to the Civil War, though Williams didn’t call it that. “A civil war is an internal revolt. But this was a war between two independent nations, one of which was exercising its constitutional right to secede.” Like many Southerners, Williams preferred the phrase War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence. “Of course, the War to Suppress Yankee Arrogance is also acceptable,” he said.
In a convoluted way, Williams was introducing me to a subject dear to the hearts of latter-day rebels: neo-Confederate thought. This loosely defined ideology drew together strains of Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians (who took the title of their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” from a verse of “Dixie”), and other thinkers who idealized Southern planters and yeoman farmers while demonizing the bankers and industrialists of the North. In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.
This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployedits industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”
Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. Including car tires.
“If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of Northern victory,” Williams said. Abandoning a lit cigar for a wad of chewing tobacco, he sent a stream of brown juice into his coffee mug. “The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something’s fucked up, the North did it, not us.”
But the fight was far from over; as Williams had said, this was a thousand-year war. As an artist, Williams chose to take his stand on cultural grounds. “If the South had won the War, we never would have had a movie like
Pulp Fiction,”
he said. I’d recently seen the Quentin Tarantino film and been put off by its gratuitous bloodshed. But what irked Williams was a detail I’d missed.
“Tarantino goes out of his way to turn every stereotype upside down—except one.” The boxer, played by Bruce Willis, was white. The drug dealers were yuppies. The hitman, John Travolta, made jokes in French and read novels on the toilet. “But when two good ol’ boys appear in the film, what do they do?” Williams asked. “They rape a black guy in front of the Confederate flag.” He paused, disgusted. “Rednecks are about the only group it’s still okay to kick around. Not counting Nazis, of course.”
It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of theSouthern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.
But parts of his diatribe unsettled me. It was certainly true that Northern zeal for
In a convoluted way, Williams was introducing me to a subject dear to the hearts of latter-day rebels: neo-Confederate thought. This loosely defined ideology drew together strains of Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians (who took the title of their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” from a verse of “Dixie”), and other thinkers who idealized Southern planters and yeoman farmers while demonizing the bankers and industrialists of the North. In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.
This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployedits industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”
Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. Including car tires.
“If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of Northern victory,” Williams said. Abandoning a lit cigar for a wad of chewing tobacco, he sent a stream of brown juice into his coffee mug. “The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something’s fucked up, the North did it, not us.”
But the fight was far from over; as Williams had said, this was a thousand-year war. As an artist, Williams chose to take his stand on cultural grounds. “If the South had won the War, we never would have had a movie like
Pulp Fiction,”
he said. I’d recently seen the Quentin Tarantino film and been put off by its gratuitous bloodshed. But what irked Williams was a detail I’d missed.
“Tarantino goes out of his way to turn every stereotype upside down—except one.” The boxer, played by Bruce Willis, was white. The drug dealers were yuppies. The hitman, John Travolta, made jokes in French and read novels on the toilet. “But when two good ol’ boys appear in the film, what do they do?” Williams asked. “They rape a black guy in front of the Confederate flag.” He paused, disgusted. “Rednecks are about the only group it’s still okay to kick around. Not counting Nazis, of course.”
It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of theSouthern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.
But parts of his diatribe unsettled me. It was certainly true that Northern zeal for
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