Dawnfire:

"Eat, Fight, F**k, Pray"

Something I came across here, interesting and insightful. 

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Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War just published by Random House Crown. He recently spoke with Joshua Frank about his new book, religion, rednecks and what it's like to serve beer to an underage horse.

Joshua Frank: So Joe, what the hell is going on with the redneck strain of the working class anyway? Why do they seem more apt to embrace evangelism rather than a labor union? Is it, as psychologists would say, learned helplessness, or worse, idiocy?

Joe Bageant: Well, Josh, that's a pretty broad brush you're painting with there. In fact, it's too broad to be answered, but that will not stop me from responding with my usual shrillness and tin drum noise punctuated by flatulence. Let me start by saying the term redneck does not apply especially to southerners. I have found indigenous redneck culture and communities in Maine, Oregon Kansas, New York, Massachusetts, and California. in virtually every state and in large numbers. Among loggers, cowboys, poles, Germans, and even Latino rednecks.

Really. Don't you think beer and low riders and macho sports aesthetic of Latinos, the heterosexual, patriotic Jesus focused Catholic is that much different from their Jesus focused Baptist Dixie and Midwestern counterparts? The low riders of LA are the same as beer and muscle cars of the south. In fact the first rednecks were probably the striking miners at the Ludlow Colorado massacre, who wore red bandanas and were seen as tough, surly, angry working class people who had to be kept down. The sun on the neck definition is another more recent one that got applied especially to Southerners, during the civil rights era I suppose.

We have been taught to use these ethnic, regional and racial labels to cover up the real issue in America that the rich want keep hidden another 200 years-that we are a classist country. That one class owns pretty much the whole country these days and that all the rest are left to suck hind tit and pretend they are all members of something called "the middle class." The only real middle class is that thin layer of commissars, lawyers, teachers, journalists, and other caterers to the empire, those people necessary to manage it and count the beans, dumb down the kids and lock up enough people to keep the privatized gulags in business.

Anyway, I assume you are referring the heartland white working class people who attend fundamentalist churches. Ever since around 1800 about one-third of white America has been fundamentalist Christians, about one-third of Americans have had a born again experience. The thing that is different now is that these churches have access to political power. They were welcomed across the church-state wall of separation by cynical GOP strategists to whom giving the Republicans another chance to sack Washington, loot the national kitty and maybe pull off a good oil raid in the Middle East, was more important than our constitution. Now that they've let John Calvin's wooly beast into to tent, we find it chewing on the constitution and generally stinking up the joint-it's not going to leave without a fight.

As to the last parts of your question: When it comes to embracing the church instead of a labor union, I can remember a time when the churches stood behind the labor unions. Have we learned to be helpless? Man, we are helpless. Capitalist conditioning has replaced citizenship with consumerism. I mean, what are you or I doing? I write a book so the global publishing chain of Bertelsmann makes more money; you and I both sit here on the Internet spewing electrons across circuit boards that keep Bill Gates and the stock brokers farting through silk while we preach to the choir who bought our books. There are far better alternatives. We could grab some axe handles and heat up the tar bucket and start to burn some shit down. That still works you know.

Joshua Frank: I've always thought that'd work.

Joe Bageant: But we won't. Because we are all programmed to participate through purchase, whether it is my book at Barnes and Noble or the software that enables us to read CounterPunch. Or choose the candidate that has been preselected and purchased in advance by the people who have essentially made Americans into a nation of iPod implanted pizza drivers and well dressed
lawn jockeys sitting in front of monitors on the empire's electronic plantations.