Redneck Nation (13 page)

They were left with campaign slogans like: “Strom Thurmond: Getting Out Of Bed For Over 98% of a Century!” Or “Strom: He’ll
PROBABLY Show Up!”

It’s the ultimate political strategy: presumed incompetence. And it worked.

Like the drunkard stumbling toward his waiting car or the secretary pulling into the parking space outside her married boss’s
motel room, the last thing Southerners wanted to discuss was whether or not what they were doing made sense. It didn’t matter
if Strom was capable of doing the job. They were going to vote for Thurmond even if they had to follow him to the graveyard
to do it.

The exclamation point on this telling example of southern-style “meritocracy” in action was when Senator Thurmond’s twenty-nine-year-old
son, Strom Thurmond, Jr., was appointed South Carolina’s U.S. attorney. Lil’ Strom, as he is affectionately known, had been
out of law school for less than three years when he was nominated for the job. When asked about his experience in prosecuting
federal law (he had none), Lil’ Strom could only point to the
seven cases he had tried as an assistant county prosecutor. His biggest? Felony shoplifting.

International terrorists, beware!

What makes this story quintessentially southern is that not a single political leader of either party objected. The kid was
clearly and utterly inexperienced but, thanks to a unique job set-aside program known as A-Thurm-ative Action, his gene pool
résumé got him the job while folks with twenty years as assistant A.G.s muttered quietly in their cubicles.

Now, I know all you northern readers are laughing at this ludicrous nonsense, as well you should. This is exactly the kind
of inbred, good-ol’-boy nepotism I wanted to get away from. So I left the South and went to Chicago.

Yes, Chicago, where city politicians live by the Daley Creed: If you can’t trust your family, whom can you trust?

Chicago, where the cemetery walls are topped with barbed wire each November in a vain attempt to slow down the dead on their
way to the polls.

Chicago, where every applicant for city employment is overqualified and underpaid. And if you don’t believe them, ask their
cousin, the alderman.

But why pick on Chicago? This machine-style, back-slapping politics can be seen in nearly every major northern city. Its how
business gets done, how votes get bought and paid for. That’s different from the Strom standard. In Chicago, Daleys get reelected
because they deliver. Thurmond’s repeated elections don’t represent a triumph of constituent services, but rather the triumph
of “my daddy knows your daddy,” the ultimate defeat of “what you know” by the forces of who you know. During the military
base closings of the 1990s, South Carolina had
the largest per capita job loss of any state in the country—and Thurmond was the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee!

Perhaps the best example in the nation of “Who’s your daddy?” politics is the state of Massachusetts, where to be a successful
candidate you must either (a) be intelligent, articulate, honest, and capable or (b) be named “Kennedy.”

This rule also applies in Maryland and New York, and it might even have worked in Illinois if William Kennedy Smith hadn’t
learned constituent services in a South Florida bar from his uncle Ted.

The poster child for flagrant mediocrity being overcome by family name has to be the congressman from Rhode Island, Patrick
Kennedy. To begin with, you know you’re a second-rate Kennedy when you have to carpetbag in Rhode Island. What, is Delaware
too big a challenge?

A profile of Congressman Kennedy in the
Weekly Standard
offers this pithy, insightful comment he made on the issue of eliminating racism in the armed services: “So what happens
is, things don’t get reported because, you know, let’s not make much to do about nothing, so to speak. One of the worries
I have about, you, a really zero-defect mentality with respect to defect—I’m not talking now—I mean everyone can acknowledge
that if there’s a little bit of extremism, I’m not saying that that isn’t just grounds for you know, expulsion from the military.
But how do we
address the broader issues… Can you answer that in terms of communication?”

Ah, those Irish boys and their gift of the blarney…

Patrick Kennedy’s lightweight status is even the subject of a documentary that has aired on PBS. (Note: When you’re a liberal
so dim the folks in public broadcasting feel the need to comment, you’re an idiot.) Everyone who’s seen
Taking On the Kennedys
, the hilarious documentary on Patrick Kennedy’s first run for Congress, knows what a vacuous caricature he is. Were his name
Patrick Smith or Pat Jones, he would be lucky to get elected programs chairman of the Pawtucket Kiwanis. But as a Kennedy,
he’s in like Flynn (if I’m allowed to use this expression about a person of Irish descent).

The point here isn’t that the people of Rhode Island have a congressman who’s not too bright. The point is that northerners
in Boston, Providence, Annapolis, and Albany have happily joined the ranks of the “who you know” America I fled in my youth.
That trend is particularly felt in New York.

The words “New York” are charged with a magic based on the belief that anything can happen to anybody in a city that exists
for everyman. New York is a bastion of accomplishment, a tabula rasa town where nobody cares what your last name is or who
your husband is or what your connections are. You’re in New York now—you gotta deliver. The City That Never Sleeps calls out
across the nation to individuals of achievement and says, “Come show me your best!”

And who to better exemplify that New York spirit of individual accomplishment than U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton!

[Wait for mocking laughter to subside. Continue.]

Before being elected senator by 55 percent of the New York State electorate, Hillary Clinton had a list of personal achievements
so impressive it need not be recounted here, even if I could think of one. Here’s a woman who, despite having never held elective
office, had a public record so well known she had to run for Senate in a state she’d never lived in, a thousand miles from
the people who knew her best. And if there were ever a politician who did not depend on her last name for success, it was
U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Rodham What’s-Her-Name.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected in a wave of southern-style, good-ol’-boy, “I-voted-for-her-husband” politicking, of course
not! I’m shocked at the suggestion, really. She earned her position of power through merit, experience, and accomplishment.
If you don’t believe it, apply this simple test:

Imagine her as Hillary Rodham Jones, wife of prosperous Arkansas poultry processor William Jefferson Jones. All things being
equal (money, party affiliation, hairstyle), wouldn’t Senate candidate Hillary Jones—who had never lived in New York, never
held public office, worked at a second-tier law firm in a rural backwater state, lost one law partner to a mysterious suicide
and another to the penal system, and whose one foray into politics had been a nationalized health care plan so frightening
it cost her party control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years—wouldn’t she be just as likely
to be elected as former First Lady Hillary Clinton?

Of course, she would. You just roll over and go back to sleep, my rednec—er, northern friend.

Back in my angry, young-southern-man days, if I had been asked why I loved America, my short answer would have been that I
loved the idea of a place where being the best was good enough. At the time, that wasn’t true in places like the Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe, and many other points around the globe. Under communism, party loyalty and personal connections mattered far
more than ability.

As a Southerner, I felt trapped in the same system. In my mind, however incorrectly, I saw the North as the merit-based alternative
to the Bubba-based southern society of low expectations and personal connections. In the most general sense, the civil rights
army that marched across the South was fighting for the cause of merit versus favoritism. The Old South customs allowed illiterate
whites to cast their ballots while George Washington Carver couldn’t get in a voting booth. The civil rights revolution promised
a future where citizens would enter the public arena as individuals, not limited or favored based on their group identity
but, rather, given a level playing field in which each man or woman could pursue excellence.

Clearly this revolution failed. America is no more a meritocracy today than it is a libertarian utopia or constitutional republic.
I won’t even mention affirmative action, which is an open, unapologetic rejection of merit in favor of racism—the example
is too obvious to merit comment. When an Asian student with a 4.0 GPA is denied a spot at Harvard to make room for a Hispanic
student with a 3.5,
neither one is getting what both deserve. But this is America, and we don’t want them to.

How far are we from the ideal of individual merit? During the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the
San Francisco Chronicle
ran a feature bemoaning the lack of diversity on the American team. The
Chronicle
bemoaned the fact that 95 percent of the American athletes were white, and, the writer implied, that meant something must
have gone wrong.

What? Is there a more pure example of individual achievement than Olympic sport? Setting aside the fiasco of figure skating—where
it’s still the Commies versus the Capitalists giving gold medals to their homeys—you are on the Olympic team if you skated
faster, skied farther, or shot straighter than everyone else. Period. There is no room in the process for diversity, and no
need for it, either. A black ice skater and a Hispanic curler could no more be kept off the team by their skin color than
they could be kept on it for the same reason. There is—or should I say, was—one standard for the Olympics: achievement.

The 2002 Winter Olympics were marred in a small but significant way by the submersion of merit to considerations of race.
But the primacy of group membership over individual accomplishment is so pervasive that the Olympic media coverage at times
turned laughable. When Vonetta Flowers became the first black person to ever win a gold medal in a Winter Olympics, reporters
were flummoxed as to how to describe her. They couldn’t go on the air and say “black person,” so one commentator resorted
to describing Flowers as “the first African American from any country to win gold at the Winter Olympics.”

Think of how proud the many African Americans from
other
countries must have felt…

A merit-based America would have a flat income tax where everyone pays the same rate. What is a graduated income tax other
than a reminder to Bill Gates from the mighty majority of mathematically impaired Americans that we don’t care how smart he
gets, we can still take away all his stuff?

A merit-based America would have a national college system that was difficult to get into, but one whose diplomas were truly
worth having. Instead, we send everyone who can walk and drink beer at the same time into our higher education system. They
may not get much from the education, but most invest heavily in the mastery of the “higher” part. After four years of bad
grades and bong hits, a majority of Americans who attend college never graduate. The ones who do graduate end up $50K in debt
and have a degree that’s worth about what my dad’s diploma was worth when he graduated from high school in 1959.

College admissions used to be one way of separating the wheat from the chaff. But now that states are throwing money at would-be
students to fill up overbuilt campuses, the slogan of higher education has become “All Chaff, All the Time!” Why is it wrong
to say to a college applicant, “Sorry, you don’t belong here,” particularly when he clearly doesn’t? Is it because we don’t
want to make anyone feel bad (a classically southern trait, by the way)? Well, think about how bad they’re going to feel flunking
out of the Feng Shui of Barney Fife: Mayberry as Oriental Metaphysics.

Except they won’t flunk out, will they? Remember those Partonesque grading curves I complained about earlier?
Check out this statistic from ground zero of northern liberalism, Harvard University: More than 50 percent of
all
Harvard students have an A or A-average. It’s the Lake Woebegone Syndrome: All the kids are above average.

They must be using the same math in Texas. According to the
Wall Street Journal
, some Texas public high schools have ranked 15 percent or more of their students in the top 10 percent of their class. This
is because college admissions and scholarships are linked to class rankings, and, well, do
you
want to tell some kid he doesn’t get to go to the college of his choice merely because he didn’t earn it? That’s so…
mean
.

The Southerner’s rejection of merit may have found its most extreme expression in the northern, liberal enclaves like Oakland
and Boston where, along with some seventy other communities, so-called living-wage laws have been implemented. Businesses
who wish to bid on government contracts are required to pay all of their employees a government-ordered “living wage,” which
tends to be in the ten-to fourteen-dollar-an hour range.

The premise of the living-wage movement is that you deserve to be paid enough to support a family of four, whether or not
you are capable of earning it. I suppose it would be futile at this point in American history to ask why you have a family
of four to begin with if you don’t have enough money to feed them. And I assume it would be considered rude to point out that
there are millions of Americans who earn at least fourteen dollars an hour and sometimes much, much more, and that their employers
happily pay these exorbitant wages without the threat of arrest. These employees get their “living wage” the old-fashioned
way: They earn it.

Perhaps it’s my poor upbringing, but I cannot see past the vast chasm between what a job is worth and what a worker is paid
to do it. It simply isn’t worth fourteen dollars an hour to pay a recovering alcoholic to sit in a parking lot and watch the
cars for eight hours, no matter what the law says. His effort does not merit that reward.