Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

by Joe Bageant

Book Overview

Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, 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.

By 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307339378
• ISBN13: 9780307339379
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Long overdue

This is an extremely important book that is long overdue. It addresses issues that typical progressives are either embarassed by, choose to overlook, or are simply not exposed to. This book has great potential to bring a wider, more compassionate, and more inclusive perspective to those of us who hunger for real change, but are too often caught up in our narrow point of view.

Serious Book Highly Recommended

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 educ

A comprehensive analysis of America's class war

I've been reading Joe Bageant on the Internet for several years and he has been and is one of my favorite commentators on life in America. "Deer Hunting with Jesus" brings together all of the themes that Joe has written about in a very readable and comprehensive book. I find Joe Bageant very valuable, because he emphasizes two points which you don't hear very much about. First, that there are a lot of people (the ones he writes about) in America who are essentially ignored by the popular culture, but yet who are very significant for many reasons (which he also writes about). The second reason I really like Joe Bageant is because he has compassion for people, he listens to them. I think he would agree with what Kurt Vonnegut reported his grownup son told him when he asked the big question about life, "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." I believe that this ethos of looking out for each other is necessary to avoid the many horrors that loom in our future (global warming, peak oil, loss of freedom, etc.) and Joe understands this and articulates it very well.

Frightening in its Implications

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.

Highly recommended

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.