Excerpt From Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant


And when it comes to heart and feeling, the best
in town is a woman named Dottie. Dot is fifty-nine years old,
weighs almost 300 pounds, and sings Patsy Cline nearly
as well as Patsy sang Patsy. Dot can sing "Crazy" and any other
Patsy song ever recorded and a few that went unrecorded. She 
knows Patsy's unrecorded songs because she knew Patsy person-
ally, as did many other people still living here in Winchester,
where Patsy Cline grew up. We know things such as the way she
was treated by the town's establishment, was called a drunken
whore and worse, was snubbed and reviled during her life at 
every opportunity, and is still sniffed at by the town's business
and political classes. But Patsy, who took shit from no one and
knew cuss words that would make a Comanche blush and, well,
she was one of us. Tough and profane. (Cussing is a form of punc-
tuation to us.) Patsy grew up on our sie of the tracks and suf-
fered all the insults life still inflicts on working people here. Hers
was a hard life.

Dot's life has been every bit as hard as Patsy's. Harder really,
because Dot has lived twice as long as Patsy Cline managed to,
and she looks it...True to our class, Dottie is disabled
by heart trouble, diabetes, and several other diseases. Her blood
pressure is so high the doctor thought the pressure device was 
broken. And she is slowly going blind to boot.

Trouble is, insurance costs as much as rent. Her old man makes
$8 an hour washing cars at a dealership, and if everything goes
just right they have about $55 a week left for groceries, gas and
everything else. But if an extra expense as small as $30 comes in,
they compensate by not filling one of Dot's prescriptions - or
two or three of them - in which case she gets sicker and sicker
until they can afford the co-pay to refill the prescriptions again...

Dot started working at thirteen. Married at fifteen. Which is
no big deal. Throw in "learned to pick a guitar at age six" and 
you would be describing half the southerners in my generation
and social class. She has cleaned houses and waited tables and
paid into Social Security all her life. But for the past three years
Dottie has been unable to work because of her health. Dot's con-
gestive heart problems are such that she will barely get through
two songs tonight before nearly passing out.

Yet the local Social Security administrators, cold Calvinist
hard-asses who treat federal dollars as if they were entirely their
own in the name of being responsible with the taxpayers' money,
have said repeatedly that Dot is capable of full-time work. To
which Dot once replied, "Work? Lady, I cain't walk nor half see. 
I cain't even get enough breath to sing a song. What the hell
kinda work you think I can do? Be a tire stop in a parkin' lot?"
Not one to be moved by mere human misery, the administrator 
had Dot bawling her eyes out before she left that office. In fact,
Dotties cries all the time now. Even so, she will sing one,
maybe two songs tonight. Then she will get down off the stage with
the aid of her cane, be helped into a car, and be driven home.

Although it might seem that my people use the voting
booth as an instrument of self-flagellation, the truth is that Dot-
tie would vote for any candidate - black, white crippled, blind,
or crazy - who she thought would actually help her. I know be-
cause I have asked her if she would vote for a candidate who
wanted a national health care program. "Vote for him? I'd go
down on him!" Voter approval does not get much stronger than
that.

But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to offer
national health care, not the genuine article, although I
suspect the Democrats will bandy some phony version next election.
If Dot is lucky, a pollster might call her, take her political
temperature over the phone to be fed into some computer. But that
is about as much contact as our system is willing to have with a
300 pound diabetic woman with a small bird and a husband too
depressed to get out of his TV chair other than to piss or
stumble off to his car-washing job.