Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.<\/p>\n
In similar news, one of my favorite best-selling SF authors is off to Mexico for hernia surgery<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is the context in which I read Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War<\/cite><\/strong>. The book was recommended by some blog or another as What’s the Matter with Kansas<\/cite> done better, and describes working-class life in Bageant’s home town of Winchester, Virginia.<\/p>\n It’s a very angry book, and it’s hard to blame him for his anger at the class system and the gross injustices it creates. He paints a really bleak portrait of life as a member of the working class, which he defines, “leaving aside all numbers” thus:<\/p>\n You do not have power over your work. You do not control when you work, how much you get paid, how fast you work, or whether you will be cut loose from your job at the first shiver on Wall Street. “Working class” has not a thing to do with the color of your collar and not nearly as much to do with income as most people think, or in many cases even with whether you are self-employed. These days the working class consists of truck drivers, cashiers, electricians, medical technicians, and all sorts of people conditioned by our system not<\/i> to think of themselves as working class.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He uses this as a background to explain why working-class people make such desperately bad personal and political decisions, and why “progressives” have trouble making inroads with them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bageant hammers a couple of main points home again and again, but the anecdotes he tells are more convincing than the lectures. They ring pretty true, as well– I am a middle-class guy from a middle-class background, but I grew up in a rural working-class area, and the general types Bageant describes are familiar to me. Some of the stories are weirdly moving.<\/p>\n Ultimately, though, this is a frustrating book. Bageant is outraged at the current system, but not in a useful<\/strong> way. He does a great job of showing how working-class people get screwed by the system, but the book is short on concrete suggestions of what should or could be done to change things. His web site<\/a> is even worse in this respect.<\/p>\n I realize that documenting the problem is a crucial step, and he does that very well. It’s just the first step, though, or it ought to be the first step in a process of trying to change things. Bageant doesn’t really give a clear indication of what the second step should be, so the book comes off as “The system sucks, we’re all fucked, grab a beer and wait for civilization to collapse.”<\/p>\n That’s not the book I really want to read, not least because I don’t believe it’s true. As I said above, I am not working class, but I’m not more than two generations removed from working class– my paternal grandfather spent his life working in a shoe factory, but all his kids went to college and did better for themselves, and he was extremely proud of that. My generation is pretty solidly middle-class.<\/p>\n So, it is<\/strong> possible to escape the working class, contrary to Bageant’s doom-and-gloom narrative. The question is, how can we get more people to recognize that fact, and either take advantage of the opportunities exist, or demand better services and opportunities so that they can<\/strong> do better?<\/p>\n Bageant’s description of the situation is good enough that I hoped he would have something to offer. I would’ve liked some suggestions about how progressives should<\/strong> be approaching the working class, not just in terms of marketing, but in terms of policy. Instead, there are just rants about how what progressives are doing now is all wrong.<\/p>\n Back at my doctor’s yesterday, I left with a somewhat-less-bulky splint, and the news that I probably didn’t tear the mumble<\/i> ligament, so I should get away without surgery, though I’m probably looking at six weeks in casts and splints. It’ll be annoying, but nothing we can’t handle.<\/p>\n The woman in the next curtain bay left without her work clearance, and it didn’t look like she was going to be able to handle that. And I wish there were a way to make that better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly… Continue reading Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18,49,28,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","category-books","category-class_issues","category-politics","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n