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.
Meanwhile the "I want it all and I want it now" mentality seems to be winding down as (lo and behold) you cannot as an individual or a country consume more than you produce (or the planet can sustain) in perpetuity. Having ransomed our future and the future of our children's children on the backs of the rest of humanity we find we cannot even pay the interest on the debt. Economic hard times aren't coming, they are here. It only remains to be seen as to how bad and how long.
I'm wondering how welcome those "rich Americans" are going to be in places like Belize if the dollar really does tank and we drag the rest of the world into a depression with us? My guess is "Not very."
Of course, if you are a regular working person who sees disaster coming, there isn't much you can do but try to find a bolt hole and figure out how many feet of beans you need to plant if the stuff stops showing up at Wal-Mart. A lot of smart people say capital and exchange controls are coming which means you might get out but whatever money you have won't. Of course, if you are uber rich, you have some kind of Panamanian blind trust set up and you already have you dollars stashed elsewhere. (Oh yeah, the Bush family just bought a big ranch in Paraguay.)
I think you are right and the world is in the process of being profoundly reshaped. There are frightening prospects and dire predictions aplenty, but I very much fear that "Totoville" may indeed be the end result and the ONLY real freedom that may be left is thought, but certainly not action or speech.
Certainly, I am not hopeful. I see my fellow Americans stunned that the mass delusion of prosperity they bought into with home equity loans and credit cards is being revealed as folly, while the bankers pocket their bonuses and look for new sheep to fleece. Very few seem to get the underlying fallacy that fueled their egocentricity and feeling of "entitlement." You just cannot buy contentment and happiness. If you spend your life working a job that offers no fulfillment to pay someone else to do everything meaningfull in your life and buy your "entertainment" is it any wonder that you feel out of touch with everything? (I would be happy if only I had fill in the blank.) It's like the ultimate outsourcing and a bottomless pit, because things just don't make you happy no matter what the marketing gurus want you to think.
I've been fortunate to have those moments in my life that I think would be called moments of enlightenment -- those moments when you feel totally engaged and alive with a sense of awe. (Crossing the desert southwest in the middle of the night when some DJ out in Bumfuck, Arizona, decided to play a commercial free Rolling Stones retrospective comes to mind. Windows down, full moon on the saguaro, and Mick howling at his young and angry best.)
But you are correct, those moments come with the luxury of great freedom and the time to THINK, and I traded a lot of comfort and "security" for that freedom. But then I never was a "material girl", my biggest weakness is for tools and the skills to use them. Right now my weaknesses are dairy goats, chickens, and open pollinating non-hybrid garden seeds. Speaking of which it is time for me to go and get my hands dirty.
Pam
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What they're saying about Joe's book
Here are some comments about Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.
"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive."
-- HOWARD ZINN, author of A People's History of the United States
"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
-- SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of Reservation Blues
"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state -- and, therefore, ours -- Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
-- MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
-- JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch
"This recounting of lost lives -- of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states -- has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media."
-- STUDS TERKEL
"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
-- DAVID SIROTA, author of Hostile Takeover
"Dead serious and damn funny ... Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder ... Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level."
—- MOTHER JONES
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War is now available at all major bookstores and online at Amazon.com. CLICK HERE.
