The Redneck Manifesto

By Jim Goad
Simon and Schuster, 1997, 274 pages
Reviewed by Charles Curley
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

          Have some chapter titles: "White Niggers Have Feelings, Too", "Feudal Existence: The Roots of Eurogarbage", "Me and the Blacks", "Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals", and my personal favorite chapter title, "What's So Bad About Hatemongers, Gun Nuts, and Paranoid, Tax-Resisting Extremists?" It goes on from there.
          This book is an in-your-face look at modern liberals that examines what they won't examine: their own hypocracies and follies. Don't get me wrong, Goad sees conservatives as almost the same. "Liberals and conservatives are two ass cheeks surrounding the same hairy bunghole."
          That and other libertarian insights show up here.
          Goad does not like the government. After a page an a half of U.S. federal government lies and atrocities (without once mentioning Waco, Ruby Ridge or Oklahoma City), Goad tosses in this little insight: "Maybe we wouldn't be so FUCKING PARANOID if they hadn't FUCKING LIED to us so many times. Just a thought." Can you figure that out, Morris Dees? Or are you too busy counting up the profits from white liberal guilt?
          (All the emphasis in the text is in UPPER CASE, as though Goad can't afford a modern word processing package and Simon and Schuster won't pay for a typesetter who can translate it into italics. Or maybe someone at Simon and Schuster thought that delicate fonts like italics shouldn't be wasted on semi-literate rednecks.)
          Here's one you won't see in NRA literature: "Getting desperate, the gun controllers will drag out the phallic-compensation explanation .... But the penis can point both ways. Why is the government, which owns many more dick-shaped weapons than the militias, rarely accused of having a weiner hangup too? Isn't it just feasible that pentagon officers are practicing phallic compensation, too?"
          The most annoying thing about this book is that for years I have been screening out all the discussion of black helicopters on the net. Loony tunes, I thought. So I have to read the rant of a white male living in a redneck ghetto of Portland, Oregon, to learn that black helicopters are real, after all, "you fruitcake .... The ebony choppers' stated purpose is 'low flying country surveillance.' Maybe instead of swallowing whatever the 'experts' say, more Americans should be asking why the government wants to watch over us in the sky."
          And the bibliography includes authors of interest to libertarians such as Edward Abbey, Gary Allen, Al Capp, Frederick Douglass, Viktor Frankl, Michael Hoy, John McManus, Ron Paul, Henri Prienne, Thomas P. Slaughter and Lysander Spooner. And most liberals don't think a redneck can read a 5 1/2 page bibliography, never mind assemble one.
          Not that Goad is a libertarian. His understanding of the economics of labor and labor-management relations are straight out of Karl Marx. Since Marx was in the top two percent of incomes in England, Marx, like liberals, might have not really understood the working class all that well, hmmm, Jim, boy?
          He also does a lot of class analysis, in which only a few libertarians engage. The thesis starts out in medieval Europe, with its ruling class and serfs. It gets more trenchant and further from liberal mythology in its analysis of indentured servitude. Try this on for size: "A study of Virginia from 1623 to 1637 showed that white servants outnumbered white freemen by three to one. In Maryland at one point in the 1600s, the ratio was six to one." Henry Cromwell, the Lord Protector's son, issued an edict that forcibly seizing young Irish women and shipping them to the colonies was "so much to their owne goode." Sounds just like liberals, doesn't it?
          "So even though the popular belief is that NO whites were shipped to America against their will, it's highly possible that MORE whites were bought here unwillingly than blacks." And sold to the highest bidder. And, like a rental car, abused far more than capital goods, like black slaves. Since, Goad argues, his ancestors were among those white slaves, why should he pay reparations to anyone? Answer me that, Bill Clinton? (Speaking of white trash .... )
          Did I mention the language is filthy? If you don't like it, tough shit.

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Charles Curley lives in Wyoming, which (for you honky liberals) is between New York and L.A. But he isn't a Redneck.

It is the nature of American politics that clarity is considered harsh and uncompromising.
-- George L. O'Brien

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