Bageant - Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from Americas class war

CONTENTS

1 American Serfs
INSIDE THE WHITE GHETTO OF THE WORKING POOR

2 Republicans by Default
REDNECK PRIDE AND FEAR IN AN AGE OF OUTSOURCING

3 The Deep-Fried, Double-Wide Lifestyle
WHATEVER IT TAKES, THE MORTGAGE RACKET WILL PUT YOU UNDER YOUR OWN ROOF

4 Valley of the Gun
BLACK POWDER AND BUCKSKIN IN HEARTLAND AMERICA

5 The Covert Kingdom
THEY PLEAD UPON THE BLOOD OF JESUS FOR A THEOCRATIC STATE

6 The Ballad of Lynddie England
ONE FOOT IN ULSTER, THE OTHER IN IRAQ

7 An Authorized Place to Die
THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM ON LIFE SUPPORT

8 American Hologram
THE APOCALYPSE WILL BE TELEVISED

For Barbara and Ken

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

While the events in this book are truefrom whupping up on boxing chimpanzees at carnivals to demon wrestling matches in the Holy Roller trailer courtsthe names and identifying characteristics of many of the people described have been changed in order to protect their privacy.

INTRODUCTION

O n the morning of November 2, 2004, millions of Democrats arose to a new order. Smoke from neoconservative campfires hung over all points southward and westward. The hairy fundamentalist Christian hordes, the redneck blue-collar legions, and other cultural Visigoths stirred behind distant battlements. In university towns across the country, in San Francisco, Seattle, and Boulder, in that bluest of blue strongholds, New York City, and in every self-contained, oblivious corner of liberal America where a man or woman can buy a copy of The Nation without special-ordering it, Democrats sank into the deepest kind of Prozac-proof depression. What, they wondered, happened out there in the heartland, the iconographic one theyd seen on television and in magazines, the one bright with church spires, grange halls, stock-car races, and community heritage festivals. And why had the working class so plainly voted against their own interests?

Two years later, Democrats regained, for the time being at least, a majority, and liberals have had time to contemplate what they see as the deeply uncultured mob that trounced them in 2004. They have watched panel discussions on PBS. They have argued about where political strategy went wrong. But the one thing the thinking left and urban liberals have not done is tread the soil of the Gothsubject themselves to the unwashed working-class America, to that churchgoing, hunting and fishing, Bud Lightdrinking, provincial America. To the people who cannot, and do not care to, locate Iraq or France on a mapassuming they even own an atlas. Few educated liberals will ever find themselves sucking down canned beer at the local dirt track or listening to the preacher explain the infallibility of the Bible on every known topic from biology to the designated-hitter rule or attending awards night at a Christian school or getting drunk to Teddy and the Starlight Ramblers playing C&W at the Eagles Club.

Well, ho ho ho! Welcome to my world!

Here in my hometown, Winchester, Virginia, it is impossible to avoid the America that carried George W. Bush to victory in 2004 (and would again elect someone else just as unsavory even if they turn on Bush like feral dogs in these last days of his attempted imperial reign, even if he is hauled out of the Oval Office in custody). Winchester is one of those southern places where the question of whether Stonewall Jackson had jock itch at the Battle of Chancellorsville still rages right alongside evolution, gun control, abortion, and whether Dale Earnhardt Jr. is half the driver his daddy was. The area is solidly fundamentalist Christian and neoconservative, steeped in the gloomy ultra-Protestant assumption that man is an evil, worthless thing from birth and goes downhill from there. If nothing else, though, Winchester is a marvelous place from which to observe this nationwhere the oldest and the newest America and all the vestigial mutant stages in between exist in spittle-flecked living color.

Winchester is foremost a working-class town, despite the yuppie monster-bellums springing up on seven-acre plots all around it and the prettying-up of the old town core as a historic district. You can make lightbulbs at the GE plant, you can make styrene mop buckets at Rubbermaid, or you can bust cartons, stack product, and cashier at Wal-Mart and Home Depot. But whatever you do, youre likely to do it as a team assembler at a plant or as a cashier standing on a rubber mat with a scanner in your paw. And youre gonna do it for a working-mans wagefor about $16,000 a year if youre a cashier, $26,000 if youre one of those team assemblers. Yet this place from which and about which I am writing could be any of thousands of communities across the United States. It is an unacknowledged parallel world to that of educated urban liberalsthe world that blindsided them in November 2004 and the one they will need to come to understand if they are ever to be politically relevant again.

By what authority am I entitled to rant in these pages? None really, other than being the native son of a working America gone downhill. That realization came in 1999, when, after a thirty-year absence, I decided to move back to my hometown and saw the creeping (and creepy) way the lives of my working-class family members, my neighborhood, and my community had been devalued and degraded by the forces against which left-leaning people have always railedthe same forces my family and town so solidly backed in the voting booths.

My part of Winchester, the North End, contains the most hard-core of the towns working-class neighborhoods, where you are more likely to find the $20,000-a-year laborer and the $14,000-a-year fast-food worker. I grew up here, my dad worked at a gas station here, and my mom worked at a since demolished textile mill whose rattling looms were the round-the-clock backdrop of our lives. I smoked my first cigarette here and married a poor white girl from down the street. My forebears are buried here, and all my ghosts are herethe ghosts of 250 years of ancestors, the ghosts of old love affairs, and the ghost of my youth. I know everyones last name, whose daddy was who, and who boinked whom when we were in high school. So when I moved back after thirty years out West, it was as if my heart was back where it belonged. Which lasted about three months.

It didnt take too many visits to the old neighborhood tavern or to the shabby church I attended as a child to discover that here in this neighborhood in the richest nation on earth folks are having a hard go of it. And its getting harder. Two in five residents of the North End do not have a high school diploma. Here, nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, credit ratings rarely top 500, and alcohol, Jesus, and overeating are the three preferred avenues of escape. These days the neighborhood looks as if it was painted by Edward Hopper, then bleakly populated with gangstas, old men with forty-ounce malt liquor bottles, hardworking single moms, and kids on cheap, busted plastic tricycles. The city government tries to cover the poverty with ordinances that make the local slumlords paint the exteriors of the rentals, but paint can cover only so much.

Wedged between the old railroad station and the Confederate cemetery, the North End neighborhood was once the redneck buffer for white Winchester. Everyone in town knew which streets represented the color line. Those same streets are becoming black and Latino now, and you can see the families who live there going through the same struggles for modest respectability in these rental properties as the working-poor whites who owned them in the fifties and early sixties, when it was possible to buy a house on a low-wage working couples income. They place foil-covered flowerpots on porches, and they crisply cut the earth along sidewalks with lawn-edging tools, as if the red clay pounded by the feet of neighborhood kids were ever going to produce enough grass to threaten the walkways. They do the very things white working people once did to proclaim: We might be poor but we aint coloreds.