Life > September 4, 2008

By Jacob Bathanti | Staff writer

I picked up Deer Hunting with Jesus on a lark, hoping for an amusing synopsis on the back cover. Half an hour later, I was on my living room couch, ripping into a timely tidbit of political writing that I had finished by the next day. What hook could possibly pull me, a non-hunter, in like a rowboat into a whirlpool?

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Part of it is the subtitle: “Dispatches from America’s Class War.” Part of it is the engaging and interesting narrative behind it: veteran freelance journalist Joe Bageant moves back home to Winchester, Va., and gets to know his birthplace again.

In the process he writes a much-needed little treatise on why the white working poor are the most loyal foot soldiers of the Republican Party and right-wing conservatism in general to the general consternation of the left-wing.

The short answer to that question is because the past three decades have seen liberals and progressives fail, utterly, to engage that demographic.

This utter failure by an effete liberal policy elite to engage this class has resulted in a paradigm that sees folks vote Republican without being rewarded in any tangible fashion save perhaps the warm glow of seeing politicians fulminate against gay marriage and abortion, when they bother to do so.

In return, my neighbors (the good ole mountain boys of Boone, N.C.) and millions like them provide votes and soldiers who get viciously shot at without getting much back in the way of benefits or much real understanding from liberals who are increasingly frightened by what Bageant calls “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”

Bageant provides a pretty solid long answer, from the perspective of a proud Socialist who has never forgotten where he came from.

As such, Bageant has written a fascinating book: part incisive ethnography, part sharp class analysis (and class is everything in the South and its spiritual twin, the poorly defined Midwest) and part moving paean to the blue-collar world that is utterly ignored by liberals come election years, and by both parties on off-years.

Bageant is by no means objective, but he makes up for it by often being right and by saying things that most are reluctant to say.

In one of his chapters about housing, he predicts the mortgage crisis by noting that impecunious folk on minimum wage were increasingly buying the American dream on the installment plan, with absolutely no credit and no hope of paying back their loans.

He takes another couple chapters to dissect rural culture’s love of guns, and what that actually means about the Scots-Irish culture that fights our wars for us.

He revisits both the harrowing story of Lynddie England (the fall girl at Abu Ghraib) and the crisp clear mornings of buck season, and manages to take the reader into a world that is increasingly extrinsic to “progressive” America. Bageant also reverts a theme ripe for revisitation, since the last time someone brought it up it did not really take.

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickeled and Dimed to remind us that the working poor support the American system by providing us with cheap labor and services (i.e. corporate places like Wal-Mart, and the more upscale Target that university students seem to prefer for back-to-school baubles and dorm room necessities).

Since absolutely nothing has changed since that ground-breaking piece of muckraking, it’s good that Bageant puts the shoddy, dilapidated state of American labor back into the public eye.

His book is especially poignant during such an important and volatile time in American politics and, one could potentially argue, American history.

Whether he’s talking about workers trying to support their families on minimum wage (virtually impossible), the paternalistic attitude of corporations toward their willing workers (employees in Winchester have to turn in a doctor’s note to take sick days), or small business owners (“Main Street pickle vendors” enmeshed in a web of local elites and just as complicit in oppression of the poor as big corporations), he sticks to his populist guns.

It is quite tempting to say that this book should undoubtedly be required reading for this election, but that is missing the point.

This should actually be required reading for the practice of political engagement in general, and it should unquestionably serve as a bold wake-up call to America.

To wit: in our increasingly polarized society, rampant inequality is airbrushed over with supposititious egalitarianism (the “Bush as a great guy to have a beer with” construct).

But behind the window-dressing lies deep rifts and to close them we all, as fellow Americans, need to get to know our neighbors.

Even the ones who specifically eat organic grilled fig and arugula salads with a balsamic vinaigrette drizzle and don’t know how many houses or Roles Royce vehicles they actually own – and even the ones who go to boisterous, beer infused NASCAR races and freeze their extra deer tenderloin.