Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Why describe it when dozens of reviewers already have:

Bageant mixes a reporter’s keen analysis, a storyteller’s color, and a native son’s love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America’s working poor. Returning to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after 30 years of life among the elite journalistic class, Bageant sought to answer the question of why the working poor vote for Republicans in apparent opposition to their own interests. (Booklist)

This is a great book. Like Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, it sets out to explain why democrats just can’t capture the hearts and votes of working class America.

There was a particular passage that I thought synced up nicely with Barack Obama’s recent “race” speech, where Obama said:

As imperfect as [Reverend Wright] may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The passage from Bageant quote concerns religion, but it has the same theme—your people are your people, and they’re a part of you, no matter what:

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is — how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high, eerie, mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people — by blood, even if not politically or spiritually. I have prayed with them, mourned with them, and celebrated their weddings. I share their rude tastes and humor, and I am marked by the same fundamentalist God-instilled self-loathing. No matter how much I may change or improve my condition, I cannot escape their pathos. I go forward, yet I remain. I wait anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Jessa Crispin for the tip.

Links:

• Buy it on Amazon
• Joe Bageant’s site

If we focus on Joseph, as Matthew does, and make this a legend of salvation, then Joseph becomes the second Adam. He is given a second chance, as we all are, constantly, a chance to reenact a life drama that we have wretchedly botched at least once before, and to do it right this time.

—Stephen Mitchell

Happy Christmas to everyone: here’s Stephen Mitchell from his book, The Gospel According to Jesus, on the Christmas Legend, Joseph, and the true meaning of Christmas: forgiveness.

Today I hope you’ll forgive yourself, and then forgive those who have wronged you.

Peace on earth!

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples.”
—Thomas Jefferson

When, at the age of fifty, I first began to study the Gospels seriously, I found in them the spirit that animates all who are truly alive. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water, I perceived much mire and slime mingled with it; and this had prevented me from seeing the true, pure water. i found that, along with the lofty teaching of Jesus, there are teachings bound up which are repugnant and contrary to it. I thus felt myself in the position of a man to whom a sack of garbage is given, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the garbage a number of infinitely previous pearls.”
—Leo Tolstoy

In The Gospel According To Jesus, Stephen Mitchell sets out on the quest of Jefferson and Tolstoy: to separate the “diamonds” of Jesus’ teachings from the “dunghill” of the gospels (Jefferson’s words).

The resulting gospel is 25 pages long.

The rest of the book is a wonderful 100 page introduction, an exhaustive 140 page commentary, and a 25 page appendix of words on Jesus by Spinoza, Jefferson, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nitezsche, Gandhi, and more.

Of course, Jefferson himself produced a collaged gospel text, commonly known as The Jefferson Bible:

“During the evening hours of one winter month late in his first term as president, after the public business had been put to rest, he began to compile a version of the Gospels that would include only what he considered the authentic accounts and sayings of Jesus. These he snipped out of his King James Bible and pasted onto the pages of a blank book, in more-or-less chronological order. he took up the project again in 1816, when he was seventy-three…pasting in the Greek text as well, along with Latin and French translations, in parellel columns. The “wee little book,” which he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” remained in his family until 1904, when it was published by order of the Fifty-seventh Congress and a copy given to each member of the House and Senate.”

Speaking of presidents, it was Bill Clinton who recommended reading this book…

More reading:

• The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell
• More on the Jefferson Bible
• Stephen Mitchell on Jesus and the Christmas Legend

This book blew my mind. I read it based on the recommendations of both George Saunders and Bill Clinton. Saunders’ recommendation pretty much sums it up:

“It deals with the way our brains process political information, and particularly with the need for people on the left to become more honest and direct in the way they talk about things – to stop trying to appease the growing right-wing movement and really say, flat-out, what they believe and why they believe it, directly and fiercely. Westen includes an incredible “here’s-what-he-should-have-said” speech that Al Gore should have made when Bush questioned his character during one of the debates. Really a mind-expanding book…”

If you want more details, these two NyTimes articles should suffice:

• Counseling Democrats to Go for the Gut
• Push Buttons; Pull Lever

Highly recommended.

I was planning on picking up Foreskin’s Lament this month (I loved, loved, loved Beware of God), but after listening to Auslander’s interview on Fresh Air, I’ll probably pick it up tonight:

Shalom Auslander: [reading from the book]The people who raised me will say I am not religious. They are mistaken. I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably. I believe in God. It’s been a real problem for me.

Terry Gross: In what sense are you having trouble getting away from God even though you’ve stopped practicing religion and you don’t believe anymore?

Shalom Auslander: The trouble is that all the things I can do to get away from him are intellectual. And all of the things that put Him inside of me are emotional. The Jesuits have an incredibly creepy expression: Give me a boy until he’s seven, and I’ll show you the man. And they know the score. They know that getting in there early and twisting the wires up makes it very difficult later in life to untwist them…And so I can read everthing. I can read Spinoza, and I can read Hitchens, and I can read every book ever written about religion and the secular world, and just how silly it all is, and I’ll put the book down and I’ll wonder where my son is and I’ll assume he’s dead.

He also said something great about anger, and using it for good:

Anger gets a bad wrap. Anger was bad for me when I was self-inflicting it, when I was turning it against my wife, who I wasn’t angry at, because I was afraid to point the gun at the people who deserved it. When I was afraid to express it properly. But everything I read that I like, all the music that I like, all the comedians I like, everything I like comes from that place. And why shouldn’t it?

Great interview, great writer.