Joe Bageant

So rich he wants to start his own country

Joe,

This evening I watched Bill Moyers show on PBS. The first guest was John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund Group. Vanguard is one of the few (the only?) employee-owned fund groups, one of the few places you can be assured of not getting screwed as a small investor.

I've never heard any US business leader give a bleaker assessment of the US and US business practices. He calls the US the new Rome -- bread and circuses, companies being run for the benefit of the top half a dozen executives at the expense of the stockholders, private investment companies buying hospitals and nursing homes, which drop care so far that residents die, and having complete immunity from lawsuits, since their corporate structure is so complicated that nobody can find out who owns the facility.

Comparing working class in Europe and US

Joe,

This is a response to the the letter from your Swedish reader: European liberal prefers global meritocracy.

I worked for a number of Fortune 500 companies before going off to become a very small scale real estate pirate. I never witnessed anything like a meritocracy in any of these companies, other than being paid on straight commission as a sales rep, except that those who brown-nosed in the office always got the best territories, leads, etc., and were allowed to sell in other people's territories and steal their sales. My sales managers were almost always dolts and people with few human characteristics, and yet they were in their jobs because of merit?

The god damn Republicans can win in 2008

Joe,

I recently read your Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. This book ought to be mandatory reading for the Democratic National Committee. You definitely know your rednecks -- and the big difference between rednecks and white trash, and the wheres and hows of how the Democrats have driven too many working people to vote for the Republicans. (West Virginia for Bush by 13 points, what the fuck?) It is truly unnatural for working people to vote for the party of the bosses and yet they do it by the millions and the Hollywood, Ivy League, North East axis doesn't know why.

Your book really scares and worries me

Mr. Bageant,

A couple of weeks ago, after reading a synopsis of your book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, I purchased it at a local book store. Until then, I had never heard of you. I am approximately half-way thru the book and I want you to know that it really, honestly scares and worries me, so much, that I've had to stop reading it just before going to bed at night. If I read 15 to 20 pages right before bedtime I am unable to sleep. I agree 100% with what you are saying in the book. I just hope that as I read further, you offer some possible solutions, or at least some encouragement for somehow making things better in the near future.

Bully mentality is cause of world's ills

Joe,

I sat down and started typing you my life story then hit upon a subject that I think has had a profound effect on me and I think many others. Plain old bullying. My background is similar to yours in that my father's father moved to the Washington, DC area from Berryville, Virginia after his stint in the Navy in World War I. Though my father was a very intelligent man, we sort of backslid financially throughout my childhood.

Right, duty to throw off such government

Joe,

George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said: "An asylum for the sane would be empty in America". We must all be mad as hatters to have allowed the complete takeover of our wonderful country by a group of criminally insane, hate-mongering, racist, greedy, vile "Born Again Christians" (bad joke on you, Christians, your religion's moral authority and relevance seem to be tanking). The tragedy is that few people seem to care. Visiting in-laws informed me yesterday that there was a huge ongoing property tax protest in Indianapolis that the governor of that quivering pile of red state pus known as Indiana was attempting to quell.

Joe Bageant radio interview available

Since Deer Hunting with Jesus was published last June, Joe Bageant has been interviewed by more than 100 radio stations. There is another great interview this week and it is available online in MP3 format.

In his introduction to the interview, Doug Fabrizio of KUER-FM in Salt Lake City, describes Joe as "one of the last remaining gonzo journalists still writing irreverent prose about social justice" for the working class poor, who are "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks." Fabrizio says Deer Hunting with Jesus helps explain to Democrats, the progressive left and urban liberals how they lost the 2004 election by ignoring the great unwashed working class. The book "is not a critique of the underclass, but rather an homage."

The interview is 52-minutes long and well worth a listen.

KUER is a service of the University of Utah and is affiliated with three major public radio networks: National Public Radio (NPR), American Public Media, formerly Minnesota Public Radio, and Public Radio International (PRI).

Click here and look for the MP3 link in the upper left of the KUER web page.

-- Ken Smith

You are too hard on your countrymen, Joe

Dear Joe,

Welcome to Belize. I only recently discovered your writings and I have to say I find them insightful, yet filled with a powerful sense of loss for the America that was. I am English and I too have gone through that process of mourning for the country of my birth and childhood. I lived in Bush's US between 2002 and early 2007. I found the American people to be open, thoughtful, caring and very giving. Just as my own countrymen are.

It's the system! Cheney and Bush clearly don't give a rat's ass about human life, but show the average American a child in a foreign land in need of life saving surgery and they'll organize a fund and get that child to the States to get that surgery.

Only two ways to settle national debt

Joe,

It's true that the national debt is unpayable, as you replied in the letter, "Smart foxes have grabbed all the rabbits".

Plug $9 trillion at 5% interest over 30 years into your favorite amortization program and be prepared for a huge shock. Unpayable. And this doesn't take into account the increasing yearly balance of trade deficit. However, dollars or euros or rubles or ameros are just pieces of paper or ones and zeroes on a computer disk somewhere, backed by the full faith and credit of whatever country issues the currencies, or actually borrows the currencies from whatever central bank conjuring money out of thin air. Real wealth exists in the form of hard commodities like gold, silver, food, bridges, highways, power plants, machinery, bricks, mortar and any other hard assets you might think of.

Yikes! What happened to the USA?

Hello Joe,

My wife and I read Deer Hunting With Jesus and loved it. And "the hologram" is truly at work where folks base their realities on the garbage they see on TV, read in the paper, or hear from the radio or a friend. Since all sides are 99 percent bought and paid for, with the remaining proud 1 percent not heard to begin with, it's little wonder we're inundated with garbage 24/7, but truly sad to see it swallowed whole.

That said, it's sad to be back in the USA and witnessing the idiocy first hand. We were overseas the last decade (in three countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe), and spent about 10 other years overseas in our almost 30-year career as a military family. Loved the travel and it opened our eyes to see America more clearly -- and "Yikes!" is the best word to describe that.

Becoming an anarcho-syndicalist in my 50s

Joe,

It is sad to read of your friend's death from cancer ("Impossible to escape US medical mafia"). Doubtless, she was poisoned and radiated to death in the finest "state of the art" fashion! She would have been better off to stay in sunny Belize, I am certain.

I'm a medical doctor. The medical system in Amerika, Inc., is long since broken. The entire Ponzi scheme (sole purpose is to enrich the great corporations of the land) is coming down about our ears and "fixing" it will be one of the main political talking and action points of who or whatever enters the White House in the next election for Chairman of the Board. Whoever (or whatever) ends up occupying the large house on Pennsylvania Avenue (the Peoples' House -- now, there is a laugh), be assured that any solution will ultimately be a windfall for Big Pharma, Big Med, Big Government, and Big Bidness! It will be Medicare Part D writ large!

Some thoughts on escaping the Empire

Joe,

I have been reading your blog religiously for over a year now after it was pointed out to me by a former client of mine when I was a social worker in the Texas Mental Health system. I recently finished your book and through his example decided to donate my copy to the public library in Las Cruces, New Mexico where I now reside.

I spent two years working in the rural suburbs of Austin, Texas, some of which bear a strong resemblance to your hometown in Virginia. Other suburbs appear to be wealthy on the surface but have a very large underclass who suffer the consequences of living in communities where people choose to deny their existence. I spent a year prior to that working in a homeless shelter for the severely mentally ill in downtown Austin and witnessing first hand just how badly our government treats those who are incapable of taking care of themselves.

Joe, you are right up there with John Kerry

Howdy Joe,

Or should I say, "Good day, sir." It's kinda hard for me to address you properly because after reading half of your book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, I'm not sure which face you are wearing today. I only had the chance to read the first half of your book today because I toil for a living. Yes sir, my wife and I paint houses for a living and we live right here in Winchester, been here for 22 years, right downtown a block from Potato Hill. Actually Joe, we live right across the street from "DE-TOX" so we get to see who has been bad, as they come and go for their "classes." As a side note, I will also tell you that I have shot in the National Skeet Shooting Association for 36 years and that my "Daddy" (I live in Winchester so I can say that southern shit too) started in the NSSA in 1959.

Like Rousseau said, people are ignorant

Joe,

I am a Mississippi boy that has made his home in the beautiful mountains of Southwest Virginia. I have been reading your posts now for several months now.

As someone involved in politics pretty intensely, and having had the problem of trying to communicate to the elitist northeastern yankee sissy ass Democrats just what fuckups they are making in their attempts to reach out to the working class people in the entire U.S. -- rednecks and working meat live everywhere in the U.S. I can tell you that reading your stuff gives me a validation that I have been longing for quite a while.

Impossible to escape US medical mafia

Hi Joe,

I really enjoyed your book, Deer Hunting with Jesus. I live in Central Maine. Maine is one of the most "redneck" states in the Northeast. Your southern culture is similar to the culture here. There is not much hope for most people here, and the families that own everything still rule the place. Deer hunting is like a religion around here, along with the moose hunt, which you need to win a lottery to do.

Capitalism is conflated with democracy

Joe,

I have just finished your book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, and I felt compelled to drop you a line and thank you. I know a bit about the places and people that you describe as I spent a few years in the Winchester area (and still have family there). I believe that I even know one of the people mentioned in your book (ha! ha!).

I didn't grow up a child of the "laboring" class -- my father was an aerospace and computer engineer -- but I was made aware of America's caste system at an early age. During the early Sixties, I attended a rural, whites-only school just outside of Huntsville, Alabama. Each morning, as our school bus made the rounds, I got a good opportunity to see "how the other half lives." In my mind's eye, I can still see one house -- a weathered, windowless tenant shack at the edge of a cotton field -- where we would stop irregularly to pick up a couple of self-conscious, strange-smelling children.

Self-sufficiency, sharing with neighbors

Hello Joe,

I just found your web site last week and I can't get over how much alike we are in our points of view. I am 62-year-old retired electrical engineer, living 10 miles between Tijuana and San Diego, and when I read your essay "The Great American Media Mind Warp" I was stunned. All I can say, sir, is that I have since read pretty much all your stuff and it's all good. We are not alone in our awareness and it doesn't matter what label is applied -- as it takes one to know one, and you are the real deal.

In the film 1984 based on Orwell's novel, there is a washer woman who ignores most everything in that horrible Blade Runner world, except the washing and she is seen to be smiling frequently as she deals only with reality. I am becoming the washer woman, so to speak, by living locally. Self sufficiency is local, so why not cooperate with neighbors? Who cares what the assholes think in Washington or Sacramento or downtown San Diego or downtown Tijuana? Why allow them to control my thinking? Reject authority and it will wither and fade into the past.