This is the most un-politically correct book I’ve read in a while. I suppose it would almost have to be that way, considering the subject. The subject, BTW, is not really about deer hunting per se, or deer hunting in the presence of Jesus. It is about a class of Americans to whom deer hunting (or NASCAR racing) with Jesus is not an alien concept, but who would view anyone who found it a strange concept as most probably an alien person, at least not “from around here”. It’s about the poor white working class — their culture and values.

It is written by Joe Bageant, a man with deep roots in that culture. He left his home town of Winchester, Virginia for publishing and joined the letters educated class. Having made a career in the professional world, Bageant returned to Winchester and  now writes an online column (www.joebageant.com) that has, according to the blurb on the inside back cover of the book, “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”.

Bageant knows his subject. I know he does for my own roots parallel his. Mine run farther South, but rural small town Mississippi and rural small town Virginia cast the same reflection from the mirror of generations of white working class Americans. What they do, what they think, and how they react to events has been programmed into their psychic essence, according to Bageant, through traditional Scots-Irish culture. (In my own culture it was called “Scotch-Irish”, but Bageant says “Scots-Irish”.) He describes that culture as hard-working, hard drinking, hard-fighting, hard playing, hard-praying and clannishly independent, with a Puritan ethic and certainty about the rightness of it all. Even that inexplicable of inexplicables, the Abu Ghraib shocker, has its explanation buried in this tangle, according to the author.

Bageant examines and weaves the stories of a good number of Winchester residents into his book. After reading what he says about his old friends and acquaintances, it’s difficult to see how he could maintain those relationships after the book was published. Perhaps he is right in his assertion that these folks don’t read books. Therefore he need not worry about it, I suppose. Still, tell-all books don’t generally earn their authors undying respect and gratitude from the subjects caught in the spotlight. The Winchester political establishment is particularly in Bageant’s crosshairs and apparently has provided the source of a running battle since his return.

Frankly, I’m not quite sure what Joe Bageant wants from his city and country. He is a critic and skeptic (he calls himself a curmudgeon, and a socialist humanist) of virtually everything and everybody within reach, primarily globalism and consumerism and corporatism. He paints a picture of “his people” as often thoughtless automatons who think little further ahead than the next fast-food burger and the NFL game or NASCAR race. Yet he casts them as the victims of a corporate America bent on out-sourcing their jobs and keeping them in abject poverty. I personally don’t recall that any of the socialist states throughout history have protected the rights and fortunes of the working poor.

Further, there are legitimate exceptions, of course, but I doubt that most Americans of reasonable intelligence and health can fail to be comfortably well off  in America unless they blow their seed money on fancy cars or too many babies (which happens far too often). So is it the responsibility of those who plan their future to subsidize the extravagances of those who don’t in some share-the-pie socialist scheme? To ever be held hostage to the procreative and gimme-gimme power of mindlessness?

I don’t think so. In fact, I doubt that Joe Bageant and other share-the-wealth types would ever consider giving up their portion of goodies over and above the world per person average to make it truly egalitarian. It ain’t gonna happen, folks. Never-the-less, he makes some good points in a colorful way.

For example consider this quote from his chapter, REPUBLICANS BY DEFAULT:

Much of the ongoing battle for America’s soul is about healing the souls of these (victimized) Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of “heroes” and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the “price of freedom.” Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire. (“American Empire! I like the sound of that!” they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.)

“The people” doing our hardest work and fighting our wars are not altruistic and probably never were. They don’t give a rat’s bunghole about the world’s poor or the planet or animals or anything else. Not really. “The people” like cheap gas. They like chasing post-Thanksgiving Day Christmas sales. And if fascism comes, they will like that too if the cost of gas isn’t too high and Comcast comes through with a twenty-four hour NFL channel.

That is the American hologram. That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique. And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads. Working people do not deny reality. They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction. Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That’s what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.

Or this:

Most disturbingly, the Iraq War, despite all the noise, is at this writing in 2006 a distant thing that occasionally spits a coffin in our direction containing some local working-class son or daughter. The flag-draped box is shown on the front page of the local paper, everyone salutes and remarks on how sad it is, but really nobody but the soldier’s family and church gives a hoot. They really don’t. You can see it in their eyes. The new Washington Nationals baseball franchise over in D.C. gets far, far more discussion than the war, dead locals or no dead locals. It is one of the hologram’s biggest media myths that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq. There was a time when that would have been true , but long ago our lives were numbed by the money grind and by the birth-to-death drenching in marketing and messages and sports spectacle, by the complete absence of genuine public questioning of the notion that America is the best nation on earth, superior in all things and therefore unassailable.

Consequently, there is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but, in this town at least, it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead. A community that has become so numb that it no longer mourns its own dead cannot be called a community, and certainly cannot be expected to mourn the children of Iraq. People so trapped in an imagined America projected daily for profit by the media cannot possibly grasp how the massacre of innocent people thousands of miles away can be used to condition in them a reflexive nationalist spirit, fostering a vacant unity in the face of the profound degeneration of our republic.

Or this admission from the chapter, THE DEEP-FRIED, DOUBLE-WIDE LIFESTYLE may offer a clue as to where Bageant is coming from—his own Scots-Irish heritage. He calls it honesty. To me it smacks of bare naked envy:

America, as we are so often told, is a classless society. And without classes there can never be a class war (which does not prevent any politician who mentions class being accused of fomenting one). Well, I’m here to tell ya, honey, class hate between whites does exist. I’m eat up with the stuff! Case in point: Every time I see a local developer’s bimbo wife sporting a fifty-dollar manicure and dropping her honky brat off at the $8,000-a-year Powhatan prep school down the road, I wanna rip her Martha Pink cashmere sweater off and stomp it. Every time I see some old-boy UVA lawyer posturing at the brew pub, I want to whup him upside the jaw with his authentic English ale glass. And I know I’m not alone in these feelings—I’m just willing to be honest about it. But for the most part, while the working woman who tracks freight on a computer screen in the K-mart warehouse may resent Mrs. Pink Cashmere, her dislike is usually limited to giving her the finger when Mrs. Pink backs out in front of her in the mall parking lot. The truth is that she is afraid of Mrs. Pink. She has always been afraid of Mrs. Pink.

And again, from THE DEEP FRIED, DOUBLE WIDE LIFESTYLE:

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. We just burn up ever-scarcer petroleum in the ever-expanding suburbs built with mortgage money lent to people who haven’t a clue. Rick Ostrander (a realtor) writes me this morning: “With inventories of unsold homes now increasing and appreciation rates flattening or decreasing, plus all the other Peak Oil/global warming shit hitting, I think we’ll start to see major bankruptcies of lenders foundering with scads of unsellable housing stock on their books. And little tribes of squatters, gardeners, and salvage artists moving from vacant house to vacant house. The McMansion folks with their unheatable foyers and 5,000-square-foot master suites and ‘too big to mow, too small to plow’ yards are at least as dependent on two whomp-ass incomes as Joe Sixpack is on the wifey’s part-time gig driving a school bus. It won’t be too long before we’re dismantling those McM’s for their copper and firewood and gardening those three-acre ‘estate lots like coolies.”

Or this concentrated blast at the nation’s built-in consumption oriented lifestyle:

Having squandered all of our postwar wealth on construction of a vast non-sustainable suburban infrastructure, we are now trapped in a “psychology of previous investment,” as James Howard Kunstler calls it. Letting go of the very thing that is sinking us is impossible for anyone like Tommy or Mike or Nance or Buck to imagine. How could we ever get loose of such an America: the cineplexes, outlet stores, tri-level overpasses, eight-thousand-square-foot “Tyvek houses, disposable double-wides, imported vitro ceramic gas ranges for the doctors’ wives and Wal-Mart barbecues for guys like Pootie and me, Hummers and Hondas and Game Boys and Dale Earnhardt memorial crockpots and twelve-bucks-a-pair Chinese made fake Birkenstocks, the big box stores and Olive Garden … the entire buzzing, blinking, digital phantasmagoria.

It has been an orgy so glorious and unholy, so mindless that we have now eaten our seed crop in our spiraling consumerism. Our political masters look the other way. The Republicans have proclaimed the entire disastrous mess to be the lifestyle we are entitled to as Americans, and therefore non-negotiable. The Democrats, even when they do have power, remain terrified of proposing any real change that would release us from our oil and sprawl addiction. To break free from our utter dependence upon reckless issuance of mortgages and the entire credit card business and invest in mass transit.

Global banking knows it. Top government officials know it. Most of the “developed world” understands it. And our White House leadership knows it, even as they, lost in pirate schemes for power, plunge toward the precipice, mad old men who’ve commandeered the nation as their getaway car, hoping to make an Evel Knievel jump over the canyon, hoping to get away clean with the whole shebang, the oil, the weapons contracts, everything…while from the backseat the silver-spooners and the chickenhawk boys are yelling, “Fuck the oil slick, George, stomp it!”

And then there is this, from the chapter, AMERICAN HOLOGRAM:

Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we receive the conditioning required to sustain our acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit-center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects of the corporate-sponsored hologram.

We live in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords. From inside the hologram there is no history, no memory, no way to equate the tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, and the home mortgage banks with the kind of debt bondage they actually represent. Yet we must pay such tribute to be allowed to survive in our society, even if that tribute is a trailer payment at usury rates or allowing a credit card company access to our medical insurance payment history. We must trade liberty and privacy in increments for comfort and perceived security. That has been the Devil’s bargain from the beginning. If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try the door.

America’s much-ballyhooed liberty is largely fictional. Three

Percent of us are either in the joint playing dress-up with some jailhouse papa or on parole and linked with our vast networks of prisons and proxy jailers via electronic tracking devices. One quarter of all the prisoners on earth are in American prisons by the hand of their own government. My own beloved wife does not find this particularly disturbing, and far too many of my friends find it comforting. The rest of us are captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund. A decade ago financial advisers deemed $100,000 adequate for retirement. As of this writing, KIiplinger’s says half a million dollars and up. More simply put, you can never have enough money, period.

I’ve included enough quotes to give a taste of the book. Bageant has a way with irony and sarcasm that make the book interesting and hard to lay aside. He delivers what one could say on the one hand is a “love song to the working poor” while at the same time divulging bitter, embarrassing diagnostics on their condition. As a portrait of a class of Americans, this is an excellent work, truly insightful.  Highly recommended reading.             
 

© 2007 R. Leland Waldrip