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Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War Paperback – June 24, 2008
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By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks."
Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas or health care. Alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.
He writes of:
• His childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced
• The mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt
• The ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’ t get it
• Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateJune 24, 2008
- Dimensions5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100307339378
- ISBN-13978-0307339379
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
—Sherman Alexie, author of Reservation Blues
“This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state—and, therefore, ours—Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel.”
—Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
—Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch
“This recounting of lost lives—of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states—has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bageant's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media.”
—Studs Terkel
"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
—David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover
“Dead serious and damn funny...Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder...Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. “
—Mother Jones
“Bageant mixes a reporter's keen analysis, a storyteller's color, and a native son's love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America's working poor...wise, tender, and acerbic."
—Booklist
“Mixing folksy populism with the lacerating fury of Hunter S. Thompson, Bageant’s bitingly funny report can at times make Michael Moore seem tame. While Hunting may leave you heartsick, it’s hard to turn away.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating...Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Hunter S. Thompson’s booze-and-dope-fueled meditations on Nixon’s political potency, and C. Wright Mills’s understanding of the durability of the power elite.”
—The American Prospect
“Hilariously funny, very angry, and somewhat depressing...The one book I read in 2007 that I would like all of you to read.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
About the Author
Joe Bageant wrote an online column that made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He has been interviewed on Air America and comments on America’s long history of religious fundamentalism in the BBC/Owl documentary The Vision: Americans on America. He worked as a senior editor for the Primedia History Magazine Group before moving to Belize, where he wrote and sponsored a small development project with the Black Carib families of Hopkins Village. Bageant's other books include: Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant, a collection of essays published posthumously.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
American Serfs
Inside the white ghetto of the working poor
"73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!"
—Men's room wall, Burt's Tavern
Faced with working-class life in towns such as Winchester, see only one solution: beer. So I sit here at Burt's Tavern watching fat Pootie in a T-shirt that reads: one million battered women in this country and i've been eating mine plain! That this is not considered especially offensive says all you need to know about cultural and gender sensitivity around here. And the fact that Pootie votes, owns guns, and is allowed to purchase hard liquor is something we should all probably be afraid to contemplate. Thankfully, even cheap American beer is a palliative for anxious thought tonight.
Then too, beer is educational and stimulates contemplation. I call it my "learning through drinking" program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt's Tavern:
1. Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had.
2. Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.
As you can see, learning through drinking is never dull. But when karaoke came to American bars, my hopsy approach to social studies got downright entertaining, especially here where some participants get gussied up for their three weekly minutes of stardom.
Take Dink Lamp over there in the corner, presently dressed like a stubble-faced Waylon Jennings. At age fifty-six, Dink's undying claim to fame in this town is not his Waylon imitation, however, which sucks (as do his Keith Whitley and his Travis Tritt). It is that he beat up the boxing chimpanzee at the carnival in 1963. This is a damned hard thing to do because chimpanzees are several times stronger than humans and capable of enough rage that the pugilistic primate wore a steel muzzle. Every good old boy in this place swears Dink pounded that chimpanzee so hard it climbed up the cage bars and refused to come back down and that Dink won a hundred dollars. I don't know. I wasn't there to see it because my good Christian family did not approve of attending such spectacles. One thing is for sure, though: Dink is tough enough to have done it. (To readers who wonder whether people really have names such as Dink and Pootie: Hell, yes! Not only do we have a Dink and a Pootie in Winchester, the town that stars in this book, we also have folks named Gator, Fido, Snooky, and Tumbug--whom we simply call Bug.)
Anyway, with this older crowd of karaoksters from America's busted-up laboring lumpen, you can count on at least one version of "Good-Hearted Woman" or a rendition of "Coal Miner's Daughter," performed with little skill but a lot of beery heart and feeling. And when it comes to heart and feeling, the best in town is a woman named Dottie. Dot is fifty-nine years old, weighs almost three hundred pounds, and sings Patsy Cline nearly as well as Patsy sang Patsy. Dot can sing "Crazy" and any other Patsy song ever recorded and a few that went unrecorded. She knows Patsy's unrecorded songs because she knew Patsy personally, as did many other people still living here in Winchester, where Patsy Cline grew up. We know things such as the way she was treated by the town's establishment, was called a drunken whore and worse, was snubbed and reviled during her life at every opportunity, and is still sniffed at by the town's business and political classes. But Patsy, who took shit from no one and knew cuss words that would make a Comanche blush and, well, she was one of us. Tough and profane. (Cussing is a form of punctuation to us.) Patsy grew up on our side of the tracks and suffered all the insults life still inflicts on working people here. Hers was a hard life.
Dot's life has been every bit as hard as Patsy's. Harder really, because Dot has lived twice as long as Patsy Cline managed to, and she looks it. By the time my people hit sixty we look like a bunch of hypertensive red-faced toads in a phlegm-coughing contest. Fact is, we are even unhealthier than we look. Doctors tell us that we have blood in our cholesterol, and the cops tell us there is alcohol in that blood. True to our class, Dottie is disabled by heart trouble, diabetes, and several other diseases. Her blood pressure is so high the doctor thought the pressure device was broken. And she is slowly going blind to boot.
Trouble is, insurance costs her as much as rent. Her old man makes $8 an hour washing cars at a dealership, and if everything goes just right they have about $55 a week left for groceries, gas, and everything else. But if an extra expense as small as $30 comes in, they compensate by not filling one of Dot's prescriptions--or two or three of them--in which case she gets sicker and sicker until they can afford the co-pay to refill the prescriptions again. At fifty-nine, these repeated lapses into vessel-popping high blood pressure and diabetic surges pretty much guarantee that she won't collect Social Security for long after she reaches sixty-three, if she reaches sixty-three. One of these days it will truly be over when the fat lady sings.
Dot started working at thirteen. Married at fifteen. Which is no big deal. Throw in "learned to pick a guitar at age six" and you would be describing half the southerners in my generation and social class. She has cleaned houses and waited tables and paid into Social Security all her life. But for the last three years Dottie has been unable to work because of her health. Dot's congestive heart problems are such that she will barely get through two songs tonight before nearly passing out.
Yet the local Social Security administrators, cold Calvinist hard-asses who treat federal dollars as if they were entirely their own in the name of being responsible with the taxpayers' money, have said repeatedly that Dot is capable of full-time work. To which Dot once replied, "Work? Lady, I cain't walk nor half see. I cain't even get enough breath to sing a song. What the hell kinda work you think I can do? Be a tire stop in a parkin' lot?" Not one to be moved by mere human misery, the administrator had Dot bawling her eyes out before she left that office. In fact, Dottie cries all the time now. Even so, she will sing one, maybe two songs tonight. Then she will get down off the stage with the aid of her cane, be helped into a car, and be driven home.
Although it might seem that my people use the voting booth as an instrument of self-flagellation, the truth is that Dottie would vote for any candidate--black, white, crippled, blind, or crazy--who she thought would actually help her. I know because I have asked her if she would vote for a candidate who wanted a national health care program. "Vote for him? I'd go down on him!" Voter approval does not get much stronger than that.
But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to offer national health care, not the genuine article, although I suspect the Democrats will bandy some phony version next election. If Dot is lucky, a pollster might call her, take her political temperature over the phone to be fed into some computer. But that is about as much contact as our system is willing to have with a three-hundred-pound diabetic woman with a small bird and a husband too depressed to get out of his TV chair other than to piss or stumble off to his car-washing job.
Americans are supposed to be so disgustingly healthy, educated, rich, and happy. But I have seen half-naked Indians in Latin America eating grubs and scrubbing their codpieces on river rocks who were a whole lot happier, and in some cases more cared for by their governments. Once, in Sonora, Mexico, I got very sick among the Sari Indians and needed a doctor. Every Sari Indian had national health care, but the American crapping his guts out behind their shacks, a man who made fifty times their annual income, could not even afford health insurance in his own country because I was a young freelance writer without the protections of a salaried staff position with a newspaper or magazine. Anyway, I wish I could say the Saris also had a native cure for dysentery, but they did not.
Actually, I can think of one politician who stands up for people like Dot and programs like national health care. But he is busy right now being president of Venezuela. Show me a political party willing to train and put real working-class people on these streets door-to-door, which is what it will take to mobilize the votes of the working screwed, and I will show you one that can begin to kick a hole in that wall between Capitol Hill and the people it is supposed to be serving. But we all know that is not about to happen. Parties do not lead revolutions. They follow them. And then only when forced to. The Democrats began to support the civil rights movement only after the bombings and lynchings and fire hoses and marchers caused enough public outrage to indicate there were probably some votes to be wrung out of the whole sorry spectacle playing out on American TV screens. That was back when a good old-fashioned Watts-type city burn-down could still get Washington's attention. I suspect nowadays it would be one of those national emergencies that Homeland Security would handle.
But Dink and Pootie and Dot are the least likely Americans to ever rise up in revolt. Dissent does not seep deeply enough into America to reach places like Winchester, Virginia. Never has. Yet, unlikely candidates that they are for revolution, they have nonetheless helped fuel a right-wing revolution with their votes--the same right-wing revolution said to be rooted in the culture wars of which neither of them has ever heard.
In the old days class warfare was between the rich and the poor, and that's the kind of class war I can sink my teeth into. These days it is clearly between the educated and the uneducated, which of course does make it a culture war, if that's the way you choose to describe it. But the truth is that nobody is going to reach Dink and Dot or anyone else on this side of town with some elitist jabber about culture wars. It is hard enough reaching them with the plain old fact that the Republicans are the party of the dumb and callous rich. As far as they are concerned, dumb people in our social class have been known to become very rich. Take Bobby Fulk, the realtor we all grew up with. He's dumber than owl shit but now worth several millions. And he still drinks Bud Light and comes into Burt's once in a while. Besides, any one of us here could very well hit the Powerball lottery and become rich like Bobby Fulk.
It's going to be a tough fight for progressives. We are going to have to pick up this piece of roadkill with our bare hands. We are going to have to explain everything about progressivism to the people at Burt's because their working-poor lives have always been successfully contained in cultural ghettos such as Winchester by a combination of God rhetoric, money, cronyism, and the corporate state. It will take a huge effort, because they understand being approximately poor and definitely uneducated and in many respects accept it as their lot. Right down to being sneered at by the Social Security lady. Malcolm X had it straight when he said the first step in revolution is massive education of the people. Without education nothing can change. What my people really need is for someone to say out loud: "Now lookee here, dammit! We are dumber than a sack of hair and should'a got an education so we would have half a notion of what's going on in the world." Someone once told me that and, along with the advice never to mix Mad Dog 20/20 with whiskey, it is the best advice I ever received. But no one in America is about to say such a thing out loud because it sounds elitist. It sounds un-American and undemocratic. It also might get your nose broken in certain venues. In an ersatz democracy maintaining the popular national fiction that everyone is equal, it is impermissible to say that, although we may all have equal constitutional rights, we are not actually equal. It takes genuine education and at least some effort toward self-improvement just to get to the starting line of socioeconomic equality.
Why are my people so impervious to information? Despite how it appears, our mamas did not drop us on our heads. Hell, thanks to our kids, most of us even have the Internet. Still, my faith in the Internet's information democracy wilted when I once suggested to a friend facing eviction that we Google "renter's rights" to learn his options, and watched him type in "rinters kicked out." (Then too, when we bumped into the banner on a site reading jennifer licks the huge man's sword, we both got sidetracked.) Yet two weeks later he had found the neoconservative website NewsMax.com and learned how to bookmark it. Sometimes I think the GOP emits a special pheromone that attracts fools and money.
The lives and intellectual cultures of these, the hardest-working people, are not just stunted by the smallness of the society into which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and businesspeople in whose interests it is to have a cheap, unquestioning, and compliant labor force paying high rents and big medical bills. They invest in developing such a labor force by not investing (how's that for making money out of thin air!) in the education and quality of life for anyone but their own. Places such as Winchester are, as they say, "investment paradise." That means low taxes, few or no local regulations, no unions, and a chamber of commerce tricked out like a gaggle of hookers, welcoming the new nonunion, air-poisoning factory. "To hell with pollution! We gonna sell some propity, we gonna move some real 'state today, fellas!" Big contractors, realtors, lawyers, everybody gets a slice, except the poorly educated nonunion mooks who will be employed at the local plant at discount rates.
At the same time, and more important, this business cartel controls most elected offices and municipal boards. It also dominates local development and the direction future employment will take.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown; Reprint edition (June 24, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307339378
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307339379
- Item Weight : 8.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #574,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #190 in Sociology of Rural Areas
- #578 in Sociology of Class
- #1,098 in Political Commentary & Opinion
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The book gave me a better understanding - as intended - of why people would vote against their own interests. I can see the huge gap that a Democrat would have to cross, in most cases, to appeal to these folks. How is it possible to appeal to both these folks - and Northeast Liberals (like me)? We all want similar things - fairness, equity, the right to pursue happiness without standing on other people's backs to get there.
In particular, I think everyone should have to read the chapter on guns. Now, I'm originally from New Hampshire, where people have guns and frankly there isn't a lot of gun crime either. However, I frequently meet people who feel that guns should be strictly controlled, that guns are used mainly to kill people. This book makes a great argument about guns being a symbol, something passed down in families like a sword might have been in Europe. It also talks about hunting, a valid way to obtain food - far more palatable than raising animals for slaughter in factory farm. It certainly seems like an area where blue-state and red-state could come closer together through mutual understanding.
A surprise bonus to the book was the history lesson on the Scotch-Irish, a heritage I share.
Overall, it is a very sad book, especially reading about people getting screwed by corporations and the healthcare industry (or lack thereof). It would have been easier at times to shut the book and close my eyes and pretend this world doesn't exist, but it does.
The book was written before Obama's presidency, so it was interesting to read the author's predictions for the future. What has happened - and what hasn't. He was right more often than not, particularly about the foreclosures. It would be cool to see an additional chapter or blog entry from the author about his thoughts about the changes in our country since he wrote the book.
My spouse did point out that the book is ONLY about one town, and while there may be many towns like this, there are also many that are NOT like that. We recently had the "99%" Occupy movement in America. So, we know 99% of the people are living life a lot differently than the 1%. But I don't think the whole 99% is like Winchester, VA. In fact, being part of the 99% myself, I know that there are lots of different types of people all over this country. However, without that insider voice and insight, this book couldn't have been nearly as good so I'm glad the author chose to focus in and talk about "his people" rather than Americans in general.
Living in a lower economic class town, I see his vision every day. And, the more flags you see in a neighborhood, the more redneck it is.
When you see the Confederate flags, it is time to keep you opinions to yourself.
The author has little good to say about the Rotary and service clubs, the chambers of commerce and Those Who Rule Over Us in general, but he nails down the plight of the working poor, and their skewed logic to a T.
The service clubs and chambers he viewed as enforcement of the status quo.
One of Rubbermaid’s factories is a major, albeit low paying employer in his community, but, after Wal-Mart worked the corporation over, wages fell and many such factories were closed, sent to foreign lands. You see it there. I see it in my little town.
This is nothing new. Just down the road from me, Carrier jobs are at stake. The top union job pays only $17.00 and hour; the company makes money, but other countries offer cheaper production.
All the STEM training our schools offer is meaningless when the jobs vanish.
Workers in his/my hometown spend a huge percentage of their earnings on housing and are about one paycheck away from homelessness. Still, just as in the Hoosier state where 70% of jobs are poverty level, they swallow the Republican line, which Bageant cannot talk any of the residents out of.
Politics is, just as in religion, dangerous, where faith trumps logic every time.
Bageant asserts the grassroots Republican agenda is repulsive, although when forced down their voters’ throats is swallowed with gusto while the liberals chatter among themselves making little attempt to convert the “heathen.” The heathen, he asserts voted for an armed and “moral” America.
Bageant is really mean about the NAFTA paradigm: “The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken. We don’t manufacture much.” (p. 110). The author seems right as rain to me. A house of cards, at least for working folks such as us…
The chapter on home/trailer/modular homes, etc. is both informative and disgusting. Joe views predatory “home” lending high on his evil list.
On guns, he has to say there are more American gun owners than voters, which costs Democrats huge vote losses. “Without a doubt the left would do much better if it stopped yammering about guns and redirected that energy toward fair wages or health care.”
Joe’s brother Mike was a self-taught preacher, pastor to a church of a thousand, who cast out demons. Joe says such Christian fundamentalists make up 25 percent of registered voters. Such congregations are not merely confined to Joe’s neck of the woods, but seem to dot Indiana as well and I am sure this is true in many other states.
You will have to read the chapter “The Covert Kingdom” to scare your socks off.
Scots-Irish are discussed at length. Joe’s opinions are quite interesting at the very least. Health care for the elderly took a terrific flogging. The effects of television finish off this book.
I have given this book a 4 star rather than 5 only because, printed in 2007, it is old. Joe did not realized how far a country could slide to the right in mere nine years. Things change, often not for the better. For instance, the hologram chapter did not discuss the time spent by Americans using hand held electronic devices and that effect upon their conclusions and decisions. Still, the title is a must read!
Joe Bagneant (1946-2011) was an American author and columnist who also appeared as a commentator on radio and television and, of course, maintained a website.
Top reviews from other countries
Der Autor (Journalist in Ruhestand) beschreibt was von der amerikanischen Gesellschaft / Massenmedien bestritten wird:
es existiert eine sehr ausgeprägte Klassengesellschaft wie man sie nur in England erwarten würde!
Statt des Adels wie in England gibt es hier die Schicht der "Business people" und sonstigen Reichen. Er schreibt aus der Perspektive der "Rednecks" , die Schicht in die er hineingeboren wurde und der er dank eines Stipendiums für das College entfliehen konnte. Er beschreibt seine "Redneck" Kultur liebevoll und nie abfällig, zeigt aber deutlich auf, dass der eklatante Bildungsmangel das Grundübel für Armut und gesundheitliche Probleme ist.









