Written by: Thomas Taylor
Edited by: Jon Wagner
The Principal Pleasures: Neither ataraxic nor afraid of mutilation, Redneck ethics finds its thrash, its moral quicksand, in frequency and intensity: Surplus pleasure in speedball cocktails of methamphetamine & fentanyl potent enough to kill your ass; proximate encounter with death, your own life risked without honor or expectation of resuscitation, or through the near or probable death of another person. Cruelty exercised over another living creature positions the Redneck in that dominance his own panicked helplessness feeds with masochistic pleasure.
The Law of Conservation of Surplus Pleasure: Surplus pain is experienced at any moment an effort to achieve or maintain a surplus pleasure is not realized. However, a sudden and unexpected loss of surplus pleasure—such as waking up at the crack of dawn to discover that a Redneck neighbor has commando-crawled across your mobile home, into your bedroom, and made off with your stash—is almost always caused by another Redneck’s pursuit of surplus pleasure, thereby retaining the community’s balanced surfeit of surplus pleasure and providing the afflicted Redneck with an opportunity to mitigate his surplus pain—perhaps in the form of a Fila flip-flop left behind by the home invader pointing to Bob Bedford, infamous glut of surplus pleasures, who lives a couple of streets down and is currently nodding out of consciousness on your dope on his couch right now, giving you a golden opportunity to take a baseball bat to his noggin and an outside chance that he will have left some of your stash untouched. A surplus of domination and/or encounter with death (depending on how far you choose to take things) to compensate for the surplus pain he caused you by ripping off your source of euphoric intoxication is itself a steady-state guarantee of excess encounter in the Redneck universe. Bone fragments, clotted blood, and the perpetual limp of an unattended fracture seal the deal.
The Law of Liquidated Loyalty: Relationships with family or friends are honored only insofar as they nurture a source of surplus pleasure. Traditional familial ties exist only where common ideals of surplus pleasure are shared and pursued by blood or alcoholic ties, the safe transgressive logic of enlightened tv sitcom families played out as an obscene joke. The social fragility of its own bourgeois façade is strictly inverse to the tolerance for surplus pain each member of the Redneck family inherits, and whose sense of loyalty will shatter the instant they are faced to choose between kicking a two-year junk habit cold turkey in jail over the two grams of heroin in the front pocket of his Wranglers, or slipping the dope in his mom’s purse before the troopers get to the truck. If a “friend” was in the mother’s seat, betrayal would be reflex; in the case of the mother, betrayal comes after a few seconds’ hesitation.
The Law of Surplus Truth: Extensive draughts of surplus pleasure condemn the Redneck to a dawning abstinence where yesterday’s thirst for ecstasy is evaporating in the noonday sun. Brought to their knees in a desert where a handle of vodka, and/or twenty milligrams of alprazolam is a mirage worth sucking sand for, they nevertheless await tomorrow and the possibility of a return to an equilibrium of surplus pleasure. It is through this sobering waiting—this wretched roaming for relief across an abyss of surplus pain that deepens with every unanswered call from the dealer and widens with each passing moment of unshed blood—that the Redneck soul is stripped bare and slow-cooked by long flames of guilt, a blistering purgatory of surplus truth where the Redneck is forced to recall everyone he’s ripped off or raped or beaten up or murdered. For so long as surplus pain abounds, the rays of truth only intensify. Scarce few, however, bear the burden of their pasts long enough to be relieved of the desire for surplus pleasure, succumbing yet again to the thanatopic snares prevalent in every trailer park, housing project, and down every country road where Rednecks find their kin.
The Law of Civic Contempt: The Redneck community is held together by rusty nails, rotten pallet lumber, and power tools stolen from your garage. A manicured yard, devoid of at least a few heaps of detritus, is presumed to belong to an informant or a homosexual and set ablaze by 4am Molotov cocktails to the cackling of rebel yells sounding more coyote than the coyotes themselves. The Redneck community—always out of date, shape, and style—subsumes the dregs of culture in an abject pastiche of style where cars become homes, lawns become open air garages full of kaleidoscopic crap, the blown-up half of a mobile home becomes an auto shop, crawl space turns to closet space, and sink holes into swimming holes. Beware the outsider who prowls across such vicinity in search of his stolen lawn mower, trampoline, or patio furniture.
Were it not for their dependence on outside materials and services necessary for the preservation of surplus pleasures, the Redneck community would be isolated and, for a brief time at least, self-sustaining. Were they somehow able defy these laws of evolutionary reversion long enough to establish their own medical facilities and narcotic manufacturing plants, their isolation would be complete and rivaled only by the likes of the Sentinelese and the Yanomami.
But what would be the result if this sudden, unexpected Redneck progress were to swell and flood out from the borders of their communities? It is a horrifying possibility that, if the Redneck were to achieve his lawless utopia, he would come to conduct his debaucheries out in the open. As memories of borders and claims to private property would fade, the scattered clans would join around an apocalyptic bonfire for an orgy of excess that would only let up when an infernal few had destroyed all the rest and a Pentecostal fury had refined their drawl into an ultimate dialect... a master Redneck race.
The Law of the Fruitless Fuck: Within the hierarchy of surplus pleasures, sex is found dangling from the bottom rung. Verily, without the inclusion of the depravities those other surplus pleasures have to offer, “old-fashioned” sex falls into the realm of Redneck indifference and necessity alongside any other bodily function. Pissing, puking and cumming do not hold so much as a spark up to those scorching pleasures sought through close encounters with death. And so it is that the Redneck, despite his erotic ferocity, is a mostly accidental and constantly endangered species; one for whom new life is often only a consequence of the pursuit of thanatopic pleasures.
In Excess of Surplus Violence: It’s in prison, or perhaps the asylum, where the Redneck finds the exquisite paradox of homicidal surplus in its panoptic restraint and professional pursuit. Why does the Redneck, intoxicated by bloodlust, pull that final fatal punch when the police come to haul him off? He is, after all, on his way to an exclusive arena where violence, in extremis, is the norm. And yet, gorged on the eve of his incarceration, this athlete of surplus has always been a variety of loser, one for whom the protocols of discipline will always breed recidivism. As institutional time stretches its ethical shackles across the brutal carpe diem of the Redneck, pleasure itself, let alone in excess, contracts until the same old faces have been punched for years on end, and the only access is in punching the cell wall till both fists turn to rubble, until the only thing to think of is smearing shit over the dried blood: Until his lawless “ethics” at last leaves him alone.
The Law As Surplus Desire: The production of Redneck law develops impulsively within those chaotic shadows of surplus desire where no amount of structured spectacle, no amount of judicial wattage or punitive lumens, can capture and illuminate a strict set of behaviors that can be predicted and controlled. Beyond society’s enormous velvet partition of law and order, the Redneck trudges after his plunder of surplus pleasures from an inhospitable moorland of value where the common citizen’s moral compass whirls out of control against a confluence of surplus forces rushing in from every direction. This Redneck wasteland is polluted by a fog of surplus desire that obscures the light of reason and gathers to a primordial night of understanding where effects are clutched wildly from the shadows of frenzied causes by scarred, tattooed, and grease-stained hands which draw up the half-assed pacts distributing the spoils of surplus pleasures.
Surplus desire is the life blood of any Redneck community, circulating to provide just enough order to ward off the extinction of the species, and more than enough hell raisin’, intoxication and drama to generate a mythology of surplus which could survive the extinction of the entire human species. But this circulation of surplus desire is threatened by a hypertension resulting from the pulse of surplus pleasures steadily intensifying with a resounding throb that overburdens and stunts the growth of Redneck communities. There is no committee, no think tank of governing Rednecks at risk of being cut off from the increasing flows of surplus desire which circulate throughout Redneck communities. There is no “brain” to the Redneck populace that awaits inevitable stroke. Rather, the outcome for which the lawless “body” of the Redneck populace is surely headed is a collective eruption of every, not otherwise blown out, artery.
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