[...] Though Redneck Nation is smart-mouthed and light-hearted (you will not be surprised to learn that [author Michael] Graham once worked as a stand-up comic), and it doesn't pretend to be a serious political book, its author does make some sober points between the riffs and jibes. On the subject of race, he says that today's left-wing neo-segregationists are morally worse than the white Jim Crow supporters, like his grandmother. ''But she didn't grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn't benefit from forty years of intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession. You and I have,'' he writes.

Take Sen. Trent Lott (R., Yoknapatawpha County), who was inadvertently making Graham's case the other day when he said that America would've been better off if it had voted for Segregationist Strom for president in 1948. Well, that did it. Now Lott is being instructed in righteousness by the Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane of black America. I refer, or course, to Jesse Jackson and his not-so-bright disciple Al Sharpton, the most notorious racialist hornswogglers north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Few media people seem to find this objectionable, or even particularly funny, because hey y'all, we're all rednecks now.'' [...]