Joe Bageant

A simpler life, but first my obligations

Joe,

You most likely don't remember, but I wrote to you over a year ago about the central government shutting down in Puerto Rico because of lack of money. You posted my letter ("How bad does it have to get?") along with your reply. But that doesn't have to do with why I'm writing to you now.

Over the past year I've become increasingly disillusioned with our ridiculous consumer culture to the point of picking useless fights with my parents. They are prime examples of people who overextend themselves buying crap they don't need and then have trouble paying for more important things like food and the mortgage.

I was happy until I read your book

Hi Joe,

Where the hell were you when I needed you the most? I'm 77 now, contemplating my time left while I suck up vodka and tonic. I was happy as a pig in shit until I read your book, Deer Hunting with Jesus. I went the way of all the schmucks you wrote about, but never really believed in the "system".

I was smart enough to marry a widow in 1983, who just happened to be a practicing medical doctor. It has been mostly peaches and cream since then. To add at least a little interest in my life, I spent three years on a chain gang in Virginia in the early 50's. Nothing serious. I think I forgot to salute the Confederate flag or something.

Let's Dump Prepackaged Class Identities

By Joe Bageant

It never ceases to amaze how American capitalism can sell even our own identities back to us in such tantalizing fashion as to make a profit. Nobody is exempt. As in "Liberal ladies, buy your wardrobe at Target and you too will be a slim sexy humanitarian like Susan Sarandon." My eyeballs are in my lap every time that woman twists her stuff against that orange backdrop. My wife glowers from her armchair: "Buy me a quarter million dollar eye job, chin and butt tuck, and I'll shake all the damned booty you want, Buster." I'm seriously tempted by her offer.

Or we can gas up the car, drive to the suburban Cineplex and pay ten bucks to see Al Gore tell us to save energy by hanging your clothes outside on lines in An Inconvenient Truth, thereby striking a blow as an environmentalist. Never mind ole Al's 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom Nashville mansion and its $20,000 annual energy bill. Or his 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia, or that rolls rural estate in Carthage, Tennessee. Al and Tipper remind us that, because it was the despicable (which it is) Hoover Institute which plastered that inconvenient truth across the pages of USA Today, the houses do not count. They may not count, but their images seem to have been yanked off the Internet.

'Shit for brains' acquires new meaning

Joe,

In your essay The Great American Media Mind Warp, you wrote: "Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality." Those two exquisite sentences instantly brought to mind the B. Kliban cartoon of a man with a tube connecting his brain to his asshole in the (for me at the time) paradigm shifting book Whack Your Porcupine.

Family and Dignity During Hurricane Dean

By Joe Bageant

Because so many people have inquired as to my safety during Hurricane Dean, here are some notes from my journal written during that time. And yes, I am quite well and safe.

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE -- Two gecko lizards are staring at one another on the wall above my laptop, as the small TV in my cabana blares an update on approaching Hurricane Dean. But the rain hammers the tin roof so loudly it's impossible to hear what is being said, even with the sound turned all the way up. So I watch the hot blonde, the satellite pics and blurry shots of storm-tortured palms and hope for the best.

Thanks to Hurricane Dean, for the next few days this Garifuna household of six, the Castillos, are sleeping several to a bed with the Rubio family, including this old gringo, who is most grateful to have drawn an older boy, not a little one still pissing on the sheets. The Rubios are a fishing family, evacuees from the black "bakkatown" (back of town) shacks out on the reefs, which usually get in such storms, even when not struck by the 'cane itself.

Get ready to hear a lot about 'populism'

Dear Joe,

Thanks so much for your dispatches. Some days, I wonder if I should fashion myself a swell Napolean hat out of some heavy duty tin foil, the kind most folks around here use for barbecuing pork steaks. When I read your columns, I don't feel crazy for seeing what I see. I've leaned not to bring this stuff up, because of course most people don't want to hear about species depletion, peak oil, how Cheney wants to bomb Iran (and how this may incite a nuclear exchange) or the large, swirling masses of plastic crap floating on the surface of the ocean.

The Great American Media Mind Warp

A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle

On televisions you see police cars surround the car of a "terror suspect." ... When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf. ... So maybe you'll just ignore what your brain was trying to say, which is that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers. ... But the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can't quite get rid of. ... But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the discussion zooms ahead. Why can't everyone else see it?
-- Jennifer, in Los Angeles

By Joe Bageant

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing up his wife and baby up for Allah.

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today's system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things -- the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.

Follow Jesus rather than worship Christ

I finished your book Deer Hunting with Jesus last night. It had so many insights into many questions I have about the people who surround me, my fellow Oklahomans and family. I came across a passage I really identified with:

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is -- how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family's Thanksgiving dinner.

American influence on Mexican culture

Joe,

I just read your article The Simulacran Republic about the great American Hologram, and I must tell you, as you must hear often, you took the words right out of my mouth! Thank you so much for so clearly articulating what I've been screaming about for so long! At least now I don't feel I need to reserve a space at the mental institution, at least not yet anyway.

I read in your web site that you are currently in Jalisco, Mexico. What a wonderful place to be! I grew up in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, and although we moved to the US when I was 18, I still hold Mexico close to my heart and soul, and still see it as 'my country'. Even though I was born here in the US by an Irish-American mother and a Mexican father, after so many years, I still feel like a foreigner here in the US. Not much seems to make sense, and as I grow older (or, more mature) things seem to make less sense to me. What is more difficult is to see so many people who just can't see beyond the hologram and are content with how things are.

Kids, don't believe that old is irrelevant

Brother Joe,

My favorite feature of your site (after your stuff, of course) is reading readers' contributions. Apparently many of us peasants do read, write, and think. But then again, a common theme is that many of us Americans of whatever class do not want to look closely at the disturbing evidence all around us. Which is intensified by the deliberate cultivation of a nebulous fear by the so-called news. With its jarring images, mixed randomly with infotainment and economic propaganda, whatever appears on the TV screen becomes part of an anxiety sustaining feedback loop. The vapidity of it induces a kind of vertigo, the feeling that nothing is reliable.

Nothing has changed, no one is angry

Hi Joe,

I read an excerpt from your book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, sampled some of the material from your website and your interview. You write with honesty and depth that comes from a lifetime of reading.

I'm a little embarrassed to go on, but reading you is almost like talking to myself, at my best. For example, your comment that corporations have substituted consumerism for the patriotism and, by implication, the generosity of heart that formerly animated the best of the middle class, is something that I have often thought, but never wrote.

The resource wars are already underway

Brother Joe:

You write a lot about the upcoming catastrophe for humanity. I agree with you. That's why I read you. In a recent letter to a reader, you foretold the demise of 5 billion people.

That will entail carnage on an unimaginable scale. How are all those people going to make the transition from living to dead? As a former military historian, and someone who's thought a lot about The Rapture, what do you think will be the mechanics of the peak oil, eco-collapse, economic implosion -- call it The Rupture? Starvation, massive weapons taking out millions of souls at a time, or human against human, gouging each others' eyes out in a battle for the last tin of beans?

Jesus is exclusive spokesman for the right

Dear Joe,

Permit me a moment to tell of a movement within the Society of Friends today. Many modern liberal Quakers are bitter refugees from other forms of Christianity that they feel have become oppressive and/or drifted too far from the message of Christ. But at this year's Pacific Yearly Meeting of liberal Quakers we are starting to talk about "taking back Jesus." And we’re doing it thanks to the strength and conviction of a young man in a wheelchair named John Pixley, with what he calls an "in-your-face disability."

I'm sometimes hopeful, but never optimistic

Hi Joe,

I recently discovered (or rediscovered) your site after following a link from Dave Pollard's blog on Salon. It is good to hear those aging hippies that still have the courage of their convictions, are still raving against a messed up world, and who can write well. Refreshing stuff. I get very depressed by the world-changing type sites that seem so committed to optimism, like a silly grin painted on their faces. So thanks, I will continue to follow your writing.

I'm white and pissed, but I'm not poor

Here's a delightful letter from Jim in Rice Lake, Wisconsin that must be answered point by point.
-- Joe

Jim: I really enjoyed your article, "Poor, White and Pissed." I think we'll be at odds, however, about many points you make. I might miss the point too, because, well, I'm white and I'm pissed.

I'm white, I'm pissed, but I'm not poor by my own standards. I make as much per year as those wage parameters you established -- somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 -- that identify po' folk. Yet, I feel adequately compensated, even satisfied. For two years, my wife and I have been going to Florida for two months annually. We have no debts, and own our own house. Our son is out of college with no loans. We live in the fourth highest-taxed state in America. Gas just hit $3.29 per gallon. What's wrong here? Why aren't we po', too?

Like USA, Canada has religious fundies

Joe,

I'm enjoying your book. Let me assure you that the USA is not the only location for the religious fundies and non-thinkers you write about. We have more than we want of them in Canada. They may not be as loud and proud as those in your country, nor as numerous, but they were sufficiently pissed off at our last government to vote themselves a minority government led by Stephen Harper, who has fairly firmly planted himself up the Bush/Cheney/Pentagon arse. (We say "arse" more often than "ass").