WHAT'S WHITE, MALE AND A SAFE TARGET?

Simon Hoggart identifies the last ethnic group in the United States whom it's all right to be rude about YOU MAY be a redneck if:

Your wife is heavier than your pick-up truck. You have to drop your pants to count up to 11. You're allowed to bring your dog to work. These jokes (taken from a book by Jeff Foxworthy, called You May Be Redneck If . . . and his later oeuvre, Check Your Neck) symbolise the fact that the red- neck, the white southern working-class male, is the last minority group in the United States anyone is allowed to be rude about.

It matters rather a lot this year because Bill Clinton is the first redneck to become president (Jimmy Carter may have been a southerner, but his neck was as white as any Harvard ,professor of soci- ology's) and because — from last week Clinton is now facing another round of difficult inquiries about the Whitewater `scandal'.

As James Stewart reveals in his book, Blood Sport (which I reviewed in The Spec- tator a fortnight ago), Whitewater is a pif- fling little scandal, hardly worthy of the term. All it proves is that Clinton and his wife were short of money and fell into the hands of an unsuccessful country slicker who promised he could get them some. The deal lost them quite a lot. Compared to Watergate, it's nothing. Compared to Vietnam and Iran-Contra, it's less. But it's set in Arkansas and all Americans are free to hold Arkansas cheerfully in contempt.

(It's the second poorest state, after Mis- sissippi. To most Americans, Mississippi has connotations of heroic civil rights struggles, plus famous blues singers sitting on the porches of their ramshackle shot- gun shacks, regretting the departure of their wimmin, or their agents, or whoever. But Arkansas is, to the average Yankee who has never been near the place, just mean whites, folk who are so dirt-poor that even their Ku-Klux-Klan robes suffer from washday grey.) You may be a redneck if:

You refer to the time you won a free case of motor oil as 'the day my ship came in'. The UFO hotline limits you to one call a day. Your sister's hairdo once wrecked a ceiling fan.

Down in the Deep South, they have churches along the outskirts like other communities have malls. The shops by the side of the road promise 'Guns! Ammo! Gas! Live Maggots!' Serious wealth here means having a gun-rack in the back of your BMW. This is the home of the trailer park trash. Last year, I visited a pleasant private university in southern Virginia (the state which, though it was the first in the South to have a black governor, is still probably the most racist in the Union). It's an all-male college, a few miles north of the Carolina state line, but someone had managed to smuggle one of the local females into the bar. She was pretty, she had a lot of blonde hair, her white tube top concealed little and suggested much, and as she leaned over to play the 8–ball her sawn-off denim shorts rode up on her thighs. In these quiet academic surround- ings, it was white trash alert!

`White trash' and 'redneck' aren't inter- changeable, but they might as well be. There's a white trash cookery book (includ- ing a dish I adore, called chicken fried steak. Take a piece of rump steak, prefer- ably full of gristle, coat it in egg and bread- crumbs. Fry quickly, lift it out, and make milk gravy in the pan with all the burned bits. Serve with mashed potatoes. Superb.) Now, Hollywood is always short of peo- ple to mock. Rightly they stopped making fun of blacks decades ago. Blacks can be villains — that's fine; anyone can be villains and most people like being villains, though not figures of fun. Even silly English asses are half-sympathetic, like Hugh Grant. Arabs, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese — all are now safe from humiliation. Everyone except rednecks.

The successful film My Cousin Vinnie is about two nice young men from New York who are travelling round the Deep South by car. Through bad luck they are accused of a murder they didn't commit. One of `Why do you insist on bottling up your emotions like this, John?' them remembers his cousin, Vinnie, who has just qualified as a lawyer. Vinnie arrives from Brooklyn with his sexy, gum- chewing, wise-ass girlfriend, who gets them off the rap with her superior knowledge of motorcars (to southerners the message is, even a New Yorker can cope with the things that really matter, such as engines; to New Yorkers it says, you need to come from Brooklyn to understand such things). But the point about the film is that all the white southerners are dumb, stupid bigots who would have caused the rapists in Deliverance to raise a quizzical eyebrow. All except for the black guy, of course, who's warm, witty and wise.

You may be a redneck if:

You wonder how service stations keep their bathrooms so clean.

Your wife's job requires her to wear an orange vest.

You watch Roseanne for decorating tips.

This is something of a problem for Bill Clinton. Americans see him in two ways: the clever Rhodes scholar and — more important — the graduate from Yale Law School, the toughest university course in the country, married to the ultimate East Coast Wasp. Yet he is also the po' boy from the sticks, chasin' after Daisy Mae, eating barbecue and rustling up money from who knows where. He is Jimmy Carter and his brother Billy Carter rolled `There are always a few hooligans in the crowd who spoil the game for everybody.'

into one person. He is the most prominent white-collared redneck in the land.

It is unlikely that, whatever the Presi- dent's travails, there will ever be a Red- neck American Affirmative Action Committee. No angry rednecks will picket the offices of Time Warner or the Wash- ington Post. Unlike ethnic groups, red- necks can always aspire to be something different, as Clinton has proved. For that reason the barbs are less humiliating than they would be if aimed at a more genuine ethnic group. And there is an undercurrent of affection deep beneath the stream of contempt. When the redneck image was of fat south- ern governors surrounded by dogs keeping black children out of school, or bus drivers forcing elderly black women to stand at the back, white trash were loathed and to some extent feared. Now the white elite can hap- pily ignore their curious ways which don't impinge on them, such as drag racing, shopping at Walmart and coon-hunting (the animal, that is). Even the white trash universities of the South and Midwest, where the football team is far more impor- tant than the faculty, don't trouble those who send their offspring to the Ivy League.

What does make the elite stroppy is when white trash culture invades and colonises their own. The classic instance is television, where Murdoch's Fox, the all- redneck channel, has caused a noticeable deterioration in the big three networks. But for the moment, as Bill Clinton is about to learn again, it's open war on white trash.

You know you may be redneck if:

Your mother genuinely likes your girlfriend's tattoos.

You have ever used lard in bed.

Any of your children were conceived in a car wash.

Simon Hoggart writes for the Guardian.