The Redneck Manifesto
By Jim Goad
Simon and Schuster, 1997, 274 pages
Reviewed by Charles Curley
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
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
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
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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.