Deer Hunting With Jesus

Joe Bageant

When Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, he rediscovered his redneck roots: ‘the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks’. But he soon realised that these were the very people who had carried George W. Bush to victory.

This seemed ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, was fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass — a white ghetto of the working poor in which two in five people do not finish high school, nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems and little or no health care, and credit ratings are virtually nonexistent.

What it adds up to, Bageant argues, is an unacknowledged, American class war from which alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is a raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary. Bageant delivers a dose of redneck reality, describing ‘white trashonomics’ (mortgage and credit-card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt), the ubiquitous gun culture, factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced, and the heady blend of Scots Irish culture with the blinkered ‘magical thinking’ of the Christian right.

By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs ‘the American hologram’— the televised, corporatised, virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant frequently appears on US national public radio and the BBC, and writes for newspapers and magazines internationally. A commentator on the politics of class in America, he has been featured in documentary films in Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, and Britain. His book Deer Hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war has been adapted for the theatre and is being developed as a dramatic television series in America. Bageant spends much of each year in Belize, Central America, and in Jalisco, Mexico, where he writes, and in which he sponsors small health-and-shelter development projects. He also writes an online column (www.joebageant.com) that has made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives.

Website: http://www.joebageant.com