Deer Hunting with Jesus

www.fredoneverything.net ^ | June 19, 2007 | Fred Reed

[teldon30]

Long ago, having had to write more book reviews than I wanted, I decided that I would rather have pile surgery by an ocelot than write another. Then I got an advance copy of Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant, and realized that I had to come out of retirement. It’s, you know, like noblesse oblige. Here goes.

Bageant is a redneck, and his book is about rednecks, who are a huge, sprawling class of people found everywhere but mostly invisible. They aren’t what people think they are. (Though, given that a strange mixture of folk read this column, I’d better be careful with generalizations.) They actually have lives, and problems, and stories. They can be amusing, admirable, exasperating, and pathetic. Mostly nobody cares. If you truly are interested in how America works, in what’s out there down the side roads, shell out the lousy $16.50 and read the sucker.

Now, quickly before I lose all my readers: Two things Deer Hunting isn’t. First, although Bageant has a sense of humor, and doesn’t hide it well, the book is not—is not at all—the sort of cutesy-phony redneck wit that floats around the internet (“You know you are a redneck if you have a ’54 Merc on blocks outside your trailer….”) True, a certain folk wisdom shines through in parts. ("Things I have learned at Burt's Tavern: (1) Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind, and swears you are the best sex she ever had. (2) Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.") But this is salad dressing. The book is dead serious.

Second, it certainly is not academic sociology, which reads like a truss ad but without the insight and grace. The guy is very sharp and well read and he’s been around. He spent the Vietnam years throwing airplanes off an aircraft carrier, and later edited Military History magazine. Further, he is an authority on bars, hunting, lousy jobs, and misery. He has been there.

Now, politics. Bageant is in favor of universal health care, which to conservatives is worse than finding half a bull roach in your egg-burger. We’ve all heard the tales of welfare queens and exploitation of the dread entitlements by shiftless parasites who breed like Renaissance popes at public expense. Some of that exists, chiefly in cities. Food stamps regularly get turned into drug-and-booze money. All sorts of swindles exist, chiefly in cities.

But the people Bageant writes about don’t fit this story. They are folk who worked all their lives, worked hard for shit wages at stultifying jobs and always showed up. And now, at the ends of their lives, they’ve got nothing. Well, they've got diabetes, which I guess is something. And maybe congestive heart failure and a pittance of social security. Know what pharmaceuticals cost? The choice comes to pills or heating oil.

It ain’t right.

Mostly he writes about Winchester, Virginia, where he grew up and now lives again. But Winchester is pretty much anywhere and everywhere. You just don’t see it. Drive a few miles south of DC on Route 301 in Maryland and you come to Waldorf. There, in the Wigwam, a down-demographic girly bar, you see (or did see; it’s been years) the dump truck drivers with baseball hats on backwards and triceps flapping like water balloons. Except very few see them. Rednecks. They hoot and holler and chaff with the girls and probably aren’t who your mother wanted you to play with.

You don’t see that these guys work as “independent contractors,” meaning no retirement or benefits, at sorry wages, and live a paycheck or two away from nothing, in crumbling fifth-rate modular homes or trailers that lose value instead of gaining it. When they’re thirty and healthy, it’s not bad. It’s at the end that things get rough, or when someone gets sick.

Rednecks, as Bageant explains in detail, are dumber than dirt. They’re not bad people. You can heist a brew with them and talk about NASCAR and gobble wings and, with a little effort, come away liking them. But they don’t know squat. They are easily suckered by real-estate scammers and corporate con artists. The level of genuine illiteracy in America is much higher than most think. Add people who can barely read, and therefore don’t, and have never read a book in their lives, and you get s disconcerting number. In thousands of Winchesters, this is the norm.

Everything comes from television, mostly Fox News, and from Rush Limbaugh. They don’t have passports, may not know what one is, and seldom leave the county where they were born.

Bageant knows what he is talking about. I know he does because I grew up mostly in small Southern towns and half-empty counties, including King George County, Virginia, a few hours from Winchester. Same people. I dated the girls and got drunk with the boys and saw how they lived. Those people worked. My best girlfriend in high school got up at four in the morning to help her father pull crab pots on the Potomac. She was pretty as any picture could hope to be, even with lots of imagination and on acid, but she could have thrown a Volkswagen over a four-storey building. They worked.

The thing is that people who went to college mostly don’t know about rednecks, or how many there are, or why they do what they do.What they think they know is usually wrong. I once talked to a psychologist from some semi-Ivy school and the subject of guns came up. She immediately launched into gunsaretokillpeoplegunsaretokillpeople, essentially pre-recorded. “Why else would anyone want guns, except to kill people?”

I mentioned hunting, and it bounced off. No response, just didn’t register. She was intelligent and not mean-spirited, but didn’t know that to Bageant’s people, to my high-school classmates, a hundred pounds of dressed deer meat meant eating decently. She thought guns were to kill people because in cities, all she knew, that’s what the urban savages used them for. Fact is, redneckdom is heavily armed and neither Bageant nor I can remember anyone being shot, purposefully or accidentally. She wouldn’t have believed it. Guns are to kill people.

And my god, the born-again evangelical Christians who are waiting to be sucked up by the Rapture as if by a god-powered Hoovermatic vacuum cleaner. They are serious as melanoma and could give any Muslim sect known a run for its extremism money. I’m running out of space, but Bageant knows them by their first names, grew up with them, and doesn’t chrome-plate them to make them seem shinier than they are. The country a lot of people live in isn’t the one they think they live in.

Worth a read. Funny, thought-provoking and, though it creeps up on you, profound. Cheap, too..

[silver charm]

Sigh, always with the cheap shots at blue collar workers and evangelical Christians. Where do these guys get off?

Evangelical Christians in my town (Navy town in the pacific northwest) feed and cloth the homeless and work their buts off for their families and neighbors. I know of a couple who do have pilots licenses but can’t remember ever hearing of any Evangelicals flying into buildings. But according to this pompous a$$ their just as bad if not worse than radical muslims.

Alot of people in my town, well atleast I know in my neighborhood own guns. We have them for hunting and protection. So yes, I suppose you could say they are for killing. Dinner and violent intruders.Not so much for hunting, more for intruders. There aren’t alot of home invasions either, I wonder why? (sarc).

Maybe its ‘cause it’s early but that bit about dumb puts a twist in my knickers too. Not having an ivy league degree doesn’t make a person dumb. Hell, having one doesn’t make a person smart either. Look at Hanoi John. Or just listen.The man is as dumb as mud.

This reviewer is the same sort of smarmy buttmunch elitist that drops his cell phone in the drain and then drowns trying to reach in and grab it.

[Cicero]

It’s tough to say it, but rednecks live and die natural lives. We all grow old. We all die. It’s nice to go to the hospital and get put on life support or given expensive shots and pills and live a few extra years. But through thousands of years of history, people didn’t have that stuff, not even rich people.

I suspect that living a natural life close to nature, working hard, drinking hard, enjoying life, having friends, may be a better kind of life than being a rich yuppie in the suburbs with a shaved lawn and health insurance.

I know I’ve always found good country people more admirable than most of the yuppies I know, and happier, too.

Read about Mother Teresa and you’ll find that even poor Indians dying in the gutter in Calcutta are probably happier than your average suburban yuppie who has “everything.”

[CyberAnt]

“... the born-again evangelical Christians who are waiting to be sucked up by the Rapture as if by a god-powered Hoovermatic vacuum cleaner. They are serious as melanoma and could give any Muslim sect known a run for its extremism money.”

Being one of “those” Christians .. I laughed when I read that paragraph. I agree with it. My faith is so deep - nobody could ever tear it away from me or change my mind by threatening to cut my head off.

And .. these “rednecks” probably make up the majority of our military and that fact makes them the greatest fighting force in the world.

[billbears]

Sigh, always with the cheap shots at blue collar workers and evangelical Christians. Where do these guys get off?

Sorry didn't see a 'cheap shot' against blue collar workers or Christians. However I do know more than my share of 'evangelical' Christians (seeing as I grew up with them) that would be more than happy to march on Washington DC to pass a law against everything under the sun that they think is immoral. When in fact if they need to march anywhere they should be marching to their state capitols. But for a laugh try explaining federalism to them.

This reviewer is the same sort of smarmy buttmunch elitist that drops his cell phone in the drain and then drowns trying to reach in and grab it.

Wow, you don't know much about Fred do you? I just don't see much wrong with this review.

[Old Professer]

Fred Reed is Deer Derf spelled backwards; I think he’s been mainlining the stuff.

[Old Professer]

Other than he can’t write?

[teldon30]

You “get” his review...so do i :)

[marsh2]

I think the comments about rednecks were a bit harsh. I have lived in the mountains for 20 years, and I have also lived in the suburbs or a great metropolis. The mountains have their folks in intergenerational poverty. They are plagued with illiteracy, but the natural resource based jobs they used to feed their families with have been regulated away and there have been no work replacements.

Suburban liberals who have no appreciation for the impacts of their actions “in the name of the environment” on these country families. 27% of the children in my county live in poverty and the median income is about half that for the state of California. Considering family income, we are the poorest county in California.

The important thing is that the values of the rural working poor are different from those in the suburbs. Of course they would like to make a decent living, but they also value a life working hard on the land; having a strong family with time to attend their kid’s soccer or ball games; having a strong faith and almost tribal sense of community; hunting, fishing, trapping and trail riding up in the mountains.

It always amazes me that agency folk and environmentalists treat these as throw away values that “don’t pencil out on the bottom line.” It is true that country folk up here generally don’t make a lot of money. But maybe they have found a way to fill the hole in the heart and gut that still gnaws away at the urban liberal.

[Bishop_Malachi]

Don’t see much wrong with this review? Are you kidding? This guy doesn’t just stereotype’, he makes some of the wildest claims I’ve ever heard.

I love the claim that these “Rednecks” are all avid Limbaugh listeners (or regular viewers of FOX news). What a joke. If they were, then they would be much more informed about the federalism of which you claim they are utterly ignorant.

You said that you don’t see much wrong with the review. Well, it seems to be the reviewer (and not the poor, helpless, federalism-hatin’ rednecks) who loves Socialized Medicine. I grew up in rural Tennessee; now I live in the suburbs of Atlanta (although I work in a rural Georgia school). I see tons of southern, country people. They do not fit the stereotypes that this twit is pimping.

Sure, some of them might initially warm to the idea of Socialized medicine, but most of them are intelligent enough to see the negative implications. Here’s something to ponder: Do you think that more rural voters oppose Socialized medicine than urban voters? Do more “big government” voters live in urban areas or rural areas? I would dare say they do. Thank goodness for these so-called “rednecks”.

[appalachian_dweller]

From the article:
“Rednecks, as Bageant explains in detail, are dumber than dirt.”

Your comment from post #5
>>Sorry didn’t see a ‘cheap shot’ against blue collar workers or Christians.<<

I live around and work in Winchester with these rednecks. Walked away from a high paying job in the city. Make 1/3 the money, 5 times happier.

These rednecks are the country’s last hope.

[Paperdoll]

At a glance, I’d say this book is meant to promote a war between the classes, to deftly divide us by vocation, location, by religion and education.

Up until now, all those things existed, but we were united behind 1. providing for our families, 2. doing the best we could with what we had. 3. fighting valiantly for what our country stood for. 4. gladly helping those in need tangibly with goods and with volunteering our time.
5. looking to our Higher Power for guidance. 6. taught our children right from wrong, as our parents taught us.
7. saving for a rainy day. 8. working through our differences rather than throwing in the towel. 9. living within our means. 10. believing that honesty is the best policy.

All of the numbered above have been attacked and discounted by the evil element which infiltrated our school system many decades ago. Now what was bad is good, and what was good is bad. In public schools, on Capitol Hill, in our TV crazed populace the indoctrination continues.

Until parents stop abusing their children by sending them to public schools, begin voting the liberals out of office, turning off the TV set, and turning on to the Bible and attending God’s church services.

[Caramelgal]

I think I get it too.

I always find Fred Reed an interesting and provocative writer and someone who I find as often equally hard to disagree with as to agree with – he’s a bit of an enigma that way. But he does have a way with words: “Long ago, having had to write more book reviews… I decided that I would rather have pile surgery by an ocelot than write another” …and …”universal health care, which to conservatives is worse than finding half a bull roach in your egg-burger…shiftless parasites who breed like Renaissance popes at public expense.” Now that was just down right funny stuff IMHO.

But what I found really interesting about this column is that while Fred seems to empathize, greatly admire and respect the hard work ethic of the “redneck” and defends their right to own guns and hunt, in contradiction to the “gunsaretokillpeoplegunsaretokillpeople” liberal, pseudo intellectuals; people who he admonishes for being so ignorant to the world around them, yet he also stoops to some of the same broad generalizations about the rednecks as the liberal intellectuals he seems to hold in equal distain. It is a curious contradiction and one I can’t reconcile for him here.

But I don’t think Fred Reed actually said that he thought rednecks are “dumber than dirt” among other things, but was paraphrasing how the writer, Joe Bageant, in his book describes them. Then again Mr. Reed didn’t make a very clear distinction between what the other writer said and how he himself really feels so I am not ready to quite defend him here.

With that being said, I think there needs to be a distinction between all the folks who get lumped into the generalized “redneck” classification by liberals and pseudo intellectuals (and even some so-called conservatives) – such as anyone who ever voted for a Republican, lives south of the Mason-Dixon line, likes NASCAR, owns a gun, ever went hunting or fishing or to a fundamentalist Christian church, works a blue collar job; and the “true redneck” as I understand the term and based on my first hand experiences and observations – a cultural subclass that distrusts any form of higher education and science, never graduated from HS and never saw the need to, yet complains that the “man” is keeping him down, who sees the lottery as sound investment strategy, blindly gives money to televangelists in hopes of a cure instead of seeing a doctor, who may still be rooted in a form of racism that fell out of favor over a hundred years ago, spends much of their very hard earned wages on supped-up cars and pickup trucks and beer yet lives in substandard housing, way lacking in maintenance with grass that never seems to gets cut and junk that keeps piling up. Come to think of it, this sounds much like another cultural subclass – the urban poor.

I don’t think either subclasses are made up of bad people and a lot of these people work very hard to make their ends meet, but they are folks stuck in a contestant re-wind of failure and subsistence – a culture that goes to church every Sunday yet hardly blinks an eye when their 15 year old daughter comes home pregnant because “it's just been that way for a long time”, an existence that our nanny state politicians (both Red and Blue) are quite happy to perpetuate for their own selfish interests.

Ignorance breeds more ignorance, but poor and hard working doesn’t necessarily mean ignorant and a lack of higher education doesn’t necessarily mean “dumb”. I’ve known poor working class people (and I grew up that way), rural rednecks, urban rednecks and urban blacks and Hispanics, who were pretty smart in their own right and some made their way out of the poverty cycle and I’ve known a good number of people with all sorts of higher education and advanced degrees who were extremely ignorant and stupid.

What you make of your life depends on not just how hard you are willing to work or what level of education you achieve, but how you as an individual apply what you know and what you learn and how willing you are to expand what you know about the world around you and not repeat the mistakes of previous generations.

[teldon30]

Ignorance breeds more ignorance, but poor and hard working doesn’t necessarily mean ignorant and a lack of higher education doesn’t necessarily mean “dumb”. I’ve known poor working class people (and I grew up that way), rural rednecks, urban rednecks and urban blacks and Hispanics, who were pretty smart in their own right and some made their way out of the poverty cycle and I’ve known a good number of people with all sorts of higher education and advanced degrees who were extremely ignorant and stupid.

What you make of your life depends on not just how hard you are willing to work or what level of education you achieve, but how you as an individual apply what you know and what you learn and how willing you are to expand what you know about the world around you and not repeat the mistakes of previous generations.

---

Absolutely wonderful post.... sometimes i disagree with Fred....but many times he makes me re-think a position or at least look at it from a different angle...”redneck” is relative...I was raised working class in the deep south...i’m a redneck to most folks in NYC...considered middle class around here...but to most of the contract workers...well i’m just uppity ;)

[riverrunner]

It is hard to reconcile Fred. He is so much an individual elitist, in his own way. This, in the end, is just another “they are too stupid to take care of themselves, so we have to do it for them, rant.”

Fred has always been too much a pessimist for my taste. Didn’t he take off to Mexico to await the coming collapse of the United States a few years ago?

[stevie_d_64]

I was actually looking through this stuff, and found myself getting “it” too...

My Redneck-ness only goes so far, but I understand the concept...

Sometimes I cringe, when something redneck actually does come across what little TV and news I do watch outside this internet forum I frequent...

But some may say they don’t get this stuff, they may not realize there actually is a loose-knit camoflage wearing society of America that could be more of a backbone to the survival of our countries sensibilities, than anything an uber-urban neophite, pop-culture, over-concentrated sycophant(s) could ever dream up in their wildest hallucinations...

[stevie_d_64]

Why, Oh Why! Didn’t I just take the Blue Pill!!!

Sometimes I just don’t know why I write the things I do...

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Thanks. I added the book to my Library list. Does it mean I’m a Redneck if I use my “Libary” instead of shelling out $16.50 for the book? LOL!

[Pelham]

Didn’t he take off to Mexico to await the coming collapse of the United States a few years ago?

He says he moved to Mexico because he finds it reminds him of the less-regimented America of his youth. That, and he has married a Mexican woman.

[WorkingClassFilth]

This guy don’t know diddly squat.