Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War | 
| Author: Joe Bageant
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  84 reviews
Sales Rank: 29682
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 12 x 8.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 030733936X
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.5097309045
EAN: 9780307339362
ASIN: 030733936X
Publication Date: June 19, 2007
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Product Description
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 culture—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”—the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 79 more reviews...
Footnotes!!! October 1, 2008
The picture he paints here is definately one that is very troubling. I am in complete agreement with him as to the scale of the problems that our nations face. I think the way that he is able to humanize the ignorant is commendable. His book ultimately has one major flaw that keeps me from giving it a 5 star rating, that flaw is the lack of footnotes. He does cite diferrent authors along the way keeping me from just assuming that he is on a long rant. Footnotes would have made his message/narrative harder to dimiss or refute. Overall funny, insightful and highly entertaining but has a weakness in it's lack of verifiable sources.
 A genuinely silly book September 28, 2008
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
What was Random House thinking? Mr Bageant is a master of poor spelling, imaginary statistics, boozy condescension and political paranoia. If you seek a semi-literate account of Winchester, Virginia (a town I know well)as the paradigm of American police-state bigotry, violence, hysteria, universal poverty, and congenital stupidity -- all wrapped in a grating 'folksiness' and cloying narcissism -- this is the book for you. Otherwise, it is both unreadable and unedifying. As I say, what was Random House thinking?
 Prophetic Insight into the Demise of the Middle Class September 19, 2008
Not since The Onion's devastatinginly accurate prediction through satire of the future course of the newly selected Bush Administration in January of 2001 have I read a spot-on prophecy which is unfolding before my eyes. Over a year ago Bageant predicted the current meltdown of the mortgage industry and its associated financial enablers through the rediculously risky and preditory loans proffered to the denizens of redneck America for their overvalued modular homes and doublewides. Bageant delineates the rickity trade cycle that creates dollars through the American debt of those least able to repay through the large financial institutions to China and back to Walmart where the working poor are stripped of the few discretionary dollars the have remaining after food, gas and mortgage payments.
This exceptionally well written analysis of the credit cycle is only one of the many aspects of poor working class culture that the author explores in a brilliantly entertaining fashion.
A sobering view of America's Heartland August 29, 2008
I don't have much to add to the already good reviews, I just wanted to get my 5-stars up... I thought it was a great read and very eye opening for me personally.
"The Covert Kingdom" chapter was chillingly scary to read. It's amazing how much grasp religion has on our political system, even with the separation of church and state. There are religious schools that literally breed politicians to spread the religious agenda. You'll have to read the chapter for the details.
My favorite quote from the book is this one:
"That was a slipup on my part. My people don't cite real facts. They recite what they have absorbed from the atmosphere. Theirs is an intellectual life consisting of things that sound right, a blend of modern folk wisdom, cliche, talk radio and Christian radio babble." (page 65)
the USA you don't know August 25, 2008
This explains, in detail, the way republicans have used the poor and lower class of America to create power and wealth for the "already" wealthy power brokers of America. It's a sad commentary on the working class.
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