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
Niðurstöður 1 - 3 af 83
Síða 120
... hunters that they let my dad take the three deer , one each on their tags , on the last legal day of hunting season . Everyone knew that my dad , the best shot in the family , had the most like- lihood of getting more than one of the ...
... hunters that they let my dad take the three deer , one each on their tags , on the last legal day of hunting season . Everyone knew that my dad , the best shot in the family , had the most like- lihood of getting more than one of the ...
Síða 122
... hunting nowadays , thanks to com- puter games and television . Anyway , surviving the brush torture test of manhood earned us the right to sit around with the men- folk when they told hunting stories - so long as we kept our mouths shut ...
... hunting nowadays , thanks to com- puter games and television . Anyway , surviving the brush torture test of manhood earned us the right to sit around with the men- folk when they told hunting stories - so long as we kept our mouths shut ...
Síða 124
... hunt . If you were raised up hunting , you know that it is a ritual of death and plenitude , an animistic rite wherein a man blows the living heart out of one of God's creatures and then , if he deserves to be called a hunter , feels ...
... hunt . If you were raised up hunting , you know that it is a ritual of death and plenitude , an animistic rite wherein a man blows the living heart out of one of God's creatures and then , if he deserves to be called a hunter , feels ...
Efni
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
American Serfs | 19 |
Republicans by Default | 51 |
Höfundarréttur | |
6 aðrir hlutar ekki sýndir
Aðrar útgáfur - View all
Common terms and phrases
Abu Ghraib Ameri American antigun Bageant believe blood Borderer boys Brother Mike bucks Bush called Charles Graner Christian church conservative corporate culture damned deer Democrats demons Dink doctors Dottie folks Fort Ashby fundamentalist fundamentalist Christian going gun control heartland hell high school hologram hospital hunting Internet Iraq Jesus kids kill labor Laurita lawyers liberals lives loan look Lynndie Lynndie England Medicare middle class million modular home mortgage Nance neoconservative never Newell Rubbermaid numbers percent person Pine Bush plastic political poor Pootie redneck Republican Romney Royal Lunch Rubbermaid Ruth says Scots Scots-Irish Second Amendment Shenandoah Social Security streets talk talk radio television tell thing tion town trailer truck Ulster Ulster Scots urban Virginia vote Wal-Mart watch Winchester Winchester Medical Center workers working-class