What Book to Read?

This is a most disturbing book. Whether or not you agree with the author’s analysis, the situation he describes should be of concern to everyone. He is writing about the small town, white working poor, those who are only ‘two pay days away from homelessness’. Much of what he talks about in the years up to 2007, when the book was published, has been exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis – which had its roots in some of the practices Bageant discusses.

Joe Bageant was born in Winchester, Virginia, of a family just like the ones he describes in the book. As a young man, ‘penniless and dumber than tree bark’, he escaped to California, got a degree and worked as a journalist and editor. There he developed a critique of the ideas and practices he thinks produce the underclass he writes about. Later in life, he returned to Winchester, where he mixed with the ‘white trash’ he had gone to school with, and chronicled their lives.

Through some of the people around him, and members of his own family, he looks at specific issues and circumstances that he says exist far more widely. An old school friend works for the one large employer in Winchester, a plastics factory, which pays him a wage of $8 (US) an hour. Another is taking out a mortgage he cannot afford on a mobile home that will start depreciating as soon as he buys it. One woman, who is overweight, diabetic and has breathing problems, cannot afford health care. Another old woman decays in a grossly underfunded nursing home. These cameos are the ‘dispatches’ – the reports from the war zone.
For Bageant believes there is a war in America. ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is that only one side understands that a class war is going on, the side that gets to do the arse kicking.’ The people he is describing certainly don’t understand it in that way. They see their poor education, low wages and insecure work, their inability to save, to own a house, to be able to pay their medical bills as at best, just the way things are, and at worst, their own fault. Staunchly individualistic and anti-union, they see accepting public help as ‘a sign of failure and moral weakness.’ Those on the other side in the war don’t usually recognise the conflict either, but they are those who benefit from globalisation and the outsourcing of American jobs to low cost countries like Mexico, who perpetuate the inequalities inherent in the health care system, and who profit from the ‘white trashonomics’ that promotes unaffordable mortgages and credit card debt to the working poor. These are manifested at the local level in the form of rapacious slum landlords, bosses after the quickest buck, predatory lending policies and dirty public hospitals.

Bageant doesn’t blame the poor people he writes about for their situation. Indeed he is more critical of the intellectual elite who condemn ‘rednecks’ for their views without ever taking the time to understand their circumstances. For these are the ‘heartland’ of America, intensely patriotic voters who support the Republican Party, despite the fact that it is not in their economic interests to do so, and who hate college educated ‘liberals’. Bageant blames poor education and harsh working conditions. ‘Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theatre of the market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness … It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation…’

Nor does he condemn the beliefs and pastimes they take comfort in – guns and evangelical religion. Gun ownership he sees as a normal part of life, and is even a bit nostalgic for the hunting expeditions of his youth. He condemns only the fascination of some enthusiasts for guns designed solely to kill people. The fundamentalist church, he says, is ‘one of the few social structures still functioning in America, and it welcomes everyone’. He is critical of the anti-intellectual and self-referential culture these churches promote, but he can see why they are attractive to people who feel alienated from so much of mainstream culture.

As a polemic it’s great. As a book, it gets a bit repetitive. As you can see from passages I’ve quoted, Bageant writes in a colloquial style that is both amusing and horrifying. This is indeed sociology from the trenches. Even if you don’t agree with his politics, the book has a disquieting reality about it; after all, it was the very lending policies he chronicles that fuelled the Global Financial Crisis. And don’t even ask about climate change.

While Joe Bageant offers a fascinating glimpse into one group of disadvantaged Americans, it is not a snapshot of ‘the poor’ in America. Poverty more generally is a function not just of income level; it also involves race and region. Here is a more nuanced discussion of the complexities.

Joe Bageant died in 2011 at the age of 65, victim of the ill-health endemic to the poor whites of Winchester. You can read more about him here.

PS. I couldn’t helping thinking that this America is about as far from the one my book group read about in Anne Tyler’s Digging to America as it is possible to get; you can read my post on her book here. And here’s an interesting illustration of the distribution of wealth in America.