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.