Redneck Nation (14 page)

Supporters of living and minimum wages have the mistaken notion that the reason the boss pays you six dollars an hour is that
he’s trying to rip you off, that he would pay you less if he were allowed to by law.

This is backward. The minimum-wage law is in place because there are millions of able-bodied adults among us who are incapable
of any legal activity that would generate enough wealth to keep them alive. If you are making the minimum wage, it’s not because
your boss refuses to pay you what you’re worth; it’s because if he paid you what you deserved, you would starve to death in
the building and create a health hazard for your fellow employees.

Think about the term “living wage” for a second: Who is so stupid that they would take and keep a job that doesn’t keep them
alive? Either somebody who has a severe problem with math or Darwin’s next scheduled pickup. If you are too dumb, too lazy,
too unskilled, and too unmotivated to feed yourself and you die… is this a bad thing?

But America the land of opportunity has become America the place to avoid responsibility. As I write, the newspapers are filled
with hand-wringing editorials over the fate of the employees of Enron Corporation. As presented by the media, thousands of
naive innocents working diligently
for a dishonest company lost everything they had through no fault of their own.

Meanwhile, the story goes, the fat cats of upper management hit the silk and bailed with everything but the towels from the
executive washroom. Worse, they fixed the rules so that management could sell their Enron stock while the selling was good,
but employees had to hold theirs until it was too late. Employees, good; Enron, bad.

But writer Michael Lewis of the
New York Times
magazine makes this observation:

… there was a brief period, from Oct. 29 through Nov. 12, in which the 401(k) plan was frozen and Enron’s employees were unable
to sell their shares. The stock during that span fell to $9.24 a share from $13.81, a small step in the long plunge from more
than $90 to pennies today. The only shares workers were restricted from selling outside that window were those pumped into
the plan by the company as a “match” for part of each employee’s contribution. (Those shares couldn’t be sold until the worker
turned 50.)

He goes on to point out that thousands of Enron employees had to know that the deals they were working on were losing big
bucks, and these employees were pulling down a six-figure salary the entire time. Some of the same employees who are suing
Enron for fraud manned the fake trading floor Enron set up to impress investors. The investors didn’t know it was a scam,
but the low-level Enronians pretending to sell shares of Siberian crude certainly did.

These folks were part of a scam, they promoted the scam, they rode the wave of Enron prosperity to its profitable pinnacle
and crashed with it at the end. But now that it’s over, these same folks—with a decade of Enron-funded big bucks and high
living under their belts—want the taxpayers to bail them out. Hardworking blue-collar schmoes who’ve never earned more than
$40K a year should chip in to cover the 401(k) funds of a bunch of Volvo drivers because, according to the plaintiffs, they
deserve it.

The Enron employees believe they deserve our tax dollars because they believe that life is a scam. They don’t just believe
it; they know it—because they were part of a major one themselves. They didn’t know where the money to pay their big-time
salaries was coming from at Enron, and they don’t care where it comes from now. They don’t care if the tax dollars poured
into their IRAs come from low-wage workers who spent the nineties sweeping floors while they were living large off the Enron
economy.

They don’t care because this is America. And in America, it’s not what you deserve, it’s not what you can earn: It’s what
you can get. Or even better, it’s what you can get your daddy, your frat brother, or your favorite uncle—Uncle Sugar—to get
for you.

It’s just another lesson in economics from the front row of a Redneck Nation.

(And Is Being Channeled Nightly by
a TV Psychic from Long Island)

S
outherners believe in Satan. Northerners believe in Darwin.

This is the Mason-Dixon line of American religion. It isn’t that more Southerners believe in God. Surveys have historically
shown that more than 90 percent of
all
Americans believe in “God, a Higher Intelligence or some omnipotent being who resembles Charlton Heston.”

What makes America a Redneck Nation is the
way
we believe in God. There is what I used to generalize as the northern approach—temperate, intellectual, and internalized.
Northerners attempt to balance faith and reason, Scripture and science. Thus, Darwin is viewed, not as an agent of the devil,
but as another truth-seeker whose discoveries must be dealt with directly, head-on. The facts are the facts, and we must trust
God that he knows what He’s doing.

Then there was the South, where the true measure of devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ was the willingness to be a complete
and utter idiot on His behalf. Nothing is less relevant than the facts, and nothing is more suspect than science and reason.
We reject Darwin as unbelievable and maintain instead that Adam and Eve frolicked in the altogether just a short six thousand
years ago, living in peace and harmony alongside the dinosaur and the woolly mammoth. In northern Kentucky, for example, an
evangelical ministry called Answers in Genesis is currently overseeing a $14-million Creation Museum and Family Discovery
Center offering proof that God not only created the world in six days but also brought it in under budget through the use
of nonunion labor.

Is this absurd? Does this fly in the face of years of carefully gathered scientific evidence? Does it make the parties involved
look ridiculous and ignorant? All the better! Simply believing in God isn’t enough for us Southerners. Our faith must be off-putting
to others and embarrassing to ourselves. Loving God has got to hurt.

Just ask Carolyn Risher. She’s the good, southern mayor of the good, southern town of Inglis, Florida. Mayor Risher, duly
elected to serve the citizens of Inglis and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in January of the year of our Lord 2002,
did officially ban Satan from the town proper.

Suburbanites, you’re on your own.

Banning the Prince of Darkness from your municipality is no small feat. He is, after all, the fallen archangel Lucifer who
once served an omnipotent God and currently does battle with His angels as the Prince of the Powers and Principalities of
the Air. Meanwhile, Mayor Risher serves on the town sewer and water committee and has to drive her own vehicle while conducting
official business.

But Mayor Risher had a strategy for defeating Beelzebub, one that involved more than merely prohibiting Marilyn Manson concerts.
According to wire reports, Risher composed, on town stationery, a five-paragraph communiqué declaring Satan “powerless, no
longer ruling over, nor influencing, our citizens.” Copies of this missive (notarized, I presume) were placed in hollowed
fence posts at the four entrances to the formerly Satan-oppressed municipality, each post painted with the words “Repent,
Request and Resist.”

That last touch a suggestion by the local tourism board, perhaps?

At last report, observers were mixed as to whether the mayor’s proclamation had, in fact, ejected Ol’ Slewfoot from Inglis,
Florida. Faithful believers commented on the recently improved weather. Cynics noted that not a single used car dealer had
closed up shop.

But there can be no doubt about Mayor Risher’s faith in the inerrant word of God as found in the original King James Version.
She demonstrated her devotion through her willingness to be publicly humiliated. In contemporary America, glaring stupidity
is the gold standard of the Christian realm.

Every news cycle finds another band of earnest southern
brethren headed to the local library to chuck
Harry Potter
off the shelves or swipe copies of
Catcher in the Rye
from the public school stacks. And if Pat Robertson isn’t predicting that monsoons will flood every bathhouse in San Francisco,
Jerry Falwell is blaming the recession on the ungodly spending habits of lesbian households.

You can dismiss the book burnings and gay bashing as part of the Christian fringe, but it appears more and more that the tapestry
of southern evangelicalism is all fringe and no rug.

Which is why U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “cover-up” of a bare-breasted statue helped confirm the image of the modern
evangelical as a clueless bumpkin who would put polyester slacks on Michelangelo’s
David
. If you don’t recall the story, two statues—the
Spirit of Liberty
and her loinclothed male counterpart, the
Majesty of Justice
—stood in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. They are art deco works from the 1930s, and for nearly seventy years
they adorned the Great Hall as a symbol of our national ideals.

And yes, you could see the lady’s booby.

No previous attorney general had ever made an issue of this libertine Liberty and her heaving bosom. But soon after John Ashcroft
appeared on the nation’s front pages with this bronzed breast giving the AP cameras the one-eyed squint over his shoulder,
the Justice Department purchased eight thousand dollars’ worth of drapes and covered the offending organ.

Subsequent statements from official sources denied Ashcroft ever knew about the draperies, but according to ABC News, former
Ashcroft spokeswoman Mindy Tucker and her female staffers “always hated the statues.” Tucker
told ABC that “half the women in the department were offended by them and the other half considered them art.” No need to
lay odds on which half were the conservatives. The order to burka this buxom wench (the statue, not Ms. Tucker) came “from
someone in the attorney general’s office, who delivered the request to the Justice Management Division and asserted it was
the attorney general’s desire,” ABC News reported.

Ah, yes: desire. The root of much evil, particularly for those easily aroused by feminine beauty. It should be noted that
Attorney General Ashcroft is the son of an Assembly of God minister from southern Missouri, and he used to travel the region
singing gospel music—a potent mix of religion and show business that gave America both Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis.
It could be that Mr. Ashcroft is simply more distracted by the unclad female form than the usual U.S. senator or commander
in chief. He’s certainly no Bill Clinton, another self-described southern evangelical who could get more policy work done
underneath
a roomful of stenographers than most CEOs could
with
them.

Whatever the cause, the draperies confirmed in northern minds that southern folks of faith are straw-chew in’ rubes who live
in fear of MTV and modern art. Ashcroft’s action was silly and indefensible. That’s what made it so perfect. Anyone can do
something smart and sophisticated for God. But to be a buffoon takes a true believer.

Believe it or not, it was my desire to escape this buffoonery that brought me to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I am often asked why I would go to a university whose name is dangerously close to describing a frequent topic on
Jerry Springer
, and I usually reply that
it was the school farthest from South Carolina that offered me a free ride. And this is technically true.

But the real reason I chose ORU is that it presented itself as the Ivy league of evangelicalism, a place where reason and
deep-seated faith could coexist. Unfortunately the Cornell of the Charismatic Movement turned out to be closer to the Jesus
Is Lord School of Straight Chiropractic, combining the intellectual rigor of a Sunday school picnic with the sound theological
theories of a slumber party séance. I walked onto the ORU campus a doubting Christian and graduated four years later a confident
and confirmed sinner.

Academically speaking, ORU was a disaster. It may have been the only accredited university in America at the time that did
not offer a single philosophy course. (“If the Lord had meant for you to think for yourself, he’d a given you a mind of your
own, hallelujah!”—Oral Roberts) There was a medical school, but the biology department refused to teach evolution. The university
tried to cancel a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s two-act opera
The Medium
when someone leaked word to the academic dean that the main character was a fortune-teller. Apparently he had been under
the impression we were performing an opera about the proper way to prepare a steak.

Oral Roberts’s philosophy of learning was the same one I had heard from pulpits my entire youth: Our intellect was our enemy,
constantly tempting us away from God’s plan for our lives. Increased devotion demanded decreasing intelligence and critical
thinking. One of the more popular choruses sung at ORU was “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me.”

You can see why the campus debate team never made it to the state finals.

But man does not live by buffoonery alone. Another hallmark of southern spirituality is its intensity. Southerners have an
innate doubt as to the sincerity of northern faithfulness because it comes with so little passion or fire. For the typical
congregant in Westchester County, New York, or Lake Forest, Illinois, choosing a church seems to be of less spiritual significance
than choosing a country club. I suspect this is because churches have no membership fees, anyone can join, and God allows
mulligans. Even in Westchester.

My experience with northern churchgoers is that they believe in God, but not enough to bring it to anyone else’s attention.
Unlike Southerners, who are looking for the chance to embarrass themselves on behalf of the Almighty, Northerners try to maintain
a low metaphysical profile. While living up North, I had the sense that everyone involved in religion was working feverishly
not to appear feverish; they were zealously nonzealots. “There is one true and living God,” the congregation intoned, “but
that doesn’t mean we expect you to, like, believe in Him or anything.”