Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War | 
 enlarge | Author: Joe Bageant
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $13.99
You Save: $11.01 (44%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 58624
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 12 x 8.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 030733936X
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.5097309045
EAN: 9780307339362
ASIN: 030733936X
Publication Date: June 19, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: NEW - IT IS NEW - In its New Dust cover and without a remainder mark
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Product Description
After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, 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. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.
A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomics”; the ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical thinking” of the Christian right. (Bageant’s brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, 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.”
Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs “the American hologram”—the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
Excellent Rant July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an excellent rant by an admitted leftist liberal. The author returns to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia to give us a revealing look at working class America, complete with gun-toters and Fundamentalist Christians.
What he reveals in a series of chapters that read like long editorial columns, is a generation of working class people typical of "middle America" who are losing economic ground in a hurry. He points to their $9 per hour jobs that pay a dollar or two an hour more than their parents' jobs but without benefits nor security. It is a sobering look at reality.
He also gives a unique look at fundamentalist Christian thinking and their desire to place Christians educated in private religious schools in the government to advance their agenda.
Beyond the chapters on economics and Christiandom, there is an excellent chapter on guns and how the liberals in this country misread the Second Amendment and America's attitudes towards guns - a not so liberal view with statistics to back his gun rights position.
Mr. Bageant, as noted, is a self-professed liberal. He takes the expected shots at the Bush administration, the Republicans and corporate America. However, he is not easy on liberals. He bashes them for being completely unconnected to the working class whom they profess to represent, noting their hypocrisies in failing to connect on a person level with this class and understanding their true plight. The dems have lost their votes and he seems to think the loss is deserved.
Nor is the author is that easy on the working class from whom he came and who he describes in the book. He finds them uninterested in the world at large and lacking ambition, especially educationally.
The book has many terrific insights for liberals and conservatives (of which I am one). It's failing is its lack of suggestions for resolution. Beyond advocating universal (good) education, much of the book is pointing out short-comings in our system. Where he does offer solutions, they are somewhat tangential with no suggestion of how to pay for them.
It is a very good look at the working class and their plight in modern America. As the author points out, most of the people who read his book will not have any real contact with this class - which is also part of the problem.
This is recommended as a good look at a very large population in America that is ignored in most quarters - the working white poor. They need help desperately and soon in more facets of life than just health care.
 Serious Book Highly Recommended July 2, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review 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 sad, since Thomas Jefferson said so clearly that a Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
Other books I recommend (and have reviewed):
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Left Hand of God, The: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
DVD (links poverty and military recruitment):
Why We Fight
heartfelt description of a misunderstand tribe June 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Joe Bageant's "Deer Hunting with Jesus" is a heartfelt description of our misunderstand southern families. For anyone who has grown up eating "government cheese" in a sweltering mobile home, the characters in Bageant's book will be like kin. For anyone who has wondered, "how do Americans actually vote for George Bush?", Bageant's book will bring some understanding.
You could imagine that a book titled "Deer Hunting with Jesus" would be ridiculing the rednecks of our country. When you read, though, you realize that the author is trying to make sense of some tragedies. For example, the first of Bageant's chapters is titled "American Serfs." There Bageant reviews very personal accounts of a failing education system, high medical costs, and the wall of strong class barriers. The working poor who struggle under this system have very few true opportunities and Bageant does a good job of personalizing this story.
In another chapter entitled "Valley of the Gun," the author discusses the deep emotional attachment that rural Americans have with their guns. He doesn't mock. He tells profound stories of fathers teaching their sons to hunt and of rural people who fear being stripped of their rights to protect themselves against a potentially intrusive government. I was impressed that Bageant was able to give such a nuanced view of such a difficult issue.
Other chapters cover such issues as religious fundamentalism, mortgage systems which entrap the uneducated, and the bellicose ideas the government is able to pour into the heads of high-school dropouts. These are all issues that affect the American heartland, and Bageant seems to speak from his heart in a way that enlightens the reader.
In summary, I much enjoyed the book and I learned much.
Deer Hunting With Jesus June 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for anyone considering moving, migrating, or retiring into the Southeastern United States. Many "transplants" into this area isolate themselves into communities which ostricizes them from ever attempting to familiarize themselves with the locals. Others make feeble attempts but without any basic foundations as this book relates often "give-up" in ignorant frustration.
This book is also an "eye Opener" to and for many of the long time residents in these areas who sometimes ponder their own predicament and those of their families, friends, and neighbors. It can give them an outside insight as to how they view and are viewed by people from other localities. I hope it encourages some to pursue higher academic interests and discover alternatives to hopelessness and despair. Desire for improvement starts from within with a bit of encouragement sometimes from without. Thank You, Don Ward
GOP evangelicals don't get it June 10, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Republican disdain for sexual education other than abstinence only in schools results in a far greater rate of teen pregnancies and teen abortions than in countries where contraception is taught.
Many in the GOP who oppose abortion also oppose sex education; they prefer not to see that sex education, which they oppose, leads to a much lower rate of abortions, which they also oppose.
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