Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

Reading Bageant, it's quite a bit like reading my own life. I'm a reporter for a small town newspaper in Kentucky. Moved back to my hometown after living many years away and getting the opportunity (and taking it) to learn some culture.I went from being a conservative kid with a subscription to National Review in my early 20's, to being a downright leftist in my mid-40's (so I have a few years to catch up to his cynicism, and I'm doing it). Married at 17 to a girl 3 years my junior. Divorced a few years later of course. Currently, I've dropped out. Ran up an amazing amount of school loans with my redneck sensibilities, and then dropped out of getting my mechanical engineering degree after 3-1/2 years.After 10 years of paying on the loan, deferring here and there, the loan now stands at nearly twice the amount I originally borrowed. I quit when I lost my job working at a slave labor paper plant in Columbia, South Carolina. A few years zombified by 12 hour shifts, where the shifts switched day to night, night to day, every 2 weeks just to make sure you were never truly human, well, I said I'd eat out of garbage cans and sleep in the street before I did that again. And I meant it.Giving up was a liberation. If I earn any money, it will be taken, so screw it. I'll be poor. I at least rest easier in the knowledge that my inability to "succeed" isn't because I'm not intelligent, I'm in Mensa, it's because I lack the proper gene I suppose.Ok, why am I telling all of this? Because, I identify so greatly with this book. I would get every conservative I know to read it except for 1) ANYTHING that even smacks of anti-religiousness would mean being ostracized (oh yeah, as if it's not enough to bel 'librul' I'm also an atheist)... and 2) socio-political reading is not exactly on the list of pastimes around here, unless of course your name is Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity.Bageant has pegged it all. I don't find the book funny. I found it horribly, horribly depressing.... because it's true. Working yourself to death is a badge of honor in the southeast. And you are either a worker, or you ain't. The biggest compliment you can get is to be known as a hard worker. It took me years and years to realize that the fact that I hate manual labor doesn't mean I'm not a man. That's how inculcated such ideas can be.Those that don't work, they're "sorry". And lord knows there's a huge percentage around that either draw their ss, or disability, or "crazy check." And the hard workers think they're paying for it. It doesn't sink in when I tell them they're taxes wouldn't pay for a tire change on a humvee in Iraq... not by a long shot.The levels that people here fight against their own best interest is amazing. But it is all over the increasingly psychotic United States. Rather than fight for health care for all, people got angry that GM workers had such good health care. So they actively fight to bring others down rather than demand some sort of benefit of living in a civilization.Tell'em that 25 people on Wall Street "made" the equivalent of 633,000 teachers making $40,000 a year and they'll just as straight faced tell you that those 25 "earned" it, and we have not right to it. It's maddening. Absolutely and literally.Tell'em that cutting the federal taxes resulted in Kentucky getting screwed because for every $1 Kentucky paid in to the feds, the state got back $1.51... eyes glaze over, as their mind turns back to the national debt and how horrible it is... and of course it's Obama's fault. Take a poll here and I guarantee the way to bring down the debt is to cut out medicare, medicade, disability, social security, welfare, food stamps... whatever program that that particular person doesn't happen to be receiving. You'll hear nary a word about the "defense" budget.I try to do my part by pointing out these masochistic tendencies in my weekly column "Seems To Me" in my paper, The Russell Register. What I notice is that it's the very ones most likely to have to share that reads my column. The poor, overworked or under-synapsied (ok, I made that word up) for the most part haven't an interest. But some do, and amazingly I get very little negative feed back, with the most common remark that "it makes you think"... can't get any better than that.I decided to pick up Bageants book after reading a few of his columns on Alternet. He seemed to speak right at me with a mixture of down home sensibility and yet some odd ethereal mystical mixture that I suppose is just the non-concrete philosophical ponderings of the perpetually flummoxed... as I am.

Deer Hunting With JesusBy Joe BageantBook purchased at Amazon.Reviewed by Wanda Jo StapletonBORN LOWER CLASS, WHICH MEANS THE (MANUAL) WORKING CLASS Author Joe Bageant, was born in 1946 in Winchester, Virginia, into the lower class (the bottom third of Americans). As a member of the working class, he labored at the Rubbermaid plant in Winchester for $1.65 an hour before leaving for a life out West. He moved back to Winchester at age 53 as a middle class liberal with insight and feeling about what he knew was happening. "These are my people," he said, as he tells their story throughout this book with compassion and urges us to understand them and their predicament. Liberals often stereotype them as Archie Bunker types, he says, and fail to understand the challenges of their lives. Bageant's father (a typical example) had worked 72-hour weeks in a gas station/garage for $45 per week, enriching the owner. He had his first heart attack in his late thirties and lived the rest of his life in debt to doctors and hospitals. Another family friend, Dottie, cleaned houses, waited tables, and paid into Social Security all her life. Her congestive heart problems, high blood pressure, and diabetic surges pretty much guaranteed that she wouldn't collect Social Security for long after she reached the required age. Dottie's "old man" made $8 an hour washing cars at a dealership. If everything went right, they had about $55 a week left over for groceries, gas, and everything else.RACIST, RELIGIOUS, REPUBLICAN The working class was mostly white with only a high school diploma and the attitude that "we might be poor but we ain't colored." They were easily manipulated because they didn't read or think, they worked all the time instead, doing manual labor. They were born again in Christ and believed that wealth is proof of God's love. As Christian fundamentalists with religious zeal, they believed in the Protestant work ethic and thought that if a white person did not succeed, his or her lack of success could be due only to laziness. And lazy was the worst thing a person could be. Work was such an obsession that they allowed themselves to rest only for sports such as NASCAR, which often required vast amounts of beer. They voted Republican by default, mainly because their radios were locked on conservative Rush-Limbaugh-type talk shows, and they watched Fox TV. They believed Ronald Reagan's dictum about "welfare queens" robbing us blind and driving Cadillacs and about the black welfare baby sleeping in the box the colored television came in.LESS GOVERNMENT The working class also believed Reagan's declaration in his first inaugural address that "the government is the problem." Reagan has previously said: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are `I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.''' Therefore, the politically misinformed, unthinking working class jumped on the bandwagon for "personal responsibility" and against "shameful entitlements" because public help is a sign of failure and moral weakness---for example college loans, unemployment compensation, food stamps, childcare for single mothers, Head Start, etc. Republicans have managed to associate the term "entitlements" with laziness and they, unbelievably, want to privatize Social Security and approve of giving "vouchers" for Medicare! Their idea is that if people want something, "they will get off their lazy asses and work for it."GUN OWNERSHIP EQUALS PERSONAL FREEDOM Workplace conditions had so ground the working class down that had to have something to hold on to. As far fetched as it seems, they held on to their guns as a symbol of their personal freedom. Each worker's gun became a "liberty bell." And they could, no doubt, agree with former National Rifle Association's president Charlton Heston who declared: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Finally, the title of this book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, captures the intersection between Protestant fundamentalism and deer hunting which was popular with the working class. They hunted mainly for the meat. According to the author, a Protestant fundamentalist stands quietly, sometimes for hours, in the natural world watching for deer. That quiet commune with nature leads to contemplation of God's gift to man. And it becomes easy to imagine that "God's son might be watching too and maybe even willing to summon a couple of nice fat does within shooting range."

Read this in one sitting. If you haven't met Bageant yet, you are in for a treat. Hard-hitting, perceptive, provocative and fair-minded. Explains a lot about the gun culture too, with sympathy. Anybody interested in America's contradictions must read this book. It is sympathetic but not sentimental.

The is a book about the plight of typical working class small town Americans and the utter lack of control they have in their lives in a so called free country. The people are at the mercy of big business without realising it. Lots of interesting facts especially the one about a man buying a trailer home (static caravan) for $15,000 and will end up paying $150,000. Well written.

Great for getting a handle on Americans who are the bedrock strength of America who have been left behind and should not have been!

Gritty and brutally true.....some painfully accurate word-pictures of everyday American characters ....lost in a crumbling Empire, forgotten and discarded. A bell weather warning of unpleasant things to come....

Great - thanks very much! Promptly delivered, specifications just as advertised and packed very properly.