Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

I have discovered a new favorite writer: Joe Bageant. His new book, bearing the above title, concerns the incredible nature of America's class/cultural divide. Bageant, an avowed aging Marxist, prefers to frame the issues purely in terms of class. However, Bageant is a native of Winchester, Virginia - a stone's throw from the Blue Ridge Mountains and West Virginia. He writes of the Appalachian subsistence farming lifestyle of his grandparents and his people's Southern roots. Despite most of a lifetime spent in the West and in more cosmopolitan settings, Bageant's interview on Australian TV reveals a discernible portion of his Appalachian Virginian accent to be intact. Bageant is adamantly and undeniably one of 'the great unwashed', my people: Redneckius Americanus.

Bageant left wage-slave Virginia for a stint in the military as a teenager, and stayed gone for decades - part of the small-town brain drain he references in the interview I watched. He spent years as a journalist, interviewing and befriending people like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. The years he spent honing his skills writing to the public practically beam through in his book. He has one of the most robust, accessible, intelligent voices of any author I have read in a long, long time. He is able to channel directly the cultural texture, the worldview, and the gritty and hazy ideas and ideals that working-class rednecks organize their worlds with. The result is a systematic, stunningly accurate, and rollickingly entertaining piece that raises the curtain on this world to educated liberal America.

I spent most of my day yesterday contemplating how joining the ranks of the college educated is distancing me from all that makes me feel comfortable and emotionally and spiritually grounded. Admittedly, this blog is an attempt to counter such a growing internal schizophrenia. While I treasure the education I have received, I worry about the six-figures of debt it has incurred me. I often sadly wonder why my family cannot understand anything I study, while my classmates seem puzzled and either bemused or shocked at half of my personal life. I am increasingly becoming aware of the extent to which post-secondary education - even at a $10,000-a-year "public" university - is the realm of middle-class privilege. Maybe its because I studied history, one of the most conservative disciplines in the classic liberal-arts canon. (Conservative being generally synonymous with money in intellectual and professional circles.) Maybe its because this is the first time in my life I have been immersed in middle-class, suburban, white America. For the first few years of college I was stunned and horrified - and also transfixed. I never saw so many people that all dressed so well just to come to school, and were so utterly vapid and vacant. Now I am just impatient to get out of undergrad and be recognized for standing out above the crowd of Abercrombie clone children who are my classmates. Half the time when I relate a personal anecdote or a divergent opinion that I have arrived at because of direct life experience the classrooms I study erupt in bewildered laughter. "Why would you ever live across the street from a slaughterhouse?" Why indeed.

I never wanted to be middle-class, but I can feel my education - and the looming prospect of an academic career - pulling me in that direction. I feel totally disoriented in such an environment. I don't think I know anyone from school that would so much as contemplate trying to fix anything they owned if it broke. That scares me.

Last week as I was driving aimlessly through Fairmount I meandered through several hilly streets whose whimsical angles and trash-strewn lawns reminded me of my childhood drawings of the rolling hills of home. I saw skinny young men with bad haircuts standing around outside working on battered vintage cars. As I passed I gave the standard country headnod of acknowledgement. (Nathan Turner and I recently discussed the nod's various forms. Country people do a polite, but sometimes gruff, downward acknowledging nod. Blue-collar city dudes, when inclined to be so friendly, perform a slightly more aggressive upward nod that imparts more a defensive message. The former is generally friendly and the latter ghetto.) The guys nodded back and I realized that such an interaction felt more a lot more like home than the trendy pseudo-gentrifying neighborhood I live in. I conferred to the map section of the 'Social Areas of Cincinnati" report linked to on the Urban Appalachian Website, and realized that it was small wonder I felt that way: I was indeed among my people. South Fairmount is home to a recognized and established Appalachian community.

I have been feeling guilty for having not been involved in any volunteer work for the last several years. When I started at UC I picked up a job as a bellboy and spent several years working myself numb to keep on Dean's List at UC and pull as many shifts as I could get carrying suitcases, praying I could somehow earn enough money at a minimum-wage gig to decrease my dependence on student loans. It took me several years to figure out that I was never going to get ahead like that, besides being miserable and exhausted all the time.

Reading Joe Bageant reminds me of the homesickness and detachment that I feel at school. His tone is the rollicking shit-kicking that underpins half the country songs that are good to get drunk to. He narrates the book from a bar where he stays in touch with roots, kibbitzing with the underemployed, uninsured, overweight, and overworked.

I have realized a selfish reason why volunteering through an agency like the Urban Appalachian Council would be really, really good for me. Due to complicated health problems, I can't drink. This means that I can no longer get drunk enough to erase the intellectual disparities between myself and people like my relatives, who have never - as Bageant elegantly quips - experienced the life of the mind. But I could spent time among the raucously dispossessed miss by helping their kids learn to read. And that would do me at least as much good as it'd do anyone else.