An interview with the author of Redneck Nation

[Zguy28]

The Dog Chapman thread reminded of this from a while back. Good stuff. He let's all sides have it.

Z

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http://archives.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/graham.html

DOOR INTERVIEW: Michael Graham

By John Carney

Issue #189, September/October 2003

One of contributing editor John Carney’s co-workers heard a provocative interview about a book of political satire, Redneck Nation. When John checked it out, he was startled to find that he recognized the author — Michael Graham — because they had been contemporaries at (cue ominous music) Oral Roberts University in the early 1980s. Graham’s book describes ORU as “combining the intellectual rigor of a Sunday School picnic with the sound theological theories of a Sunday School séance.” John’s just happy he escaped with a diploma. Since that time, Graham has worked as a standup comic and a Republican political operative, though the lines between the two are often blurred. (He was the South Carolina coordinator for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign.) Today, he has a talk show on WRVA-AM in Richmond, Va., and is a frequent guest on programs like The G. Gordon Liddy Show and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

Redneck Nation: How The South Really Won The War is based on the premise that the very qualities for which the South was criticized during the Civil Rights movement have become typical of the nation as a whole. Graham may be a conservative, but he’s an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, criticizing Bob Jones University alongside Berkeley. John couldn’t resist the chance to pick up the telephone and pick Graham’s brain.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: The subtitle of Redneck Nation is How the South Really Won the War. Explain what you mean by that.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: What I mean is that all the worst ideas of the rural redneck South have now become the dominant ideology of the United States as a whole, particularly the American Left — whether it’s obsession with race, or aversion to free speech, or a vision of women as barely competent and in constant need of state protection, or the idea that the dumber and more irrational your religion is, the more you must be a true believer. Whichever of those ideas — and more — you want to follow, they’re all ideas that I grew up with, and they’re now the ideas I’m stuck with as an adult.

DOOR: Give us some specific examples.

GRAHAM: The biggest example is the obsession with race. Trent Lott got into trouble because he said something nice about segregation, and yet right now at Dartmouth and other major Ivy League universities they are building racially segregated dorms.

DOOR: Um, just to be picky, Lott said something nice about Strom Thurmond, who said something nice about segregation.

GRAHAM: Strom Thurmond stood up and said, “We can’t have black and white kids going to school together,” because they will never be educated at the same level, or the same way. Today you have educators building public schools only for black students. This is a quote from a liberal in Boston: “Black people don’t learn the same way as white people.” The last time I heard that I was 12 and at a Klan rally.

DOOR: Don’t hold back on our account, Mike.

GRAHAM: That’s the most obvious example of how a really bad southern idea, which is that “segregation is good,” has become a popular national idea. There is an academic movement called White Studies where you have liberal academics trying to get white people to be more racially aware of themselves, and to think of us more as a race group. If you had told the freedom riders who left Cornell and Harvard and Princeton in the 1960s that would one day be the curriculum back in their universities they would have said, “There’s no way.” But that is exactly where we are.

That’s the easiest, most obvious example.

(Take) free speech: Southerners grew up with the idea of, “You ought not. You ought not say that now. You ought not be talking that way. You’re going to upset somebody — you ought not.”

Well, where in America today are you the most likely to get in trouble, either lose your job or get arrested because you said something that hurt someone’s feelings? Is it down south? No, it’s Berkeley, Calif., once the home of the free speech movement. If Mario Savio showed up at Berkeley today, he would be lynched on the spot, because the last place in the world that believes in free speech are the liberal students of the University of Berkeley.

DOOR: Referring to religion, you write, “In contemporary America, glaring stupidity is the gold standard of the Christian realm.” How does this redneck quality evidence itself in Christianity?

GRAHAM:I’m a huge fan of (H.L.) Mencken. One of his greatest pieces of writing was his coverage of the Pentecostals outside Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes Monkey Trial. What he saw there was a group of people who not only were behaving irrationally, as Mencken would judge it, but who had no fundamental belief in the concept that being reasonable, being rational, being intelligent was good. It was evil, as I learned at Oral Roberts University. Oral Roberts was fond of saying “If the Lord had meant you to think for yourself, he’d have given you a mind of your own, hallelujah!”

DOOR:Did he really say, “Hallelujah”?

GRAHAM:Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly, but the fact is that the ethos of southern evangelicalism was that your mind is dangerous, and that you have to fight against the evil temptations of reason. The northern ethos, the kind of Episcopalian Methodist ethos that came down with the freedom riders and the Civil Rights movement, was that it is possible to merge your intellect with your faith, and that you can be very, very bright, and very, very devout at the same time. My family, and the people I grew up with, absolutely rejected that.

Today, in the United States, people with all kinds of metaphysical beliefs also reject that. So you have the bizarre situation of — and this actually happened to me — someone getting into an argument with me about Christianity, and about how any rational adult could believe in Christianity: “It’s ridiculous, it’s just a book. How could you possibly believe that?” The person who’s saying this is wearing a healing crystal, believes that they were a handmaiden to Cleopatra in a previous life, and watches TV psychic John Edward on a regular basis. I’m sorry — you’re an idiot. You happen to be an idiot about a different set of metaphysical constructs, but you’re still an idiot.

DOOR: You praise the northern tradition for having a reason-based faith, but you also say that, “Northern churchgoers believe in God, but not enough to bring it to anyone else’s attention.”

GRAHAM:Exactly! That is part of the dichotomy. When you get to faith and religious belief, at some point, if you truly believe that you’ve had a divine revelation of the truth, it’s going to have an impact on your life and on your behavior. The southern evangelicals that I grew up with, anytime we met someone from one of these moderate northern churches, it was like, “I have a cure for cancer, but does anyone really care?” We could never figure it out; “Wait a minute; does this really matter to you in any way at all?”

As a result, I am a fan of red meat religion. I always have been. If you’re going to believe, then gosh darn it, get in there and believe away.

DOOR: Did you just say, “Gosh darn it”?

GRAHAM: We didn’t handle snakes at the church I went to, but we knew where to get them on short notice; that’s the tradition that I come out of. But what’s distressing for me is to listen to people who say things far more ridiculous than anything I ever heard from the pulpit of the Assemblies of God church in South Carolina mocking and degrading evangelical Christians and members of the Christian Coalition. The premise seems to be that Shirley Maclaine is not an idiot but Pat Robertson is. I’m working on the second one; it’s that first one that’s got me fooled.

DOOR: You talk a little in the book about fascination with angels.

GRAHAM: Talk about “dumbing down”! You go from Christianity as a fundamental, metaphysical base upon which you base your daily life values, to a bunch of people sitting around watching Della Reese going, “Oh, look at the angels.” It’s like faith as a hobby, faith as a collector’s item, faith as a kitsch item off the shelf of a knick-knack shop. There is no more juvenile expression of a pseudo-faith in God than believing that little fairies with wings are flying around your bedroom at night. That’s the standard daily practice of millions of Americans, millions of Americans outside the South.

Growing up in the South, you were surrounded by ghosts and spirits, you lived with people who thought they could cure warts with some strange transaction involving a frog and a tree trunk, and this is where you lived. The fire-and-brimstone preacher would be behind the pulpit, and you would think you could hear the sounds of Satan outside the very church door, although it actually turned out to be the dogs from next door drawn by the howling. That’s this kind of quasi-magical environment that was the evangelical world of the South; we’d have people go straight from Sunday night prayer meeting to a séance in the closet at their house.

To see that prosper in American religious communities, where Santeria is probably one of the fastest-growing religions, is very distressing. It’s certainly not the religious tradition of the ministers of the Northeast, who helped shape the public policy from their pulpits by making faith-based, reasonable arguments to rational, intelligent people. Now you make changes to public policy by screaming about Harry Potter.

DOOR: People argue about the founding fathers, and about what they did or did not intend as far as America being a “Christian nation.” How does that fit in with your ideas about religion?

GRAHAM: I don’t know if I covered it in the book, but I’m one of those people who absolutely believes that the Constitution was designed to keep your religious belief from being a mandatory part of your life as a citizen, and yet to allow the free expression of that faith as one of your benefits of citizenship. And so, I’m frustrated by people who want my school teachers to lead my kids in prayer — because that is clearly not the role of your government employee, particularly given that most of them are incompetent to teach even the subject for which they were hired. You put teachers in charge of religion, and we’ll have a generation of atheists in 12 years.

At the same time, every time some idiot wants to kick a Bible club off a school campus or tear down the Menorah from a public gathering, I just go, “What are you thinking?” There is no fear of religion in the Constitution. It’s not that northerners or non-southerners are fearful of religion; they are fearful specifically of Christianity, which is bizarre. I know people who are more afraid of a Christian with a Bible on the street corner than they are of an Islamic Jihad member with a strange-looking backpack. What is it that the typical American, who has no particular religious view, fears from evangelical Christians? I don’t get it; are you scared he’s going to show up at your house with a Jack Chick tract? It’s okay, you’ll survive. Trust me!

DOOR: Are changes in our religious beliefs an effect of the dumbing down of America, or are they part of the cause?

GRAHAM: I think everything is an effect. The core premise, the fundamental premise at the bottom of Redneck Nation is that the single most important southern idea that has been adopted by the nation is that reason doesn’t matter. There is no need for us to turn to evidence, to the scientific method, to arguments, to legitimate intellectual debate; there is no reason to. Just do whatever you want and then put the burden on everyone else around you to accept it, no matter how foolish your behavior. I would argue that’s the same threat we face with the jihad in the Middle East.

Once you abandon reason, any behavior becomes acceptable, and once you abandon reason you have a society that slips farther and farther and farther into emotion-based juvenile behavior. In a nation where Jackass: The Movie was No.1 at the box office for two weeks in a row, I think that’s a pretty good description. I think the cause is the abandonment of the standards of enlightenment, the abandonment of having to demonstrate why what you think is true. That has been replaced instead with, “Well, I just believe it, and you can believe what you want to believe, and I’m going to believe what I want to believe, but you got no right to judge me,” which was the core of the segregationists’ defense of Jim Crow.

DOOR: You say this “what I believe” mentality now governs offensive speech: something is offensive if someone is offended by it, regardless of whether or not it’s intrinsically wrong.

GRAHAM: Right. The standard today is, if you are offended I have to take your offense seriously, which is a ludicrous standard. Go back to the Civil Rights struggles: southerners would stand up and say, “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you outside agitators, you’re just rousing up our Negroes, and I don’t want to hear it. You ought to be quiet, because you’re offending my southern white culture.” Northerners just looked at them and said, “No, you’re an idiot. I don’t care, you can be offended all you want. What you’re saying is ridiculous on its face. Here’s the rational defense for what I believe, and I’m going to stand up and say it.” Are we anywhere near that standard today? Anywhere? No, of course not. We’re at the standard now where an Indian activist can stand up and say, “I find the nickname ‘Atlanta Braves’ offensive.” You ask them why; they have absolutely no answer. They don’t even try to answer. They say, “It doesn’t matter why, I’m just offended.” Well, I don’t care; you’re just a moron. Before I change my behavior, the burden should be on you. That standard has been completely abandoned.

What’s so funny is when, let’s say, someone from a local church goes to a school board meeting, and says, “You’ve got these books in your library that my child has access to that have content about sexuality or drug use or lifestyles that I find immediately offensive and immediately destructive to the way I’m trying to raise my child.” Every lefty in the room goes, “Oh, oh, you Nazi, what’s wrong with you? You just need to thicken your skin, and understand that you’re going to be exposed to ideas you don’t agree with, come on, it’s part of being an adult.” Then they promptly turn around and say, “Did you use the word ‘niggardly’ in your speech? My goodness gracious me, did you just say ‘the pot calling the kettle black’?” And then, boom, they’re right in the same position as the Christian they just threw out the door.

DOOR: Speaking of potentially insulting terms, you are — let’s not mince words — a radio talk show host. Some people would associate radio talk shows with the dumbing down of America and some of the other problems you talk about in the book.

GRAHAM: There absolutely is “The Howard Stern Talk Radio Standard.” I absolutely reject the Howard Stern standard. The Howard Stern standard is that dumb people have more fun. I disagree wholeheartedly. Dumb people don’t have more fun, they just laugh at the same joke over and over and over again. Smart people have more fun. Smart people see more things to laugh at, and smart people see more nuances. I’m not presenting myself as either Einstein or H.L. Mencken; I’m just saying I’ve found that life is more satisfying, and the entertainment is more enjoyable, when you’re trying to get it, as opposed to jumping into someone’s lap and aiming for the lowest common denominator. I understand why people don’t like talk radio; I don’t like that kind of talk radio either. I try to do a different kind of talk radio, which is why I’m panhandling on the weekends to pay the bills. No, I’m kidding.

DOOR: How long did you work as a standup comic?

GRAHAM: I spent six years on the circuit, and I discovered that no matter where you go — I went to 41 states — it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, people will laugh at you for being from the South, which is a tremendous benefit. I also discovered the only good use for a diploma from Oral Roberts University: comedy! As far as I know, it will not get you a job in any other field, but in comedy it was pure gold.

DOOR:Doing standup is quite a bit different from writing a book.

GRAHAM: When I did standup comedy the reviews were instantaneous, you knew after each joke whether it worked, and then as a columnist the feedback is relatively quick. I write a piece for the weeklies that carry my stuff in South Carolina. The next week or maybe the week after the letters to the editor appear, or you get people saying, “Hey, I saw the thing you wrote,” and you get some sense of whether or not what you were trying to do worked. With the book, I put this away in May, and then the following November people start going, “Hey, I read that book, blah, blah, blah.” I had to go back and reread it, it was so long since I’d written it. I said, “What? No!” but I stand by it all, because I’m stuck. I must admit I wrote it.

DOOR: You’ve also worked as a GOP political consultant.

GRAHAM:That’s right. My dad called me one day and said, “You know, son, it’s breaking your poor mother’s heart, she sent you to Oral Roberts, and here you are out in bars telling people jokes about your groin. Isn’t there something else you could do?”

DOOR: At least you weren’t telling jokes about Oral Roberts’ groin.

GRAHAM: So a few weeks later I got a job as a Republican political consultant, and the next week my mother had a heart attack, so, oops. It’s a true story, but she’s fine now. The only thing funnier I could find to do than being a comic was working for Republicans. I had a great time — I’ve always been a political junkie. I got to work in campaigns, and if you ever need proof of the H.L. Mencken dictum, that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” all you’ve got to do is work in politics for a few months. It really is a race to see who can be the dumbest the fastest.

That’s why I loved the Al Gore race in the year 2000. It was an open, blatant, strategy to go after people who didn’t care enough to vote, who were literally too dumb to vote. The Democratic organization in Florida went out, found these people, dragged them off their front porches, took them down to the polls, shoved them into a ballot box, and it turned out once they were in the ballot box they were too dumb to work the voting apparatus to cast their votes. They beat themselves because they sent people to the polls who were too stupid to push the right button. Oh, it was wonderful.

DOOR: You were a frequent guest on Bill Maher’s old ABC show Politically Incorrect, and you’ve also appeared on his HBO show Real Time. His cancellation at ABC was attributed by most observers to the controversy over statements he made during his first show after the 9/11 attacks.

GRAHAM: Maybe I just like the guy too much, but what I heard him say was that there’s no way you can call somebody who is able to sit in the ****pit of an airplane and intentionally fly it into a building, a coward. You can call him evil, criminal, disgusting, vile, monstrous, but that is not cowardice. It takes a certain amount of misplaced bravery to do that. That’s what I heard him saying. I thought he got the shaft.

But, you know, I don’t know anyone who has more animosity towards people of faith than Bill Maher has. Once, I asked him the question, “What is it you’re afraid they’re going to do — jump in your bed and drag the prostitutes out of your hotel room?” They’ll judge you, they’ll pray for you, but I promise they will not hurt you.

You have evangelicals obsessed with the unreligious or any expression of anything they find counter-religious, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and then you have Bill Maher and the gang who are terrified of any expression of any religious faith at all. What’s the difference?

DOOR:Where do you see us heading in the future? Are you hopeful that some of the trends you talk about in the book can be turned around? If so, how?

GRAHAM: I have no reason to believe that America is not going to continue to get dumber and dumber and dumber, because it’s my experience that the fundamental desire of human nature is to find the line where stupidity equals death, and then to straddle it. I’m hoping to be able to stand right there behind you, and kind of nudge you right over.

DOOR: Uh, thanks, I think ....

GRAHAM: So no, I have no hope whatsoever. People are going to get dumber, the society is going to get less free, and the fundamental ideals that I thought we articulated during the Civil Rights era of integration, rationalism and an adult, grownup, tolerant society, those days are long gone. They will never come back; if they were ever there, they’ll never come back. Hey, so have a great day!

The grown up, adult, satisfying experience of joy is the minority experience, but what do I care? What do I care that a thousand of my neighbors are knuckleheads going around on a tear against free speech and reason, if I have my community of friends who are looking up and trying to live the most satisfying possible life they can?

[Predicto]

That was fantastic, even though I think he overstated a bit of it. The assault on reason in this country is undeniable, and he is right - it is coming from both sides.

[Zguy28]

That was fantastic, even though I think he overstated a bit of it. The assault on reason in this country is undeniable, and he is right - it is coming from both sides.

I think the overstatement comes from his comic personality.

[headexplode]

Anyone who likes H.L. Mencken is okay in my book. Interesting interview.

I'm not sure what this interview has to do with doors, though.

[Zguy28]

Anyone who likes H.L. Mencken is okay in my book. Interesting interview.

I'm not sure what this interview has to do with doors, though.

Christian satire. The Wittenberg Door is where Luther hung his 95 theses to spark the Protestant Reformation.

[DCsportsfan53]

Very interesting interview. I may have to pick that book up and give it a look.

[SkinsHokieFan]

An excellent interview. I agree with the premise that reason and learning are becoming more and more frowned upon in this country, for some bizzare reason. That and free speech is trampled upon if its not what people want to hear

Nice find

[Jumbo]

I've read on this guy before. Of course we differ on some stuff, but gets a big thumbs up from me based on what I've seen to date. Wish we had more like him.

[Chachie]

I enjoy his POV and I agree with most of what he says here, but- It sounds to me like he made his living on everything he claims to despise now. At least he woke up, but isn't he somewhat of a hypocrite?

[Prosperity]

Logic and reasoning have taken a back seat to tribalism. Not enough people care about the evidence and logical steps that we need to get to the end point. Many of us just care about the end point and just rationalize our way backwards (best case scenario).

hat do I care that a thousand of my neighbors are knuckleheads going around on a tear against free speech and reason, if I have my community of friends who are looking up and trying to live the most satisfying possible life they can?

I wholeheartedly agree with this point, and it kind of depresses me. There is still plenty of room for individuals to have fulfilling lives, but it has to be at the cost of alienation from mainstream society.