No longer working class, so quit bitching
Dear Joe,
I've read your book Deer Hunting with Jesus and it reminded me of growing up in a small mill town on the Connecticut River called Bellows Falls. We used to call it Fellows Balls. When the paper mills closed and the railroads became a shadow of their previous selves, most workers traveled to Springfield, 12 miles north, to the machine tool plants, then those plants closed down.
It's an irritating litany repeated everywhere in this country. The little village of Bellows Falls couldn't even support the 12 or so bars for its 3,500 population. Bellows Falls is having a semi-gentrified cultural/arts/music scene revival, but the poor and working folks are still struggling to survive. Now I'm 58 and live in a hamlet of 250 just 20 minutes from Bellows Falls. Sometimes it seems like a thousand miles away. I enjoy reading your work in this dark age.
Steve
------
Steve,
Consider this:
- 72% of all U.S. shoes are made in China
- 50% of all U.S. kitchen appliances are made in China
- China has the largest number of Internet users in the world, 220 million
- 432 million Chinese own Chinese made cell phones
- Hottest car market on the planet -- China
- Number of Chinese who pay for their cars in cash -- 96%
- Portion of wages saved by the average Chinese wage earner -- 25%
- Percentage of Chinese parents who believe their children will have a better future than they did: 89%
- Source: National Geographic Survey, and others
Now China may well be a governmentally repressive, polluted place with many folks living in backward places (I could make the same argument for the U.S. these days). But it appears to me that they are happy as hell to embrace "the American Dream," that our government (the corporations) drop kicked across the Pacific in the name of Wall Street and gold plated toilet seats for CEOs .
And let's not even talk about what's happening in India.
Anyway, as one European friend of mine, a fellow socialist, jokingly puts it, "You Americans abhorred being called part of the world's 'working class.' Now you are not. So quit bitching!"
In art and labor,
Joe
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What they're saying about Joe's book
Here are some comments about Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.
"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive."
-- HOWARD ZINN, author of A People's History of the United States
"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
-- SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of Reservation Blues
"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state -- and, therefore, ours -- Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
-- MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
-- JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch
"This recounting of lost lives -- of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states -- has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media."
-- STUDS TERKEL
"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
-- DAVID SIROTA, author of Hostile Takeover
"Dead serious and damn funny ... Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder ... Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level."
—- MOTHER JONES
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War is now available at all major bookstores and online at Amazon.com. CLICK HERE.
