Redneck Nation (23 page)

When we saw the poll numbers showing that 85 percent
of New Yorkers supported a prohibition on cell phone use, we Southerners just shook our heads and muttered, “Only in New York.”
First of all, if 85 percent of the state’s drivers really feel that way, they don’t need a law. They just need to put down
their cell phones. Problem solved.

But these days it is more often Northerners who allow the government to deny the rights of all because of the foolish behavior
of the few, and to be celebrated by the majority for doing so. We aren’t as willing to ban cell phone use down South, where
people unable to drive and talk at the same time used to be called dumb.

Now we call them New Yorkers.

Are some citizens incapable of driving safely while carrying on a conversation? Of course. What the new Prohibitionists are
laughably unable to grasp—but that we Southerners understand very well—is that stupid people will reveal their stupidity in
their actions, not their technology.

If New Yorkers really want safer highways, they won’t arrest people for using a device that might one day distract from their
driving. They will arrest people for the bad driving they do while actually distracted. Any driver weaving from lane to lane,
running stop signs, and tailgating is a menace to be stopped, regardless of what causes the bad driving. What difference does
it make if this dangerous driver is talking on a phone, reading a book, or buttering a bialy?

The South has long been considered a more superstitious, less rational region of the nation. But no southern legislature would
approve such a totemic ban on “evil” objects like cell phones. A driver who plowed into a tree
and then said, “It wasn’t me, Officer, it was this bad, bad talkin’ machine,” would be laughed right out of Dixie.

But Prohibitionists can’t wait around for you to do something harmful, because they don’t believe you have the right to be
bad in the first place. Instead, they see the government as the proper agency to make you be good.

I truly understand the desire to coerce one’s neighbors into righteousness. Part of growing up in the South is knowing that
your neighbors will always be there to comment on what you do, as though it is somehow their business.

One summer during my college years, I came home from the confines of Oral Roberts University and grew a beard—in direct contravention
of Oral’s orders. It wasn’t much of a beard, rather thin and scruffy, but I was proud of it. What fascinated me was the willingness
of total strangers to comment on it. One older lady whom I had never met actually stopped me to say, “You know, you’d look
pretty good if you’d get rid of that beard.” I remember thinking at the time, “What kind of nosy, obnoxious busybodies are
we down here? This kind of thing never happens up North.”

Then I met a vegetarian.

I am not saying you have to be annoying to be a vegetarian. Only if you want to be really good at it.

Few people are more unbearable than the Vegetarian of Virtue, the tirelessly evangelical eschewer of flesh. He cannot let
a public meal go by without casting judgment
on the victuals. As each dish is presented, he issues his pronunciamentos on the congregation of comestibles: “Fish: mild
backsliding. Chicken: not for the true believer. Veal—Let the Lord rain fire from above!”

These vegheads are in a class apart from the casual vegetarian who avoids meat eating for reasons of health, nutrition, or
weight loss. This vegetarian is, from an animal-rights standpoint, the moral equivalent of a Christmas and Easter Christian:
He wants the benefits of righteousness without the disquieting irrationalism of the faith. He is not a true believer.

Neither is the handful of unfortunate souls who claim they just don’t like the taste of meat. I’ve actually met one or two
of these people, and they truly amaze me. They insist that meat simply doesn’t taste good to them, that if they were seated
at Patout’s in New Orleans and presented with a smoked filet mignon topped with sautéed crawfish and slathered in a cream
reduction sauce, they would greet it with a yawn and order a spinach salad.

These people aren’t stupid. They’re ill. They need our help and our prayers.

My disdain is reserved for the moral vegetarian alone. Moral vegetarianism is a form of religious extremism, not dissimilar
from the extremism I lived with at Oral Roberts. But unlike ORU, whose dictates were confined by biblical literalism, veganism
is a religion without theology, without (to paraphrase Al Gore) any controlling moral authority. The result is a group of
radical activists who believe it is wrong to eat a chicken and okay to burn down a KFC to make that point.

Why isn’t it enough for you to stop eating meat? Why must you attempt to coerce me into your dismal, dietary
hell? But the spirit of Prohibitionism is too strong. I watch the political battle over public smoking and I see the eyes
of the vegans light with hope: today the Marlboro, tomorrow the meat loaf!

Even vegetarians I like are almost unbearable company. Years ago I was having dinner with Kathy Najimy, the wonderfully talented
comic actress. We have a mutual friend who introduced us after a performance of the hysterically funny
Kathy and Mo Show
in New York, and we all met for dinner in Greenwich Village.

I didn’t know Kathy very well, but when my dinner came, she didn’t hesitate to hit me with the Vegan War Cry: “You’re not
going to
eat
that, are you?”

I looked down. In front of me was a plate of skewered chicken. On each side, a fork and knife. What other possible outcome,
I wondered, did she have in mind?

“You really shouldn’t eat that,” she intoned, exasperated. “Eating meat is so unnatural.”

And so it begins, the Prohibitionist arguments against my choice to slap a rump roast on the barbie. And like the southern
Prohibitionists, the arguments of the New Age nannies are uniformly weak.

What, for example, could possibly be “unnatural” about eating meat? Human beings are mammals. We are bipeds. And we are omnivorous.
There is nothing more natural in this world than an omnivore (me) sitting down to a heaping plate of flora and fauna. A cursory
examination of our species finds incisors at the front end and a large intestine at the back. Baby, I was built for beef!

Still, she wouldn’t stop. I have since discovered that militant vegetarians never stop. They’re like Mormons…
except Mormons don’t smell like bean curd and they at least feel some vague, moral duty to be polite.

Not the vegheads. They come straight at you, and it’s almost always with the same arguments, the catechisms of the anticarnivore.
I’ve had dozens of discussions with vegans, vegheads, and animal-rights activists of varying passion and intellect, and they
always come back to the same questions:

NUMBER ONE
: Don’t you know meat is bad for you?

No, I don’t know it. My doctors don’t know it, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t know it, and millions of years of
human evolution don’t know it. But vegetarians are incessant in their demand that you agree with them that meat is inherently
unhealthy.

I actually knew one stand-up comic who was a vegetarian alcoholic. He smoked pot and drank beer all day, but wouldn’t eat
a hamburger because “all meat is bad for you.” Four ounces of beef aren’t any worse for you than twelve ounces of beer, and
the fact that this lush had dedicated his life to the pursuit of cirrhosis of the liver was not an argument for the elimination
of alcohol from the American diet. But because vegans are zealots, they insist that you see every bite of bologna as an irreparable
moral failing.

NUMBER TWO
: Don’t you believe that all killing is wrong?

The second test of the church of Save the Chickens is even dumber than the first. Of course, all killing isn’t wrong. If it
were, every house cat in America would be facing the chair (an idea I fully favor, by the way). Animals kill each other all
the time. It’s called the food chain, and there is no substitute. Are all the dead mice, fish, birds, and gazelles killed
in the wild victims of a crime? If
so, what do you vegans intend to feed the millions of fish, fowl, and fast-moving felines who live off of flesh? At this point,
the argument inevitably turns to…

NUMBER THREE
: Yes, but people don’t have to kill to live. Since we have the moral sense to tell us right from wrong, isn’t it wrong for
us
to kill?

And thus, tenet three reveals that veggie-ism is nothing more than redneck evangelicalism wrapped in radicchio and served
on a bed of kelp.

The folks back home who wanted to take away my right to “drink, smoke, or chew, or run with women who do” founded their Prohibitionism
in their faith. Now I’ve got militant vegetarians attempting to do the same thing. They appeal to my “moral sense,” which
conveniently allows them to avoid making any appeals based on biology or reason.

But this argument against meat eating ends up in a traffic circle of logic. Either I’m just another animal making my way on
the Good Lord’s earth, as some vegheads argue, in which case I have just as much right to eat my fellow animals as they have
to eat me; or I have a metaphysical moral sense, in which case I am a higher being and have been given dominion over the animals
on the earth and the birds in the air just like the Good Book says. Either way, I win! Fire up the grill!

I cannot recall a conversation with a militant vegetarian that did not leave me embarrassed on his behalf. And I can’t recall
a single one who had the sense to be embarrassed for himself. If anything, they continue to evangelize their vacuous worldview
even more fervently.

If there was any doubt about the Prohibitionist nature of the animal-rights movement, it was resolved after the
September 11 attacks. That’s when Karen Davis, Ph.D. of United Poultry Concerns, made this public statement:

“For 35 million chickens in the United States alone, every single night is a terrorist attack…. The people who died in the
[World Trade Center] attack did not suffer more terrible deaths than animals in slaughterhouses suffer every day. Moreover,
the survivors of the September 11 attack and their loved ones have an array of consolations—patriotism, the satisfaction of
U.S. retaliation, religious faith, TV ads calling them heroes, etc.—that the chickens… do not.”

And you think the Christian Coalition is extreme?

If you view the world as Ms. Davis does, however, you must take action. Just as the southern Prohibitionist believes the next
drink will send your soul to damnation, Davis knows that poultry must be preserved, protected, and honored. Given the lack
of religious faith noted by Ms. Davis, perhaps these hedonistic hens should be evangelized as well.

I, for one, would be happy to declare all chickens heroes, to give them official military status, and allow them the practice
of the religion of their choice if it would make Ms. Davis happy.

Somehow, I think not.

F
rom the sports pages:

ARJAY
, Ky. (Reuters)—A Kentucky man who accidentally killed his best friend when he took up his dare to shoot a beer can off his
head was being held Tuesday on murder charges, police said. Assault charges against Silas Caldwell, 47, were upgraded to murder
after his friend, Larry Slusher, died from the head wound. Witnesses told police the two had been drinking when Slusher posed
the dare and Caldwell took him up on it, firing a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

If the first Olympic Games had been held in Athens, Georgia, instead of Athens, Greece, Larry Slusher would be a gold medal
athlete.

For any sport, game, or competitive activity to become a popular southern pastime it must adhere to two principles: The rules
must be very simple and easy to understand,
and there must be at least a theoretical chance that at some point during the event, someone or something is “gonna get blowed
up real good.”

A good example is cockfighting, which once did boffo box office down South. It’s easy enough—two angry gamecocks try to kill
each other—and there is guaranteed bloodshed. Cockfighting has become rare, even in the deepest South, due to the fact that
it is both illegal and (speaking from experience) painful. But the popularity of simplistic, dangerous pastimes continues
to dominate entertainment in the South.

I learned this aspect of southern character when, as a young teen, my cousin Joey challenged me to a game of Throw the Knife.
Once again, the rules were simple: Joey handed me his hunting knife, with a four-inch blade, spread his feet about shoulder-width,
and waited for me to throw the knife at his feet, the object to leave it quivering ninja-style in the ground between his ankles.
Then he picked up the knife and did the same to me. Whoever got closer to the other person’s foot without drawing blood won.
Or to describe the game another way: If I stick a four-inch knife into your foot, you would consider that a good thing.

Note that Joey, a true, 100 percent Southerner, suggested that I be the one to throw the knife first, a touch of chivalry
worthy of comment. Southerners aren’t looking for an excuse to hurt somebody else; they just want to see someone or something
get hurt—even themselves. My southern youth was one long pursuit of entertainment through the manipulation of pain, minor
tortures, and the threat of fatality. Joey and I watched to see who would hold the firecrackers the longest as their fuses
sparked
and spit; when Uncle Joe pulled his pickup into the long driveway, we tried to jump out of the back as early as we dared,
before he slowed down; we would jump onto tractors rolling through a field with the hay baler roaring behind.

These were my southern Summer Olympic Games in a community where previous competitors like Stumpy, Lefty, and One-Eyed Earl
were our legendary champions.

Perhaps that’s why it was in Tennessee that a gang of college freshmen hanging around in the vacant campus library thought
“it would be a thrill to leap into a small opening they thought was a laundry chute,” according to the Darwin Awards website.
It didn’t occur to the first jumper that few libraries actually provide fluff ‘n’ fold laundry service until he slid three
stories and found himself in an automatic trash crusher.