George Allen: poser.
Faux Pa
by Michelle Cottle
Only at TNR Online | Post date 08.18.06
Macaca? Good grief. While I've long suspected George Allen to be a complete horse's ass, this recent slip of the tongue clinches it--and for the exact reasons I've always believed. Not because Allen may be, if not a genuine racist, at least a politically opportunistic one. (He'd hardly be the first Southern politician with that distinction.) And not because the details of the incident--hurling a snarky, possibly racist insult at a young member of his political opponents' campaign, twice, in public, while the kid was videotaping him--suggest that Allen is irretrievably stupid. (Also not unprecedented among Southern pols.) But what truly delights me about this mini-scandal is that Allen has at last shown himself to be such a hopeless fraud, such a transparent redneck wannabe, that he can't even get his racial epithets right.
Seriously. What kind of hoity-toity, Frenchified, North African slur is "macaca"? Allen, whose maman is French Tunisian, may have heard this term bandied about in his childhood, perhaps so long ago that he hardly remembered its meaning when he reached into his mental quiver of spontaneous insults. But I guarantee you none of the rednecks I grew up with would have come up with something so obscure and cosmopolitan. They tended use simpler, more classically American terms.
But faux hickness is what Allen is all about: Despite the omnipresent cowboy boots and that gag-inducing dip habit of his, the wealthy California native is not some backward good ole boy. He just desperately wishes he were. And, while such cultural delusions may not be as absurd as, say, the scion of the preppiest political dynasty in modern U.S. history somehow passing himself off as an Average Joe Texan, they're still pretty pathetic.
Our political differences aside, I find Allen personally objectionable for much the same reason I do George W. Bush. Having spent much of my youth in East Tennessee, I am all too familiar with both the charms and the downsides of good ole boys and even hard-core rednecks. And what never ceases to amaze me is how pretenders like Bush (eternally aiming for good ole boy status) and Allen (with even grander pretensions of redneckdom) always seem to latch on to the less admirable aspects of the breed. Allen's enduring obsession with the Confederacy and slavery would be morally questionable coming from someone reared in Greenville, Mississippi, listening to romanticized accounts of how his great-great-grandpappy took one in the gut at the Battle of Vicksburg. From a well-to-do kid raised by non-Southern parents in the suburbs of Chicago and Los Angeles, it's downright revolting.
Less overtly offensive but equally obnoxious is Bush's I-never-put-much-stock-in-book-learnin' shtick: Doesn't follow the news. Doesn't pay attention to so-called experts and other pointy-headed types. Doesn't bother himself with policy details. Goes with his gut. Blah blah blah. This sort of reverse snobbery may have been the most common and least admirable trait among the true good ole boys I knew. These were the type of men who would sink thousands upon thousands of dollars into the piece of crap truck they took mud-bogging every Saturday but claim poverty when it came time to pay for their kids' college education. These people weren't just ignorant; they were proud of their ignorance--snickering about how going to a good college just made folks uppity. It's a lot like the phenomenon you see in certain segments of the black community, when young people who are academically ambitious are charged with acting "too white." It's bullshit when blacks do it, and it's bullshit when good ole boys do it.
It is completely indefensible, however, when a hick-wannabe like Bush or Allen does it. It's one thing for some redneck raised around all that racist, ignorance-is-bliss nonsense to buy into it. It's quite another for some privileged twit from the West Coast to fall so in love with the cartoon image of Johnny Reb that he starts collecting Confederate memorabilia and dipping Copenhagen just to feel macho. As for Bush's message that intellectual curiosity and academic striving are for elitist girly men: Way to be your own man and thumb your nose at the tediously accomplished Poppy, Georgie Boy. Unfortunately, you make a lousy role model for the vast majority of Americans, who, sadly, don't have a rich, well-connected, exceedingly forgiving daddy to bail their butts out every time they get busted for drunk driving, need a safe place to sit out a war, or manage to drive an oil company into the ground.
Bush and Allen fancy themselves the heroes of those old, hard-luck country songs--they just want to play the role without any of the hard luck. Arguably, the most admirable quality of genuine good ole boys (and, yes, even rednecks), is that they are authentic--even if at times authentically ugly. A phony good ole boy is an unlikable oxymoron. If politics were just, the Georges' hick affectations would have long-ago rendered both men about as popular as vegetarians at a pig roast. As things stand, I have to content myself with seeing W.'s abysmal job performance sink his poll numbers--sorry you blew off 41's Iraq advice yet, 43?--and watching as Allen struggles to wipe the macaca off his face.
