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(More customer reviews)Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (Simon and Schuster, 1997)
Three years before the publication of The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad was self-releasing the magazine ANSWER Me! on his own press, Goad to Hell Publications (who also published Peter Sotos' first collection, one of the only books I know of that was actively suppressed before being challenged through official channels), and standing trial for obscenity for issue #4. Fast-forward to 1997, and he's getting a hardback first-printing for a book I wouldn't have thought a major publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Maybe there IS some small hope for the world.
That, ultimately, is what The Redneck Manifesto is about-- hope. Most people probably won't figure that out from reading it, though.
The Redneck Manifesto is a two-hundred-fifty page rant, I grant you, but it is a savagely intelligent, well-researched, and downright laugh-out-loud funny rant, and like all the best rants throughout history, it has at its core both a simple truth, that the redneck is the last subsection of American society against which it's permissible to be prejudiced, and a solution to that truth, which in this case is that the rednecks, and the people who oppress the rednecks, have a common enemy who has manipulated them into being enemies.
This is nothing new, of course. The power elite have been manipulating segments of the great unwashed against each other throughout human history. They're still doing it. (The Israelis and the Palestinians, anyone? The Orange Irish and the Green Irish? Shiites and Sunnis? The Tutsi and the Hutu? We could keep going like this all day.)
Goad has a plan to get everyone clear-headed, but to say it's confrontational would be understating the case somewhat. His thrust in the first segment of the book is to make you aware that the word "redneck" is as much a slur as are many other words that we recognize as slurs now (and are thus unprintable in an Amazon review), and he does so by using them. A lot. For most people, there's going to be a shock factor, though it's surmountable-- especially if you're paying attention to what Goad is driving at.
From there, he launches into a very well-researched history of the redneck, which further clarifies a point he made in the beginning: that the modern redneck, contrary to popular wisdom, is not the architect of American race-hatred; quite the opposite. It's the book's most "scholarly" section, but it still reads like a rant, and that's a wonderful thing.
After that, three chapters on the culture of the redneck. It should be no surprise to those who know Goad's work that they come off kind of like a rapper telling N-word jokes; "it's okay, because I'm a member of the oppressed group." There's more to it than that, though; Goad is a misanthrope more than he is a redneck, and you can't just turn off the jaundiced-eye filter. This, ultimately, is what gives the book its highest street-cred marks; Goad doesn't make the same mistake other oppressed-minority writers do in confusing a desire for equality with a desire for revenge. He's not talking about the redneck rising supreme to put its boot on the neck of any other oppressed minority, he's talking about all of them, with all their many faults, rising up as one to overthrow The Man.
The book concludes with a strenuous, energetic dissection of those groups who really need to be brought down with extreme prejudice. If you don't get fired up after reading the chapter on the banking industry, pal, check your pulse.
This is an important piece of work, and it's especially relevant in the post-2004-election atmosphere of restless natives presently pervading the country. If you're breaking your back for The Man, be you white collar, blue collar, no collar, redneck, black neck, white neck, jobless, homeless, whatever, read this book. It is, potentially, a life-changing experience. *****
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