6 Unshakable Beliefs You Develop Growing Up a Redneck

I'd seen square plates at local Walmarts, but I had no idea that anyone actually used them, outside of the people in science fiction films who ate nondescript puddings out of their space trays. And if it was square, it absolutely had to be in tray-form, because you could portion out the food into the different areas that way. If you used the square plate, so often created with an exaggerated dip in the surface, anarchy would erupt, at least according to my 9-year-old, sheltered brain. The food would either slide down towards the middle or chaotically be unable to stay separated from the other foods.

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WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!

A circular plate is logical. You could ration out the different locations on a circular plate. Every one of the Grandma Uncle's Country-Home-Cooked Barbecue Diner-type restaurants near my home used circular plates, and all the small-town, kick-your-boots-off-and-sit-a-spell, ain't-nothin'-wrong-with-hard-work-and-Jesus-Christ-Almighty food they served was arranged according to a sort of unspoken pie chart rule. Finally, and this is just aesthetics, but square plates stacked rigidly, while circular plates were warm, colloquial, and more likely to be enjoyed by Mark Twain.

Multiple types of the same kind of silverware also never made sense to me as a kid, as they were mainly reserved for slapstick scenes involving boorish men visiting the royal parts of England and not understanding that you can't talk about farts while at dinner with the Queen. Finding that I had the choice to not remember which was the salad fork and which was the dessert fork made me feel as if I had been thrust into the plot of My Fair Lady. The role of the redneck is used in the media as a way to either assert someone else's higher intelligence, or prove how much better the redneck lifestyle is than that of those boys from New York City, who might wear fancy suits and drink champagne but ain't never gazed at the beauty of the moon. Thus, many in the South assimilate this mindset, including my younger self. They become a living stereotype, because for their whole lives, they're either presented with the idea that they're being attacked by people looking to make a joke of them, or that they're fish out of water in the harsh, soulless machinations of an America that would be way better off if it had a Jack Palance character to impart valuable lessons to.

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"And that's why all the love you ever need resides in the heart of a lost calf."

I'm sure that if I had used square plates extensively, I'd be thinking about how weird it was that all those bumpkins ate off of ceramic Frisbees. But square plates were advanced technology, and they were perfect for carrying ...

The South isn't exactly a prime location for raw fish. Many parts of it often have the kind of hot air and humidity that can best be described as "asshole at midnight," and when hot air learns that anything raw exists, that plate will turn into a mound of wasabi, flies and more flies. I'm not saying that the South, as a whole, hasn't discovered air conditioning yet, but I've been in enough poorly managed Dairy Queens to know that, if it's summer and the air conditioning isn't turned down to "absurdly cold," anything that you want to stay fresh and potentially unmelted is going to be dumpster-bound by the end of first shift.

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Keep those flies away from that sushi! It'll make them sick!

Sushi, because of the odd "sterile" quality that it seemed to have, was an item that the rich consumed, because only they could afford these combinations of unspoiled, recently deceased sea creatures. Now I'm old enough to know that sushi can be bought for suspiciously low prices, but my parents didn't eat it and neither did any of the older figures in my life. I didn't have a lot of exposure to it, and the sushi I did see had been shoved into the back corner of the local Chinese buffets, as if it was an eyesore and an embarrassment to the superior chicken and broccoli, and the fiercely lukewarm lo mein.

Adding to this notion of sushi as an unreachable status symbol was the ever-present childhood warning that, if something wasn't cooked (fried), it would kill me. The paranoia of any food that didn't drip grease was encompassed under the blanket term "salmonella," a mysterious disease that attached itself to every item that didn't have a breaded epidermis. If you ate raw fish, you would immediately come down with the salmonella, and your days of fort-building and backyard-wrasslin' would be over.

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"Why won't anyone accept my challenge?"

This outlook turned every trip to a coffee shop into a treat, including Starbucks, which serves bean-grinder piss. The antique ambiance and long, silly names were special in comparison to the places that we usually went -- places built around how plainly efficient they were, like Big Lots. Coffee shops were citadels of hipness, something that camouflage jackets are allergic to. Never mind the fact that most of the people in every high school in the area wore camouflage jackets because a large number of other people they knew wore camouflage jackets, not because they had been creeping through the woods that morning and decided to try for an education.

To be an effective "redneck craze," the fashion must, at all costs, emphasize simplicity. This is something that coffee shops and every portrayal of coffee shops refuse to do. "Venti mocha latte Frappuccino with cream, please. Can you use soy milk? And can you make sure that all the soy is local? Is this plastic cup biodegradable? Also, can I add a shot of organic, fair trade espresso?" Oh, every movie joke about coffee shops. You're hilarious!

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"Sorry, my order is kind of complex. I'll need a Mac to map it out for you."

Pfafftown, the North Carolina town I grew up in, isn't the smallest unincorporated community in the world by a long shot. It isn't as small as, for instance, Creston, where, if someone died, the newspaper headline would read "Local Man Killed. Other Half of Creston Fears Bear." It's just small enough to be considered relatively unremarkable. But hey, at least it isn't East Bend, which is a town that is full of white trash, am I right? Also, East Bend and Pfafftown are nearly identical, but the South breeds an indestructible pride, not necessarily for your hometown, but for the fact that your hometown isn't the horrible town next door.

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Look at that shithole. I bet they don't have even half the dogs that we do.

Pfafftown is surrounded by neighborhoods and towns that look exactly like it. There may be changes in the population size, but there is not enough disparity to influence the basic layout of fields, forest, two houses -- repeat. There is also no real change in the accents, but if you asked someone from Pfafftown to imitate someone from King, North Carolina, they'd immediately take on a personality created by a single viewing of True Grit and a thousand head injuries. It's some kind of Super Saiyan redneck that exists solely to misconstrue the importance of Obama's middle name. Sweet King reference, though.

This obviously doesn't include the situation that many locations in the South face, where one town is right next to another that gets a bad reputation from the poverty it's riddled with. That only exacerbates the issue, and it is the much-lauded "Southern hospitality" that is commonly replaced by a mocking disdain. Famine and hardship? Those goofy hillbillies. When will they ever learn that you don't need government assistance when you have a cold glass of iced tea and a girl wearing Daisy Dukes?

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And if you call it "sweet tea," there's a good chance a redneck will punch you.

They also apply this "I'll drink anything, despite its disputable chemistry" attitude towards all other kinds of alcohol, which puts vodkas and liquors of all qualities on equal playing fields, as long as it can get you passed out in a lawn chair. This is problematic for the college freshman (who shall not be named) that decided to buy Burnett's Vodka during his first weekend of college, only to learn from the more knowledgeable people in his dorm that brands like Burnett's and Aristocrat are supposedly shitty. If some kind of liquid costs $20, it must have some kind of decency or at least be drinkable. And since it's drinkable, it should be worthwhile. Apparently not, because that college freshman's new peers looked at the freshman and his choice of beverage as if he'd just suggested that they get coffee from Starbucks.

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And then they all died of alcohol poisoning. The end.

The hackneyed South associates drinking with some kind of inherent manliness. It's a rite of passage. As long as the drink's title doesn't include the name of a fruit, it doesn't matter what you choose. If it does, well, you must be the kind of guy who likes sushi things.

Complaints about rap music are numerous. Critics say that it degrades women in a way that other genres like country music, which has illustrated women as KFC ornaments, don't. But one accusation that is almost unfathomable outside of the South is that rap is "hard to understand." Redneck culture treats hip-hop the same way that people without tongues treat scatting. It's this nonsensical combination of "beeps" and "fo shizzles" that is destroying the radio and is only enjoyed by those who can't understand how supernaturally crucial guitars are when constructing anything musical. I spent a long time hoisting the "CAN'T SPELL 'CRAP' WITHOUT 'RAP'" banner, and I regret that choice, mainly because it alienated good decision-making.

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Like my failed career as the first person to rap about corn.

This grievance has even less significance when you consider just how much rap has influenced country music in recent years, most notably with Kid Rock, the fifth-grade curriculum of the music world. Other well-known examples of genre fusion are Toby Keith's "I Wanna Talk About Me" and "Getcha Some," a song that wins the coveted "Awful Toby Keith Song That Is Also a Decent Big Sean Song" Award.

Less successful is the recent remix of the Jerrod Niemann song "Drink to That All Night," which featured Pitbull's usual contribution of discrediting every genre that he's fucking involved with. Regardless, denying that hip-hop is on the same level as country music and is so different from anything in your realm of possibilities that you can't even comprehend it, is the lamest claim since Pitbull said "Mix the Voli with the moonshine, alright!" in the aforementioned ode to drinking to (insert something of importance) all night. Anyone who is aware of what basic vodka tastes like and can imagine what it would resemble if you used moonshine as your unfortunate mixer knows that this is, at best, "alright," and, at worst, a tragic medical event.

To talk to Daniel about hot sushi and square plates, look him up on Twitter.

For more from Daniel, check out The 5 Unexpected Downsides of Working at a Movie Theater. And then check out How the Rich Secretly Amuse Themselves.

Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. A young woman from the trailer park and her very smelly cat. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, a new novel about futuristic shit, by David Wong.