Redneck Quotes

The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men. We all have the same enemy. The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.

...These inbred pinheads are the only people you could find in the world to agree with your philosophies. (In reference to Wally George's largely redneck audience.)

Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back

How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas.

If you think fast food is hittin a deer att 65 miles per hr.. you might be a redneck

This place is just too frickin precious," the cop said, eyeing a guy dressed in a hot pink leisure suit with makeup to match. "Give me rednecks and home-grown beer any day of the week over this X-culture bullshit.

Yes, peasants,” he repeated slowly. “The lowliest of the low among humans.” Then he enunciated, “Exceedingly backward and vulgar hillbillies.” “Been called worse, mister.” At his raised brows, she exhaled impatiently. “Bootlegger, moonshiner, Elly May Clampett, mountain mama, redneck, backwoods Bessie, hick, trailer trash, yokel, and, more recently, death-row con.” “No references to mining? I’m disappointed.

You might be a redneck if your dogs name is Miller Light

I towed the panel away like a redneck removing a tree stump.

When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.

Having a little pee in your pants had to be better than being dinner for some redneck.

If you think the last four words to the national anthem are " gentleman, start your engines", You might be a redneck.

Hunting humans for sport? Eating them?" the bitterness in his voice cut through me. "Yeah, I caught that part." "That doesn't have anything to do with you? He lifted his eyes, gaze shuttered. "No?" "Not unless being a werewolf transforms you into a wolf AND a redneck moron.

If you ahve ever unloaded your pickup by backing up really fast and slamming on the brakes, you might be a redneck.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

This so called 'Home of the Brave' why isn't anybody Backing us up! When they c these crooked ass Redneck cops constantly Jacking us up

Where were they from originally? The Seabolts?" "I don't know, Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa. One of those red-neck states with vowels on both ends." "You mean like Alaska?

I emerged into the sticky-hot evening to find Ricky smoking on the hood of his battered car. Something about his mud-encrusted boots and the way he let smoke curl from his lips and how the sinking sun lit his green hair reminded me of a punk, redneck James Dean. He was all of those things, a bizarre cross-pollination of subcultures possible only in South Florida.

Is it too redneck to say you look sexy operating a radio?" Chase..

Was everything redneck actually mystical?

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.

Roses are red, Foxes are clever. I like your butt, let me touch it forever. -Redneck Love Poem

You know what a redneck's last words are, right, Mace?"my aunt asked on the phone. "Hey y'all...watch this!

This is what you get for letting rednecks play with antimatter, boss

In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

Do you really think that if Jesus came back, he'd be hanging out with Ted fuckinging Cruz? Ted Cruz's wife doesn't hang out with Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is a skin-walker and a demon from the nether region.

Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas.

Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.

But don't get me wrong...driving a truck doesn't make me a redneck. I don't have a gun rack in it. I have a wine rack.

Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude--the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.

Damien has died and gone straight to boy heaven,' Shaunee said as soon as we were out of earshot 'Hey it's about time those kid stop acting like ignorant rednecks and behaved like they had some sense,' I said. 'She doesn't mean that, even though we agree with you,' Erin said 'She means Mr Jack the cute-gay-new-kid Twist. 'Now why in the world would you think he's gay?' Stevie Ray asked. 'Stevie Rae, I swear you have got to broaden your horizons, girl,' Shaunee said. 'Okay, I'm lost too. Why do you think Jack's gay?' I asked. Shaunee and Erin shared a long-suffering look, then Erin explained. Jack Twist is yummy Jake Gyllenhaal's totally gay cowboy character from Brokeback Mountain.' 'And please just please! Anyone who chooses that name and who looks all geeky like that is totally, completely playing for Damian's team.' 'Huh' I said. 'Well, I'll be 'Stevie Rae said 'you know i never did see that movie. It didn't come to the Cinema 8 in Henrietta.' 'You don't say?' Shaunee said. 'Please. I'm so shocked,' Erin said. 'Do guys kiss in it?' 'Deliciously' Shaunee and Erin said together. I tried, but failed miserably not laugh at the look on Stevie Rae’s Face.

There has been a tendency to personify racism in the figure of a working-class white redneck who dislikes Black people and spouts hateful things, as opposed to a middle-or upper-class white person who might decry such hatefulness but still embraces racially unjust policies.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

Depends on if this is an ass chewing session or a rational discussion. I've had enough shit flung at me today that I'm feeling like a monkey.

Sure, some find gunning down unsuspecting, innocent animals to be a real hoot. I mean, for Christ sake, they mantle the decapitated, formaldehyde-stuffed heads on the wall. Then, of course, there are the people who enjoy putting sunglasses or hats on it, even putting a blowout in its mouth as if it were an avid party animal. If it had any hands, there would surely be a plastic cup full of cheap beer in it, as well. We can’t forget that it would be named some horrendous name, such as Bill or Frank, something so plain, ordinary, and down-right ridiculous that makes me want to bitch-slap the perpetrators.

Anybody can be unhappy. We can all be hurt. You don't have to be poor to need something or somebody. Rednecks, hippies, misfits - we're all the same. Gay or straight? So what? It doesn't matter to me. We have to be concerned about other people, regardless.

Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

Often it is those who are most critical of a “Eurocentric” view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race.

...with that I turned into a punching, struggling, kicking psycho redneck zombie bitch.

If you're afraid they might discover your redneck past, there are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past.

I had a black belt in redneck pissed off bitch dirty fighting.

The worst thing the nineteen sixties did to this country was introduce drugs to rednecks,

He wouldn't have seen the wolf in redneck clothing.

[The militia experts] accuse antigoverment agitants of paranoia, yet they spin around and claim that militias speak in coded phrases, have underground bunkers, and are secretly conspiring to take over the world and enslave minorities. They say it`s lunacy that men at the pentagon can conspire, yet they`re certain that farmers out on the plain are plotting as we speak. They depict the United Nations as weak und ineffectual, yet they portray raggedy-ass backwoodsmen as the world`s biggest organized military threat.

If everyone who’s worth a damn just leaves as soon as possible, then what’s left?

Such are the ways of politics, where the crusade of the hour often blocks out everything else, at least until another crusade comes along and takes over the same monopoly of our minds.

I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house. I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped.

Yo mama so stupid, she watches Fox News and voted for Trump.

We Finches don't marry the children of rednecked white trash.

Money is my drug of choice--and you can't make money if you're always stoned or high. (Twila Taunton in Redneck P.I.)

United States of America? More like United States of Extraordinary Injustice Against Certain Segments of the Population All Because Rednecks Are Scared of Butt Sex.

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

Us southern boys can pretty much make a grill out of anything,” Preppy said, plating the last burger. “I’m like a redneck MacGyver.

He would tell you that music is truly a universal language, and that we the listeners will always impose our own fears and biases, our own hopes and hungers on whatever we hear. He would tell you that the rhythm that spurred on Tchaikovsky is the same rhythm that a kid in a redneck North Carolina town would beat with a stick against a fallen tree. It is a rhythm in all of us. Music is about communication, a way of touching your fellow man, beyond and above and below language. It is a language all its own.

There were no zombies in those movies is all I’m saying. How many dangers should we have to face on any given day? We’ve got zombies, vampires, rednecks and now a biker gang. Enough is enough already!

Shutting the door, I look around and see clusters of groups all over the parking lot. Every school is different. You generally have your skaters, preps, jocks with cheerleaders of course, nerds and over achievers. I also see a heard of rednecks, it's Georgia after all.

It's my right as an American to fly that flag! Yeah? Well, buddy, lemme tell ya, screaming about your rights as an American while rockin' the Confederate flag is like arguing against gay marriage with a dick in your mouth. Makes no sense. But, see, rednecks are immune to irony.

the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.

I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.

Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.

Stop telling everyone how they ort live their lives and how to be and just love.

Men claiming superiority over women because men make more money than they do is like claiming you're stronger than a lion that you tranquilized and put in a cage.

She was still and silent against his chest, though he knew that indomitable will of hers was still firmly in place. She was the strongest person he had ever known in his life, and he wanted nothing more than to allow her to be weak. And that was the redneck in him, he knew it was. The man who wanted to protect his woman against any and all threats. To be a partner until danger rolled around. But he had chosen a woman who refused to hide from danger.

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

Even when I encountered racism outside Salmon Creek, it usually rolled off me. The worst of it often came from rednecks whipping past in rusted pickups. I looked at them and I looked at me-class leader, track star, straight-A student- and their slurs about dirty Indians and drunk Indians and dumb Indians were laughable. Mom says crap like that comes from people who´ve accomplished so little in lifethat they feel the need to lift themselves above someone, anyone. So they pick skin color or religion or sexual orientation and say, "Well, I might not be much, but at least I´m not a ..." I´d look at those guys, and see the truth of her words.

Kay Cannon was a woman I’d known from the Chicago improv world. A beautiful, strong midwestern gal who had played lots of sports and run track in college, Kay had submitted a good writing sample, but I was more impressed by her athlete’s approach to the world. She has a can-do attitude, a willingness to learn through practice, and she was comfortable being coached. Her success at the show is a testament to why all parents should make their daughters pursue team sports instead of pageants. Not that Kay couldn’t win a beauty pageant - she could, as long as for the talent competition she could sing a karaoke version of ‘Redneck Woman’ while shooting a Nerf rifle.

This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.

Now let me ask you all a question, what's more pathetic and sad to you? A bunch of poor black people who listen to rich black rappers rapping about their wealth, or a bunch of poor white people who listen to rich white country singers singing songs about how much they love being broke rednecks?

What did you do to Eduardo?” “I don’t know any Eduardo!” Mac wheezed. I twisted his arm a fraction more. He cried out. “I know your name is Mac. I know that’s your redneck cousin Leroy. I know you’re in Eduardo’s territory, muscling in on his gig, and I know that you stole the FJ Cruiser from his fiancée. Look at me. Look at my eyes.” Mac looked up at me. His face went white. My voice was barely above a whisper, but I sank a lot of rage into it. “Eduardo is my friend. His fiancée is my friend. She is his sister.” I pointed at Curran. “Tell me everything you know or I’ll break your arm right here.” I tapped his shoulder. “Then I’ll keep breaking it here and here and here. No amount of medmagic and steel pins will fix it. It’ll never work right again and it will always hurt.

A Manhattan lawyer who describes himself as "America`s leading expert on the militia movement" writes that he hugged his three-year-old kid the night of the Oklahoma City bombing. He told junior that it happened "because they hated too much" For now, let`s accept the premise that one hundred sixty-eight humans died in Oklahoma City because people "hated too much" Now answer these questions if you would be so kind: did a federal sniper shoot Vicki Weaver in the face because he hated too much? Did our government conduct the Tuskegee with syphilis on black soldiers because it hated too much?

Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some sort of unvarnished foundational political truths. I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what psychiatrists call "no insight".Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those who are more educated to "bite my ass!

Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.

Heil Hitler, Y'all

I have to shave you Angel. I love your curly bush but it’s getting in my teeth.

...if you think shootin' guns and muddin' and pontoon boats ain't fun as fuck, then us and you, well, we just two different kinds of people

The camera is a remarkable thing, you think, with its ability to transform the mundane into an immortal moment able to travel through time, reappear days or months or years after its actually occurrence. Every second of our existence is alive with possibility, but we don’t see it until we hit rewind, until we freeze the frame. It is sad that so many things, all suffused with meaning, escape the unaided eye.

For all his apologies, the convict Esau Davis was just a low-level toilet scrubber without the sense that God gave a goat. If she could get to a pistol or a shotgun or a hammer or a screwdriver, Caddy Colson would go all redneck on his ass and tear him a new asshole. That’s the way she was feeling, sitting there in the front seat of his shitty old truck, muffler rattling loose and wild, while he took Kleenex to his bleeding eye and talked about old times with Jamey Dixon like he thought they could still be friends after all this shit went down.

What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.

He had been hurt doing everything he had ever done. He expected it, even wanted it. Nothing centered a man like pain. Nothing drove the irrelevant bullshit our of your mind like the taste of your own blood. Duffy always wanted to tell people who were worried about the future of their children, or about God and the order of the universe, to go out and break a rib or two. A few broken ribs threw all thoughts of children, God and the order of the universe right out the window. Nobody with broken ribs ever had free-floating anxiety, or so Duffy was convinced. It was cheaper that a psychiatrist and never so humiliating.

Jesus drank wine in the Bible, y'all. Yun's make up a bunch of shit he never said about gay people but then just ignore the fact that one time a party started sucking and he abracadabraed some well water into Pinot and got that bitch turnt!

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.

FIRST AMENDMENT No one shall give a damn about your religion. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want about prayer and God and rules and gays, and everyone else has to take it. It means you can say whatever you want about all that, but I can then say back to you, “Your church is a cult, and all the women in it are fat.” So suck it up, Brother Daryl.

...I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell *me* about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes that they are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change. In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag—and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily.

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

Life isn't about keeping score. It's not about how many people call you and it's not about who you've dated, are dating, or haven't dated at all. It isn't about who you've kissed, what sport you play, or which guy or girl likes you. It's not about your shoes or your hair or the color of your skin or where you live or go to school. In fact, it's not about grades, money, clothes, or colleges that accept you or not. Life isn't about if you have lots of friends, or if you are alone, and it's not about how accepted or unaccepted you are. Life just isn't about that. But life is about who you love and who you hurt. It's about how you feel about yourself. It's about trust, happiness, and compassion. Life is about avoiding jealousy, overcoming ignorance, and building confidence. It's about what you say and what you mean. It's about seeing people for who they are and not what they have. Most of all, it is about choosing to use your life to touch someone else's in a way that could never have been achieved otherwise. These choices are what life's about.

In short, even though some individual slaveowners grew rich and some family fortunes were founded on the exploitation of slaves, that is very different from saying that the whole society, or even its non-slave population as a whole, was more economically advanced than it would have been in the absence of slavery. What this means is that, whether employed as domestic servants or producing crops or other goods, millions suffered exploitation and dehumanization for no higher purpose than the transient aggrandizement of slaveowners.

Position B: Wolves, as top predators, are a natural part of healthy, complex, self-regulating ecosystems, and removing most of them (the plans call for 80, even 100 percent reduction in certain management units) is only bound to screw things up. Without wolves, deer and moose numbers explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over. Wolves, too, are a valued resource on which trappers and subsistence hunters depend, and a multimillion-dollar cash cow attracting throngs of ecotourists and photographers. Their presence also offers inestimable aesthetic value to many residents, even if they never manage to see one. Besides that, shooting wolves from airplanes is just plain wrong and reflects horribly on the state’s image. Anyone who doesn’t see things that way is a nearsighted, beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging redneck.

For most of human history, and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact, freedom was, and for many still remains, anything but an obvious or desirable goal. Other values and ideals were, or are, of far greater importance to them—values such as the pursuit of glory, honor, and power for oneself or one’s family and clan, nationalism and imperial grandeur, militarism and valor in warfare, filial piety, the harmony of heaven and earth, the spreading of the “true faith,” nirvana, hedonism, altruism, justice, equality, material progress—the list is endless. But almost never, outside the context of Western culture and its influence, has it included freedom. Indeed, non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West.

Men justify the women taking care of the kids and the house and holding down a job because, after all, men are the primary breadwinners in the family. But that’s because we fucking pay women less! Men claiming superiority over women because men make more money than they do is like claiming you’re stronger than a lion that you tranquilized and put in a cage. Sure, you’re in a better spot now—but how ’bout you unchain the beast and see what happens?

There is probably something good in every religion, the important thing is how you practice it. And this is when I found out that the most beautiful thing is to be able to live with a religion. Not just by displaying it and going to church and all, but by really being able to live some of these thoughts in your everyday life. This is a good thought. My problem right now is—and I just went to a Catholic service in connection with my daughter's something-or-another—and I got so damn annoyed by the fact that every text was about humility in relation to God. That's annoying, and I keep on being annoyed by it. Granted, the texts were written by people and not by God, but it's still so annoying. I don't see the meaning of you being humble just because you've been created by God and He has created all this. You can be humble toward life and toward other human beings and toward creativity and everything—and you are—but being humble toward the man who has created the whole circus? Of course, but you shouldn't have to prostrate yourself, and you do that in many religions—you crawl in the dust before these gods. Why? I can see why some king down here on earth might enjoy seeing people crawling before him, but if this guy is that great, then he shouldn't care whether I bow down before him or whether I play around with my dick at night—he shouldn't care a bit about anything like that. As long as I don't do anything that will harm his creation, as long as I don't kill, say, too many fish—well, he's OK with fish, they eat them in the Bible. But this thing about throwing yourself on the floor and exclaiming, "You're so great! You're so great!"—that's completely illogical. If you believe in him, then he's the greatest anyhow. You look at a tiny leaf and you'll get humble—everyone will—even some stupid redneck in an ugly car. You really have to be stupid not to be able to appreciate a thing like that—a little leaf is like looking into eternity. It's totally amazing! And you don't have to stand around in church every day proclaiming that you're a little sinner and worth nothing and he is everything. That's annoying. Sorry, I must have made my point by now.

In the opening essay of his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell neatly summarized some of these findings: The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.26 Most whites have of course abandoned this behavior, and have risen socioeconomically as a result. How ironic that so many blacks cling to these practices in an effort to avoid “acting white.” And how tragic that so many liberals choose to put an intellectual gloss on black cultural traits that deserve disdain. The civil rights movement, properly understood, was about equal opportunity. But a group must be culturally equipped to seize it. Blacks today on balance remain ill equipped, and the problem isn’t white people.

Slavery happened. That flag stands for segregation. We have monuments to Civil War generals and slave owners, as well as preserved plantations. But we have only one slavery museum, and that was built by a private citizen. We have no national or federal slavery museum. There is no government-funded slavery museum. A proposal to put one in Virginia came through in 2001 and went unfunded and failed. Another one in Richmond reached a similar fate. This is absolutely shameful.

EIGHTH AMENDMENT The government shall not “crack down” on drug crime while taking kickbacks from industries and companies perpetuating addiction and abuse. You can’t fight wars on drugs—only on people. The drug war kills people, not drugs. Anytime you hear a politician talk about being tough on drugs but then say nothing about pharmaceutical companies, doctors, or insurance providers needing reform as well, you call them what they are: hacks. And hit them in the fa—we mean, vote against them.

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history. History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies.The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes. History is the memory of the human race. For an individual to wake up some morning with no memory would be devastating. In addition to the emotional trauma of suddenly finding everything and everybody unknown and unfathomable, there would be no way to carry out the practical necessities of work or managing a home, much less maintaining or establishing relations with other human beings. It would not be much better to wake up some morning with a false memory, induced in you by some means by some other person—to serve that other person’s purposes, with all memories expunged that do not serve that end and other memories twisted or created out of thin air to make you the willing instrument of some ulterior design.

In our humble12 opinion, the South in general’s attitude regarding the war and everything that came after needs a major paradigm shift. Put simply: we need to be more like Germany. Ya see, after World War II, Germany as a nation took responsibility for its crimes, owned up to them, and has refused to make excuses for the atrocities that occurred. Germans own it. That’s just the way it is. (Or at least the perception of the way it is, and as we keep reiterating, the perception can be just as important as the reality.) How many people in the South could stomach the idea of Nazi statues existing in Germany in order to “honor the past” but “not meant to offend the Jews, of course?” Because y’all do realize that’s what most of these Civil War monuments are, right?

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the entropy written in our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers [sic] races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?