Fear and Loathing in Middle America

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

Reviewed: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant (Crown, 288 pages)

Every so often, you pick up a book and two pages in your nose is glued to it. Not necessarily because of the subject matter per se -- though good subject matter certainly helps -- but because the prose is so damned electric.

Usually, I've found, when it comes to reportage like this, the book's author has a single name: Hunter S. Thompson. Recently, though, I've added another name to my stuck-nose lexicon, having been utterly ensnared by Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Bageant grew up in a fundamentalist Christian, ultra-working-class family in a claustrophobic little Virginia town named Winchester. Then, in his own terminology, he made his escape. He moved west and made a pretty decent career for himself in the world of journalism. A few years ago, though, he felt a craving for his childhood home and, now deep into middle-age, decided to relocate once more.

So the self-proclaimed socialist, atheist, heavy-drinking, three-times-married Joe returned home, to a landscape dominated by rabid, demon-battling fundamentalists (including his younger brother, a fire-and-brimstone preacher); NASCAR; overpriced mobile homes; greasy food; depressing, dead-end, anti-union workplaces; and gung-ho patriots whose pick-up trucks boast bumper stickers such as "Kick their ass. Take their gas."

Lucky for us, Bageant didn't hop on the next plane back west, and didn't chalk it all up to a terrible, misconstrued nostalgia. Instead, he stuck to his guns -- literally -- and tried to understand why people in his part of the country, people he genuinely loves despite his utter detestation of their politics, are so dyed-in-the-wool conservative that it'd take the Apocalypse to prize them away from supporting George W. Bush.

"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, members of the political left supported these workers, stood on the lines taking beatings at the plant gates alongside them," he argues. "Now there is practically no labor movement, and large numbers on the left are comfortably ensconced in the true middle class... From that vantage point, liberals currently view working whites as angry, warmongering bigots, happy pawns of the American empire -- which begs the questions of how they came to be that way, if they truly are."

Deer Hunting With Jesus gets down-and-dirty with Bageant's friends, acquaintances, beer buddies, family members. He tells stories of jobs lost, of health catastrophes brought on by lifetimes of overwork and under-privilege, of huckster subprime mortgage brokers preying on near-illiterate clientele, of grown men chasing nickel-an-hour pay raises and people a paycheck away from bankruptcy swearing blind everyone can make it rich in America. He reports on karaoke nights, fundamentalist church gatherings, civil war re-enactors, and premillenialists longing for a foreign policy that can nudge nearer a nuclear apocalypse and the onset of End Times.

A common theme throughout his book is fraud, and the peculiar vulnerability to fraud of closed-in, under-invested-in communities such as Winchester: religious charlatans pushing dodgy theories into the heart of the political process; wealthy, educated men and women deliberately curtailing the educational opportunities of the poor, giving them just enough schooling to know how to dream the American Dream, but not nearly enough to ever be able to challenge their poverty and make that dream a reality; workers "encouraged" by companies like Wal-Mart to be hostile to the "special interests" represented by trade unions.