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.

Okay, it’s time to tackle Greg Palast’s new book, Armed Madhouse. It’s made the New York Times bestseller list, far the less substantial works by far lesser authors have hovered above it, a testimony to the power of the prevailing mindset of the media and the American reading public.

Palast is well-known in Britain for his political analysis of American politics, but because he is ruthless in pursuit of the truth about what is happening in this nation, he is a non-person in the America media, much like Noam Chomsky, who is known abroad far better than here. Palast must look for publication on the BBC, The Guardian, and the world media outside our borders.

After the 2000 election, Palast broke the story about the Florida “felon list,” a device concocted by Kathleen Harris, the Republican Secretary of State, and Choicepoint, a personal data-gathering company with close Republic ties. Felons are prohibited from voting in Florida without having the right restored by the governor, but it turned out that few of the persons on the list were felons—many had similar names—but by the time the scam was revealed the election was over and in the hands of the U. S. Supreme Court. We all know how conscientious they were about honoring the intent of the voters.

Palast focuses his attention on several issues in his book, but the ones that struck me as the most important were the Republican plans to steal the next election and the real reason why the Bush administration led us into the military disaster that is Iraq.

First, the elections. Palast painstakingly reviews what happened in 2004 to the votes in several critical states that resulted in those states being counted for Bush. The details of what transpired in Ohio and New Mexico are not pretty. Moreover, they were obvious. Ohio is a classic case of voter disenfranchisement by a thousand cuts: furnishing an inadequate number of voting machines to Democratic precincts and thus creating impossible lines for working people, and the wholesale rejection of provisional, absentee, and “spoiled” ballots, not to mention ballots in which the voters unaccountably failed to vote in the presidential race. Palast:

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage—millions of them. Most are called “spoiled,” supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 election.

It gets worse from there. When the exit polls, shown to be highly accurate in predicting the election outcome, showed that Kerry should have won in Ohio, the mass media immediately put on experts stating that the exit polls were flawed.

Palast puts it all together and concludes that John Kerry won the presidential race and his victory was stolen from him by fraud, aided and abetted by the mass media. He further states that the Republicans are planning the same tricks and even more for this year and 2008.

Think of the new computer black boxes as a convenience. You may already have voted in 2008, they just haven’t told you how.

If you have any investment in the U.S. Constitution or democracy, you will be outraged by the sorry story of how Republicans stole the election and the Democrats acquiesced. I am afraid that it may be too late to remedy the situation before the fall elections; the mechanisms for disenfranchising Democratic voters are already in place.

Then there is Iraq and oil. I would not want to spoil your surprise when you learn why Bush was so intent on invading Iraq, even though he already knew that every single reason his administration advanced in support of the invasion was a lie. To prepare yourself for this revelation, try the following exercise: Make a list of the winners and losers of the conflict up to now. Let your mind wander all over the globe; do not stop with the obvious. Two hints: first, recall that the middle east is the center of what was once called the “Great Game.” Second, follow the money. The incredible deficits run up by the Bush administration play a significant part in this petro-pecuniary drama.

Palast’s thorough and careful reporting convinced me that a peak in world oil production is highly unlikely, if not impossible, at $80/bbl, although it is a serious problem at $10/bbl. The higher price makes it feasible to spend a lot of money to extract and process oil that would otherwise be uneconomical.
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Long-standing readers of The Jackson Progressive will notice the ad for Armed Madhouse on the sidebar. It is the first advertisement to be run in this publication since its inception in May, 1999. The author has plans for expansion of The Jackson Progressive, and although the cost of hosting a web site today is, for all practical purposes, zero, investigating local and state politics and creating or purchasing content is another matter entirely. Ultimately, revenue will be required to publish a journal of politics and the arts that is worthy of the appellation. Unless a wealthy donor steps up with a substantial sum of money, this site can grow only through selling, either as an associate of firms like Amazon or as a seller of its own products like books or T-shirts. Wealthy people are usually not progressive, so the ad route is the only practical way to build a great journal.

So buy Armed Madhouse, preferably by clicking on the sidebar icon, but buy it somewhere and read it. It is high time that the truth be generally known.