Joe Bageant and the Plight of the Redneck
Aug 09, 2007 21:10 Filed in: Books
Deer Hunting with Jesus — Dispatches from
America's Class War
by Joe Bageant (Crown, 2007)
I started reading Joe Bageant's web site about six months ago at the suggestion of a friend, and, like many of us not far removed either in time or distance from the rural life of the American South quickly found myself hooked by his ability to bring to life the humanity of poor and oppressed southern rednecks, with their fierce pride and individualism, their profound ignorance of the forces that are driving them deeper and deeper into despair, and their apocalyptic religious visions that make them tolerate the ills of this world for the promise of a perfect and blissful life sometime in the future.
Bageant grew up in Winchester, Virginia, a small rural town that looks on the map to be about 100 miles northeast of Washington, DC, on Interstate Highway 81. After escaping his hometown to the U. S. Navy during the Vietnam War, he travelled west and began writing for a living. He also tended bar in an Indian reservation for 10 years. As most southern writers do, he eventually returned to Winchester and has chronicled his experiences coming home with the local folk, many of them relatives, and the changes that globalization and finance capitalism have wrought upon their lives.
It is not a pretty picture. Declining wages, predatory lending, sub-standard health care, and mobile homes only begin to describe what the working class is going through with no clue as to how it got that way. Some of Bageant's characters, like Dottie, the woman who sings in bars with the aid of an oxygen tank, are touching, humorous, inspiring and outrageous at the same time. Others, like his brother, a fundamentalist preacher who claims to have cast out devils, are a little scary to this rather rationalist Episcopalian, who has read enough history to know that religious zealotry can turn ugly on a dime. Nevertheless, Bageant is usually sympathetic to some of the most repellant of his characters, and even when his sympathy runs dry he is slow to condemn. Like Socrates, he attributes many of our problems to ignorance and often illiteracy.
This is a book worth reading, even though it does not have a happy ending. The dominant genre of American narrative is melodrama, where everything turns out OK in the end. Simon Legree is foiled, the hero gets the girl, and everything is back the way it was. Melodrama is escapist pablum for persons who cannot endure literature and drama intended for mature adults. Real life is like Humpty-Dumpty over and over again; nothing can ever be put back the way it was before. In fact, once Humpty-Dumpty falls, it's almost impossible to even remember how things were before the fall.
Bageant's pessimism is tempered by his obvious affection for the down-and-out, hard-working folk that do the menial, mind-numbing and body-wrenching work so necessary for the rest of us to live comfortable lives. One leaves the book with a deeper understanding of the human condition, and that is all a serious writer should hope for.
Joe Bageant's Web Site: http://www.joebageant.com
You can purchase Deer Hunting With Jesus from his home page.
by Joe Bageant (Crown, 2007)
I started reading Joe Bageant's web site about six months ago at the suggestion of a friend, and, like many of us not far removed either in time or distance from the rural life of the American South quickly found myself hooked by his ability to bring to life the humanity of poor and oppressed southern rednecks, with their fierce pride and individualism, their profound ignorance of the forces that are driving them deeper and deeper into despair, and their apocalyptic religious visions that make them tolerate the ills of this world for the promise of a perfect and blissful life sometime in the future.
Bageant grew up in Winchester, Virginia, a small rural town that looks on the map to be about 100 miles northeast of Washington, DC, on Interstate Highway 81. After escaping his hometown to the U. S. Navy during the Vietnam War, he travelled west and began writing for a living. He also tended bar in an Indian reservation for 10 years. As most southern writers do, he eventually returned to Winchester and has chronicled his experiences coming home with the local folk, many of them relatives, and the changes that globalization and finance capitalism have wrought upon their lives.
It is not a pretty picture. Declining wages, predatory lending, sub-standard health care, and mobile homes only begin to describe what the working class is going through with no clue as to how it got that way. Some of Bageant's characters, like Dottie, the woman who sings in bars with the aid of an oxygen tank, are touching, humorous, inspiring and outrageous at the same time. Others, like his brother, a fundamentalist preacher who claims to have cast out devils, are a little scary to this rather rationalist Episcopalian, who has read enough history to know that religious zealotry can turn ugly on a dime. Nevertheless, Bageant is usually sympathetic to some of the most repellant of his characters, and even when his sympathy runs dry he is slow to condemn. Like Socrates, he attributes many of our problems to ignorance and often illiteracy.
This is a book worth reading, even though it does not have a happy ending. The dominant genre of American narrative is melodrama, where everything turns out OK in the end. Simon Legree is foiled, the hero gets the girl, and everything is back the way it was. Melodrama is escapist pablum for persons who cannot endure literature and drama intended for mature adults. Real life is like Humpty-Dumpty over and over again; nothing can ever be put back the way it was before. In fact, once Humpty-Dumpty falls, it's almost impossible to even remember how things were before the fall.
Bageant's pessimism is tempered by his obvious affection for the down-and-out, hard-working folk that do the menial, mind-numbing and body-wrenching work so necessary for the rest of us to live comfortable lives. One leaves the book with a deeper understanding of the human condition, and that is all a serious writer should hope for.
Joe Bageant's Web Site: http://www.joebageant.com
You can purchase Deer Hunting With Jesus from his home page.