After at least seven different people suggested I read Joe Bageant’s, “Deer Hunting With Jesus. Dispatches from America’s Class War”I finally gave in and downloaded it to my Kindle several months ago where it stayed unread. This week, while working up in Portland I gave it a try hoping to put myself to sleep in the hotel room and though it didn’t put me to sleep and I haven’t finished it, I am really glad I started it.
One of the biggest quandaries besetting my fellow progressives and me is what mechanism exists that allows working class Americans to consistently vote against their own interests. More specifically, I have watched it happen here in the almost seven years I have lived in Coos County despite all my efforts to provide data, both empirical and statistical to my fellow working class citizens, proving the folly of this or that course of action. Willful, prideful ignorance I have proclaimed and speculated while the objects of my frustration accuse me of liberal elitism.
The World Forum (if you can call heavy handed moderation of non conservative ideas a forum) is rife with the kind of pro-big-business, anti-Islam, anti-environmentalists, anti-taxes, anti-entitlements, all welfare mothers drive Cadillacs and eat lobster. All union workers are lazy, overpaid and priced themselves out of the market and that’s why mill jobs left Coos County and went to China. People here really believe the unions are to blame for Weyerhauser baling out in the eighties while they ignore the multimillion dollar bonuses of the CEOs running major corporations. They think nothing of the fact the working poor pay higher taxes and their taxes subsidize jobs in foreign lands by virtue of offering ‘enterprise zone’ exemptions, property tax exemptions (remember NW Natural) and tax credits and federal grants all while white collar crooks like Ken Lay didn’t pay a penny in taxes.
Progressives like me stand in stunned amazement as the working class not only stand there and take it in the shorts but bloody hold ‘tea parties’ extolling the rights of the rich to stick it to the poor, and “oh, and by the way keep the goddam government out of my medicare!” I don’t read The World Forum anymore because it makes me sad and it makes me want to wrap myself in my liberal elitism like a thick blanket against the bitter cold and escape the hell out of here.
While Bageant doesn’t offer solutions (so far anyway) he makes a really good point
I don’t mean to reinforce the false neocon-generated label of Brie-eating, microbrew-sucking, Volvo-driving wimps. I’ve done all those things and more – except for the unaffordable Volvo. Besides, if liberal America has been somewhat too smug of late, my working-class brethren have been downright stupid to be so misled by the likes of Karl Rove, Pat Robertson and the phony piety of George W Bush.
The fact is that liberals and working people need each other to survive the growing economic calamity delivered to us by the regime that promised to “run this country like a business.” Sooner or later, despite the Democrats’ wins in the 2006 midterm elections, the left must genuinely connect face to face with Americans who do not necessarily share all of their priorities, and especially with Americans who have not been voting, if the left is ever to be relevant again to working America. If the left is not about class equity, what is it about?
With that in mind, I would like to take the reader someplace closer to the lives of America’s homegrown working folks than our media ever ventures, closer to those whose kids’ high school trip is to Iraq, who are two paydays away from homelessness yet in their pride cling to the notion that they are middle class Americans.
A year ago, New Year’s Eve, twenty two road workers were laid off from the Coos County Road Department in an undeniably underhanded way and I had the opportunity to sit in on the meeting where Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean effectively gave them all the ax. The event triggered an unusual but encouraging opportunity for me to get a snapshot of what I had previously viewed as the ‘other side’, even though I regard myself as working class, and while we will never see eye to eye on everything we found common ground. From that experience I believe we proved the highlighted point of Blageant’s graf above… we need each other and together we changed the political landscape of Coos County.
Blageant, a former redneck conservative turned liberal elite, (he even lived in Oregon for a time) returned to his hometown of Winchester, VA to live and his political transition coupled with the homecoming prompted him to write the book and I am glad he did because it has helped me understand what I am really up against.
Upcoming commissioners elections with two incumbents facing multiple opponents will mark just how much the landscape has changed but one thing I know we all have in common is a real sense of fairness. The thread that binds that fairness, I believe will be jobs. Not temporary jobs as created by building a pipeline or an LNG terminal but real long term family wage jobs that only can come from independence and sustainability in communities that have learned to shake hands and disagree but still work together and have a dialog.
Everyone, redneck and liberal alike should read this book!
