Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAnne and I met the redneck's liberal Joe Bageant while out for a stroll a month (or two) of Sundays ago in his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, an hour's pony ride from here, while he was out in his yard patching his old house and repairing to prepare for Belize on the proceeds of his demographic rant, Deer Hunting with Jesus.
He didn't know it through our chit-chat over the housing market down his way, but we were part of the aspiring liberal educated poor: advanced degrees (true: we have three M.A.'s between us) and, for the D.C. area, low salaries or none, which, partly, is how I came to settle in Hagerstown, the Cumberland Valley, AKA about one-third to one-fifth off the price of anything and everything more closely associated with life around the nation's capital (Anne sort of caught up with me, and I let her, God bless).
I was once upon a time enamored of Charles Dickens, Jonathan Kozel, and Studs Terkel (whose work I haven't read but to which I have nonetheless given a special home in my library), also, from the 1980's education, E.F. Schumacher, George McRobie, and Larry Brown, whose works I had read, enthused as I was for ecology and economics (that first M.A.: "Outdoor Recreation Resources Management", which I managed to hook into a thesis, ne, "Perceived Social Competence, Boredom, and Capacity for Self-Entertainment," which title, to those who know me, still fits).
Anne, by comparison, seems to have missed some of the social studies reading but encountered the life.
For the past five years, right up to this weekend but not beyond, in fact, she has served as a tutor for English composition for the TRIO Program at Bowie State University--"an educational outreach program that provides opportunities for academic development, assists students in meeting basic college requirements, and helps motivate students to successfully complete their postsecondary degrees"--a program that bestowed on her benefits by sucking about $500 per month, mandatory (the price of insuring the single woman had to be a retailer's 100 percent mark-up within a contract with the state), out of her modest, at best, paycheck for health insurance, leaving the Georgetown educated writer--also top-scoring SAT wunderkind out of high school)--living hand-to-mouth in a first-floor garden apartment efficiency down the block from my old place (yes, I picked her up at the swimming pool).
Anne, sez I, here's your chance to get out of D.C. and morph into the writer (and woman) you really want to be; and Jim, sez I also, you've had a great bachelor run and here may run into (or wreck upon) the "real life" of working white folk detailed so well by Joe Bageant.
As I have said now many times to my fellow writer and love, there must be a God to have brought us together that fated, sunny, chlorinated August afternoon: after a decade of dancing with snazzy, possibly inappropriate, cowgirls three or four nights a week down at the Cancun Cantina (and going home alone, usually, as consequence), I took that hard left turn out of the life and into oh my God (what have I done); alternatively, as I have often said to the old unrelenting if occasionally dancing "gal pal"--for whom I felt I was crawling at 9 miles an hour down the proverbial dead-end street--God also has a wicked sense of humor.
So here is my cold and rainy October morning in the mountains of western Maryland, and the girlfriend's moving in ('bout time), and I, liberal friend of the educated poor, am hunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder, as it were, with Joe Bageant, educated liberal friend of the high school educated po' white workin' class.
Remember, as if a father to children and if I teach you nothing else: God has a wicked sense of humor.
Wherefore these accidental meetings and new arriving possibilities and responsibilities?
Bageant's social tract, endearing in its bona fide trash-talkin' down-home tone (but, not to fool you, watch out for the Faulknerian tour de force when he gets going on guns and hunting--"For fifty years Kenny has oiled his guns and walked this ground, haunted by Pap, Daddy, Uncle Nelson, haunted by our Scots-Irish and Huguenot forefathers who likewise trod here, who planted it in buckwheat and hunted its frozen stubble"), rings also too true: for the men and women on the floors in manufacturing, retailing, and the less degreed parts of services (and even then), the economics have been bitter since the Reagan Devolution, and they're getting worse.
Bageant, in a near miraculous act of secular prophecy, foretells the mortgage meltdown settling down in the bellies of the the markets like the big, soft cancerous ball it is, while at the same time, which is the meat of his book, delving into the political psychology of kith and kin who have gone wayward into unhelpful Republican politics and backward (by the millions) into the comforts of Christian fundamentalist life.
Once upon a time, from Roosevelt to Johnson at least, the Democrats stood up for the working man, concocting social security and enabling unions, but perhaps at a time when it made a difference. Today, employers higher "temps" (not to mention "interns," the most pernicious of cost-reducing practices), churn and rotate labor at the lowest levels, or, as I think has happened with Anne--these are my thoughts, not hers--threaten to indenture its far better educated, egalitarian, and idealistic citizens (at least the ones not armed with math, science, and engineering degrees for hooking into the mixed corporate-defense conglomerate) for as meager a sum as the low-rent lifestyle allows.
Personally, I'm not ready to raise my fist and shout "Solidarity!"--there's much to dislike in those politics too--but with Bageant, one hears both the call and the prophecy, and it's not only for the beer swillin' salt o' the earth but for all for whom employer interest and loyalty followed by the benefits of health care, education, affordable housing, and certain and decent retirements have slipped from grasp.
Daddy always said, "Don't get greedy."
To whom he was speaking, I was not always sure.
For the good dose of righteous whining underlaid by hard to remove facts, click on over to www.joebageant.com.
I'll probably have to go on and read "Studs" (The Great Divide) now (just as soon as I finish saving Somalia--truly, also on deck: Catherine Besteman's Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery), but I have yet a few colorful and incendiary pages of Bageant's work through which to plow, and I'm going to enjoy them.
1. Bageant, Joseph L. Deer Hunting with Jesus. New York: Crown Publishers (Random House), 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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