Rednecks, Bogans, Chú Mười and Zef

[Daniel McConnell interviewed on Today, 2016]

Asked by a Vietnamese friend about the state of rural America, I said, “Very bad.”

“Why?”

“First off, it’s nearly impossible to be a small farmer. You can’t compete against the factory farms. It’s very hard to just be a peasant in the USA!”

“Hmmm.”

“Plus, you can’t even get work in factory farms. With their machines and modern techniques, they don’t need that many workers. They pack in these animals. They can raise 10,000 cows with few workers.”

We were sitting in a small garden in an alley. There were a handful of fish in the pond. Vung Tau has more trees than most Vietnamese cities, so it’s less suffocating, and there’s the ocean, always a relief just to look at. Sea breezes cool.

“If they can’t farm, how do they make a living?”

“Most of them don’t! American politicians love to talk about their support for Main Street, but most Main Streets are dead!”

“Hmmm.”

“Your typical Main Street has all these boarded up stores, plus a few ‘antique’ shops, but they mostly sell junk sold by people who’ve run out of money. I buy your used shirt. You buy my used pants.

“To make everything worse, you have these big box stores. If a Walmart’s open, nearly every store within a 20 mile radius dies. If you need a hammer or a nail, you go to Walmart. There’s huge stores for grocery too.”

“In Vietnam, we still have all these small businesses.”

“So there’s character. A problem with chains is you can’t just hang anything on the wall. The decor has to be uniform.”

My friend grinned.

“Another problem is zoning law. If this was the USA, this cafe would be outlawed. You can’t have a business in a residential neighborhood. To get a cup of coffee in the morning, you might have to drive 30 minutes. Everything is designed for the car. If you need something at the mall, you might have to drive 40 minutes. Each is surrounded by a huge parking lot. Once there, you must look for a parking spot. There’s one! You must get there before someone else! Since you’ve invested so much time to reach the mall, you might as well spend a few hours inside it. You’re not going to just buy a hammer, then go home, so you linger. You buy this and that you don’t need. You eat. And nearly every store inside the mall is a chain!”

“Since it’s so hard to survive in rural areas, what do people do?”

“Young ones try to move to cities, but it’s a huge challenge. If you’re born in Montana, for example, it’s a big deal to reach Denver, but many do try. They have no choice. They resent being born in Montana. The media make fun of rural areas. There’s that in every society, but it’s worse in the USA. We make fun of our hicks, but we’re also attached to our villages. We’re fond of them. In the US, hicks are constantly made fun of. Hillary Clinton called them ‘deplorables.’ Our friend Hương [an American academic] thinks they’ll lynch her! There’s a term, ‘flyover country,’ meaning the middle of America. You must fly over it.”

“Without landing!”

“That’s right. There are just hicks in the middle. I told you about that New York intern who referred to the middle as ‘hell land.’”

“Incredible!”

“Even when you go to an American village that’s 100% white, you’ll still find kids dressed like urban blacks. That’s the culture being pushed, and it’s not the positive sides of black culture, but its worst!”

On other occasions, I showed this friend videos of Honey Boo Boo and the banjo dueling scene from Deliverance. I’ve talked to him about Howard Stern and Jerry Springer.

“You see so-called white trash acting savagely on stage. Sometimes, there are blacks, but never Jews! The Jewish host is in a suit. At the end of each show, he delivers a moral lecture. ‘You must behave better,’ he tells us, but it’s him who staged the savage spectacle!”

Mocked endlessly, rednecks, bogans and chú mười end up parodying themselves, so we had the Redneck Games, with its bobbing for pig’s feet, toilet seat throwing, mud pit belly flop, big-hair contest, armpit serenade and hubcap hurling. Though it never attracted a crowd larger than your typical high school football game, it’s immortalized in an episode of Honey Boo Boo.

In 2010, Die Antwoord released “Zef Side.” Though artistic sophisticates, Ninja and Yolandi posed as crass simpletons. As performance art, it’s brilliant.

When Mexican Yalitza Aparicio was nominated for an Oscar in 2018, not everyone back home was happy. Some even mocked the dark skinned Indian. Conditioned to laugh at her kind with shows like La India María, many Mexicans frowned at being represented by such a hick.

Sherwood Anderson’s classic about small town America has “The Book of the Grotesque” as its introduction.

Montenegrin Who See’s “Naselje” [“Settlement”] is a gently humorous celebration of his hood. There’s a woman stabbing a soccer ball and a dead cat in the road, but the older woman cooking a thin soup, young woman beating a carpet, men playing chess, teen boys smoking pot, teen girls taking selfies, small boy on a swing, boys playing soccer, sexy babe in tight pants and construction workers, etc., are all lovely and perfectly believable. No one is a freak.

With media concentrated in cities, rural areas haven’t just been slandered, but deformed. Globally, each society has also been perverted by America’s sicknesses. It is the cultural Moloch. To regain sanity and dignity, one must assert the local with total indifference to outside judgements. Stop aping and dancing for them.

[bobbing for pig’s feet on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 2012]

[Die Antwoord’s “Zef Side,” 2010]

[Who See’s “Naselje,” 2018]

[La India María, 1981]