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Popular Culture Review
Most importantly, here, are the scripts themselves, not the authenticity of
the actors nor even presidential opposition itself—at least not exactly. The trick
of the Redneck Ideal is that it does not require actual membership of social
class. As I mentioned before, the phenomena that strikes me most is how
individuals assume the role of Redneck despite socio-economic positions that
would seem to nullify their inclusion. George Bush, obviously, fits this bill, as
his personal image depends heavily on his role as self-acclaimed Redneck. But
as Country Music Television chief Brian Philips has said: “There’s a real
dichotomy between the raising of the son, George W., and the way most of our
audience has been raised. But God bless Karl Rove if he was able to connect
those two and make people feel like he was one of us” (Willman 111). The
function of the scripts, then, might be best explained as a sort of Althusserian
hailing, where self-assignation as Redneck comes about because of the
interpellation enacted by ideological state apparatuses, which creates an
“imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”
(693). So, individuals who are not of the marginalized working class recast
themselves as such and, more, themselves convert into an apparatus that
demands others who are conceived as part of the imagined class act along the
lines of the scripts that govern properly inclusive behavior. George Bush, here,
might be considered as equally hailed as other individuals, as his presidential
policy is restricted by the ideology of the Redneck Ideal: he must follow the
guidelines of white, Christian, masculine America. To prove his validity as
leader of the United States, he must act within the ideal, thereby offering both
model and defense of citizenship. The Dixie Chicks, then, threatened the
solidarity of the Ideal, acting from within the culture in opposition to the leader
of that culture. Martie Maguire of the Dixie Chicks read it best: “It had to be
somebody or some group that seemed like the All-American girls. It was perfect.
It had to be the unlikely voice from what looked like the conservative heart of
America saying it. That was perfect” (Shut Up and Sing). Their greatest threat to
the Redneck Ideal was to disrupt the ideological image, to prove that the socalled “conservative heart of America” was a constructed heart, to reveal just
how the nation hails its citizens and dictates a particular way of being. That an
All-American girl group could, in fact, break from the script showed the scripts
to be impermanent, which in turn called into question the accepted parameters of
citizenship. Interestingly, even as the Dixie Chicks create that disruption, they
cannot help but be bound by certain scripts. The documentary Shut Up and Sing,
which chronicles the group’s actions following F