Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class WarCrown Publishers, 2007 - 273 síður 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 cultureâ€"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†â€"the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life. |
From inside the book
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Síða 162
... Brother Mike has been preacher , youth pastor , bus outreach manager , and general all - round wrangler for God at this church since 1974. That was the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army , Nixon resigned ...
... Brother Mike has been preacher , youth pastor , bus outreach manager , and general all - round wrangler for God at this church since 1974. That was the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army , Nixon resigned ...
Síða 176
... brothers , we end all our meetings and phone calls with the words " I love you . " And we do love each other . And I can see Mike's genuine pain that I am not saved . One more time I , the prodigal brother , snatched from proffered ...
... brothers , we end all our meetings and phone calls with the words " I love you . " And we do love each other . And I can see Mike's genuine pain that I am not saved . One more time I , the prodigal brother , snatched from proffered ...
Síða 178
... Brother Mike , " I said , " do you cast out demons often ? " I must say here that one of the biggest quandaries in writing this book is that people trust me not to make fools of them . Brother Mike talks straight and is never evasive ...
... Brother Mike , " I said , " do you cast out demons often ? " I must say here that one of the biggest quandaries in writing this book is that people trust me not to make fools of them . Brother Mike talks straight and is never evasive ...
Efni
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
American Serfs | 19 |
Republicans by Default | 51 |
Höfundarréttur | |
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