Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant
Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. New York: Crown Publishers.
http://www.joebageant.com/
13 - In the days before the spine of the labor movement was crushed, back when you could be a gun owner and a liberal without any conflict, membes of the political left supported these workers, stood on the lines taking beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now there is practically no labor movement, and large numbers on the left are comfortably ensconced int he true middle class, which is only about 20 to 30 percent of Americans, as well shall see.
26 - In the old days class warfar was between the rich and the poor, and that's the kind of class war I can sink my teeth into. These days it is clearly between the educated and the uneducated, which of course does make it a culture war, if that's the way you choose to describe it.
28 - The lives an intellectual cultures of these, the hardest-working people, are not just stunted by the smallness of the society in which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and businesspeople in whose interests it is to have a cheap, unquestioning, and compliant labor force paying high rents and big medical bills.
29 - Meanwhile, the conservative Republicans ballyho "personal responsibility" to working-class employees like the guys and gals here at Royal Lunch. Most working people around here believe in the buzz phrase "personal responsibility." [. . .] Consequently, they don't like
30 - social spending to give people a lift. but self-reliant as they are, what real chance do they have living on wages that do not allw them to accumulate savings? What chance do they have living from paycheck to paycheck, praying there will be no layoffs at J.C. Penney or Toll Brothers Homes or Home Depot? [. . .]
We first started hearing about the average Joe needing to take complete responsibility for his condition in life, with no help from the government, during the seventies, when Cold War conservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz dubbed themselves "neoconservatives."
31- But what sort of personal responsibility is possible in the neocon environment? A wage earner's only asset is his willingness to give a day's work for a day's pay, the price of which he does not determine. So where does he get the wherewithal to improve his circumstances? He gets that wherewithal from the wages he earns. Bt in the new neocon environment, that wage does not support savings. It does not support higher education. it only allows the wage earner to survive from paycheck to paycheck [. . .]
Admittedly, a real blue-collar middle class still exists in some places, just as unions still exist. But both on are on the ropes [. . .]
64 - Tom is intensely antiunion, which amazes me since I can remeber when he had a Che Guevara poster on his apartment wall. You'd think after twenty years in a southern factory a guy would be begging union organizers to sweep through this town like Grant took Richmond. But Tom and most other plant workers here have bought the rightist mantra that goes: "Maybe unions were once valuable, but they have priced American labor completely out of the market. They always want more money for less production." Tom, like me, has heard this line from birth; we know it by heart. He still believes it.
65 - "Whaaaat? How can you be such a corporate advocate?" I ask.
"I'm not a corporate advocate. I'm for the common worker. When unions demand a twenty percent pay raise for the same amount of output and prevent management from firing the screw-offs, it raises the cost of everything. It makes it just that much harder for the average worker in a nonunion job to survive."
In Tom's world, "unions workers getting paid forty dollars an hour are not the working man" but are "greedy assholes who drive up the price of American cars so the rest of us can't afford them." Never mind that very few union workers make $40 an hour or that union membership is down to about 12 percent of the American workforce and by no means dictates the price of cars or anything else. It's maddening to talk to Tom on this subject. But when you do, you are talking to the real Joe Sixpack/NASCAR Papa that the media bullshit about.
"Give me one example of a union demanding a twenty percent pay increase for zero productivity growth."
That was a slipup on my part. Most people don't cite real facts. They recite what they have absorbed from the atmosphere. [. . .] So I know there is no use in pointing out that corporations are very good at increasing productivity using every means available except increasing wages and benefits. Or that corporations are beholden to Wall Street, not to the workers, and vastly prefer Asian sweatshops to the bargaining tables of free
66 - men and women. In Tom Henderson's world, there are no sweatshops. "The Asians in the so-called sweatshops working for two dollars a day are the middle class of their economy," he says. A Limbaugh-ism if ever there was one.
I cannot resist: "So you think we all should be reduced to the level of some guy on a sampan in Asia? Is that what you want for Americans?"
"Well pardon me, ole buddy," he replies, poking around in his crumpled cigarette pack for a Camel, "but I don't think anybody in Washington is asking Tom Henderson what he thinks. But the bottom line is that globalization is in our national interests."
It's not wonder Tom cannot distinguish his own political interests. The very language we use to talk about globalization hides its class structure. "National interest is consistently yapped about in the media without defining exactly who is getting what and how much. So when American workers are told that "the Chinese are taking American jobs," no one points out that the "China threat" is just another global business partnership, one among Chinese elites who supply cheap labor, American capitalists who supply technology, and global capitalists who finance China's exports.
71 - Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladitorial theater of the free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism.
73 - what haunted me was this: Tom is every bit as intelligent as I am. He was a better writer than I was in high school and often said back then that his goal in life was to be a writer, painter, musician. Where did those dreams go? The same place any such dreams go for the children of lower-working-class families. They go out the same door that opportunity for a decent education never walks in through.
78 - Active in her church, Nance does not drink and seldom dates. She is predictably antiunion [. . . ]
Nance is a Republican pretty much by default. She doesn't think of herself as one, but she votes Republican every time. Because of her caste--lower working class, southern, high school educated, fundamentalist Christian--she does not personally know a single registered Democrat. [. . .]
Inconceivable though it may seem to urban Americans, it is easily possible for many working Americans not to know a person of the liberal persuasion. Why? Partly because most middle-class liberals are uncomfortable being around people like Nance. She lives in a modular home close to the interstate and is raising two kids, one of whom has ADHD, is half black, and was fathered by her ex with a previous wife. She sends her kids to a "Christian academy" on a scholarship.
80 - Naturally, there is the ever-present antiunion pressure. From the first employee training and indoctrination sessions, Newell Rubbermaid makes the corporate position clear. this is not really necessary. We learned the lessons as kids. I remember my nineth-grade history teacher at Handley High School spending an entire classroom hour on "communist labor unions." [. . .]
It is safe to say that radio supplies the workers with most their knowledge of things political.
94 - Most disturbingly, the Iraq War, despite all the noise, is at this writing in 2006 a distant thing that occasionally spits a coffin in our direction containing some local working-class son or daughter. The flag-draped box is shown on the front page of the local paper, everyone salutes and remarks on how sad it is, but really nobody but the soldier's family and church gives a hoot. They really don't. [ . . .] It is one of the hologram's biggest media myths that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq. There was a time when that would have been true, but long ago our lives were numbed by the money grind and by the birth-to-death drenching in marketing and messages and sports spectacles, by the complete absence of genuine public questioning of the notion that America is the best nation on earth, superior in all things and therefore unassailable. Consequently, there is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but, in this town at least, it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead.
128 - Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in
129 - those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. [. . .]
So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid.
182 - Yo don't need a degree in sociology to see that the most obvious class indicator in America is religious belief and that religious zeal is concentrated in lower-class and working-class whites.
188 - When I look at the fundamentalists I know personally, I see many kind, brave, and hardworking people, embodying all those things and American is supposed to be. But knowing what they used to be and what they have become, I see something else. I see that one of the most significant yet least understood political events in America is the conversion of millions of people from apolitical Christians into Christian political activists.
200 - Whatever you think of the leash girl of Abu Ghraib, Lynnie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts, for instance), was always her destiny. Nearly half of the three thousand Americans killed thus far in Iraq are from small towns like hers, like mine--towns of fewer than forty thousand. Yet these towns make up only 25 percent of America's population. Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynnie had at the chicken-processing plant, though many deny it or do not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism and youthful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. [. . .]
And don't forget those big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000. Lynnie was supposedly going to college after her enlistment to become a "storm chaser," as in the Helen Hunt movie Twister. Perhaps many poor and working-class kids do go to college on their military benefits. But I can count on one hand the
201 - number I know who did it.
205 - Liberal America in particular lives in thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every working white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture an what James Webb rightly called America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers." Whether educated liberal believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots-Irish and thousands of Scots-Irish-influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.
Years ago, when Newt Gingrich became the first to describe the struggle in these terms, I winced because the truth of what he said was so obvious.
http://www.joebageant.com/
13 - In the days before the spine of the labor movement was crushed, back when you could be a gun owner and a liberal without any conflict, membes of the political left supported these workers, stood on the lines taking beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now there is practically no labor movement, and large numbers on the left are comfortably ensconced int he true middle class, which is only about 20 to 30 percent of Americans, as well shall see.
26 - In the old days class warfar was between the rich and the poor, and that's the kind of class war I can sink my teeth into. These days it is clearly between the educated and the uneducated, which of course does make it a culture war, if that's the way you choose to describe it.
28 - The lives an intellectual cultures of these, the hardest-working people, are not just stunted by the smallness of the society in which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and businesspeople in whose interests it is to have a cheap, unquestioning, and compliant labor force paying high rents and big medical bills.
29 - Meanwhile, the conservative Republicans ballyho "personal responsibility" to working-class employees like the guys and gals here at Royal Lunch. Most working people around here believe in the buzz phrase "personal responsibility." [. . .] Consequently, they don't like
30 - social spending to give people a lift. but self-reliant as they are, what real chance do they have living on wages that do not allw them to accumulate savings? What chance do they have living from paycheck to paycheck, praying there will be no layoffs at J.C. Penney or Toll Brothers Homes or Home Depot? [. . .]
We first started hearing about the average Joe needing to take complete responsibility for his condition in life, with no help from the government, during the seventies, when Cold War conservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz dubbed themselves "neoconservatives."
31- But what sort of personal responsibility is possible in the neocon environment? A wage earner's only asset is his willingness to give a day's work for a day's pay, the price of which he does not determine. So where does he get the wherewithal to improve his circumstances? He gets that wherewithal from the wages he earns. Bt in the new neocon environment, that wage does not support savings. It does not support higher education. it only allows the wage earner to survive from paycheck to paycheck [. . .]
Admittedly, a real blue-collar middle class still exists in some places, just as unions still exist. But both on are on the ropes [. . .]
64 - Tom is intensely antiunion, which amazes me since I can remeber when he had a Che Guevara poster on his apartment wall. You'd think after twenty years in a southern factory a guy would be begging union organizers to sweep through this town like Grant took Richmond. But Tom and most other plant workers here have bought the rightist mantra that goes: "Maybe unions were once valuable, but they have priced American labor completely out of the market. They always want more money for less production." Tom, like me, has heard this line from birth; we know it by heart. He still believes it.
65 - "Whaaaat? How can you be such a corporate advocate?" I ask.
"I'm not a corporate advocate. I'm for the common worker. When unions demand a twenty percent pay raise for the same amount of output and prevent management from firing the screw-offs, it raises the cost of everything. It makes it just that much harder for the average worker in a nonunion job to survive."
In Tom's world, "unions workers getting paid forty dollars an hour are not the working man" but are "greedy assholes who drive up the price of American cars so the rest of us can't afford them." Never mind that very few union workers make $40 an hour or that union membership is down to about 12 percent of the American workforce and by no means dictates the price of cars or anything else. It's maddening to talk to Tom on this subject. But when you do, you are talking to the real Joe Sixpack/NASCAR Papa that the media bullshit about.
"Give me one example of a union demanding a twenty percent pay increase for zero productivity growth."
That was a slipup on my part. Most people don't cite real facts. They recite what they have absorbed from the atmosphere. [. . .] So I know there is no use in pointing out that corporations are very good at increasing productivity using every means available except increasing wages and benefits. Or that corporations are beholden to Wall Street, not to the workers, and vastly prefer Asian sweatshops to the bargaining tables of free
66 - men and women. In Tom Henderson's world, there are no sweatshops. "The Asians in the so-called sweatshops working for two dollars a day are the middle class of their economy," he says. A Limbaugh-ism if ever there was one.
I cannot resist: "So you think we all should be reduced to the level of some guy on a sampan in Asia? Is that what you want for Americans?"
"Well pardon me, ole buddy," he replies, poking around in his crumpled cigarette pack for a Camel, "but I don't think anybody in Washington is asking Tom Henderson what he thinks. But the bottom line is that globalization is in our national interests."
It's not wonder Tom cannot distinguish his own political interests. The very language we use to talk about globalization hides its class structure. "National interest is consistently yapped about in the media without defining exactly who is getting what and how much. So when American workers are told that "the Chinese are taking American jobs," no one points out that the "China threat" is just another global business partnership, one among Chinese elites who supply cheap labor, American capitalists who supply technology, and global capitalists who finance China's exports.
71 - Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladitorial theater of the free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism.
73 - what haunted me was this: Tom is every bit as intelligent as I am. He was a better writer than I was in high school and often said back then that his goal in life was to be a writer, painter, musician. Where did those dreams go? The same place any such dreams go for the children of lower-working-class families. They go out the same door that opportunity for a decent education never walks in through.
78 - Active in her church, Nance does not drink and seldom dates. She is predictably antiunion [. . . ]
Nance is a Republican pretty much by default. She doesn't think of herself as one, but she votes Republican every time. Because of her caste--lower working class, southern, high school educated, fundamentalist Christian--she does not personally know a single registered Democrat. [. . .]
Inconceivable though it may seem to urban Americans, it is easily possible for many working Americans not to know a person of the liberal persuasion. Why? Partly because most middle-class liberals are uncomfortable being around people like Nance. She lives in a modular home close to the interstate and is raising two kids, one of whom has ADHD, is half black, and was fathered by her ex with a previous wife. She sends her kids to a "Christian academy" on a scholarship.
80 - Naturally, there is the ever-present antiunion pressure. From the first employee training and indoctrination sessions, Newell Rubbermaid makes the corporate position clear. this is not really necessary. We learned the lessons as kids. I remember my nineth-grade history teacher at Handley High School spending an entire classroom hour on "communist labor unions." [. . .]
It is safe to say that radio supplies the workers with most their knowledge of things political.
94 - Most disturbingly, the Iraq War, despite all the noise, is at this writing in 2006 a distant thing that occasionally spits a coffin in our direction containing some local working-class son or daughter. The flag-draped box is shown on the front page of the local paper, everyone salutes and remarks on how sad it is, but really nobody but the soldier's family and church gives a hoot. They really don't. [ . . .] It is one of the hologram's biggest media myths that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq. There was a time when that would have been true, but long ago our lives were numbed by the money grind and by the birth-to-death drenching in marketing and messages and sports spectacles, by the complete absence of genuine public questioning of the notion that America is the best nation on earth, superior in all things and therefore unassailable. Consequently, there is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but, in this town at least, it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead.
128 - Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in
129 - those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. [. . .]
So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid.
182 - Yo don't need a degree in sociology to see that the most obvious class indicator in America is religious belief and that religious zeal is concentrated in lower-class and working-class whites.
188 - When I look at the fundamentalists I know personally, I see many kind, brave, and hardworking people, embodying all those things and American is supposed to be. But knowing what they used to be and what they have become, I see something else. I see that one of the most significant yet least understood political events in America is the conversion of millions of people from apolitical Christians into Christian political activists.
200 - Whatever you think of the leash girl of Abu Ghraib, Lynnie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts, for instance), was always her destiny. Nearly half of the three thousand Americans killed thus far in Iraq are from small towns like hers, like mine--towns of fewer than forty thousand. Yet these towns make up only 25 percent of America's population. Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynnie had at the chicken-processing plant, though many deny it or do not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism and youthful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. [. . .]
And don't forget those big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000. Lynnie was supposedly going to college after her enlistment to become a "storm chaser," as in the Helen Hunt movie Twister. Perhaps many poor and working-class kids do go to college on their military benefits. But I can count on one hand the
201 - number I know who did it.
205 - Liberal America in particular lives in thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every working white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture an what James Webb rightly called America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers." Whether educated liberal believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots-Irish and thousands of Scots-Irish-influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.
Years ago, when Newt Gingrich became the first to describe the struggle in these terms, I winced because the truth of what he said was so obvious.
posted by jlhart7 at 8:49 AM
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