How did you become a redneck socialist?

Dear Joe:

Regarding "shacks" in Belize, I can be happy in a hammock between two trees. Never did much care for material things. except for my laptop, books and music. Oh yeah, and my weaving loom.

I just finished reading your essay "What the Left Behind Series Really Means" and I am chilled. My rakish and drunken uncle one day opened the door to a couple of Jehovah Witnesses and found "Jesus". He then proceeded to dry up and wreak havoc on his children. His daughter -- my cousin -- has chronic psoriasis now and his son has disappeared from the family (I would have too).

I flew down to Puerto Rico a couple of years ago to stay with my beloved abuelita (grandmother) while she lay dying – she was a Witness and my mother is an avid Catholic. My mother managed to sneak in a couple of evangelistic Christians who spoke in "tongues" over my abuelita and I was stuck in between my mom and these people trying to not laugh hysterically.

My parents are in their 80s and when they die the funeral will be an interesting one with me, the only Buddhist, and a bunch of Witnesses and guilt-ridden Catholics. I tend to speak my mind and get into trouble a lot with family because of this.

However did you become a socialist from Virginia? In recent years I joined the Freedom Socialist Party/Radical Women -- one office is in Harlem and whenever I can afford the bus trip I go down there from Albany to their workshops, etc. (By the way, I am NOT one of these brie eating wine drinking liberals. My dad is Irish/German and was a token seller in the NYC subway system and my mom is a poor Puerto Rican farmer's daughter.)

Are you starting a socialist community in Belize?

LM

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Dear LM,

Sounds like you would do great in rural Belize. Or Thailand, or Laos or any of the many Third World countries that have so much to offer an American willing to live the simple life.

How did I become a socialist in redneck Virginia? I read a lot of books when I was young and the books opened my eyes to what was all around me.

Starting a socialist community in Belize: Nah. The kind of pseudo-leftists Americans it would attract would be just too hard to deal with every fucking day. But I do try to live by my beliefs when I am in Belize. I do not preach it, but in the evenings when we men sit around sipping our bitters I talk about how one man's life and toil is as valuable as another's all around the world and that working men need to stand together and see each other as brothers in labor. For example, the gringos in Hopkins, my village, are used to hiring even skilled Belizeans for US$1.00 to US$1.50 an hour. I paid Eldon, the young Garifuna carpenter who does the building for me on my cabana projects, $50 a day.

That created quite a buzz among some of the the Garifuna menfolk. Some saw me as an easy mark gringo, but it gave others pause for thought. They all know they are being exploited by both the gringos and the business class of their own fellow Belizeans, most of whom are light skinned English/Negro Creoles, the former "house niggers" of the British, who, whether they admit it or not, look down upon the poorer Garifuna people and the Mayans in much the same way that urban Americans look down on us Southern rednecks.

But the truth is that, regardless of class, nearly all Belizeans and definitely the Belizean national culture and government was colonialized by the British long ago and chances for a genuine socialist movement are zilch. Just like here, where Americans have been conditioned to be members of an unquestioning consumer society that keeps them in the lock step march toward the goals of the corporatism which has become our government.

In the end though, not even Eldon (who has become like a son to me) was affected by the experience of being treated like every man of labor should be -- paid an honest wage, set his own hours and work pace, and work completely unsupervised, making all the design decisions because he was the experienced expert craftsman, not me. Toward the end I tried to get him to bid his work like the contractors who exploit Garifuna carpenters. And I asked him to give me a price for each specific project, so he would have the experience of making thousands instead of hundreds on the cabanas he builds for the gringos. He ground his bare foot in the sand, hung his head submissively in that way American blacks used to do in the deep south, and said: "Whatever you feel like paying me will be OK."

I was foolish to think I could change another man's way of thinking. And I was arrogant to even think I had the right to try.

But at least I can sleep at night knowing I walked my talk.

In art and labor,

Joe