Mead, in turn, was indebted to the absolutely crucial book to understanding American political culture and history, David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed
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Posted on 09/09/2008 12:37:22 PM PDT by KarenMarie
During this US election cycle we are hearing a lot from the pundits and candidates about "heartland voters," and "white working class voters."
What they are talking about are rednecks. But in their political correctness, media types cannot bring themselves to utter the word "redneck." So I'll say it for them: redneck-redneck-redneck-redneck.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Not over reacting. The bullet points pretty much describe me and many of my family and friends. However, I'm not of Scott-Irish descent, but a "Hun-Redneck" of German-Norwegian descent...from small-town Michigan-by-way-of-Wisconsin-now-in-Virginia. I don't chew tobacco nor fry everything, but I fit most (if not all) the other bullet points.
It’s the World we live in. You can safely demean white people.
Frankly, I don’t know what a “redneck” really is.
Proud %100 God fearing,Gun toting,freedom loving, country loving, hard working, pick-up driving, bow,shotgun, muzzleloader hunting, NRA member, married, straight,white, father, two hunting dog owning, hockey fan and McCain/Palin voting Red Neck. All those moonbats can kiss my A$$!
Those are such noble traits! How in the hell can anyone mock them and say they’re some of America’s worst???
Just shows how pathetic a wretch he is!
This guy is a self-proclaimed "redneck" just long enough to publicly humiliate and mock them in print.
Ah, another don’t read the whole article type.
The next sentence after the quoted excerpt is
“The fact is that we American rednecks embrace the term in a sort of proud defiance.”
And yes, under cover of slightly toffish BBC English, the article is mostly on our side.
“most of Europe, when they use the term “cowboy,” they mean for it to have a negative connotation.”
There were plenty of Europeans who loved cowboys. They helped make Buffalo Bill Cody rich. I think it’s just another way for the intellectual elites of Europe to look down on the common folk.
Ct redneck here clinging to my guns, my faith, my family and my country. And I cling very hard.
They probably watched all of our John Wayne / Clint Estwood Westerns and others in the theater or on TV and they have American-Western envy.
That one looks like one of the Village People..
Cause we might say "nucular"?
Well at about mid century they were established and the frontier was gone they had survived and ensured their survival. So they took the skills and attributes they gained from the frontier and put them to work at building a more prosperous country and a better life for themselves. And when the turn of the next century happened they had built the most prosperous country in the face of the world. They passed these habits and values to there children.
They were world changers. That little country that consisted of 13 colonies turned states along the Atlantic coast with little of anything past the Appalachians spread form sea to shining sea. It was a fantastic sucess. Most places in Europe in contrast looked pretty much the same way they did at the end and the beginning of the nineteenth century. We learned that if we don't like the way the world works, and if we are right. Then we go out and change it. And we have don it many times over and the rest of the world has always been better for it.
Those people (red necks if you will) passed these values onto their children and because of it American has always been successful. That is one reason why I would go for a person not so removed from he pioneers over Barrak Obama any day. Sarah Palins life experience on the near frontier of Alaska beats BO’s Harvard education any day.
I do not have a degree from a University but I dropped out to start my own business on which I support a wife and 3 kids. My wife has a bachelors and most of my friends do too. Most never used their degree for their occupation they now have. I know some liberals who seem to have degrees in Sociology which I guess makes you incredibly intelligent.
I liked the article. Of course, I am a descendant of a Scots-Irish great great grandmother. I found it rang true for my neck of the woods in far northern California. Freedom is a most important value to us here on the “frontier.”
The tern “redneck” came from the scarves worn by the coal miners in Appalachia trying to unionize against dengerous mining conditions. When it came down to a shooting standoff, they could tell their fellows from the red scarves or “red necks.”
It’s not only deeply offensive, it’s just wrong on facts. It’s like someone took a Jeff Foxworthy book and tried to extrapolate a worldview from it. In fact, I reckon that’s just what he did.
I looked and looked. Which one(s) of that list of traits represented the “worst” of American culture? they all looked pretty good to me, but maybe I’m mistaken.
I checked myself against his list, but I came up short:
So I scored about 30%. Play again?
One of these days I'll get that spelling thing down.
Mead, in turn, was indebted to the absolutely crucial book to understanding American political culture and history, David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed
.
Bageant is on the left, and calls himself a "leftneck," but he's cutting across the "culture war" -- not taking one side against the other.
I don't know what to make of his article. He wants "redneck" both to be a Southern or Appalachian Scots-Irish thing and to apply to the whole American working class. When you try to stretch words that far, maybe you need new ones.
The author of this piece is an imbicle.
We had Bubba Clinton in the white house..LOL
Also an anecdote: I have heard that during the first inagural George Washington went to a two day BBQ!! (By the way cooking hot-dogs and burgers in the back yard isn’t “bbq’ueing” in the South!! LOL
While I live in Texas, I work indoors, so I can’t be a redneck.
Nonetheless, all I have to say to this ball-less Limey and people like him/her/it: phuhk y’all.
"What that Limey is doing to that steak just ain't right..."
Was written by a poser.
I am a redneck down to the Ulster ancestors and loving fried pickles.
I find it offensive also. I think it is because we can laugh together and have fun at our own expense, but don’t want someone outside to make fun of us. We know just how much is really true and what isn’t. Jeff Foxworth is one of us.
As the author of this article writes:
“Self effacement, humility. We are usually the butt of our own jokes, in an effort not to appear aloof among one another.”
Or they may have gone to Ivy League schools and prefer the southern lifestyle.
Is that the sheriff in BLAZING SADDLES? lol
Jeez, am I really that old? The default insult from a Brit is (or used to be):
“You think life’s a John Wayne movie!”
No mention of it in the article. Even if tongue in cheek, I would have thought the Duke would have been mentioned.
Man, I’m feelin’ more and more like a dinosaur every day...
I must be a redneck...I did not find it all that offensive. And I saw myself a little and my relatives a lot in that article, but they are all from small town SC and GA. Redneck, yes, but good people.
There are no rednecks in my Texas village. These are the winners of the Commode Race.
Who cares what these people say. It’s the “rednecks” and country boys who will survive in any circumstance. Those of us who know how to handle a gun, hunt, fish, build things with our hands. We are the ones America was built on, and keep America running. We are the ones who can make it through anything. We don’t need anyone to hold our hand. We don’t need anyone to tell us to do things. We take the initiative to get ‘er done. While the city folk will be dying off in droves, we will be waiting it out in relative comfort.
I read the whole article and I found it a great read. Maybe you’re upset because you’re not a true ‘redneck’. A true ‘redneck’ isn’t upset when someone makes fun of them...they just consider the source and move on.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think the article was meant to be a put down to rednecks...but hey, I’m simple...I’m a redneck :-)
Cheers!
I guess that we of the Scots-Irish, English, Irish genotype have acquired distinguishing features. I can't wait to see how my Grandson turns out. His mother is half North Alabama Ridge runner and has an Uncle Bubba, Rufus.
You are correct, I am not a redneck. Born and raised in NY, I lived on the North Yorkshire Moors UK and then 5 years in Nashville, TN before moving to Northern NJ. Blue collar, manual labor all my life.
I am offended because the author says that anyone who is educated is a dem and anyone who is not a dem is a redneck. And the pic they paint of rednecks is really negative.
Rednecks are not bad, stupid, boorish or the embarrassment that I think he wants the rest of the world to think they are. And not everyone who is not a dem is this definition he claims ‘rednecks’ to be.
I might just be a bit touchy when ppl try to make us look bad.
:)
All this has become so deeply instilled as to now be reflexive. It represents many of the worst traits in American culture and a few of the best.And that has every thinking person here in the US, except perhaps John McCain and Sarah Palin, worried.
...;0)
All this has become so deeply instilled as to now be reflexive. It represents many of the worst traits in American culture and a few of the best.
And that has every thinking person here in the US, except perhaps John McCain and Sarah Palin, worried.
Very worried.
I agree. According to the last bullet points in the article, I guess I’m a redneck.
I see the BS, but where’s the cattle?
I grew up less than an hour from NYC in Hopatcong, Lake Hopatcong. New Yorkers think it’s the country, another 30-45 minutes west they think they have hit “Deliverance”. Look at the county maps. Plenty o’ rednecks here in NJ, I bet plenty of other rednecks don’t even know that.
That being said, ATTENTION REDNECKS:
Put down the pork rinds, stop the VCR and register all your friends to vote, because Obama wants to take away your PORK RINDS.....and your guns.
A great book on the Scots-Irish is “Born Fighting - How the Scots-Irish Shaped America” by James Webb. The “Scots-Irish” were Protestant and settled in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Charleston and the Appalacians. Ever-spreading westward on the frontiers, they came as an early wave of immigrants to America before the Revolutionary War, then again during the potato famine and as late as the 1920s. They are notable in literature, (Jacksonian) politics, the military and fundamentalist Christianity (Calvinism.) According to Webb, the Scots-Irish leave a legacy of beliefs in personal honor, equality, individualism, patriotism. They also have a strong distrust of the nation’s elite and include much of blue-collar America. They are one of America’s largest cultural groups.
They comprised 40% of the Revolutionary War army, included pioneers such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Lewis and Clark and Sam Houston. Mark Twain and Edgar Alan Poe were writers of Scots-Irish descent. Military leaders included Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Audie Murphy and George Patton. Presidents included Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronal Reagan and Bill Clinton.
I think the article is spot on. The Republican party is an triangle of Religious fundamentalists; (for want of a better word) the country-club or Burger class; and the libertarian conservatives, (who pretty much fit the description of the Scots-Irish.) Sarah Palin has tapped into 2 out of three of the base.
I think people will be suprised at how much she resonates with the last group and how large that group actually is.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of the article till the end, then I might find it offensive, but I really don’t care anymore.
But I have to say I love fried pickles..... /drool... Has anyone tried fried recese (I forgot how to spell it) cup? It’s supposed to be amazing....
I think you mean the English have always sneered at the Scots, since English, Scots, Welsh, and Ulstermen are all British. Saying that the "British" are prejudiced against the Scots is like saying the Americans are prejudiced against people from Colorado.
And btw, Scotland is not a monoethnic country. The Lowland Scots are of Anglo-Saxon and Brythonic descent rather than actual Gaelic Scots, and non-Gaelic Scots are quite capable of being as anti-Irish as any Englishman.
I'm sorry if I seem to be overstressing a minor point but as a redneck of English rather than Scots-Irish extraction the identification of "British" with "English" (and the assumption that Welsh, Scots, and Ulstermen are not British) drives me absolutely bonkers.
And it is England, not Scotland, that has paid the highest price for the Union. Scotland retains its unique identity; England is merely "Britain."
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