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 58
... stand up . My money is on the lying . Top hourly wages at Rubbermaid now run as high as $ 15 , up to $ 32,000 yearly , good money by local standards despite the fact that its purchasing power has dropped by more than a third since the ...
... stand up . My money is on the lying . Top hourly wages at Rubbermaid now run as high as $ 15 , up to $ 32,000 yearly , good money by local standards despite the fact that its purchasing power has dropped by more than a third since the ...
Síða 125
... standing quietly and alone in the natural world leads to contemplation of God's gifts to man . And so , when a book like Meditations for the Deer Stand is seen in his- torical context , it is no joke . For those fortunate enough to ...
... standing quietly and alone in the natural world leads to contemplation of God's gifts to man . And so , when a book like Meditations for the Deer Stand is seen in his- torical context , it is no joke . For those fortunate enough to ...
Síða 181
... stand to be around him . He sometimes killed copperhead snakes with his cane as he walked the roads with his Bible and muttered that they were " adders in the path of the righteous . ” According to family legend , he once took his cane ...
... stand to be around him . He sometimes killed copperhead snakes with his cane as he walked the roads with his Bible and muttered that they were " adders in the path of the righteous . ” According to family legend , he once took his cane ...
Efni
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
American Serfs | 19 |
Republicans by Default | 51 |
Höfundarréttur | |
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