Joe Bageant

Letting go of the quest for bling

Dear Mr. Bageant:

(That "Mr. Bageant" sounds a little pretentious, but I don't really know the right way to address an internaut whom I've never met.)

I've just been reading some of your essays after seeing your name in an article in El Mundo about your book Deer Hunting With Jesus being published in Spain in the new Los Libros del Lince Spanish language series by Enrique Murillo.

The last online essay of yours that I read, "Nine Million Little Feet", got me thinking about how I have also stepped away from home and how that has given me a changed and changing perspective. I had already let go of the quest for bling while living on a (relatively) limited income in very expensive Boulder, Colorado, for a couple of years, but then I moved to Mexico City and started to get a more close-up picture (I can't say experience because I have never wanted for anything) of the world way outside the American Dream.

With Todd Vachon in Connecticut

By Joe Bageant

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days of hard traveling back and forth across Connecticut's Second Congressional District. The Second District is not the Connecticut where Paul Newman lives and Katherine Hepburn is buried. The one with the marvelously tasteful old homes set against magnificent Yankee New England seascapes. It's the one where -- although quite pretty in its own right, with its small villages and winding roads -- the mills are closed, the housing bubble has popped and everyone fears what comes next. It is a place where good union men still stick together as best they can in the face of globalization, the sub prime collapse and a two-party system whose millionaire players are more married to the game than to the unheralded people who build their homes and make their world function every day.

Joe and Todd at WHUS

Should Obama choose Jim Webb as VP?

Dear Joe,

Whatever passes for "dittos" from me to you. I live in Sweden, but grew up in the USA, with bonafides from places like Okeechobee, Florida, where I have in fact lived in a double-wide. I have honest to goodness rapture ready relatives.

Have you ever read Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason? Paine wrote this in Paris, in prison, and he thought it was going to be the last thing he did before Robespierre put him to the guillotine.

I've got a question for you.

Immersion in the shit storm of talk radio

Hello Joe:

When I was a boy the last item of the day for us kids was to kneel at our bedside and pray to an angry god, hoping against hope that he would spare us from his wrath and the destruction to come. It took a good chunk of my 51 years to finally realize I was talking to thin air and that there would be plenty of wrath and destruction to come from the misguided words and deeds of ordinary men and women bent on trying to be god and play god and get the "big" god to be on their side.

I mention this only as a point of contrast to the far more comforting and enlightening bedtime ritual I've adopted of late, courtesy of your spot-on, no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners writing. I prop up on a pillow, laptop on, navigate to your site and console my very troubled of late soul by reading what you have to say about a once great country that is going down very fast.

Jefferson and Washington would weep

Joe;

Wow, what an article! I have just read your essay "A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard". It's as true as the day is long. Our typical tenured professor has as much guts, smarts and pluck as a gerbil and wouldn't last five minutes in the real world.

Damn it, Joe, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass when I say your articles are simply a desperately needed breath of fresh air. You know I'm right. Of course you're not infallible or wise in all things. So what? You have the guts to stand on your own two feet and boldly speak the truth as you see it. Outside of the internet, that behavior almost doesn't exist here in the US. Land of the "Free & Brave" my ass. Jefferson and Washington would weep for a hundred years if they could see the present state of affairs.

Getting comfortable with being depressed

Joe:

I have just finished reading your essay "The Audacity of Depression" and I want say thanks for helping me put a new and uplifting slant on the visceral unease I've been feeling. Your comments on the state of the world, particularly the USA, align closely with my own thoughts.

I'm struggling, recently, with trying to offer my three grown children some hope for their future -- and I find that I can't. Hope for the future is something I can't honestly offer them. Does that make me depressed? You bet it does! Being 64 and recently retired from a 30-year nursing career, my instincts are to "make it all better". But, I can't. Any information or education I send my kids ends up sounding like a condemnation of their lives, which are very successful and deeply rooted in the current delusion.

No longer working class, so quit bitching

Dear Joe,

I've read your book Deer Hunting with Jesus and it reminded me of growing up in a small mill town on the Connecticut River called Bellows Falls. We used to call it Fellows Balls. When the paper mills closed and the railroads became a shadow of their previous selves, most workers traveled to Springfield, 12 miles north, to the machine tool plants, then those plants closed down.

It's an irritating litany repeated everywhere in this country. The little village of Bellows Falls couldn't even support the 12 or so bars for its 3,500 population. Bellows Falls is having a semi-gentrified cultural/arts/music scene revival, but the poor and working folks are still struggling to survive. Now I'm 58 and live in a hamlet of 250 just 20 minutes from Bellows Falls. Sometimes it seems like a thousand miles away. I enjoy reading your work in this dark age.

Steve

Hard times aren't coming, they're here

Good Afternoon Joe,

You can count me as a new reader. I found you down a trail of links. You write eloquently about what I call the spiritual blight in the good old USA.

I lived for years in and around Austin, Texas and I've had a belly full of arch "liberals" who look down there nose at anyone who doesn't get their organic free trade coffee beans from Whole Foods Market. (Driving there in their SUVs with a Save the Whales bumper sticker, no doubt). In other words people who think they are "liberal" because of what they CONSUME, and don't begin to understand how elitist and offensive they really are.

Back here on planet earth (deep east Texas now) you get what they sell at Wal-Mart or Brookshire Bros. because those are the only grocery stores in town. Of course you also have what you can grow, raise, or catch. East Texas may not be Belize, but it's a lot closer to the Third World than it is to Wall Street.

Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

By Joe Bageant

There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann's Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo.

And all because Obama mentioned something we've known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation's heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.

To quote Obama:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. ... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

Thank you for 'The Audacity of Depression'

Dear Joe:

As a long time reader of your prose, I've often thought about sending you an e-mail. As I read through your latest essay "The Audacity of Depression", complete with your riffs on musings from Adorno and Lyotard, I knew I just had to finally shoot you a note. While you have often weaved tidbits of forgotten wisdom into your essays (everything from the Rolling Stones to Gui Rochat), your current invocation of a prominent Frankfurt school thinker and one of the more salient French post-modernists is pretty damn apropos of our current political malaise. However, I was actually taken by the more central argument in your piece.