K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
Deer Hunting with Jesus
Things You May Not Know
June 19, 2007
Long ago, having had to write more book reviews than I wanted, I
decided that I would rather have pile surgery by an ocelot than write
another. Then I got an advance copy of Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe
Bageant, and realized that I had to come out of retirement. It's, you
know, like noblesse oblige. Here goes.
Bageant is a redneck, and his book is about rednecks, who are a huge,
sprawling class of people found everywhere but mostly invisible. They
aren't what people think they are. (Though, given that a strange
mixture of folk read this column, I'd better be careful with
generalizations.) They actually have lives, and problems, and stories.
They can be amusing, admirable, exasperating, and pathetic. Mostly
nobody cares. If you truly are interested in how America works, in
what's out there down the side roads, shell out the lousy $16.50 and
read the sucker.
Now, quickly before I lose all my readers: Two things Deer Hunting
isn't. First, although Bageant has a sense of humor, and doesn't hide
it well, the book is not--is not at all--the sort of cutesy-phony
redneck wit that floats around the internet ("You know you are a
redneck if you have a '54 Merc on blocks outside your trailer....")
True, a certain folk wisdom shines through in parts. ("Things I have
learned at Burt's Tavern: (1) Never shack up with a divorced woman who
is two house payments behind, and swears you are the best sex she ever
had. (2) Never eat ****tail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how
big the bet gets.") But this is salad dressing. The book is dead
serious.
Second, it certainly is not academic sociology, which reads like a
truss ad but without the insight and grace. The guy is very sharp and
well read and he's been around. He spent the Vietnam years throwing
airplanes off an aircraft carrier, and later edited Military History
magazine. Further, he is an authority on bars, hunting, lousy jobs,
and misery. He has been there.
Now, politics. Bageant is in favor of universal health care, which to
conservatives is worse than finding half a bull roach in your egg-
burger. We've all heard the tales of welfare queens and exploitation
of the dread entitlements by shiftless parasites who breed like
Renaissance popes at public expense. Some of that exists, chiefly in
cities. Food stamps regularly get turned into drug-and-booze money.
All sorts of swindles exist, chiefly in cities.
But the people Bageant writes about don't fit this story. They are
folk who worked all their lives, worked hard for **** wages at
stultifying jobs and always showed up. And now, at the ends of their
lives, they've got nothing. Well, they've got diabetes, which I guess
is something. And maybe congestive heart failure and a pittance of
social security. Know what pharmaceuticals cost? The choice comes to
pills or heating oil.
It ain't right.
Mostly he writes about Winchester, Virginia, where he grew up and now
lives again. But Winchester is pretty much anywhere and everywhere.
You just don't see it. Drive a few miles south of DC on Route 301 in
Maryland and you come to Waldorf. There, in the Wigwam, a down-
demographic girly bar, you see (or did see; it's been years) the dump
truck drivers with baseball hats on backwards and triceps flapping
like water balloons. Except very few see them. Rednecks. They hoot and
holler and chaff with the girls and probably aren't who your mother
wanted you to play with.
You don't see that these guys work as "independent contractors,"
meaning no retirement or benefits, at sorry wages, and live a paycheck
or two away from nothing, in crumbling fifth-rate modular homes or
trailers that lose value instead of gaining it. When they're thirty
and healthy, it's not bad. It's at the end that things get rough, or
when someone gets sick.
Rednecks, as Bageant explains in detail, are dumber than dirt. They're
not bad people. You can heist a brew with them and talk about NASCAR
and gobble wings and, with a little effort, come away liking them. But
they don't know squat. They are easily suckered by real-estate
scammers and corporate con artists. The level of genuine illiteracy in
America is much higher than most think. Add people who can barely
read, and therefore don't, and have never read a book in their lives,
and you get s disconcerting number. In thousands of Winchesters, this
is the norm.
Everything comes from television, mostly Fox News, and from Rush
Limbaugh. They don't have passports, may not know what one is, and
seldom leave the county where they were born.
Bageant knows what he is talking about. I know he does because I grew
up mostly in small Southern towns and half-empty counties, including
King George County, Virginia, a few hours from Winchester. Same
people. I dated the girls and got drunk with the boys and saw how they
lived. Those people worked. My best girlfriend in high school got up
at four in the morning to help her father pull crab pots on the
Potomac. She was pretty as any picture could hope to be, even with
lots of imagination and on acid, but she could have thrown a
Volkswagen over a four-storey building. They worked.
The thing is that people who went to college mostly don't know about
rednecks, or how many there are, or why they do what they do.What they
think they know is usually wrong. I once talked to a psychologist from
some semi-Ivy school and the subject of guns came up. She immediately
launched into gunsaretokillpeoplegunsaretokillpeople, essentially pre-
recorded. "Why else would anyone want guns, except to kill people?"
I mentioned hunting, and it bounced off. No response, just didn't
register. She was intelligent and not mean-spirited, but didn't know
that to Bageant's people, to my high-school classmates, a hundred
pounds of dressed deer meat meant eating decently. She thought guns
were to kill people because in cities, all she knew, that's what the
urban savages used them for. Fact is, redneckdom is heavily armed and
neither Bageant nor I can remember anyone being shot, purposefully or
accidentally. She wouldn't have believed it. Guns are to kill people.
And my god, the born-again evangelical Christians who are waiting to
be sucked up by the Rapture as if by a god-powered Hoovermatic vacuum
cleaner. They are serious as melanoma and could give any Muslim sect
known a run for its extremism money. I'm running out of space, but
Bageant knows them by their first names, grew up with them, and
doesn't chrome-plate them to make them seem shinier than they are. The
country a lot of people live in isn't the one they think they live
in.
Worth a read. Funny, thought-provoking and, though it creeps up on
you, profound. Cheap, too..
http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm
Things You May Not Know
June 19, 2007
Long ago, having had to write more book reviews than I wanted, I
decided that I would rather have pile surgery by an ocelot than write
another. Then I got an advance copy of Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe
Bageant, and realized that I had to come out of retirement. It's, you
know, like noblesse oblige. Here goes.
Bageant is a redneck, and his book is about rednecks, who are a huge,
sprawling class of people found everywhere but mostly invisible. They
aren't what people think they are. (Though, given that a strange
mixture of folk read this column, I'd better be careful with
generalizations.) They actually have lives, and problems, and stories.
They can be amusing, admirable, exasperating, and pathetic. Mostly
nobody cares. If you truly are interested in how America works, in
what's out there down the side roads, shell out the lousy $16.50 and
read the sucker.
Now, quickly before I lose all my readers: Two things Deer Hunting
isn't. First, although Bageant has a sense of humor, and doesn't hide
it well, the book is not--is not at all--the sort of cutesy-phony
redneck wit that floats around the internet ("You know you are a
redneck if you have a '54 Merc on blocks outside your trailer....")
True, a certain folk wisdom shines through in parts. ("Things I have
learned at Burt's Tavern: (1) Never shack up with a divorced woman who
is two house payments behind, and swears you are the best sex she ever
had. (2) Never eat ****tail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how
big the bet gets.") But this is salad dressing. The book is dead
serious.
Second, it certainly is not academic sociology, which reads like a
truss ad but without the insight and grace. The guy is very sharp and
well read and he's been around. He spent the Vietnam years throwing
airplanes off an aircraft carrier, and later edited Military History
magazine. Further, he is an authority on bars, hunting, lousy jobs,
and misery. He has been there.
Now, politics. Bageant is in favor of universal health care, which to
conservatives is worse than finding half a bull roach in your egg-
burger. We've all heard the tales of welfare queens and exploitation
of the dread entitlements by shiftless parasites who breed like
Renaissance popes at public expense. Some of that exists, chiefly in
cities. Food stamps regularly get turned into drug-and-booze money.
All sorts of swindles exist, chiefly in cities.
But the people Bageant writes about don't fit this story. They are
folk who worked all their lives, worked hard for **** wages at
stultifying jobs and always showed up. And now, at the ends of their
lives, they've got nothing. Well, they've got diabetes, which I guess
is something. And maybe congestive heart failure and a pittance of
social security. Know what pharmaceuticals cost? The choice comes to
pills or heating oil.
It ain't right.
Mostly he writes about Winchester, Virginia, where he grew up and now
lives again. But Winchester is pretty much anywhere and everywhere.
You just don't see it. Drive a few miles south of DC on Route 301 in
Maryland and you come to Waldorf. There, in the Wigwam, a down-
demographic girly bar, you see (or did see; it's been years) the dump
truck drivers with baseball hats on backwards and triceps flapping
like water balloons. Except very few see them. Rednecks. They hoot and
holler and chaff with the girls and probably aren't who your mother
wanted you to play with.
You don't see that these guys work as "independent contractors,"
meaning no retirement or benefits, at sorry wages, and live a paycheck
or two away from nothing, in crumbling fifth-rate modular homes or
trailers that lose value instead of gaining it. When they're thirty
and healthy, it's not bad. It's at the end that things get rough, or
when someone gets sick.
Rednecks, as Bageant explains in detail, are dumber than dirt. They're
not bad people. You can heist a brew with them and talk about NASCAR
and gobble wings and, with a little effort, come away liking them. But
they don't know squat. They are easily suckered by real-estate
scammers and corporate con artists. The level of genuine illiteracy in
America is much higher than most think. Add people who can barely
read, and therefore don't, and have never read a book in their lives,
and you get s disconcerting number. In thousands of Winchesters, this
is the norm.
Everything comes from television, mostly Fox News, and from Rush
Limbaugh. They don't have passports, may not know what one is, and
seldom leave the county where they were born.
Bageant knows what he is talking about. I know he does because I grew
up mostly in small Southern towns and half-empty counties, including
King George County, Virginia, a few hours from Winchester. Same
people. I dated the girls and got drunk with the boys and saw how they
lived. Those people worked. My best girlfriend in high school got up
at four in the morning to help her father pull crab pots on the
Potomac. She was pretty as any picture could hope to be, even with
lots of imagination and on acid, but she could have thrown a
Volkswagen over a four-storey building. They worked.
The thing is that people who went to college mostly don't know about
rednecks, or how many there are, or why they do what they do.What they
think they know is usually wrong. I once talked to a psychologist from
some semi-Ivy school and the subject of guns came up. She immediately
launched into gunsaretokillpeoplegunsaretokillpeople, essentially pre-
recorded. "Why else would anyone want guns, except to kill people?"
I mentioned hunting, and it bounced off. No response, just didn't
register. She was intelligent and not mean-spirited, but didn't know
that to Bageant's people, to my high-school classmates, a hundred
pounds of dressed deer meat meant eating decently. She thought guns
were to kill people because in cities, all she knew, that's what the
urban savages used them for. Fact is, redneckdom is heavily armed and
neither Bageant nor I can remember anyone being shot, purposefully or
accidentally. She wouldn't have believed it. Guns are to kill people.
And my god, the born-again evangelical Christians who are waiting to
be sucked up by the Rapture as if by a god-powered Hoovermatic vacuum
cleaner. They are serious as melanoma and could give any Muslim sect
known a run for its extremism money. I'm running out of space, but
Bageant knows them by their first names, grew up with them, and
doesn't chrome-plate them to make them seem shinier than they are. The
country a lot of people live in isn't the one they think they live
in.
Worth a read. Funny, thought-provoking and, though it creeps up on
you, profound. Cheap, too..
http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm