I once had the displeasure of listening to a displaced Bostonian (a “Hah-vahd” man) on the radio talking to 2 similarly situated friends he’d invited on his local show, spending an hour disdaining Texas and the South, over the paucity of “true” culture and intellectual rigor (actually, of any intellect at all). They so perfectly fit the stereotype of Americans aping English class snobbery I’d have sworn it was a Beyond The Fringe sketch. Especially as I knew real Texans (i.e., not our politicians) are incredibly hospitable people, it burned to listen to these snobs mocking their hosts in Texas (not the transplant on the show, who clearly longed to return to “civilization) and presuming they were superior.
I think I quit listening to Pacifica Radio after that.
There are two points in Randy Newman’s song “Rednecks.” And the second is that rednecks, the ignorant, clannish, inbred bigot, show up in all cultures and attitudes. Like snobs from Harvard, for example.
BTW, one of the nicest people I ever met was a Brooklyn Jew from Harvard Law. I sat with him as an usher at the Catholic wedding of a mutual friend, and did my Protestant best to explain to him, sotto voce, what was going on. The groom, also a Harvard Law graduate, was the mutual friend. Those three voices on the radio were the closest I’ve ever come to actual Harvard snobs. (I met a few intellectual snobs on the faculty at UT in grad school. It’s why I took my Master’s and left.)
In the South we “know” people “up North” look down on us as inbred peckerwoods with no culture and less couth, who don’t even know a dinner table can have more than one fork at the plate. But I’ve honestly never met such people. I spent two weeks in NYC, in two trips, and had a lovely time each trip. I even drove into and out of Brooklyn the second trip, in the days before GPS. (Yes, I consider that an accomplishment.) I don’t look it (well, maybe the cowboy boots), but I can certainly sound Texan. Or certainly not from north of the Mason-Dixon. Yet I’ve never personally been faced with regional snobbery.
And yes, in general, the nicest people I’ve met have been the poorest. Or at least in the working class. I met a lot of well-off people when my daughter was in private school (long story). When they found out I wasn’t in oil or a big law firm, they pretty much had no use for me. Not all of them, but many. (They also freaked because I was a pastor. I still had hopes of securing another church at the time. Something about clerics really freaks people out.) Of course, that may have been because we had little in common. Except I was the only college degreed worker on a construction site the summer I graduated, and I got along well with everybody there. Go figure.
So when Newman sings about “some smart-ass New York Jew,” it’s the persona of the narrator presuming (i.e., bigotry) that all New Yorkers on TV are…Jews. I grew up in a small East Texas town with a synagogue (and a Catholic Church, now a cathedral. These are still as rare as hen’s teeth in East Texas), even went to school with two Jewish girls. Their father was a prominent businessman whom my father knew; and their Judaism meant nothing to us. But still, when we thought of NYC, we thought of Jews. Stereotypes. Everybody’s got ‘em. When I was young and met people who found out I was a Texan, they inevitably thought I: a) rode a horse (I did, but not in town) and, b) probably lived near an oil derrick, if it wasn’t in my backyard (only they didn’t know what to call it). Oh, and c), I wore a cowboy hat. 🤠
Ironically, the kids in high school who wore boots and cowboy hats we called “rednecks.” They didn’t ride horses to school, either. They drove pickup trucks; with gun racks. Anyway…
When I got to seminary, a friend asked me if we had humidity in Texas, as St Louis (where we were) did. I only realized later he thought the “Texas” he’d seen in westerns was the real thing. Mostly that was the deserts of California. Again, anyway…
What makes me think of all this, and Randy Newman?
We got no-necked oilmen from Texas
No comments:
Post a Comment