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Frightening in its Implications Jun 30, 2007 (164 of 172 found this helpful)
As a progressive who grew up in exactly the kind of town the author describes, I found "Deer Hunting With Jesus" to be a chilling and dead on accurate account of modern day America. Unless you've had the experience of seeing the house you grew up in only 20 years ago boarded up and sold at a HUD auction, or turned into a crack house as my best friend from high school's house recently was (we were solidly middle class by small town standards), you really can't appreciate what the author is trying to describe.
That said, this is no biased political rant, as the author's staunch defense of gun ownership demonstrates. It is instead a desperate warning to all Americans just how perilously close we are to seeing our way of life destroyed by our own misguided collective actions. The author believes that progressives and the white working class (rednecks as he calls them) ought to be able to find political common ground based upon economic interest. He's also realistic enough to realize that it is unlikely to happen in time to rescue America from the precipice we seemed so determined to fling ourselves over.
Be forewarned, it is depressing as hell and in no way conforms to the Republican OR Democratic narratives of what America needs to do to preserve our way of life. It is the kind of truth-telling book that could only be written by someone who has seen enough of living on both sides of the red-blue divide to truly understand what ails this country.
In all, a perfect antidote to what the author calls the "American Hologram" of our mass media culture.
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Highly recommended Jun 26, 2007 (128 of 136 found this helpful)
I am a native of Winchester, VA, Bageant's hometown that is also the focus of this book. It was interesting to read about the dark underbelly of the town in which I grew up. My sense is that Bageant's facts are mostly correct, even though his assessment is quite obviously one-sided.
I give this book a solid five stars and highly recommend it to any reader regardless of their politics. It was a very entertaining read and I found it to be more informative about how the working class lives than either "Nickel and Dimed" or "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Those were good books, but they never escape the "outsider" perspective. The authors of most books on working class America are like scientists looking at some bizarre pathogen through a microscope; Bageant doesn't approach working class people as specimens to be studied, he actually sits down and talks (a lot) and drinks (a whole lot) with them.
The reader should keep in mind Bageant's perspective and remember that Winchester is not all bad. I graduated from the city high school (Handley) in 1996 and it seemed like any student who was reasonably intelligent and hard-working had a good future; however, the problem emerges when you look at where students get such habits - usually from peers and family members. That's why Bageant's description of the culture of the poor is so important regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics (I most emphatically do not). Conservatives and libertarians should find this useful because it exposes why some behave so irresponsibly.
This is by far the best political commentary I have read this year. Highly recommended and a quick and easy (but very intelligent and witty) read.
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Biting but convincing book about the working class in America Jun 19, 2007 (65 of 70 found this helpful)
This books has moments of sharp-edge humor, but overall it paints a very bleak picture of the working class of our country. Whereas the "average Joe" in his Virginia hometown used to be able to afford his own home and enjoy something akin to the "American dream," Joe Bageant returns 30 years later to find a world bereft of hope...a place populated by folks who relentlessly pursue a dream that they will never see come true.
I find Bageant's points well-taken and convincing, and it did open my eyes up to a few things I had never considered. I recommend it, not for it's sharply humorous thrust, but for the important observations he makes.
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A Blue (but Escaped Red) American Writes with Feeling about Red America Jul 27, 2007 (47 of 50 found this helpful)
Let me begin by saying that, as an escapee in 1974 from Red State Indiana to Bluest of Blue New York City where I discovered my own liberal bona fides, I hope every New Yawker, Bostonian, Connecticut Yankee, San Franciscan, Portlander (OR), and Seattlean reads Joe Bageant's DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS. Along with every East and West Coast Democratic Congressman, Senator, and Presidential aspirant. Why? Understanding a different country within our country, developing a modicum of identification or at least empathy, developing and further promoting national policies to address the societal needs of working class America, and (if for no other reason) increasing the chances of re-establishing and maintaining Democratic control of Congress, the White House, and someday the Supreme Court.
Bageant is not some liberal academician who just helicoptered in Margaret Mead-like for a brief, notebook-in-hand stay with the indigenous peoples of Winchester, Virginia. Rather, DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS describes the author's return to live in his hometown after a thirty-year absence in such far-flung left wing havens as Boulder, CO , Eugene, OR, and the Coeur d'Alene (ID) Indian Reservation. What he discovers is a town far different than the one of his boyhood, a place where "average folks" are uneducated, hopelessly parochial and uninformed, terrified of getting sick, and anesthetized by materialism, religious fundamentalism, and eight hours a day of television. They spend most of their lives resentful of "elites" and the rich, but resigned to their lot, all the while living on an economic precipice.
In each chapter, Bageant tackles one aspect of rural, working class life: Republicanism, debt and bankruptcy, gun ownership, religion, allegiance to the military and military ideals, health care, and education and the American lifestyle as delivered by Wal-mart and the mass media. In almost every instance, however, the author combines exposition and revealing statistics with highly personal accounts based on the lives of Winchester's citizenry. From the first pages at the Royal Lunch to the book's closing back there again, Bageant tells his story through the townspeople. We meet Dink Lamp and Pootie, the karaoke-loving Dottie, local rich guy Bobby Fulk, Woody McCauley and his wife Ruth, Tommy Ray, longtime friend Tom Henderson, old high school flame and Rubbermaid factory worker Carolyn, and Joe's demon-exorcising, Baptist pastor brother, Mike. In his one major diversion out of Winchester to the nearby town of Fort Ashby (WV), Bageant relates the fascinating story of that town's native daughter and serial Abu Gharib abuser, Lynndie England. Some of their stories are illustrative, while others are stunning in their subject's naivete and a few are simply heartbreaking. Bageant tells their stories, especially those of Dottie and Ruth, with a touching tenderness and humanity, and without a trace of condescension. In the end, most of Winchester's working class are simply economic victims of the broader American society, most fooled by corporations, government leaders, and the media into believing they are living the average Joe's American Dream.
Of course, Bageant's imposed reality on these individuals tells the real tale, the one few if any in Winchester comprehend. Working class America is grossly undereducated and overfed, hypnotized to near catatonia by television and right wing talk radio, underpaid but duped into believing that unions will only worsen their plight, and lacking in health care and retirement benefits. The lives of many of the people in DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS will ultimately be dictated by events and forces outside their control and understanding. Yet they march along in political lockstep, conservative Republican to the core without knowing why, responding with emotion rather than reason to religious and political appeals designed for just that purpose.
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Serious Book Highly Recommended Jul 2, 2008 (25 of 25 found this helpful)
Senator Obama may or may not have read this book. It's author does open with the observation that life is so hard among the white poor and working poor that they seek solace in beer, overeating, Jesus, and guns. This is, however, a very serious book, a first-hand deep look into the hearts and minds of the 60% of the country that cannot control its lifestyle, environment, pay check, or future.
Early on I note that the author appears to combine both education and common sense. There are magnificent turns of phrase throughout.
My fly-leaf notes:
+ Parallel world to that of the educated urban liberals
+ Life runs from complete insecurity to looming job insecurity
+ Just over half the poor in the US are white and this is the only group that is growing in number
+ For someone earning $8 an hour, if nothing goes wrong, they have $55 a week for groceries, gas, and incidentals
+ Insurance can cost as much as rent or mortgage
+ One third of working Americans make less than $9 an hour
+ They are inherently anti-union, facts are irrelevant, Christian radio is their primary source of information and viewpoint
+ This is a permanent underclass, two out of five have no high school diploma while all over 50 have major health issues, and low to no credit
+ The leftist middle class does not realize that this group votes right in part out of a feeling of revenge
+ Right owns the bars, the non-Internet real world
+ Left lost the middle when they demonized guns and gun owners--70 million gun owners, 200 million guns, guns are used to protect 60 times more often than they are used to attack
+ Superb multi-page discussion of whitetrashonomics and the trailer mortgage scams
+ Fundamentalists are superbly organized, home schooling leads to select colleges where political indoctrination is part of the deal
+ Sense of Rapture and Left Behind is very real within this group
+ Excellent discussion of how health "non-profits" are a real-estate valuation scam that serve only the well-off and not the poor
+ Television and petroleum have defined us
The author makes it a point to quote and point to a dirty dozen books that he drew on, but overall this is an essay from the heart with a great deal of intellect and a great deal of discipline in the presentation.
I highly recommend this book to both moderate Republicans wondering where their Party went off the rails, and to moderate leftists and to libertarians wondering how best to reconnect to what appears to be a very angry, down-trodden, unheard and unseen majority.
The most compelling insight for me from the author centered on his description of small towns across America, but especially in the South including Virginia, where a network of "elites" controlled the bank, newspaper, city hall, zoning board, and so on. As the author describes it, these fiefdoms and their masters are all too eager to cut deals with corporations and make money off the resulting land transactions, while not spending money on education, localized health care, or anything that might elevate the "local poor" to a point where they might understand the value of unions or tenant boards.
I experienced one major personal insight in reading this: the author takes great care to point out that most members of this group do not read, period. No books, no newspapers, barely use the Internet (except for NASCAR) and--this is the insight--have great disdain for those of us who have the "luxury" of sitting around and reading (not real work, that). This book and this author really communicated to me how little value my education and reading has in this context--what is needed is a long-term hands-on strategy for educating all the people all the time, and that is something neither the Democrats nor the Republicans appear willing to fight for, which is sa