JOE BAGEANT: Deer Hunting With Jesus - Dispatches from America’s Class War

[Tace]

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

“Well, good lordie, you really was writin a book! I thought it was just some bullshit you spread around when you got drunk.”

That was my friend Fat Larry’s reaction when I showed him the Amazon.com prepublication sale of my book a few days ago. Longtime Internet readers will notice that the title has changed to Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War. The original title was Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck: Dispatches From America’s Class War. Contrary to what one might suspect, the name change had not as much to do with the word “fuck” as it did the fact that a book was recently released with a very similar title. So, after much kicking around of other titles, Deer Hunting With Jesus was chosen because it is in the spirit of the book and the people within its pages, hopefully with a satisfying dose of humor in the mix. Deer hunting and Jesus do come together in the book (in fact, there are Christian Deer Hunter’s Associations, Google it) in what I hope gives insight to the working class flyover America that hunts, prays, work like dogs and voted for the Dub -- twice.

The book is a non-fiction work, not a collection of essays or a collection of previous online material, although there are some parts of essays included. In a sense however, it is a series of linked essays, with the people from my home town recurring throughout, those working Americans who grease our cars and wipe the asses of America’s elderly in nursing homes, or sit at terminals all day doing mindless meaningless work under the eye of the management classes.

And, if I have done this damned thing half right, I may have demonstrated that real working class conservatives are by no means stupid or particularly mean spirited. Given some time to catch their breath from debt slavery, and some honest news, they can see who is picking their pockets and killing their kids in Iraq. Take away all the hubris, ego, greed and knee-jerk politics of both sides of this tiny bandwidth we let pass for a “political spectrum,” and we find that most of the commonalities ordinary Americans used to enjoy still exist -- the kind of commonalities and equal respect we acknowledged back when liberals still owned guns and even the most conservative Christians understood that the Constitution and the Bible were two entirely separate documents.

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[FlavaKreemSnak]

1. It is going to be a problem

For one thing the war on terror is going to get more expensive because so many people in other countries don't agree with the invasions and occupations and renditions etc even though their leaders do, and that is going to mean higher international crackdown expenses, and that is going to mean a lot of changes in the way we live and a lot of those changes will have the effects of more people's lives being like what we think of now as the more low income lifestyle.

And at the same time there are just changes in the American economic policies. I remember hearing somebody on CNN explaining that one of the reasons for the insurgency in Iraq was because they were used to having everything handed to them on a platter by Saddam because of socialism, and now they were having to get used to democracy and freedom, where fewer people would have jobs but the ones that did would earn more.

And that is a good explanation of the American changes too. Like when Bush talks about how good the economy is, he is talking about how good it is for people who already had a lot of money. They are getting more.

But maybe it seems like to people who don't have a whole lot that they have less.

And I don't mean to be playing the class war card, but as that direction keeps going it will not be long before the low income people here will have to go under a crackdown. And that will also be expensive and have the result that even more people will start to have a low income lifestyle.

I guess it is just like an indirect cost of the war on terror?