Why I called this blog "Born Again Redneck"
Obviously I'm not a real redneck. I wasn't born in the South and I don't live there. So why use that phrase?
My extended family was a real mixture of wealthy educated cultured folks at the top and trailer trash at the bottom. My immediate family fell somewhere in the middle - but closer to the bottom so we did not have much to do with the rich relatives. Most of my uncles and aunts worked menial jobs on the railways and in the post office or as waitresses and store-clerks. My richest uncle was a motor-cycle traffic cop. The next richest was a foreman in a coal mine but our closest cousins were what are known in South Africa as "poor whites" and they lived in a trailer park.
My dad was a a professional wrestler before he went into the airforce as a mechanic during WWll. After the war he bought a hotel with his savings but was not a good businessman and soon had to sell it. He then worked as a part-time door-to-door saleman and managed hotels for other people. (Yes, I lived in hotels for most of my early childhood and still love hotels to this day.) My mom was a nurse which, in those days required no college education - she was trained on the job. My parents had middle-class aspirations but did not have enough education to better themselves.
After I became a Catholic at the age of 7, I begged my dad to send me to Catholic school. Eventually he agreed and I went to the Marist Brothers boarding school. Then my dad got sick and could no longer work and I had to go to a government school for my final year of high-school. In those days all school kids wore uniforms - even government school kids - and I had to get a new uniform for the new school. My dad did not have the money to buy a new uniform - a new blazer, boater hat and tie cost as much as food for a month. The eldest son of a friend of my mom had recently graduated from that school and I was given his old uniform. The elbows in the blazer were worn out and had to be patched. The boater hat was dented and no longer crisp and white and the tie was blotched with stains.
I stuck out like a sore thumb on my first day in the new school in my grubby second-hand clothes amid all the shiny new uniforms. I tried desperately to hide the patches in my elbows by crossing my arms and covering the elbows with my hands. But there was no escaping the sneers of my fellow pupils. I resigned myself to a life of humiliation and coped with it by adopting the role of an eccentric and playing the class clown. I go into detail about this because it was such a big turning point in my life and turned me into a rebel.
Despite the fact that I was obviously not a rich kid, I was a smart kid and the other smart kids liked me and befriended me but I was wary about bringing them home. I was educated beyond my parents and ashamed of them. Every time that I did bring new friends home, I could see that they were shocked by my family - especially my dad who would sit at the kitchen table studying horse-racing "form" without a shirt on; all the while smoking like a chimney, coughing and lifting his thighs to let out shameless farts. It didn't help that he always called my friends "goddamned pansies and poofters." Okay so some of them were but dad called all "cultured" people "pansies and poofters" including me.
By the time that I graduated, I was really good at literature, history and Latin and wanted to study to be a teacher but there was no money to study "useless nonsense" as my dad called it. My best friend was going to study pharmacy and I discovered that there were scholarships available for pharmacy so I applied eventhough I was no good at science or math. The head of the pharmacy department called me in for an interview to let me know that my science and math grades were not good enough for a scholarship. He asked me why I wanted to do something that I was obviously not suited for. I told him my predicament - sick dad, no money to study "useless nonsense" etc.
He told me that he could see that I was smart enough to get better at science and math and that he would lend me the money to study pharmacy out of his own pocket and I could repay it slowly over a number of years. I went out and got a part-time job in a drugstore and began to study science and math seriously for the first time in my life. I did well in pharmacy school and started to pay off my debt to my generous benefactor. When I graduated, he told me to stop paying him; that he was forgiving the rest of my debt. (What a saint. How blessed I was to have known him.)
Now, the kind of people who study pharmacy are not the most cultivated people in the world - they're mostly practical sensible folks - and most of my friends in college were those who studied literature; the artsy-fartsy types. I read all the books that they read like Marx and Proust and became fairly educated. But there were big holes in my education because I was self-taught. I realized that I could not keep up with my artsy-fartsy friends when I mispronounced words like Leviathan and hegemony - eventhough I knew what they meant.
But still I gravitated toward the arty-fartsy types. The only classical music that I had been exposed to as a kid was Tchaikovsky - we had an old 78-rpm record of "Swan Lake" which I adored - but my friends could argue about whether Wagner or Verdi composed the greatest operas and they would snicker when I told them my favorite opera composer was Puccini. Slowly I improved myself in their eyes till I was almost as smart as they were - almost but never quite as clever. And that's been the story of my life - struggling to rise above my trailer trash beginnings but never quite making it.
Eventually I gave up after I moved to San Francisco and met a very wealthy lawyer who introduced me to the city's richest and most influential people. I learned to enjoy fine wines and French food and, God forgive me, even some Wagner. But it was in this setting that I realized that still preferred Puccini to Wagner and barbecue steaks to French food. You can take the trailer trash out of the trailer park but...
I'd known rich people before. For some reason they liked and trusted me - probably because they knew that I admired them and was not envious but meeting this wealthy lawyer coincided with my realization that I was no longer a "liberal" like my rich and educated friends. They were protected from the harsh realities of survival while I was still struggling to make ends meet. They were insouciant about cutting off the branch of capitalism on which they were sitting while I was still struggling to gain a foothold on it. I wasn't quite lowbrow trailer trash anymore but I certainly was not highbrow bourgeois. I was just a regular middle-brow middle-class middle-of-the-road average Joe - not quite a redneck but no longer ashamed of my humble roots.
Then about 6 years ago I met a guy on the internet through the anti-cult forum to which I contributed. Like me, he too had been in the guru cult and had seen through it. He was a career military officer and, like me but unlike the other ex-cultists, he was politically conservative. He posted under the nickname, New Age Redneck - a reference to the fact that he was not one of the hoity-toity leftists eventhough he had, like me, been sucked into a New Age cult at an early and impressionable age.
So, when it came time to give my blog a name three years ago, I took my inspiration from him. "Born Again Redneck" means that I was born as trailer trash but moved away from my roots only to rediscover them later and be born again into acceptance of my middle-brow mediocrity. Sure I like expensive wines and have even learned to enjoy haute cuisine and can now pronounce Leviathan correctly but I still can't stand Proust and Marx.
PS I've changed the name of the blog a couple of times because I know that calling myself a redneck is inaccurate and pretentious but I keep reverting back to it because I don't want to give up the links that refer to me. I added the "yogi" bit to make it funnier - and a little bit more accurate.
Now, I'm off to barbecue some possum and decant some fresh moonshine - er, I mean finish listening to Brahms' "German Requiem" before I go prune my roses and transplant some violets. Maybe I should call this blog Schizophrenic Bourgeois Redneck.
My extended family was a real mixture of wealthy educated cultured folks at the top and trailer trash at the bottom. My immediate family fell somewhere in the middle - but closer to the bottom so we did not have much to do with the rich relatives. Most of my uncles and aunts worked menial jobs on the railways and in the post office or as waitresses and store-clerks. My richest uncle was a motor-cycle traffic cop. The next richest was a foreman in a coal mine but our closest cousins were what are known in South Africa as "poor whites" and they lived in a trailer park.
My dad was a a professional wrestler before he went into the airforce as a mechanic during WWll. After the war he bought a hotel with his savings but was not a good businessman and soon had to sell it. He then worked as a part-time door-to-door saleman and managed hotels for other people. (Yes, I lived in hotels for most of my early childhood and still love hotels to this day.) My mom was a nurse which, in those days required no college education - she was trained on the job. My parents had middle-class aspirations but did not have enough education to better themselves.
After I became a Catholic at the age of 7, I begged my dad to send me to Catholic school. Eventually he agreed and I went to the Marist Brothers boarding school. Then my dad got sick and could no longer work and I had to go to a government school for my final year of high-school. In those days all school kids wore uniforms - even government school kids - and I had to get a new uniform for the new school. My dad did not have the money to buy a new uniform - a new blazer, boater hat and tie cost as much as food for a month. The eldest son of a friend of my mom had recently graduated from that school and I was given his old uniform. The elbows in the blazer were worn out and had to be patched. The boater hat was dented and no longer crisp and white and the tie was blotched with stains.
I stuck out like a sore thumb on my first day in the new school in my grubby second-hand clothes amid all the shiny new uniforms. I tried desperately to hide the patches in my elbows by crossing my arms and covering the elbows with my hands. But there was no escaping the sneers of my fellow pupils. I resigned myself to a life of humiliation and coped with it by adopting the role of an eccentric and playing the class clown. I go into detail about this because it was such a big turning point in my life and turned me into a rebel.
Despite the fact that I was obviously not a rich kid, I was a smart kid and the other smart kids liked me and befriended me but I was wary about bringing them home. I was educated beyond my parents and ashamed of them. Every time that I did bring new friends home, I could see that they were shocked by my family - especially my dad who would sit at the kitchen table studying horse-racing "form" without a shirt on; all the while smoking like a chimney, coughing and lifting his thighs to let out shameless farts. It didn't help that he always called my friends "goddamned pansies and poofters." Okay so some of them were but dad called all "cultured" people "pansies and poofters" including me.
By the time that I graduated, I was really good at literature, history and Latin and wanted to study to be a teacher but there was no money to study "useless nonsense" as my dad called it. My best friend was going to study pharmacy and I discovered that there were scholarships available for pharmacy so I applied eventhough I was no good at science or math. The head of the pharmacy department called me in for an interview to let me know that my science and math grades were not good enough for a scholarship. He asked me why I wanted to do something that I was obviously not suited for. I told him my predicament - sick dad, no money to study "useless nonsense" etc.
He told me that he could see that I was smart enough to get better at science and math and that he would lend me the money to study pharmacy out of his own pocket and I could repay it slowly over a number of years. I went out and got a part-time job in a drugstore and began to study science and math seriously for the first time in my life. I did well in pharmacy school and started to pay off my debt to my generous benefactor. When I graduated, he told me to stop paying him; that he was forgiving the rest of my debt. (What a saint. How blessed I was to have known him.)
Now, the kind of people who study pharmacy are not the most cultivated people in the world - they're mostly practical sensible folks - and most of my friends in college were those who studied literature; the artsy-fartsy types. I read all the books that they read like Marx and Proust and became fairly educated. But there were big holes in my education because I was self-taught. I realized that I could not keep up with my artsy-fartsy friends when I mispronounced words like Leviathan and hegemony - eventhough I knew what they meant.
But still I gravitated toward the arty-fartsy types. The only classical music that I had been exposed to as a kid was Tchaikovsky - we had an old 78-rpm record of "Swan Lake" which I adored - but my friends could argue about whether Wagner or Verdi composed the greatest operas and they would snicker when I told them my favorite opera composer was Puccini. Slowly I improved myself in their eyes till I was almost as smart as they were - almost but never quite as clever. And that's been the story of my life - struggling to rise above my trailer trash beginnings but never quite making it.
Eventually I gave up after I moved to San Francisco and met a very wealthy lawyer who introduced me to the city's richest and most influential people. I learned to enjoy fine wines and French food and, God forgive me, even some Wagner. But it was in this setting that I realized that still preferred Puccini to Wagner and barbecue steaks to French food. You can take the trailer trash out of the trailer park but...
I'd known rich people before. For some reason they liked and trusted me - probably because they knew that I admired them and was not envious but meeting this wealthy lawyer coincided with my realization that I was no longer a "liberal" like my rich and educated friends. They were protected from the harsh realities of survival while I was still struggling to make ends meet. They were insouciant about cutting off the branch of capitalism on which they were sitting while I was still struggling to gain a foothold on it. I wasn't quite lowbrow trailer trash anymore but I certainly was not highbrow bourgeois. I was just a regular middle-brow middle-class middle-of-the-road average Joe - not quite a redneck but no longer ashamed of my humble roots.
Then about 6 years ago I met a guy on the internet through the anti-cult forum to which I contributed. Like me, he too had been in the guru cult and had seen through it. He was a career military officer and, like me but unlike the other ex-cultists, he was politically conservative. He posted under the nickname, New Age Redneck - a reference to the fact that he was not one of the hoity-toity leftists eventhough he had, like me, been sucked into a New Age cult at an early and impressionable age.
So, when it came time to give my blog a name three years ago, I took my inspiration from him. "Born Again Redneck" means that I was born as trailer trash but moved away from my roots only to rediscover them later and be born again into acceptance of my middle-brow mediocrity. Sure I like expensive wines and have even learned to enjoy haute cuisine and can now pronounce Leviathan correctly but I still can't stand Proust and Marx.
PS I've changed the name of the blog a couple of times because I know that calling myself a redneck is inaccurate and pretentious but I keep reverting back to it because I don't want to give up the links that refer to me. I added the "yogi" bit to make it funnier - and a little bit more accurate.
Now, I'm off to barbecue some possum and decant some fresh moonshine - er, I mean finish listening to Brahms' "German Requiem" before I go prune my roses and transplant some violets. Maybe I should call this blog Schizophrenic Bourgeois Redneck.
posted by Joubert at 11:31 AM
The Alliance
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