Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

Joe Bageant

Jun 2008 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. 

By turns 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 Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it 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 or health care. Alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape. 

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
• 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

Ratings and reviews

This book was interesting for the insight it provides into the social and political outlook of the poor rural whites of Joe Bageant's hometown. That said, the content here is not particularly new, but I appreciated reading about in a first-person perspective. The book is a collection of related essays in a narrative style that I, personally, found off-putting: plaintive, deprecating, and self-deprecating. Not that the style is dismissive or unsympathetic, but rather that it contains an undercurrent of overblown fatalism that, while possibly reflective of the way the people he writes about see the world, seems to hinder rather than help efforts to change the status quo.

Best writing I've ever enjoyed. Was disappointed that he was not balanced in spreading blame. His descriptions were fantastic and everyone should read this author!

1.30pm

About the author

Joe Bageant wrote an online column that made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He has been interviewed on Air America and comments on America’s long history of religious fundamentalism in the BBC/Owl documentary The Vision: Americans on America. He worked as a senior editor for the Primedia History Magazine Group before moving to Belize, where he wrote and sponsored a small development project with the Black Carib families of Hopkins Village. Bageant's other books include: Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant, a collection of essays published posthumously.