The Redneck Manifesto

From its coruscating opening sentence, this broadside by the publisher of ANSWER Me! magazine in Portland, Ore., presents a number of home truths that will provoke controversy, if not riots in the streets. Now that it is infra dig to target African Americans, Native Americans and all immigrants, the only scapegoats left, notes Goad, are rednecks, aka hillbillies and hicks. But they, too, he points out, are members of the underclass and hence victims. Turning to history, Goad shows that they have been exploited as Egyptian and Roman slaves, medieval serfs, indentured servants in the American and Australian colonies, child laborers in mines and factories--the very people whose labor created the rich and powerful. Goad's manifesto, however, is not a call to class warfare, but a call to awareness of the fact that class warfare has been waged for millennia, conducted exclusively by the upper class against the underclass, who have almost invariably surrendered supinely. And, he shows, the underclass still gives more voice to issues like racism and crime while the distribution of the world's goods becomes ever more inequitable. Goad, writing at the top of his voice, merits a listen. (May)