Posted on 06/26/2007 5:58:42 AM PDT by a_chronic_whiner
Deer Hunting with Jesus
Things You May Not Know
June 19, 2007
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..
Many more great and insightful read at
http://www.fredoneverything.net/index.html
BS. Rednecks don't blow up infidels.
That's for sure - we aren't one country. This is one of Fred's better articles. The book sounds interesting, though no doubt many FReepers will quickly take offense at some of the redneck characterizations without reading the whole review.
Some of them would be burning witches before long if there were no laws against it.
Yet.
Bull. Rednecks aren’t exactly Puritans when it comes to the law. They don’t blow up people or burn witches because they know it is wrong. They respect innocence a lot more.
Other sects don’t see innocent life as that important. There is no comparison between the two.
None of your links leads to a story titled: “Deer Hunting with Jesus”
Call me when the first Baptist group flies a plane into a skyscraper in order to kill non-believers.
Amish terror splinter groups are building buggy bombs in Middle America as we speak.
The answer is not government involvement, which will only make things worse for these folks. The government can't run a post office, let alone provide decent health care for all the elderly and injured folks up every holler in West Virginia. Plus it will offend the poor-but-proud, and encourage the usual complement of layabouts to continue gaming the system.
My own preference is for a local health care consortium, organized by locals for locals. Church and charity can help fund, but everybody's going to have to chip in. Sort of like the old mutual benefit societies, back in the days before health insurance.
And my redneck credentials are impeccable. I'm descended from Alabama dirt farmers on my daddy's side (my mom's folk are half small town Southern and half Tidewater, but nobody's perfect.)
They might not be the brightest, and may lean towards reactionary, knee-jerk patriotism, but it is them who hold this country together in a way, not the city-dwellers, not the ghetto-dwellers, not the suburb folks.
It is they who go to church and send their sons into battle. It is they who pay their taxes instead of looking for a loophole. Since they are behind the curve on current trends, they tend to have values more closely aligned with their elders and ancesters, and that's a good thing.
I love them, I just don't want to be surrounded by them, although I'm getting ready to propose marriage to one. It will be an interesting wedding seeing the two sides interact!.
Why wouldn’t they? I’m sure if one came in their hill, they would.
Why didn't you warn us before hand that you were an idiot?
Thank God the secular humanists have saved us Christians from burning witches with their wise laws. And your post wisely generalizes from a troubling set of murders centuries ago by (gasp) Christians to all of us who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And, the sorry history of humanity related in the Bible and for the past 2,000 years certainly proves that Christians and Jew aren't perfect, or even close.
Trouble is the alternative. When slinging pejoratives about Christians governing themselves, one always has to consider the alternative. And that alternative stares everyone who looks at the history of the 20th century without flinching. The lesson of that century is that when secularists start running things, people die. Lots of them. Huge gigantic bucketsful of dead people. And the deaths aren't accidental. They are in the Name of whatever idea the humanist has dreamed up is his answer to HOW THINGS OUGHT TO BE. As opposed to how things are.
Consider this, at least Christians are violating their God's Law when they commit mass murder. Secularists have no law but their own will and, in the West, maybe a little of Judaeo-Christianity has rubbed off on them. So they comfort theselves thinking that they have ethics, its just that unlike those silly Christians and Jews, they have willed their own ethics into existence.
Consider, westerners in general, and Christians, in particular participated in the almost universally accepted institution of human slavery. For centuries. But eventually, the truth given us in the Bible shamed Christians into forcing the West to give it up. No comparable result has happened in other religions or cultures. Much of Islam still embraces slavery. The humanist states recreated it. Similarly, shameful Christian episodes (like the one you embrace) were stopped by . . . Christians. We didn't need humanists to tell us we were way out of line.
So the issue is not, would some unfettered Christians get out-of-line? Sadly we would. And we explain that as the fallen nature of Man, redeemable only through Grace. The question is, how does a society minimize out-of-line behavior. I would respectfully suggest that turning moral judgment and law over to humanists is perhaps the worst imaginable idea in that regard, at least based on the history of the 20th century.
Exactly. As bad as so-called "Christendom" has been over the last 1500 years, secularism/atheism/humanism has done it double in the past 225.
Me, though I was born and raised in SoCal (my mom was born in OK), I call myself a CA Okie. I lived in Bakersfield before all that big money and people came in, and loved the real people that lived there.
I are a redneck.
To be fair to Mr. Jeeves, for his statement to be accurate you only need to find two such people.
And they do exist. However, they're marginal and have no power or influence over 99% of rednecks.
My brother-in-law (during a difficult period in his life) was involved with such a group, and I had extended Biblical discussions with him about their bizarre teachings. They believed all women should stay home, regardless of circumstances, that white people were the chosen people of God, and that all others were "mud people" who should eventually be "gotten rid of." Method left unstated.
They also believed all "witches" should be punished, although I don't recall any actual calls for burning.
He eventually left the group and is now a strong traditional Christian.
That is hardly what the average Christian does...most just try to live decent lives for God and their families in a very disturbed culture that was not always so hostile to God.
these sort of ramblings are such a clue as to how little anti-Christians really know about the subject
Perhaps Mr. Jeeves can clarify if he was talking about these groups, of if he was just trying to take an unjustified and simplistic swipe at any conservative Christians? At any rate, I do want to apologise for calling you an idiot, Mr. Jeeves, that was out of line, regardless of your intentions with your original statement.
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