Product Description

Culture maverick Jim Goad presents a thoroughly reasoned, darkly funny, and rampagingly angry defense of America's most maligned social group -- the cultural clan variously referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, white trash, crackers, and trailer trash. As The Redneck Manifesto boldly points out and brilliantly demonstrates, America's dirty little secret isn't racism but classism. While pouncing incessantly on racial themes, most major media are silent about America's widening class rifts, a problem that negatively affects more people of all colors than does racism. With an unmatched ability for rubbing salt in cultural wounds, Jim Goad deftly dismantles most popular American notions about race and culture and takes a sledgehammer to our delicate glass-blown popular conceptions of government, religion, media, and history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165413 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780684838649
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
Angry white male or astute social critic? Whichever, Goad (he's not using a pseudonym, is he?) bellows a primal scream in defense of white working-class wage serfs. There is not a meek, mealy-mouthed word in this tract, so readers had better strap themselves in if they recoil from cussing, epithets for every blankety-blank group under the sun, or chapter titles such as "Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals." This tract is so hyperbolic, so vitriolic, so viciously funny, so unrestrained, that its sheer outlandishness might indicate that Goad is just venting a sustained satire. But his harangue is in earnest, a high-decibel diatribe agin' big gummint, high taxes, big business, and the media reiteration of (white) racism as the metaexplainer of what's wrong with America. Moreover, Goad's book will not go quietly, as it is a politically unclassifiable polemic sure to humor, or offend, or enrage library patrons, in equal measure. Gilbert Taylor

From Kirkus Reviews
An often reactionary diatribe on reverse discrimination by the editor of the 'zine Answer Me!, redeemed in large part by its author's phenomenal sense of humor. Goad disavows both the political right and left, but he's most likely to be tagged as a conservative. He's most lucid when characterizing the centuries-old race struggle in our country as a smokescreen for what should really be a class struggle. The poor have been enslaved, persecuted, and exploited by the upper class regardless of skin color, Goad maintains. That words like ``redneck'' and ``white trash'' are deemed acceptable while the ``N-word'' is not is proof that as Americans, by and large, we have been duped by rich folks into playing the race card. The author is at his best when using humor to elucidate a point, as when he argues that both black slaves and some disenfranchised whites were cheated and lied to by society in the same manner. Ex-slaves were offered 40 acres and a mule (which they never saw); whites in 18th- century America who had been bonded servants (in effect, white slaves) were promised ``two suits, an ax, and two hoes.'' The hoes, ``we are to presume, were gardening tools instead of prostitutes, unless `weeding' and `grubbing' were sexual euphemisms in colonial America.'' Goad's astute command of history and his sharp wit make for a volatile combination, and one that could be misread. A truly bigoted reader may take Goad's remarks about Lincoln not really intending to free the slaves, or about there being other Holocausts besides the Jewish one, out of context and use them to buttress their racism or anti-Semitism--views that Goad clearly does not sympathize with. But, of course, ideas that have value are also often dangerous. While Goad's defense (and overview) of redneck culture past and present is sure to infuriate the liberal reader, he is also likely to make that same reader laugh ruefully, and often. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Ethan G. Machado Our Town Dares to rewrite American history, take on government greed and lambaste white liberals....Goad's eight-cylinder prose intentionally rattles the reader, driving home a message that challenges the conventional wisdom of many a Honda Accord owner. -- Review

Customer Reviews

The class war is coming. Get in on the ground floor.
Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (Simon and Schuster, 1997)

Three years before the publication of The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad was self-releasing the magazine ANSWER Me! on his own press, Goad to Hell Publications (who also published Peter Sotos' first collection, one of the only books I know of that was actively suppressed before being challenged through official channels), and standing trial for obscenity for issue #4. Fast-forward to 1997, and he's getting a hardback first-printing for a book I wouldn't have thought a major publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.

Maybe there IS some small hope for the world.

That, ultimately, is what The Redneck Manifesto is about-- hope. Most people probably won't figure that out from reading it, though.

The Redneck Manifesto is a two-hundred-fifty page rant, I grant you, but it is a savagely intelligent, well-researched, and downright laugh-out-loud funny rant, and like all the best rants throughout history, it has at its core both a simple truth, that the redneck is the last subsection of American society against which it's permissible to be prejudiced, and a solution to that truth, which in this case is that the rednecks, and the people who oppress the rednecks, have a common enemy who has manipulated them into being enemies.

This is nothing new, of course. The power elite have been manipulating segments of the great unwashed against each other throughout human history. They're still doing it. (The Israelis and the Palestinians, anyone? The Orange Irish and the Green Irish? Shiites and Sunnis? The Tutsi and the Hutu? We could keep going like this all day.)

Goad has a plan to get everyone clear-headed, but to say it's confrontational would be understating the case somewhat. His thrust in the first segment of the book is to make you aware that the word "redneck" is as much a slur as are many other words that we recognize as slurs now (and are thus unprintable in an Amazon review), and he does so by using them. A lot. For most people, there's going to be a shock factor, though it's surmountable-- especially if you're paying attention to what Goad is driving at.

From there, he launches into a very well-researched history of the redneck, which further clarifies a point he made in the beginning: that the modern redneck, contrary to popular wisdom, is not the architect of American race-hatred; quite the opposite. It's the book's most "scholarly" section, but it still reads like a rant, and that's a wonderful thing.

After that, three chapters on the culture of the redneck. It should be no surprise to those who know Goad's work that they come off kind of like a rapper telling N-word jokes; "it's okay, because I'm a member of the oppressed group." There's more to it than that, though; Goad is a misanthrope more than he is a redneck, and you can't just turn off the jaundiced-eye filter. This, ultimately, is what gives the book its highest street-cred marks; Goad doesn't make the same mistake other oppressed-minority writers do in confusing a desire for equality with a desire for revenge. He's not talking about the redneck rising supreme to put its boot on the neck of any other oppressed minority, he's talking about all of them, with all their many faults, rising up as one to overthrow The Man.

The book concludes with a strenuous, energetic dissection of those groups who really need to be brought down with extreme prejudice. If you don't get fired up after reading the chapter on the banking industry, pal, check your pulse.

This is an important piece of work, and it's especially relevant in the post-2004-election atmosphere of restless natives presently pervading the country. If you're breaking your back for The Man, be you white collar, blue collar, no collar, redneck, black neck, white neck, jobless, homeless, whatever, read this book. It is, potentially, a life-changing experience. *****

Razor Sharp
If you decide to read this book, you are in for a major treat. This is a book unlike any other. As I read the book, I kept wondering how it ever got published. Jim Goad is one angry redneck, to be sure. His goal is to show how poor white trash has become the only acceptable scapegoat left in this country. Along the way, he rides roughshod over every type of politically correct supposition known to man. Goad doesn't care a whit about whiny blacks or liberal do-gooders. He doesn't give a fig about conservatives with their big-business loving mentality, either. Goad is concerned with one thing: the mistreatment of people, regardless of their skin color.

Goad reduces the ills of poor white trash to one simple formula: economic exploitation by the wealthy. Goad believes that the rich, throughout history, have consistently played off classes against each other in order to maintain their privileged status. The recent black vs. white warfare is just the latest incarnation of this exploitation. Goad disproves the widespread belief that blacks suffered alone. The majority of whites in America got here as indentured servants, many of whom were kidnapped and tossed on a boat against their will. America also served as a dumping ground for poor white criminals. The indentured servants were often treated worse than black slaves. Owners of indentured servants knew that they only had a limited amount of time to exploit these white slaves, so they worked them to a frazzle. Goad cites statistic after statistic to show that the vast majority of whites had it as bad, if not worse, than blacks.

Most of the book concerns razor sharp insights into white trash values. Goad looks at Elvis, Bigfoot and snake hugging Christians and sees within them new religions of the trash class. Militias and conspiracy addicts are also examined and shown to have somewhat of a basis for their paranoia. Probably the best part of the book, in my opinion, is when Goad describes a night out on the town in a poor white bar. His observations on the denizens of this bar are hilarious and sad at the same time. Most of the time that is the charm of this book: it is thigh-slapping funny. I would love to quote to you some of the witty aphorisms contained in this book, but I can't because they are so obscene. If you are not a fuzzy-wuzzy liberal, you'll laugh at this gem of a book too. After reading this book, I'm sure my reparations check is only a trip to the mailbox away. Highly recommende

Superbly entertaining; makes good points as well.
This wonderful little gem is something I would assign in a second were I a teacher of American history in a liberal school like Berkeley where, contrary to the alleged situation in the rest of the country, undergraduates are forced, via a required class, to be sensitive to American diversity, which (in the class I took there) ended up containing a great many cliched leftist attacks on white males, heterosexuality, Christianity, and many favorite targets of Bay Area lefties. This book attacks the liberal scapegoating of poor, uneducated whites that is prevalent in the "liberal media." It does this with a rather impressive array of evidence combined with a hilarious argumentative style which, regrettably, will almost ensure the book's absence in American history courses. Jim Goad doesn't hate anyone but jokingly advocates the enslavement of all white liberals. (It's a joke.) But on the way he points out American hypocrisy in, for example, thinking it abhorrent to ridicule poor, uneducated blacks but hilarious to ridicule poor, uuneducated whites. He explodes the conflation between the Old Boy Network and Good Old Boys and writes the funniest critique of liberal free weekly newspapers that I have ever seen -- for he worked for one himself and knows them intimately. This book will have you listening to Elvis in no time, if you don't already. If you are one of those humorless uptight liberal types who haunt my steps in the Bay Area, you will probably dislike this book; but, if, like me, you are somewhat left of center but enjoy reading viewpoints from many angles, especially if they are written well, you will adore this book.