Joe Bageant (1946–2011)

This is a vulgar book. Off color anecdotes and stories abound.
It's filled with profanity, including sexist and racist terminology.
It's hilarious in places, pathetic in others.
It's dated (2006).
It's one of the best books I've ever read.
It's part political screed, part personal memoir.
It's a journey home to the foreign country of your birth.
It acknowledges the unacknowledged and confronts it's true history.
If you want to understand the political landscape of America's heartland, you need to read this book. Don't care if you're conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, libertarian, socialist or communist. You need to read this book.
Period.… (meer)

When NPR correspondent Joe Bageant moved back to Winchester, Virginia after being away for decades, he felt the true breadth of the chasm that exists between - for lack of a better term - the classes in America.

He tells it like it is - showing empathy for the folks who are working hard to sustain a lifestyle that encompasses far less than most of us are accustomed to. He also acknowledges the anger and disbelief that he experiences around these folks who so willingly give their votes to a political party that seems to far removed from their basic needs. Yet, they forsake the promise of good jobs and health care because - as Bible belt Southerners - they put more stock in a candidate's purported stance on God, guns, and guts (a/k/a, blowing up foreigners).

The book is, at times, infuriating, and then it swings to heartbreaking, then to humorous. At times it gets bogged down in Michael Moore like fact-checking, but the point is clear - a sizable portion of the American voting pubic is made up of rather simple folks who cling to an ideology that might seem outdated to many of us, but to them, it's what got them this far, and they aren't ready to relinquish it.

Those of us that go to Starbucks every day, and spend time on Goodreads (or, heck, just reading!) are as elitist and odd to them as they may seem hayseed to some of us.

Bageant pulls it all together nicely with the reminder (cliched though it may be) that we're all Americans, and we all essentially want the same basic things - we just have very different views of how to accomplish those goals.

I'll never endorse the NRA/Nascar mentality, but now I have a better understanding of who some of these folks are, and I see why they believe what they believe, whether I agree with it or not.



… (meer)

Certainly a worthwhile book on the travails of the working class in America, especially the white working class, especially especially the southern white working class (Bageant is white and from a working-class Virginia family). Not every chapter hits home for me (the defense of any and all guns and the attempt to trace all white working-class American culture back to the people who lived along Hadrian's wall 500 years ago didn't convince me) but at his best, Bageant weaves together fact and anecdote to paint a picture of the myriad ways working people are screwed by everyone, left and right, in the power structure.… (meer)