What is the worst that can happen? I read Deer Hunting with Jesus and immediately sent a copy to my dad for just one of the ideas in it, hoping it could sink in. That idea, expressed in a way that makes less sense on the surface of it, is our way of life is under attack.

Politically, there are two very distinct groups of people who believe whole-heartedly that their "way of life" is under attack: people who are anywhere right-of-center politically, and people whose way of life is actually under attack.

The politics of poor white folk in the southern US is, well, peculiar. Southern whites these days tend to vote for people who have zero interest in helping them or enabling them in any meaningful way. They tend to vote for people who are anti-union, anti-free-speech, pro-war (a large section of the armed forces of the US come directly from the southern US white population), pro-corporation, pro-profit at all cost. They tend to vote for politicians who are in bed with the corporations who lay them off and offshore their jobs. And they tend to know all of this, but they externalize their hate and blame anything other than the masters of their houses. In the book, this is tied back to their heritage: Scots Irish who were used as ballast for ships returning from tobacco and cotton delivery. Folks who've been under the heel for generations, behaviorally adapted to be drawn to those more powerful for protection. Like a stereotypical abused wife or long term prisoner, the more abuse, the more they express their devotion.

A good chunk of this is directly traced to the prevalent religious attitudes born out of the same swamp the politics come from. The greater the punitive threat, the greater the intangible and un-attainable reward, the more fervent and fanatic the devotion. A belief, direct and written, that suffering is not only born with us, but anticipated and relished, suffered through and eventually soothed. Sins forgiven, at the dying moment the soul attains greater material and spiritual treasure than the body could imagine.

Hypocrisy and stubbornness aside, the root cause of this poor white voting block's behavior is really a deep psychological conditioning that demands control by fear. The carrot and stick are replaced by a stick and a much larger stick, and whole generations of them fall victim to the lesser of two perceived evils. Thanks to modern media supplying them with fear 24 hours a day, and the echo chamber of talk radio, these folks are in a frenzy. Right now what frenzies them and fills their faces with blood are:

• Barack Hussein Obama
  
• Terrorism in the US and abroad
  
• Mexicans and other illegals
  
• China (where jobs go)
  
• Taxes (nothing specific)
  
• Anything socialized or decriminalized
  
• A perceived attack on Christianity
  
• Gay Agenda
  
• Bankers who are in cahoots with liberal elites
  
• Liberal elites
  
• Freedom of Speech
  
• Abortions

There are some others, but any of these will send someone prototypical (my cousins, for instance) into a panic no red scare ever elicited.

In my many, many dealings with folks like this at work and at family functions, I've found a resistance to fact and discourse that borders on psychotic. The resistance to basic facts about rights, taxes, government (idealistically and statistically), healthcare(!), and the like is downright alarming to experience. I'm not sure how many people actually have exposure to a truly psychotic person. Someone who has delusions that replace their eyesight with hallucinatory hells (or heavens), someone who doesn't talk to you so much as at you. People who don't share our collective reality. I've worked with some very, very deeply disturbed people in a clinical way (mostly while studying to become a paramedic way back when), and it is an alarming thing.

Some of these folks, these poor white southerners, are exactly like this. They exhibit a mental disorder that replaces the world with a fear-soaked mundane hell. They have replaced reality with talk radio. Jobs shipped to China? It's those bankers who all support Obama. Terrorists, who hate our freedoms and who hate our religion, they're right outside our door thanks to the lax immigration standards put in place by years of liberal political nonsense. We haven't won in Afghanistan or Iraq because too many cry-baby liberals won't let us nuke the place. We'd get more information from prisoners of war if we tortured them live on TV. We need strong religious fundamentals taught in public school, and we need a preacher for a president. We'll all be speaking Spanish soon and we're losing the US, we;'re losing the dominance we had, we're losing our religions and our youth to the cultural morass of Internets, Europeans, and Modern Life. We're losing everything all the time, and hell even the oil is running out. We're all about to die horribly at the hands of some greasy foreigner who wants to socialize our towns and force us to work for a collective good, the fuckers.

And they believe this, truly. With a sort of brainwashed emptiness that makes any exchange of information impossible; you cannot speak with any reason to an animal that doesn't live in your dimension. The best you can do is study it, and learn how to make it jump.

And when you do, you get a suit and run for office. It's the law.

To balance this, we have folks on the left who truly want some good-for-humanity things to happen that blind themselves to criticism and reality, only to be brutally reminded of their own inability to come together, cult-like, and restructure their culture to match their own hypocrisy. Maybe some day with enough kids suffering through years of faux-liberal politicians (like, say, most Democrats) a new sort of delusional whitewash will cover their painful lives with an ointment of political promise not unlike religion. They'll start electing and buying into politicians who do nothing to help them. They'll feel entitled to live in a way that they cannot possibly afford. They'll vote for a president who will promise them the sort of global rational change that W promised the right, and then drive them further into corporate-owned slavery. Some day, the left will have the same sort of hypocritical OH WAIT.

In the end, the world turns and we're all going to hell in a handbasket, but really we've been on our way there since just before the first slave owner sorted out that he could own people. and we'll be in this handbasket on our way to hell for the duration. And while I hope that real, true government by the people, for the people, and of the people is actually a thing that can be attained, I know that really I just need to shut the fuck up and eat my dinner.