednecks:
My
culture needs to reclaim itself, not let others define, mock or use it.
Because “sophisticated” America tends to avert its eyes from them, it is inclined to ignore or misunderstand this culture. The Scots-Irish tradition of disregarding formal education and mistrusting, even despising, any form of aristocracy has given us the man the elites love to hate – the unreconstructed redneck. The Southern redneck is an east target, with his intrinsic stubbornness, his capacity for violence and his curious social ways.
His legacy is stained because he became the dominant culture in the South, whose economic system was based on slavery. No matter that the English aristocrats of Tidewater were slavery’s originators and principal beneficiaries or that the typical Scots-Irish yeoman had no slaves in America.
His is a culture founded on guns. He considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct. Literary and academic America sees such views as not only archaic but also threatening.
The things he’s known for aren’t exactly valued in America’s centers of power. He’s always been a loyal American, sometimes to the point of mawkishness. He shows up for our wars. He hauls our goods, grows our foods, sweats in our factories.
In the classic film Cool Hand Luke, the warden of a Southern work camp was fond of saying, “Luke, we got to get your mind right.” But the warden never got Luke’s mind right. He put Luke in solitary. He put him in chains to keep him from running away. But Luke kept running, kept resisting, because he would rather die than have the warden make his mind right.
Luke was nothing more than an unpretentious, unreconstructed, unre-educated redneck. And America ia a much stronger country for all his stubbornness, his willingness to stay true to himself and his refusal to back down in the face of pressure from above.