{"product_id":"deer-hunting-with-jesus-isbn-9780307339379","title":"Deer Hunting with Jesus","description":"\u003cb\u003eYears before \u003ci\u003eHillbilly Elegy \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eWhite Trash,\u003c\/i\u003e a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eBy 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDeer Hunting with Jesus\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He writes of:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • His childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced\u003cbr\u003e • The mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt\u003cbr\u003e • The ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’ t get it\u003cbr\u003e • Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England\"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Howard Zinn, author of \u003ci\u003eA People's History of the United States\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sherman Alexie, author of \u003ci\u003eReservation Blues\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush \u0026amp; 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Mark Crispin Miller, author of \u003ci\u003eFooled Again: The \u003c\/i\u003eReal Case\u003ci\u003e for Election Reform\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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. \u003ci\u003eDeer Hunting with Jesus\u003c\/i\u003e is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jeffrey St. Clair, author of \u003ci\u003eGrand Theft Pentagon\u003c\/i\u003e and co-editor of CounterPunch\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Studs Terkel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eDeer Hunting with Jesus\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—David Sirota, author of \u003ci\u003eHostile Takeover\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eWhat’s the Matter With Kansas, \u003c\/i\u003eto the next level. “\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eMother Jones\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating...Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank’s \u003ci\u003eWhat’s the Matter with Kansas?\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe American Prospect\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hilariously funny, very angry, and somewhat depressing...The one book I read in 2007 that I would like all of you to read.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eAtlanta Journal-Constitution\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJoe Bageant \u003c\/b\u003ewrote 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: \u003ci\u003eRainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eWaltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant, \u003c\/i\u003ea collection of essays published posthumously\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eExcerpt from Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e American Serfs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Inside the white ghetto of the working poor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e —Men's room wall, Burt's  Tavern\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments  behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 2. Never eat cocktail weenies  out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303834407141,"sku":"NP9780307339379","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307339379.jpg?v=1767724957","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/deer-hunting-with-jesus-isbn-9780307339379","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}