Dear Joe,
I was fortunate to find your website a few months ago and have been an enthusiastic reader ever since. I just polished off your book Deer Hunting with Jesus and I was thrilled to see something in print that so gracefully articulated what I've been seeing all my life.
I grew up in a trailer park in central Kentucky. I was a child of divorce and could have easily slipped through the cracks had it not been for the love of some wonderful grandparents and godparents. They were people who had weathered the Great Depression and had lost kin in World War Two. My grandparents started out as share croppers working other people's land solely for pay in the form of food. The godparents came of age in the Black Star mining camp in eastern Kentucky and they were paid in corporate script. Never even saw US currency during their childhood. Hell, even their schoolhouse was owned by the corporation.
I count myself lucky to have been raised by their generation as opposed to the Boomer generation. My grandparents had little education but were wise as serpents and made damn sure I hit the books and made the most of my "lessons" as they used to call them. At an early age I demonstrated an aptitude for drawing and was encouraged by my family to work hard at it. I did, and by the time I was a senior in high school the work paid off in the form of a partial scholarship to Eastern Kentucky University. My family was thrilled.
It didn't last too long. Like many poor people that never had a shot, they couldn't imagine why I would choose to major in art and theater, two fields virtually insuring a life of economic hardship. To me, it was a no-brainer. Looking around campus at the kids who were going into finance and pre-law, I saw nothing but disgusting yuppie larvae, the sort of thing guaranteed to put you off your lunch. I knew my life might wind up harder because I was embracing a liberal arts education as opposed to being immersed in the doctrine of "fuck you Jack, I got mine". But I felt I'd be better off pecking shit with the chickens than becoming a lickspittle for the wealthy criminal class.
Upon graduation I headed out into the territories. I worked for a comic book company in New York City, and did everything from production design to storyboards for the movie industry in Los Angeles. I was still naive enough to believe that with enough hard work and talent a person could make it big in the entertainment biz. It took about ten years for the scales to fall from my eyes. Do people make it big? Hit pay dirt? Enjoy fabulous riches? Well, of course they do, but the numbers are on par with playing the lottery. In fact, the lottery is probably a bit fairer as there does seem to be some oversight there. In this new economy of outsourced jobs, union busting and deregulation, the entertainment industries are nothing but highly efficient ways to enrich the people who don't actually create anything.
Most art related jobs are put on a temp basis and lack benefits of any sort. Walking papers come your way much faster than paychecks and I found myself taking odd jobs to make ends meet. In time I stumbled on a night watchman gig in Burbank, California, and it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Long, quiet hours with nothing to do but read. Now, I confess that when I was in college I spent a lot more time chasing girls and drinking beer than I did reading, but since I did drag myself to class every now and then I at least managed to hear about people like Thoreau, Hume and Tolstoy, just to name a few. Now that I had time on my hands and need of a new world view the seeds planted years before by that liberal arts education began to take root.
Before long I sold or gave away everything I owned and bought an old sailboat in Ventura, California. With the money from selling all my junk I bought myself more time to think. One year on a dilapidated sailboat doing nothing but thinking and reading. Much needed bibliotherapy. No phone, no electricity and most of all, no goddamned TV. I began to ask myself what the hell I was doing out there anyway. What the hell did I really want out of life? Questions that most Americans never even get to ask as they are so anesthetized by mass media and beat down by the rat race. I began to think long and hard about whether or not art should be commoditized and whether it even could be.
In the end it was writing from Kentucky that called me home. I credit Thomas Merton with helping to save me from myself. Harry Caudill's book Night Comes to the Cumberlands spoke eloquently of how Kentucky educates so many of her best kids at state funded colleges only to see them leave for opportunities in big cities and never return.
I now live in Lexington, Kentucky. I work for the state Public Broadcasting System affiliate. (I know it's TV, but it's a bit less pernicious than the corporate shit.) I married an amazing Kentucky woman who puts up with my wooly headed thinking and we have a beautiful little boy we named Thomas Wyatt Lister. I help make the TV to keep a roof over the little boy's head but I make art to stay sane. Some of my paintings and drawings I sell to people I know and some pieces I give away.
I'm attaching a couple of pieces that I did to this e-mail. (Scroll down below Joe's reply for the attached art.) The first is an editorial cartoon that I thought you might like and the other is a large pen and ink drawing that is a sort of visual metaphor, what I sometimes think of as the Great Struggle. I also have a blog of artwork up that has more like the two I sent you. If you ever have the time I would love for you to take a peek.
I've never written to an author before. I think it's because the ones I seem to admire the most are long since dead. I'm real happy I happen to be a part of a world that has a Joe Bageant. I really look forward to whatever you do next.
Best,
Charles Lister
Lexington, Kentucky
http://charleslister.blogspot.com/
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Charles,
What a beautiful and eloquent American testimony. Response to my book has shown me there are probably millions of folks like you and me out there, and of course one of the purposes of this web site is to document and make available these stories, not just to each other but to those who feel alienated, old or young, including the "disgusting yuppie larvae," should they chance upon our little corner of cyberspace.
I think one the commonalities, so often shared by mature readers and visitors to this site, is that we have a blood link with our personal past and our progenitors -- a spiritual link, if you will. We have a base of subjective personal experience that allows us a very good view of what is going on and think comparatively.
As I said, there appear to be millions of us in America, not only in the South, but particularly plentiful in the South. I was speaking to a large crowd a while back (I believe it was in Nashville, but the ole memory isn't what it used to be) and I asked everyone who grew up in real poverty and managed to be the first person in their family to attend college to stand up. More than half the audience stood up. Then I asked how many people felt comfortable sharing their backgrounds with their co-workers. "Those who feel comfortable doing so please sit down." Not a person sat down that I could see. Then I asked how many people felt that, even though they were white, they felt like Negroes trying to "pass" in their middle class surroundings and lifestyles. The response was astounding. Nearly all identified with that comparison and there were many emotional testimonials during the ensuing discussion. Honest to god, it had the flavor of a tent revival as people poured out their pent up feelings and observations on class structure in America.
You and I are fortunate to have chosen the arts and humanities as a path. Most of the good folks in that audience were working in typical middle class jobs, for the government, or as educators, or in business.
But art! I have always seen it as offering an inner path, regardless of how we must apply its associated skills to earn our living under the Empire. And since you are a reader of Thomas Merton, I feel comfortable in saying that art is a moral and spiritual road, or the promise of one at least, given diligent practice and thought. And the words that come to me at this moment are:
There is a long-promised road, leading up, up and out of Egypt, across the Jordan's cold waters onto Canaan's lighted plain.
It's not a quote from anything. Just the metaphorical resonance of a Baptist childhood, words that soothe an aging man's journey on the road. One whose most constant lover has been language. And so that lover comes wisping up from vanished childhood itself the utter assurances in a lost tongue.
My point is that when we choose the creative life over the material one, we choose one that leads us toward the light, not away from it, and along a path where two like souls and minds such as we can meet.
And for that I am grateful.
In art and labor,
Joe
PS: As one who attended art school briefly, and studied art informally for many years, I must say it's damned nice to see there are still people out there who can draw -- who understand mass and space. Your rendition of Uncle Sam has every bit the solid mass of Bill Mauldin, coupled with sort of an "Aubrey Beardsley on steroids" kind of flow.
