Free Redneck Nation by Michael Graham Page A

up with things that suck. And I know this for a fact, because I used to wait tables for a living. Ask any waiter,
     and they’ll tell you that Yankees are the last people to say thank you and the first people to send everything back. They’re
     the first to ask for the manager, the first to complain to the other tables around them, and, to their credit, much more likely
     to leave a decent tip if they get good service. But putting up with bad service is not the northern Way.
    I’ve sat in a restaurant in New York and watched a customer take out a meat thermometer to check her dinner. I’ve seen angry
     vegans threaten to throw food on the ground in Greenwich Village because it sat on the same platter as a piece of chicken.
     I’ve seen customers stand at the table and wave empty glasses at inattentive waiters and, once, two guys from Jersey hit an
     assistant manager in the back of the head with a hard roll to get him to turn around. (I found out later that they knew the
     guy, but the manager beat the crap out of them, anyway.)
    If the cable TV goes out on Sunday afternoon, Yankees don’t show patience and understanding. They get on the phone and start
     screaming. “Ice storm, schmice storm! The Jets are playin’ the Giants and I’m missin’ the goddam fourt’ qwatta!” When city
     services get screwed up, local pols know northern voters are not easily placated. Chicago politics can hinge entirely on how
     quickly an alderman gets a ward heeler his trash pickup.
    In short, making a Yankee happy is harder than satisfying an aging harem. And not nearly as much fun. Northerners are living,
     breathing quality control experts who,when it comes to getting what they want, always go down fighting.
    But I’m supposed to believe that the same people who speed-dial their lawyer over an underdone steak are cheerfully willing
     to accept the highly expensive but wildly unproductive public school system for their own children?
    Ah, but that’s the catch, isn’t it? They won’t accept it for their children. Just
yours
.
    Northern liberals are tireless defenders of the government-run school system, ardent supporters of higher taxes for public
     education, and shameless hypocrites when it comes to educating their own children in private schools. They are absolutely
     confident that an open-enrollment, racially mixed, county-run public school is absolutely perfect for absolutely all of America’s
     children. And they’ll be glad to drop your kids off on their way to taking Junior to prep school.
    Liberals who can’t afford private schools move their families to cultural cul-de-sacs in lily-white suburbs. The children
     and grandchildren of white Freedom Riders who fought to integrate southern schools now send their children to private (mostly
     white) academies or live in monochromatic, educational enclaves like Rye, New York, and Deer Park, Michigan.
    White flight, elitist self-segregation—that’s about as southern as you can get and keep all your teeth. Which explains how
     schools in the North can survive while providing crummy service to demanding northern consumers. These Northerners simply
     don’t see the public school system as theirs. As long as the one school in their one suburbworks, the school system as a whole simply doesn’t exist to them.
    Which is why nobody noticed, for example, when Bill Clinton tapped former South Carolina governor Dick Riley to head the federal
     Department of Education. Do you know what South Carolina was ranked in average SAT scores on the day President Clinton made
     his pick? Dead last! Bill Clinton literally could not find a politician leading a more poorly educated populace to oversee
     our nation’s school system. And nobody so much as cracked a smile.
    Imagine if President Clinton had chosen the governor of Iowa to oversee the U.S. Coast Guard, or the senior senator from Utah
     to chair the federal Department of Porn. Such a choice would have inspired a loud clearing of