digitalprimate

A friend of mine mentioned to me that thrice in my young blog I’ve maligned “rednecks” or people who live in trailers or “godforsaken” places such as Florida. Really, I don’t have anything against Floridians. Well, not much anyway. But I can’t abide a redneck.

What exactly, you might ask, is a redneck? Having grown up in the very buckle of the Bible Belt, most folks would feel I’m qualified to comment, for many people associate rednecks with the American South. I can tell you, though, that there are rednecks all over the face of the Earth. Redneckery knows no geography, no class or race. It is perhaps one of the most equal opportunity of existential conditions. It’s also a mistake to assume all rednecks live in the “country.” There are probably more rednecks per square kilometer in Long Island than anyplace else in the contiguous United States.

The defining characteristic of a redneck is not a lack of urbanity or education; it’s not a dearth of sophistication or an inability with social niceties. There are probably just as many middle class and wealthy rednecks as there are poor ones. The defining characteristic of a redneck is a deeply ingrained distrust of and - given the opportunity – active persecution of people or ideas outside of their own group. That’s right: the reason I hate rednecks is their exclusivity.

I know it must be difficult to reconcile the Wal-Mart herd mentality of the average redneck with the concept of exclusivity, but think about it for a minute. Why do rednecks bask in their willful ignorance of, well most anything, but in particular world affairs? Because the rest of the world is not of their local tribe of rednecks; the rest of the world is excluded from their little circle of reality. If it don’t affect Texas, who gives a flying cow patty? When people or ideas from outside the tribe threaten them with, say, racial integration or sushi, they react instinctively to exclude the Different Thing. Extraordinary school board meetings are called to order, covered dish suppers organized, and if you get them really riled up, they might even grant you the rare sighting of an actual book burning.

They are humanity’s white blood cells. And in this sense they are profoundly conservative. They exist to preserve things just they way they are.

The problem arises, just as it does in all autoimmune disorders, when these self appointed guardians break free of their local sphere of influence and begin to eat the body of humanity itself. Mostly their “simple” values are both beneficial and straightforward. The good people of the land and all that. However, taken to extremes (for reference, see the United States of America’s Republican Party), these genuinely conservative values become radicalized, destroying innovation, eliminating tolerance and generally bringing progress to a stop.

So really, while most people think rednecks are merely displaying their inherent bad taste by embracing the lowest common denominators in clothing, food or elected officials, they are actually broadcasting to other rednecks their affiliation with the same or perhaps an aligned tribe. You’d be surprised how much a NJ redneck has in common with a SC redneck. Modern America has developed a kind of Panredneckism, if you will. And now what was once just an annoyance or perhaps cause for a giggle is a daily challenge for folks who value progress. Or Ethiopian cuisine.

But we can take some small solace in knowing that God has tried to balance things out. No, I don’t mean the counter-weight offered in the newfound popularity of all things homosexual. I mean direct Acts o’ God. Verily, doth He send His Tornados and Hurricanes unto them; and the trailer park is an abomination in His eyes.

There’s this one fellow who’s hustled two of my colleagues, one of our drivers, and a rabbi. He’s attempted to hustle some of my company’s clients and a few of the other neighborhood businesses. His method was fairly straight forward: he’d wait until after business hours, then tell folks he worked for us but had locked his car in our garage and left his key to the garage at home. Could they give him a lift to [insert town far enough away to be inconvenient but not so far as to be implausible]? No? How about $20 for the train? Well, OK then.

His ruse went awry when he actually had the balls to walk into our place of business and tried a similar line, claiming to work for the business across the street. Needless to say, we showed him to the door and reminded him that our business is very, very tight with the local police precinct.

We didn’t hear anything about this guy for six months.

So, today I get a call from a local Chevy dealership asking us when we were planning on picking up our ’97 Chevy Whatsitsname. We own no ’97 Chevys of any sort, I informed the man, and I asked him who had dropped off the car for repair. A well dressed well mannered guy? soft but well-spoken? in his early to mid 30s? on the tall side? acts demure, even a bit effete? very short hair? racial features sort of indeterminate? Indeed. Well, let me tell you a little bit about this fella…

So it will be interesting to see how Mr. Hustler with the Balls of Steel reacts when he comes to pick up “our” company car and discovers that several uniformed officers would like to take him for a ride in another type of car altogether. In an odd way, I’m actually kind of rooting for him. Just a little bit.

First, I’m not a particularly traditional guy. I will say, however, that there is a good reason tradition dictates the bride and groom don’t see each other between the rehearsal dinner and the wedding itself.
But everything worked out ok, the happy couple are off to Thailand to generate their own stories of South East Asia, the sort of stories with which I famously bore my friends. I really don’t mean this vindictively, but now that my friend is married and traveling someplace where waving a few dollars in someone’s face and shouting won’t get him his way, I’m looking forward to many an evening of “I told you so’s.”
I tend to think of weddings nowadays as more expensively orchestrated, slightly less sadistic sorority or fraternity initiations. Really, the only reason to have a formal wedding is to ritualize your entrance to the club. Most of your audience are already card carrying members, and welcome the newcomers with gifts, grins, and the occasional grimace. The ceremony itself - if done properly - and the speeches afterward, can be quite moving, even for this jaded primate. But by and large, a formal wedding is much more about demonstrating fluency in the genre and less about the joy that lies inherent in realizing the chairs are in six rows of five instead of five rows of six, awaiting only a last minute panic to reveal its inner beauty, like a Rodin.
But what changes, really? Potentially quite a lot. A strong marriage, such as the kind I like to think Mrs. Primate and I have, is a heavily invested partnership. Even without the house and children, she’s so crucial to everything I do, every decision I make, I can hardly fathom life without her. This is not a needy thing - both of us are fairly resilient people who could go it alone and successfully at that, something we both know. But it’s so much better to have a partner to gently (ok, well maybe not always so gently) encourage you along the right path, someone you trust to weed away those parts of you that just don’t work. Friends and family can help you become a better person, but short of intense personal tragedy, only a life partner can engender the intimacy to affect real change in a fully formed adult. There are also other advantages, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader [insert smirk].
OK, that was pretty sappy and somewhat ethnocentric. I suppose the point is that I enjoy seeing my friends get married, especially when I like both of them a great deal and think that they’ve a good shot at building a real family. And, I guess the fact that I’m embracing this sentiment is the revenge of the generations before us, the ultimate, “I told you so.” Oh well, being mistaken about this marriage business is a sophism of my youth I don’t begrudge having corrected.