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 102
... high school , I once watched Rubbermaid Carolyn , who was working poor , broad - faced , and less attractive in those days , stifle tears and pretend to be unaffected when a doctor's daughter named Zemma mocked her for her rather ratty ...
... high school , I once watched Rubbermaid Carolyn , who was working poor , broad - faced , and less attractive in those days , stifle tears and pretend to be unaffected when a doctor's daughter named Zemma mocked her for her rather ratty ...
Síða 130
... High School and a member of the high school's Civil War Club . One day , after participating in a local reenactment of the Battle of Chancellorsville , he threw his Yankee uniform and blank - firing replica musket into his vehicle ...
... High School and a member of the high school's Civil War Club . One day , after participating in a local reenactment of the Battle of Chancellorsville , he threw his Yankee uniform and blank - firing replica musket into his vehicle ...
Síða 163
... high school or who think that a year or so of any sort of training after high school is enough . ( Liberals can be grateful they are not all registered voters . As it stands , Christian fundamentalists make up 25 percent of those ...
... high school or who think that a year or so of any sort of training after high school is enough . ( Liberals can be grateful they are not all registered voters . As it stands , Christian fundamentalists make up 25 percent of those ...
Efni
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
American Serfs | 19 |
Republicans by Default | 51 |
Höfundarréttur | |
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