The more liberal you are, the more you need to READ THIS BOOK, especially if you are an activist.

[tom_paine]

It's called "Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War" by Joe Bageant

http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/030733936X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198185595&sr=1-1

Bageant describes himself as a "redneck socialist" but his politics are beside the point as opposed to his ability to relate to us what he sees by someone who has bridged both worlds.

I have always said that one of the Bushies more pernicious talents in constructing their Web of Propaganda and Deceit is the ability to take a grain of truth and wrap about it the most absurd tissue of lies. The grain of truth makes the lies easier to swallow, from the point of view of the "disinterested observer".

Further, there are other reasons for why the very "FDR liberalism" that uplifted the quality of life for millions upon millions of Americans is now rejected by the descendants of those same Americans, even as they are being taken apart at the joints, economically-speaking, by the Royal and Loyal Bushies of the world.

It is a complex issue, one which defies the simple platitudes such as "The American Sheeple are stupid."

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not perfect, just the opposite. I have probably said this and other simple platitudes a hundred or a thousand times on DU.

Bageant bridges two worlds that desperately need to be bridged if we are to have any hope of reaching our fellow Americans and save this country from authoritarian totalitarian Bushies.

Liberal Activists, when reading this book, will have to have an open mind and recall our "FDR Roots". Otherwise, they/we will not gain anything from this book but a fresh contempt for "yokels", and that is one luxury we cannot afford at this late date.

Liberals, most of them/us, excoriated Howard Dean when he spoke of the need to get "people with Confederate Flags on their trucks" in our camp, but there is more than a little truth to that.

This book enlightens, illuminates, and shows us the way as to the whys and even some of the hows of doing this. As the book will illuminate also, the desperate need for doing this, and it is going to involve getting our hands dirty and doing things which seem pointless and unpleasant.

Anyway, the more Liberal a person is, the more they need to read this book, to read it with and open mind and to sit down and read it to the very end.

"Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War" by Joe Bageant.

http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/030733936X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198185595&sr=1-1

Read It. You will not regret it.

[Double T]

1. Social and economic revolutions are NEVER pointless and ALWAYS unpleasant.

Thanks for the referral!

[MadHound]

2. Sounds interesting,

It also sounds like something we liberals and progressives out here in the hinterlands are already doing. I live in rural Mid Missouri, and my neighbors are, for the most part, pretty darn conservative. However I've found that they can be brought around with patience and perserverence. I don't brow beat them, I don't rail away, I don't even usually bring up a candidates' or party name. I do however point out the huge flaws in where we are headed, both in terms of the war, the economy, the ever growing police state that we're living in. While a few are so far around the bend they don't even want to listen to you, most are actually quite thoughtful about such issues, and most have wound up agreeing with my position after a while.

When you do it one on one, and don't put it in the normal, hot button political terms, most people have enough sense to do the right thing. The trouble is while people like myself are doing this retail, one by one, people like Limpballs can do it wholesale thanks to their exposure and airtime.

[yasmina27]

3. I've read this book

and lived near the area he writes about. He is spot-on with his observations. That's one reason why I couldn't stay there more than 1 year.

I was a single, female teacher, and the source of continued conversation and speculation as to why I wasn't yet married. I was a lesbian, a drunk (because I bought a 6-pack of beer one day and a student of mine was packing the groceries), and any other reason they could come up with. I hated the small-town mentality, and got out of there as quickly as I could.

That's not to say that all small towns are bad. I just grew up differently and really didn't appreciate all the interference into everyone's personal lives.

[tom_paine]

5. That kind of living is not for everyone. I have lived in both city and country

(albeit always, but for a couple brief exceptions related to being in the military) North of the Mason-Dixon Line.

It doesn't have to be for you, but in the larger sense, if we write it all off that isn't for us then we abandon the playing field and the Bushies win by default.

This cannot happen. It must not happen.

[AX10]

15. Where was this?

[flashl]

4. "Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. "

Indeed.

[Echo In Light]

6. Will take a look...

[KG]

7. read his work more often at his website / blog

http://www.joebageant.com/

[scarletwoman]

9. You beat me to it! I was just getting ready to post the link to his website.

Some of the most outstanding writing I've ever seen. I love this guy!

sw

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. I haven't read the book, but it should be elementary to note that

you can't win people over if you act is if you despise them.

In some ways, the Democrats have become the yuppie party, while the Republicans have developed the ability to pretend to be "just plain folks."

I cringe whenever anyone talks as if all Republicans are "trailer trash" or "degenerates who marry their siblings."

The so-called "trailer trash" are precisely the people we claim to want to help.

[elizfeelinggreat]

10. I have just started it

I'm hoping it will help me understand (having lived most of my life in the Northeast and then been transplanted to places with the exact mindset he writes of).

He both scares and gives me hope (copied from an old essay on his website):

We should quit pretending that a very large portion of Americans are not degraded human beings. They are. Skeptics are welcome to visit me here in the armed and inbred environs of Winchester, Virginia. It no longer matters what or who degraded them. Much time has passed and this is how many Americans have become. Fundamentalist cults abound, both religious and economic. Millions upon millions of Christians live in hermetic worlds of their own, with their own books stores, schools, media. Millions of middle class Americans both conservative and liberal live in suburbs and condos and brownstone row houses completely surrounded by their own kind, all of them worshippers in the American value cult, commodity fetishists. They are differentiated mainly in their own minds and the narratives they have made up for themselves. And of course in their consumption.

After 35 years of inattention to these not-so-nice Americans among us (in another time they would have been called fascists, but now they are considered merely a political "base," which is in itself a strange sort of national acceptance of cruelty as part of the national character) we are now watching them consolidate power. For the time being they control the presidency, the Congress, the media, the Supreme Court, the federal courts, most governorships, and most state legislatures. And if their manipulation of congressional districts stays put they could feasibly stay in power indefinitely. Do these people, this half of our population which cheers on unprovoked wars abroad, spying on the citizenry and demonizing of the poor truly hate democracy? Fuck if I know. But after generations of brainwashing and psychological molding and exploitation of their fears, I suspect they never really knew what democracy was.

If anyone is going to turn the ship of the republic around, put us on a course more in the direction of liberty and openness, it will require the navigational help of those among us who can still remember what it was like before totalistic capitalism took such grip. People who can remember that genuine good will and intent were once alive in the hearts of most people even if never in the halls of Congress. Remember when at least some human and social progress was evident around us, thereby giving reason to hope.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2006/02/welcome_to_midd.html

[MedleyMisty]

11. Yeah, the veiled classism and the hate of people based on where they're born

isn't doing us any favors. I know it turns me off and if there was somewhere to go other than the fascists, I'd be jumping ship. And I can see how a person who isn't as informed would go to the fascists.

[tom_paine]

12. It's an easy mindset to fall into, an outlet for frustration, and most of us have fallen into it

at one time or another.

And while I don't belong to the school of "oh what will the world think of us if we say that?" at DU, I do think that we have to get past that and understand that Howard Dean was right.

Speaking for myself, it ain't easy, and that's why books like Bageant's are important.

[Redneck Socialist]

13. Hmmm, me thinks I'll be making a trip to the bookstore this week.

This book sounds like it's right up my ally.

For the past decade I've largely focused my volunteer activist time on local environmental issues. All too often when meeting with environmentalists I'm the only hunter in the room. Just as often I'm the only self identified liberal environmentalist in the room when meeting with hunters. The social divide the OP alludes to is all too real and is a huge roadblock to making any progress on a host of issues in this country.

I'm definitely going to read this book.

[tom_paine]

14. Whoa! Are you kidding me? That's your monniker, and you've never read Bageant?

Wow.

I am not being facetious. It's like when Leibneitz and Newton both simultaneously invented calculus without knowing each other's work!

OK, maybe I am being facetious, but your monniker is very cool and thought-provoking...just like Bageant.

[tom_paine]

16. Kick for the weekday morning crew.

n/t

[Breeze54]

17. Thanks, tom_paine

I'll see if I can get it at my local library. ;)

[annabanana]

18. Thanks for that. The info in this book needs to become part

of the frame. I think people can understand that this is necessary in a "one-on-one" situation, and most of us operate like that in a day to day setting.

Getting this perspective "out there" would be very helpful for those who live in places where you don't get much face time with this mind set.

[tom_paine]

19. What is the "squid-ink" in the water is the semantic cookie-cutter template the Bushies

have inoculated their "activists" with? It was designed in the bowels of hell, as it were, the billion-dollar apparatus of Bushie "think-tanks" (Bageant touches on this several times throughout the book).

It spreads like a virus, because it was designed and marketed that way. It is easy to replicate, fiendishly clever in that with short declarative Orwellian statements it creates rhetorical Gordian knots which take so long to properly untangle that in our ADD society, people's eyes glaze over like those characters in "Scrubs" before one can unpack and debunk these misleading falsehoods.

It works because it touches a chord we all have in our reptile brains "fear of the other". It works because it was designed to be easily mimickable, and gives the wielder a potent club that at the very least, squirts squid-ink into the discussion and at worst, shuts down any reasoned discussion.

You can find it in use on any message board anywhere. Hell, because it is now such a part of our surroundings, you can see it is use in the Clinton/Obama flamefests and elsewhere on DU.

As I said, it is easily mimickable and wields like a potent club. It was marketed to us on a subconscious level (as all good marketing is) so that even if we defend against it consciously, it still seeps in.

For such a potent weapon, who could resist the temptation to pull it off the shelf and beat one's opponents over the head with it? Not me. I have unwittingly done so and will probably do so again, even though I recognize it for what it is and consciously try to defend against it whenever possible.

And because our clueless Democratic Leadership did nothing while it was morphing all around, threw no "sand in the gears" and offered no real resistance for 25 years and even now mostly fails to do so, this THING, whatever you want to call it, has cemented into stone.

So much of what 97.5-99% of the Imperial Subjects of Amerika believe as Convention Wisdom is misinformation, disinformation and Bushie Lies, hammered home, as Goebbels foresaw when he was using a primitive form of this Bushie Thing, this absolutist, demonizing, and dehumanizing rhetoric, by sheer repetition and the audacity to tell such Big Lies and keep on telling them, no matter what.

Goebbels spoke of this Bushie Strategy quite eloquently seventy years ago when he said:

"Propaganda…must always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run, only he will achieve basic results in influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form despite the objections of the intellectuals."
- Joseph Goebbels’ diary, 1/29/42

There is a quote I have seen in various siglines around DU, "There is one thing they had over their enemies, and that was the capacity to astonish."

Well that quote is correct, too, and our Democratic Leadership has been paralyzed by the snake's eyes for so long they know no other way of being. That, too, is what Bageant's book is about.

The difficulty and hard uphill road anyone who wishes to go out and follow through on Bageant's advice should understand what they/we face, the better to combat it. I have to varying degrees been doing this "Paul Revere-ing" for seven plus years and have met repeatedly with our National Madness that has been as brilliantly marketed and integrated into the National Consciousness as the original Goebbels' did, maybe better.

I don't know what the answer is, but maybe we can put our heads together and figure it out, now that we know what the question is. The answer to this question is notably missing from Bageant's book, he just says to get out there and mix it up, so to speak.

But what to do against Goebbels v2.0 that is ingrained in the National Mind so deeply, now? How to combat this thing that was designed by hundreds of very smart, if evil, people at the cost of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours?

It is an answer, at this late date, we desperately need if we are to restore the old American Republic to some semblance of it's former post-WWII self