Joe Bageant

From Wall Street to Skank Street

Poking the frog at Gunther's Garage

By Joe Bageant

If you have the balls to stand up to Gunther Gatlin, and pay in cash, you just might manage to get him to do his job, which is fixing cars. Gunther's Garage is jammed in between an unpainted shotgun shack and a weedy vacant lot on a skanky little side street in Winchester, Virginia. The place is really an illegal junkyard, but slips through the city code masquerading as a garage.

Patronizing Gunther's is not for wallflowers, gays, feminists or Yankees. You do not go there unless you don't mind being insulted. Gunther has a habit of greeting customers with remarks such as: "So what the hell is your problem?" Once he addressed a gay guy as "Twinkles." Sometimes he will just stand there, grease all over his Hawaiian shirt, pulling on his suspenders, and with a poignant pause, ask what a customer thinks is wrong with the vehicle. He listens thoughtfully, eyes toward the ground, then looks up and says, "Well that's the dumbest goddamned thing I ever heard."

Canadian asks: Who you gonna bomb next, eh?

Hi Joe,

Greetings from one of the attic dwellers in Canada. We've been mocked as being eternally uninvited to the party going on downstairs. However, lately it seems more like someone has called in the cops to break up the bash. Canadians probably obsess over "America" even more than the Europeans and pretty much every other country, and why wouldn't we? You guys are the 800-pound gorilla in the global room, and when thing start going to shit down there, you can bet it's going to hit the fan up here too.

I was a year old when Vietnam ended, and I'm wondering how low the national mood was back then compared to today. Vietam was obviously an epic American ass-kicking, and the sense I get from some of your articles is that many Americans are finally waking up to the fact that they've been getting kicked in the teeth by their own governments and corporations for another 35 years since then. In clinical terms, you would be looking at a major PTSD patient whose shattered delusions of grandeur have been twisted into an ugly rage spiral -- all of which is now being expressed in, um, the Tea Party Movement?

Moon Over Gringo Gulch

In God we can only trust, but in hashish rests assurance

By Joe Bageant

Poolside in Ajijic, Mexico. The heavy red faced guy in the khaki Bermudas and powder blue polo shirt is telling the seventyish woman, the one with her breasts hauled up and strapped down into a boob loaf, that he ditched his oxygen tank for this party. Which was damned thoughtful of him, since the sight of such things only reminds us geezers and geezerettes what a geriatric camp Ajijic's "Gringo Gulch" really is. (Still, my COPD was killing me and I wished I had not thrown away my own oxy tank in a fit of stubborn refusal.)

Ajijic is one of those sunny roosting places south of the horse latitudes preferred by aging Americans who've put away a few bucks, and Canadians whose government still stands behind its national retirement plan, for the time being at least. They come here in winter, from Buffalo, Scranton and Calgary, Ontario and Ohio, to roast aching bones, drink among others who can remember Sonny and Cher's first hit record, and, as is the case particularly with the Canadians, to smoke pot. An American never quite gets over the sight of half a dozen retired middle class seventy year olds in puffy white velcro strap tennis shoes, nonchalantly passing a fat bomber.

Round Midnight: Tortillas and the Corporate State

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Mexico

Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

Once more for the record

An update on The Annotated Obama

By Joe Bageant

Obviously Barack Obama has wiped his ass on his campaign promises. That's yesterday's news. Americans demand jazzy new and ever more shocking "news" daily, or else they fall asleep before their TV sets face down in their sausage pizzas from Brooklyn to Beaumont (or their fat free vegan lentil soup, as the case may be on the West Coast). Which means that if the accelerating economic collapse is sure to drown out such mundane stuff as the Constitution, surveillance, international kidnapping and star chamber military tribunals. Add to that such roaring distractions as the emerging new Weimar American dollar and Tiger Woods' tearful apology for having more side action than any one man is entitled to, Obama may yet come through relatively unscathed. If he keeps up the charm and waits long enough, the public will give him a pass for lying like a whore at a police station during his campaign. But some things are so important they need to be restated and hammered on for as long as possible, lest we wake up to find a fascist state hammering on us. (Right now it just bitch slaps us around daily).

MP3 file of Joe on the Jeff Farias Show

When it comes to being interviewed, one of my very favorite radio hosts is Jeff Farias. Most liberal radio interviewers get caught up in the Empire's media noise, and become part of the self-referential circle jerk of facts and figures and mainstream media citations that pass for news and information in this country. Apparently talking like two human beings is a big no-no these days (unless it's pointless talk radio jibber-jabber, or emotional outraged call-in stuff, which seems to be permissible, if one adheres to the demographic slicing and dicing conducted by those of the Empire's commissars called marketers). But talking to Jeff is like sitting in the back yard with a cold drink and just chatting about the state of things. Kind of free form, and relaxed. Laughing is permitted. Real homey. We need more shows like his.

Click here for MP3 audio file, download or stream.

In art and labor,

Joe Bageant

The Annotated Obama

By Joe Bageant
Jocotepec, Mexico

I've managed to sit still through a few state of the union speeches, through the remarks of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, one Bush (the pappy, I never could gut out one of The Dub's ) and a Clinton. Brother Clinton finished me off, made me give up on state of the union speeches altogether.

Still, there was the off chance (OK, vain hope) that Obama might come out swinging in the wake of the Massachusetts massacre and the Supreme's recent sale of Congress to corporations. As in: The senator from Wal-Mart now has the floor. So I poured myself a stiff one and fell into a deep cush recliner in front of a mongo brain-wrapping TV screen. Not that I would ever own one, mind you. I watch it at my friend and fellow writer Fred Reed's house. That way he gets the rap for being a torpid brainwashed American pig.

Tea Baggers are our canary in the coal mine

Joe recently asked our "masked political consultant," a well known West Coast political adviser for his quick take on the Tea Party movement. He is now writing under the pseudonym John Brown (Email: postpolitico88@yahoo.com. His previous contributions to this site are:"Not New Ideas, but Identifying New Enemies", "Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus", and "Life in the Post Political Age".  As usual, the masked consultant cuts through the bullshit like a laser. Here is their exchange:

Dear John,

I don't get it about the Tea Party movement. After eight years of of a super right wing administration destroying jobs and what social safety net there was ... "the people"  have suddenly decided: "Now that I'm unemployed, I think I'll form a grassroots movement to destroy my health care too. It seems that no one in the mainstream media finds it a bit suspicious that this so-called grassroots popular movement sounds an awful lot like the neocons we just dumped. Hell, in my home town the Tea Bagger leadership pretty much comes from the ranks of the movers and shakers in the local Republican Party. This is a populist movement?

Joe interviewed by Ian Masters, KPFK

On Sunday, Jan 24, I was a guest on Ian Masters' Background Briefing radio show, KPFK, Los Angeles. Ian's show is noted for its hard authoritative analysis by America's leading political pundits and experts. Being neither, naturally I shotgunned my way through the interview as best I could. Listeners did not seem to mind. It's downloadable as an MP3 -- CLICK HERE.

The segment runs from 18:30 to 38:30 on the little slider do-jiggy on the media player.

-- Joe Bageant

Cars fed on corn, people fed on horseshit

Dave and Joe ponder socialism and the Tea Party

Dear Joe,

The Tea Parties started out as Ron Paul supporters in protest of both the neocons and the faux bleeding heart liberals and have been co-opted and corrupted by others so unfortunately are not what they started out to be.

I agree both Dems and Reps have been and are horribly corrupt and just two sides of the same worthless coin flipped for our confusion and division and "their" amusement and profit. My view of Dems and Reps has always been the Dems take your money and give it to people that don't deserve it to get votes and the Reps take you money and keep it for themselves. They are learning much from each other and the main difference now are the sound bites. One of the reasons I have not watched TV for the last 15 years. Few ever wonder why there is almost always a 50/50 split and we just flip back and forth thinking we finally got rid of the last bastards.