Armchair Revolutionaries

Hi to everybody...here's a book that might be interesting to read...

Deer Hunting With Jesus, By Joe Bageant

If you fell within the category of people who are the focus of this impassioned polemic, subtitled "Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America", then you would not be reading these words, for 89-94 million members of the US adult population are "functionally illiterate". Joe Bageant exposes the vast social gulf in America, and how the poor are exploited and betrayed by those for whom they work and vote: big business and government.

Far from allowing them to remain faceless statistics, however, Bageant aims to humanise those clinging to society's fringes; those who "smell like an ash-tray in the check-out line"; the overweight and the underpaid. His informed sketches succeed in inciting not derision and scorn, but compassion.

In 1999, after a 30-year absence, Bageant returned to his hometown. In the poor, white, working-class neighbourhood of Winchester, Virginia, dwell the ghosts of his ancestors and the ghosts of his own youth. There, his father worked at a gas station, his mother at a textile mill, Bageant smoked his first cigarette and married a girl from down the street. He discovers that his neighbourhood has since been degraded, and the three preferred avenues of escape are "alcohol, Jesus and overeating".

Bageant depicts both the causes and effects of poverty, the "brutality of environment" and its "intellectual bareness". Television presides over a country which has become a corporation, pulling the purse strings and even dictating the seasons – marking its viewers' lives into the football, shopping, election and marketing seasons.

The prose style errs into tautology and flabbiness, but this is an emotive and evocative exposé of the "dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure". That this book exists at all is testament that the determined may find ways around brick walls.

Hi to everybody...thought you might like to read this...one more woman who finds Sarah Palin dangerous...
Editor-At-Large: No woman is an island, Mrs Palin

John McCain's running mate shares the dangerous tunnel vision of George Bush junior in her avoidance of foreign travel

Janet Street-Porter
Sunday, 14 September 2008
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Are women voters in America really that hungry for power that they will endorse Sarah Palin? She makes my flesh creep – that one-note voice. That limited script. That constant referral to her twin motifs – God and Our Boys. A carefully stage-managed series of network television interviews on ABC last week only reinforced my certainty that the election of this particular female would represent a backward step, not just for her sex, but for her country.

This is someone who didn't apply for a passport until two years ago, who has only visited Canada – her next door neighbour – and Mexico, apart from one trip to Kuwait to visit the Army, with a stop-off in Germany on the way home to visit wounded soldiers. This, she told ABC's Charlie Gibson, was the "trip of a lifetime". Sarah Palin embodies all that is most insular about the American psyche. If you thought George Bush didn't do foreign travel, welcome to the frighteningly xenophobic world of Mrs Palin.

When asked if her lack of experience in foreign affairs was a drawback, she retorted something along the lines of "most vice-presidents have not met that many foreign heads of state... the desire now is for no more politics as usual... people with big fat résumés from the Washington establishment". In other words, she's proud of the fact that she's been nowhere, met no foreign politicians and possesses a curiosity which is limited to how to skin and cook a moose. She tells Gibson, "you can actually see Russia from Alaska!" I'd be more thrilled if she had ever considered visiting the place she sees on the horizon.

Is my heartfelt belief that travel broadens the mind and adds immeasurably to my understanding of the world a middle class bit of snobbery?

Do I sneer at Sarah Palin because she's happy at home in the featureless tundra of Alaska and doesn't feel the need to stare at the wonderful ceiling of the Sistine chapel, admire the Eiffel Tower, gasp at Ayers Rock or be enchanted by the Taj Mahal? A couple of hundred years ago, the upper classes toured Europe as part of their education. Young people today travel all over the world in their gap year, helping with charity projects in the Third World. Previous American Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush senior, realised they had to go abroad to promote their policies. President Clinton holidayed in Africa, Spain and Australia, and his daughter attended Oxford.

Sarah Palin, however, continues the tradition established by George Bush junior – why go anywhere when you can have it all in your own backyard? This fellow would rather walk around an arid ranch in Texas and round up cattle than spend one hour on holiday in a foreign land. And when he does turn up in one of the locations where he is engaged in war, he is surrounded by security and sees nothing that isn't stage-managed.

Ironically, since the US embarked on its post-9/11 foreign policy – the so-called war on terror – its leaders have spent less and less time trying to understand how people outside their own culture live and think. They talk of Muslim culture but only experience it in the confines of a combat zone. They debate global warming but have no appetite to walk across the land in the parts of Africa where crops are failing.

Sarah Palin regularly invokes a Higher Power – The Almighty – as her adviser and running mate, not John McCain, but when it comes to life on earth her tunnel vision is chilling.