North
American society prides itself on being classless. Almost no one in
North America calls him/herself lower-class or upper-class, and people
who describe themselves as 'middle-class' (a class which really no
longer exists in North America) do so hesitantly. Few even describe
themselves as 'working-class', since that seems to imply it's a place
one resides for life (which is the case, but to acknowledge this fact
would put the lie to the myth of social mobility). Despite the Great
American (and Canadian) Dream (anyone can be President or Billionaire
if they work long and hard at it), your chances of moving up even one
quintile in the economic and social order are negligible, and dependent
more on luck than intelligence, endeavour or education.
My friend Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus
explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how
strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and
always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of
the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are
stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to
write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible
courage and honesty.
This is a society where poverty and illness
are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a
society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and
misunderstood. The principal determinant of one's class in America, and
the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.
More than anything, Deer Hunting
is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their
working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they
live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard
as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist
exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens,
and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all,
a fair pension and a decent wage for a day's work -- the end of the
"dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure".
I'd given away three copies of Joe's book before I'd ready anything beyond the brilliant introduction -- I just knew the people I gave them to needed to read the book more than I did. If you've read Lakoff, and kind of understand the huge divide between conservative and liberal worldviews, you have to read Bageant, so you really
understand the chasm between the worldviews of the uneducated and
educated. When you read Joe's astonishing stories, all of a sudden what
George Lakoff says makes sense. And, just as astonishingly, so does
Bush's 2004 win, and the terrifying prospect that Republican
arch-conservatives could be poised to establish a dynasty in the US
that will accelerate the Cheney-Bush regime's project for endless war,
bankrupting and dismantling government, and ending the separation of
church and state, and which will last until that country's final,
ghastly unraveling occurs (I'm betting that will happen later this
century).
I picked up my fourth copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus
in Australia, which includes a little orientation for Australians not
familiar with current US culture. This orientation was probably
unnecessary for two reasons: Educated Australians (and Canadians and
Europeans) probably know as much about current US culture as their
American counterparts. And uneducated people from these countries, I
strongly suspect, think much like their US counterparts (though less
fanatically) -- Joe's description of uneducated Americans sent shudders
up my spine, as I recognized in their stories and attitudes those of
many uneducated Canadians I thought I knew, or didn't care to know (and now understand much better).
There
is so much wisdom in this book, and it is so important to read to
achieve an understanding of the current predicament of the US (and
hence of the world), that I would not presume to précis it here. If you
read only one book this year, please make it Deer Hunting With Jesus.
Some of the key lessons for me:
- "Universal
access to a decent education would lift the lives of millions over
time...Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families
for generations". After reading Joe's stories I have new respect for
those who have taught themselves what they needed to learn to be
informed, independent citizens, and an appreciation for how those
without education are oppressed to an almost unimaginable degree.
- At
least 60% of Americans are "working class", i.e. they do not have power
over their work -- when they work, how much they get paid or whether
they'll be "cut loose from their job [or self-employed labour dependent
on big corporations] at the first shiver of Wall Street".
- The
critical aspects of the "terrible and silent crisis" destroying
working-class Americans are: (a) the working class' own passivity,
antipathy to intellect, and belligerence towards the outside world, (b)
an economic, corporatist system that benefits from keeping them
uneducated, fearful and debt-ridden (and hence holders of low-wage,
nonunion, disposable, part-time, noninsured jobs), (c) a health-care
system that is especially dysfunctional in working-class areas and
whose few quality services are unaffordable to the working class, (d)
their dreadful, fat-laden diet (which is all that they can afford) and
the toll it takes on their health, and (e) religious and political
leaders who prey on their ignorance and exploit their fears.
- Almost
as bad as the corporatists at exploiting the working class are the
rich, uneducated entrepreneurial class who live in their neighbourhoods
-- realtors, lawyers, brokers, gas retailers, "downtown pickle vendors"
and other "middlemen who stand on the necks of the working poor". This
"mob of Kiwanis and Rotarians" who dominate local politics help get tax
breaks and regulation exemptions for big corporations, in return for
financial favours.
- As I read this book I realized that my book
on Natural Enterprise, which was in part designed to help the
chronically underemployed to find meaningful work, will be totally
inaccessible to the working class -- they don't have the literacy or
basis of understanding of how an economy works to even begin to
understand its processes and messages. I can appreciate how
working-class people, and their friends (like Joe) perceive
"entrepreneurs" to be just the low-level agents of the corporatists,
not a means for their liberation from wage slavery.
- "Getting a
lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow
workers in the gladiatorial free market economy does not make for
optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for
a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working
people to accept the American empire's wars without a blink." Joe tells
how scourges like Tyson Foods and Rubbermade belittle, abuse, threaten
and browbeat their workers into obedience, and acceptance of their lot
in life. As a result, "the intellectual lives of most working-class
Americans consist of things that sound as if they might or should be
true" (e.g. that we should all "support our troops"), and what is
engendered as a result is a "tide of national meanness".
- Rich
Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on
their own turf, at community activities important to these people.
Progressives don't even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the
'red' communities, and as a result "the left understands not a thing
about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity
of ordinary working people...letting them be worked cheap and farmed
like a human crop for profit".
- As a consequence of this numbing
existence, "it is [a huge myth] that small towns are thrown into deep
mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq...There is growing
dissatisfaction with the war, but it is because we are not winning, not
because of the dead."
- The mortgage and banking industries
exploit workers' dreams of home ownership, supported by the
corporatists who need continued growth and rising home prices to
finance ever-increasing consumer spending, in the fragile house of
cards which is now beginning to implode in the US. Gullible poor
workers who buy mobile homes on rented property are essentially "buying
large rapidly-depreciating vehicles and paying for space to park them",
the absolute antithesis of real home ownership, and a recipe for
bankruptcy. But as long as workers are taught that "they are not worthy
of a traditional house or decent treatment in the labor market or a
living wage", this is the best they can hope for and aspire to.
- Probably
the most eye-opening chapter for me was the one where he explains
Americans' zeal for gun ownership and fierce opposition to gun control
(a view Joe himself shares). He provides credible data to support gun
owners' claims that (at least in a country as violent as the US) the
mere possession of a gun deters more crime than gun ownership
precipits. Progressives should look at the facts and realize that their
passion for gun control is alienating them, and the parties they
support, from 70 million gun owners for whom the issue is a pivotal one
at the ballot box.
- At the same time, Joe is concerned about
the propensity of many Americans (which he later ascribes in part to
their belligerent Scots-Irish heritage) to carry their enthusiasm for
guns to a degree that makes them "devotees to lethality". He worries
about its explosive potential: "What happens when this country hits
Peak Oil demand and the electrical grid starts browning down and even
little things become desperately difficult or unaffordable? What
happens if the wrong kind of president declares the wrong kind of
national emergency? What will be the first reflex of those hundreds of
thousands of devotees to lethality?" Joe is concerned that this
belligerence and passion for religious fundamentalism is behind the
passion for wars in the Mid-East and Asia and even a passion for a
nuclear war. He analyzes the low-level perpetrators of Abu Ghraib like
Lynddie England and finds their behaviour completely consistent with
the pent-up anger, ignorance and willingness to follow orders that
those of Scots-Irish ancestry, or influenced by that culture, exhibit
around the world and especially in workng-class US communities.
- Joe
describes the leaders of the fundamentalist churches in the US as
poorly educated breakaways from the lower ranks of other churches.
Their lack of "fancy learnin'" is unrecognized by their equally
uneducated followers. Fundamentalists now make up a quarter of the
electorate, a segment that has recently and cynically been politicized
by corporatists, and is overwhelmingly white, with a high-school
education or less, and working-class. A growing minority of
evangelicals are believers in replacing secular government and laws
with Christian ones, and support what can only be called Holy Wars
against non-Christian nations, to accelerate the prophecy of the second
coming and the Reign of Christ. A majority believe in the Rapture,
which means they could care less about the future of their nation or
the environment.
- Unlike public schools, and unlike health care
and other civic organizations, fundamentalist congregations are still
functioning, growing and open to all. And Christian education and
Christian home-schooling are filling the void of a crumbling public
education system, and helping to develop the cadres of right-wing
believers in the future. They have already achieved astonishing
penetration of the upper echelons of the Bush administration and many
political establishments and educational institutions and NGOs. The
product of this brainwashing by uneducated religious leaders is an
electorate "with eyes, that is to say the camera to shoot what is all
around them, but no intellectual software to edit or make sense of it
all.", victims of "an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis" that
Joe predicts will outlast any brief respite in the 2006 and 2008
elections.
- Joe points out the astonishing popularity of the
most grotesque "entertainments" -- videos circulating on and off the
Internet showing the grisly deaths of both Americans and Iraqis in the
Bush War -- the ultimate reality shows. The former are used to whip up
fury, indignation and xenophobia, and the latter are a spectacle of
religious eye-for-an-eye retribution, applauded by Mel Gibson-style
viewers as vengeance in God's name. Joe is not surprised at this, or at
the probability that many more Abu Ghraib type atrocities are occurring
worldwide in US secret prisons, directed by the CIA and perpetrated by
working class, uneducated, Scots-Irish troops many with streaks of
religious zealotry. And he was not surprised at the monstrous animal
cruelty at the Pilgrims Pride plant (workers reveling in stomping
chickens to death), where Lynddie England used to work until she quit
because management didn't care about the atrocities that went on there.
You come from violent stock, and get put down violently all your life,
you tend to perpetuate the pattern. Violence, in the streets, in the
workplace, in entertainment, and in theatres of war, defines the
working class life experience. The rest of us would just rather not see
it or acknowledge it.
- There is a complicated and ironic
explanation why huge not-for-profit (but very profitable) hospitals
centralized in affluent communities are starving out smaller, local
hospitals in poorer areas, to the point that health-care facilities in
poorer communities are mostly now just places exhausted working class
Americans are "discarded when they can no longer work". Joe explains
the perverse way many of these institutions are forced to operate,
often treating long-term patients for illnesses they don't have and
worsening their condition. These facilities are now the largest cause
of bankruptcies in the US, even though 2/3 of these bankrupts have
health insurance (thanks to high premiums and deductibles and uncovered
costs), and half of uninsured Americans owe money to health-care
institutions.
- Joe presents some alarming data on the health
care and social security crisis looming especially for older women in
the US. Two thirds of Social Security recipients are women, and 90% of
them receive no other income, putting most of them below the poverty
line at a time the Bushies are trying to cut, bankrupt and/or abolish
the system entirely. Half of Americans depend entirely
on the government for help when they get old. "Social security is the
most important ongoing domestic story in America", Joe asserts bluntly,
explaining that it is destroying the social fabric of working class
families as many face the dread of regularly visiting elder family
members in horrific institutions, elders who paid much into the system
and now plead desperately and hopelessly for escape from these terrible
places, escape that never comes.
The bottom line of this
vicious cycle is that half of Americans are functionally illiterate,
and poor education, poor health care, poor nutrition, corporatist
oppression and exploitation are creating a time bomb that, in the short
run, vents itself in anger against pontificating liberals they never
see and don't understand, and in the long run could explode into bloody
and nationwide violence. These people, living right in our midst but
whom we never reach out to, simply don't have the wherewithal to
improve their own lot -- "they are too uneducated, too conditioned to
the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen."
Joe
laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up
with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition -- for
discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a
'menu' of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand
names and ensembles. "Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose
from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they
like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive." None of us can, any longer,
"make up his or her identity from scratch." The upper-middle and
affluent suburban "catering classes", those who support the corporatist
centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its
excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least
have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published
this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my
liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge
are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any
inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to
become part of it.
We are all, Joe argues, prisoners of this
corporatist political and economic system, caught, more or less, in its
web. "America's much-ballyhood liberty is largely fictional. Three
million of us are [in prisons or on parole]...The rest of us are
captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our
ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund." What's worse, "You
never know you are in prison until you try the door". And America's
working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that
they can't even see the door.
America, he says, cannot hope to
stop messing up the rest of the world until it solves its own mess.
"When social conscience extends no farther than ourselves, our friends,
our families then Darfur and secret American prisons abroad are not
[perceived to be] a problem".
This book is about the horrific
mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for
those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American
culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the
most part, forced down anyone's throats). And our cultures already
exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so
magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe
Bageant.
So no matter where in the world you live, please buy several copies of Deer Hunting With Jesus
and give them to people who do not understand why George Bush won the
US election of 2004. This is important, and Joe has done all the hard
work and research for us, in a courageous, personal and awesome
portrait of the true nature of the most powerful country on the planet.
We need everyone to hear this story, to understand what has been going
on under our noses all along, that we never got quite close enough to
see.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
