Since I am neither a deer hunter nor a close neighbor of Jesus, why should I be interested in reading a book called Deer Hunting with Jesus.  Because the title drew me, and the following excerpt on the book flap captivated me.

After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant (author) 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.

As a resident of a state, formerly known as a swing state, more recently counted among the red states, and currently showing some maroon overtones, I figured I might learn something useful about the cultural makeup of my neighborhood and beyond. I wanted to understand the divide that separates the Rural Red from Urban Blue in our state. And the author, Joe Bageant, delivers in no uncertain terms.

He speaks to the subject of “deep fried and double wide”, the importance of the gun culture and how urban liberals just don’t get it, and of charismatic religious movements.  He tells of the futility of lives of the Lynddie Englands and their struggles for survival. Many are descended from the American Scots Irish, and Bageant supplies the following for our contemplation:

  Since arriving in America during the first seventy five years of the eighteenth century, Calvinist Ulster Scots have constituted a parallel culture to that of the enlightened Yankee liberals.  Scots-Irish Calvinist values all but guarantee anger and desire for vengeance against what is perceived as elite authority, college-educated secular people who run the schools, the media and the courts.  One Calvinist premise has always dominated:  The word of God supercedes any and all government authority.  Period.  That same flaming brand of Calvinism brought here by the Ulster Scots launched American Christian Fundamentalism. Now it threatens to breach the separation of church and state… indeed its most vehement elements push for a nuclear holy war…there are millions of Americans who believe we should nuke North Korea and Iran, seize the Middle East’s oil. “Kick their ass and take their gas”..

This is an immigrant movement that arrived initially in Pennsylvania, drifted south into Virginia and then westward across the south all the way to Texas.  They were used by the powerful to man the frontier, to overcome resistant native populations and to club Mother Nature into submission.  Today they are used to wield the club in Vietnam and Iraq and any other place that seems to need clubbing.

Bageant labels “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, god-fearing, church going, gun loving America that has never set a foot inside Starbucks” as the unacknowledged parallel world of educated urban liberals. Life is hard for these people and getting harder.  Existing on a continuum between complete insecurity to the not quite complete insecurity of having a job that may be outsourced any minute, there remains a strong belief in personal responsibility, a strong aversion to welfare, for themselves and others. The Reagan myth of the Welfare Queen takes root quickly here.  Anti-union, pro-globalization, they are mainly Republican.  They work hard and there is little time and perhaps less inclination toward intellectual activity.  What they get they usually get via a substandard education system and the ubiquitous TV?

The book is an easy reader, but it packs the burn of a triple martini, or maybe a double six pack, (whatever that is) while providing a compassionate look at the lives and struggles of the rural white working class.  Although most of us occupy at least a facsimile of the parallel world, it much behooves us to be aware of the origins and motivations of this world and to remain critically alert to the corporate and political perpetuators of cradle to grave hand to mouth lives. This is our counterpart, our political competition, Bush’s base, and we ignore at our peril.

But grab a copy of the book and read a few pages. It gives an antidote to what Pageant calls “the American Hologram” – the televised, corporative virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious reality of American life.