By Jim Heffernan
This book was published 15 years ago but remains accurate and topical today. The author writes about his hometown of Winchester, Virginia in the early years of George W.’s presidency, but the people he writes about live today in towns all across the country. He writes with unflinching accuracy and honesty about working class people who have been left behind by political parties that mollify them with false promises of concern, all the while catering to corporate interests in a country controlled by wealthy and powerful.
The book is divided into 8 chapters and deals with aspects of our society we normally don’t think about very much. I particularly liked the chapters, “American Serfs”, “Republicans by default” and the closing chapter, “The American Hologram”.
He defines “working class” as the 60% of us who go through life without control of their lives, as he says on page 11, “Leaving aside all numbers, “working class” might be best defined like this: You do not have power over your work. You do not control when you work, how much you get paid, how fast you work, or whether you will be cut loose from your job at the first shiver on Wall Street. “Working class” has not a thing to do with the color of your collar and not nearly as much to do with your income as most people think, or in many cases even with whether you are self-employed. These days working class consists of truck drivers, cashiers, electricians, medical technicians, and all sorts of people conditioned by our system not to think of themselves as working class. There are no clear lines, which is one reason why the delusion of a middle-class majority persists.”
I appreciated being introduced to the history of the Scots Irish immigrants who came to this country in droves in the 19th Century. They were descended from the warlike people in the north of Britain, where the Romans put up Hadrian’s wall as an easier solution to going further. They ended up Protestant and many ended up in Ulster. As he says on page 156, “The mark of the Scots Irish on Winchester’s people is clearly visible in the way we reject government while at the same time we are ultra-patriotic about “values” such as “defending our way of life,” despite the fact that is has seldom if ever truly been threatened.”
In the final chapter, “American Hologram”, the author bemoans that millions of Americans are functionally illiterate and form their ideas on the “hologram” of television and the internet. As he states on page 250, “Uneducated and trapped within the hologram, people like Carolyn and Bobby will never be capable of participating in a free society, much less making the kind of choices that preserve and protect one, unless the importance of full literacy can somehow be made clear to them/”
Joe Bageant (1946-2011) grew up poor in Winchester, Virginia. He joined the Navy early in life and went on to a college education and a career in Journalism and Publishing. “Deer Hunting With Jesus” was his first book.
290 Pages, Published June 24, 2008
Available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita and Tillamook Public Library
3.9 out of 5 on Goodreads, 3,982