Again, this makes more sense in the context of the times. The cultural divide was so wide, that a redneck shooting a hippie for no reason other than he looked like a freak, didn’t seem all *that *paranoid.
I didn’t get the impression that they were professionals, if by professionals you mean office jobs. More like, they’d had blue-collar, dead-end jobs, and had gradually gotten more immersed in the counterculture until they were ready to chuck it all, perhaps for good. Just before they hit the highway, Fonda takes his watch off and flings it away. He no longer cares what time it is.
The Stranger is particularly interesting, in that his background could be anything. When they stop for the night, the guys ask him where he’s from, and he mutters, “I’m from the city…Doesn’t matter what city; all cities are alike.”
“Why’d you mention it, then?”
“'Cause I’m from the city; a long way from the city, and that’s where I wanna be right now!” Now, there’s a number of ways to interpret that, but my first guess is, running from the law.
The whole movie is a time capsule, but the Mardi Gras sequence is particularly anachronistic. No women showing boobs for beads. No plastic go-cups scattered everywhere. No banners for corporate sponsors. All the music is acoustic. And it’s not even as crowded as Mardi Gras is nowadays (well, pre-Katrina, anyway), because people didn’t travel nearly as much and as easily back then. You almost wouldn’t know it was MG if they hadn’t said it was.
As for the gun-totin’ rednecks, I remember an article in Rolling Stone about alternate, happy endings for downer films. The suggested ending for ER was the redneck driver telling the passenger, “Ah just had a psychic flash! In eleven years, Ronald Reagan is gonna get elected Persident!” “You mean, those fellers represent no threat to our way of life?” “You got it! Roll up that window!”