Hunting Life

Deer Hunting with Jesus Dispatches from Americas Class War

Deer Hunting with Jesus Dispatches from Americas Class War

A raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor-and why they hate liberalism.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is web columnist Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which-like countless American small towns-is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. 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.”

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars A Revelation
I quickly realized I really know very few people like the one’s Mr. Bageant writes about so this book gave me a better, and broader understanding of small town, working class people. I’m no snob but this book fleshed out in great detail (particularly the chapter on guns) things that have had me scratching my head for years and I am very happy for that. Very funny writer, mixed into some melancholia here as the author makes clear the BS, manipulation, and ignorance going on in many corners. This book was very much an eye opener for me. The book also just has that ring of truth I love to discover when someone is writing about people or culture or society. Highly recommended.

5 Stars Its all been said…..
… its a great book that explains the mystery of TWO bush votes….:-)) funny, too.

5 Stars What Makes Joe Blue?
“Deer Hunting with Jesus” is a long meditation on what divides our country, a division that has been described in the past few election cycles as Red States versus Blue States. Further analysis during the baffling Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 showed that it was not the Mason-Dixon Line, not income, not race, not religion that explained the division, but rather the somewhat surprising dichotomy of Urban versus Rural. Even within the Red States the larger cities voted blue, while the solid Blue states voted red out in the farmlands. Only a preponderance of large cities made the Blue States blue.

This information is counter-intuitive on the surface of it, because it was the poor rural folk who suffered disproportionally under Bush policies. Why would rich city folk vote to raise their own taxes, while farmers voted to dismantle the very social safety nets on which they rely?

The answer, as DHWJ finally explains, is education. City dwellers tend to have at least some college, while out in the heartlands an 8th grade education is considered achievement enough. Bageant, who himself comes from the blood Red hills of Northern Virginia, describes the “beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.” He states early in the book (pg.32), “Conservative leaders understand quite well that education has a liberalizing effect on a society.” Country folk — who Bageant is quick to point out are uneducated but not stupid — distrust “high-falootin’ liberal elites” and are likely to get the majority of their news from Rush Limbaugh. Most of them have never traveled outside their own local county, unless it was to war overseas (which is hardly a broadening experience). They don’t read books, magazines or newspapers so their opinions tend to get handed down father-to-son.

This explains the many grammatically-gnarled vitriolic one-star reviews on Amazon of anything Rush has inveighed against.

It explains the rise of charismatic evangelical religions (with their beliefs in demons and miracles). It explains why so many fundies want an Iron Age biblical justice that exactly parallels Sharia Law in Muslim countries. It explains why home schooling, charter schools, and Christian colleges, which like their Muslim equivalents do little more than memorize holy books, are so popular. And why so many of them believe in, and even encourage apocalyptic concepts like End Times, the Rapture and global nuclear war as a sure herald of the promised Second Coming.

Thomas Jefferson warned that we cannot have a functioning democracy without an educated populace. Bageant’s terrifying, sobering & illuminating analysis explains exactly how important — and difficult — a task this will be.

3 Stars Molly “manqué”
Gosh, how I miss Molly Ivins! For part of this decent book, I thought Joe Bageant might replace the loss of Ivins’s funny, heartfelt, lefty voice. But it was not to be.

Bageant is at his best as he describes the quiet, desperate lives of the working poor. He returns to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia and hobnobs with the working class folks he left behind to get an education. Working in mines or at the local Rubbermaid plant, these folks are hard-working, but ultimately controlled by economic and social forces beyond their comprehension. Bageant, a union and social organizer, has tried over the years to help folks stand up to landlords and other social abusers. He tries to understand how these folks, who could truly benefit from progressive policies in this country, so often vote Republican against their self-interest. Bageant makes the best case I have seen about the causes. Part of it stems from well-meaning liberals who have their hearts in the right place but are often reluctant to actually rub shoulders with the people they care about. Meanwhile, the local establishment — landlords, lawyers and real estate dealers, are working together at the local level to get their cut of the action at the expense of their less well-connected neighbors. Reluctant to put themselves in a bigger bind than they are already in, the people turn to patriotism, churches and the entertainment industry (especially talk radio) — which basically hammer home the value of staying in their place.

As much as I liked the book, I faltered about halfway through. I found Bageant’s political tirades tiresome. I put the book down and never picked it up again. Too bad. The picture Bageant paints of the working class is priceless and heartbreaking. These people deserve far more than they get. And the world needs an author who wont get caught up in his own sermonizing.

4 Stars Gifted Good-Ole-Boy Gripes About God-fearing, Gun-toting, Gullible Gomer Pyles
Mr. Bageant is a male version of Barbara Ehrenreich (author of “Nickel and Dimed”), but much, much funnier. The book is informative, highly opinionated and caustic beyond measure. He is genuinely upset about the plight of the dumb-as-dirt people who live in the town of his childhood. He does a commendable job of fleshing out and explaining a sizeable, white, uneducated subculture who are probably foreign to most metropolitan intellectuals. Whatever your opinion of the author, you got to give the guy credit for having foresight. In Mr. Bageant’s book, he predicted the home-lending meltdown prior to the actual event. It was obvious to the author that the loosey-goosey financial scams peddled to his illiterate townspeople spelled a manure storm of historic proportions was bearing down on our nation. Mr. Bageant’s rant is well worth reading. Unfortunately, I may never sleep comfortably again.

Buy/More Info