Mixed Media

JAMES WOLCOTT

A Redneck in Pursuit of the Unspeakable

On Friday, April 12, 1985, Joe Bob Briggs put his boot in it. He messed up real bad.

Joe Bob Briggs, the redneck creation of a Texas journalist named John Bloom, reviewed movies weekly for the Dallas Times Herald, making a big, macho swerve around the nancy-fancy class acts. Movies in which Meryl Streep's eyes mist or Liv Ullmann peers anxiously across the fjord are not down Joe Bob's bowling alley. No, he likes movies that are from a lower stage of evolution, emerging from the swamp in a slick coat of mucus. In his column "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in" he manhandled all the B-movie double-feature hot-weather dreck—kung fu flicks, mad-slasher rampages, zombie-cannibal picnic outings, sorority-house films in which the girls take lots of showers: movies for mutants and droolers. To this task Joe Bob brought the jolly zest of a car-wreck freak who hears about an accident on his C.B. and drives over to check out the debris. He might even take along a dipstick to measure the blood. Joe Bob's casualty report on Night of the Comet read, "Fifteen dead bodies. . . Two pints blood. . . One exploding jeep. Great scene where these two cops get their faces microwaved." Joe Bob is an aficionado of the blatant. He favors women with large balconies (Sybil Danning, Mamie Van Doren) and men with immovable necks (Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger). In the red ketchup of movie gore, he locates the virile corpuscles of our American heritage. "Joe Bob reminds you that there are only 293 driveins left in Australia. Remember, without eternal vigilance, it could happen here."

Joe Bob's fans are the moviegoing equivalent of baseball's bleacher creatures, those rowdies who go to the ballpark to sun their spare tires and hear themselves holler. For example, to vote in Joe Bob's Drive-in Academy Awards, readers had to pass an eligibility test. Sample requirement: "When I watch a Jerry Lewis movie, I completely identify with Jerry when he dances like a duck and hits himself in the head with a broom-handle." However, a photo caption warns, "If you saw Sting in his underwear in 'Dune' and stayed till the end of the movie, you are NOT eligible to vote." Standards must be maintained. Remember those cowboys farting around the campfire in Blazing Saddles? They might have been Joe Bob's forefathers.

Joe Bob Briggs is the sort of man who would build a Great Pyramid out of beer cans if he could only find the slave labor. It was this attitude that landed him in the cactus. On April 12 he announced that he was cutting his own superstar rock anthem to benefit the famine victims in Ethiopia. Like "We Are the World," it too would end up as a video on EmptyVee (MTV). Now, the "We Are the World" session, with its famous checkyour-ego-at-the-door directive, has been parodied by everyone from Garry Trudeau to David Letterman. But Joe Bob didn't mock the stars swaying before the mike; he mocked the victims. "There are Negroes dying," announced Joe Bob, "and it's time to make em eat." He then had his drive-in all-stars chorusing,

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We are the weird,

We are the starvin,

We are the scum of the filthy earth. . .

Joe Bob wrote that the proceeds from this record would go not only to dying Negroes in Africa but also to "the United Negro College Fund in the United States, cause I think we should be sending as many Negroes to college as we can, specially the stupid Negroes." There was recently a baseball fan, hugely fat, who would cause a ruckus in the stands by shooting off firecrackers in his mouth. This is what Joe Bob did in his April 12 column (and perhaps what John Bloom did with his career). But the explosion was strangely delayed. Over the weekend the sun made its appointed rounds, and no birds dropped from the sky in ill omen.

On Monday, however, black leaders brought down their wrath, and Times Herald editors found themselves picking shrapnel out of their hair. They did some fast backpedaling. A front-page apology was printed on April 16, the column itself was canceled later that day, and the editor of the Times Herald, Will Jarrett, declared that half of the next twenty slots in the newsroom would go to minority applicants. Like Chuck Connors in Branded, Joe Bob was stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Lonely would be his march across this arid, unforgiving land.

Well, not quite. Dropped by the Times Herald and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, the ''Joe Bob" column was picked up by the Universal Press Syndicate (which also handles ''Doonesbury"). But perhaps the most interesting thing about the aftershock of this affair is that Bloom/Briggs refused to make an act of contrition. When New York magazine theater critic John Simon reviled a play as "faggot nonsense" and was quoted in Liz Smith's Daily News column as wishing a plague of AIDS upon gays, he mopped the floor with his tongue to atone. He went hysterically out of his way to praise two plays about AIDS, As Is and The Normal Heart, proclaiming, "If you ask me which of the two plays about AIDS you should see, I can only say, 'Both!' " (That exclamation mark exposed his desperation.) He gave a grudging, capitulating interview to the gay newspaper New York Native, his Cookie Monster face appearing on the cover. Simon did everything except walk into the baths with a bar of soap in one hand and a towel draped over his arm to plead for clemency: "Forgive me, comrades..." All of this sounded insincere, but at least Simon went through the motions of making amends. Not John Bloom. Instead, he had Joe Bob hunker in his bunker and bite down hard on his grievances.

In the first column written after the "We Are the Weird" fiasco, Joe Bob refers to his former paper as the "Crimes Herald," and says of the funds to be raised by "We Are the Weird," "Most of the money was gonna go to building a chain of Wyatt's Cafeterias in every nation of Africa. The rest was gonna be spent on buying basketball scholarships to the University of Houston for every Ethiopian child that wanted one."

Under his own name, Bloom wrote a mawkish, missing-the-point resignation letter in which he denied that the "We Are the Weird" furor had anything to do with racism ("I'll stand on 17 years of journalism to counter that charge") and reported on his dark night of the soul: "I fell asleep reading the book of Ecclesiastes and the essays of Mark Twain, not being able to decide whether I needed the wisdom of Solomon or the comic relief of my favorite liar. I finally chose Mark Twain over Ecclesiastes, for which I hope God forgives me." This is rather a lofty tone to take after plowing the black victims of famine under.

Bloom seems confused about his role as a satirist. Or perhaps a better word is disingenuous. He's been quoted as saying that Joe Bob is a lampoon of the redneck mentality, a comic exaggeration, but his columns don't read that way. "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in" doesn't ridicule rednecks; it ridicules the people rednecks want to run over in their pickup trucks: Mexicans ("Meskins"), blacks ("stupid Negroes"), feminists ("the National Organization of Bimbos"). Since the offending remarks were put in the mouth of a cartoon buffoon, "Joe Bob" could say the unsayable and claim it was all just joshing. In photographs, John Bloom looks like a yup (at thirty-two, he's certainly part of the Pepsi Generation), and the "Joe Bob" column suggests a man of education getting his kicks by loosening his tie and enjoying the liberty of being low-down ignorant crude. I can see why this would be liberating— beer fills the tank in a way that Perrier can't. John Bloom is a very clever writer (some of his reviews really are hilarious), but reading through an ample helping of his columns left a small lake of rancid grease on my desk. It was like lifting a copy of Hustler magazine at the newsstand and having the sleaze come off on your hands. I choose Hustler for a reason. Like Joe Bob, Hustler savages blacks and women, all in the name of anything-goes white-male humor. One of the ironies of the "Weird" controversy is that some women were angry that a line was drawn only after blacks had been mortally insulted. So even among Joe Bob's boo squad there was friction.

Still, the spontaneous combustion that swept through the Dallas Times Herald seems to me a cleansing fire. If you can't expunge racism from people's hearts, you can at least exact a social cost for its expression, and John Bloom had a tariff taken out of his hide. The sad thing is that Bloom seems determined to keep popping those firecrackers in his mouth. In a column written for his new syndicate, Bloom had Joe Bob drawing up a prenuptial agreement for any "bimbo" desiring to be his bride. One stipulation began, "I, the personal meat of Joe Bob Briggs. . .," and all I could think of was the infamous Hustler cover showing a woman being fed into a grinder. In that same column, Joe Bob declared, "As long as there's one newspaper on earth sick enough to print [me], I'll keep writing 'Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.' " Fightin' words. But Joe Bob doesn't really need to beep his honker from a newspaper parking lot; he has written for Spin magazine, and a drive-in-movie guide is being published by Delacorte. Fans of John Bloom admire him for refusing to trim his losses and stuff Joe Bob back into his fun box, where he belongs. To them, he's not Chuck Connors in Branded but the last defender of the Alamo, standing up for frontier values in an age of softies and dinks.

Oh, the hell with it. Surrender the Alamo.