Joe Bageant

The Sucker Bait Called Hope

Making the best of a slow apocalypse

By Joe Bageant

We just concluded an election in which both parties talked about hope, one more so than the other. Hope, that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus, or modern science, or some great political leader, or other -- as yet unknown force -- will reverse our national or personal condition ... will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then ecologically: Decline and eventual collapse. There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world 'round fully understand this.

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.

The Audacity of Depression

Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America

By Joe Bageant

One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.

So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers -- a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.

Nine Billion Little Feet

On the Highway of the Damned, Are We There Yet, Pa?

"John Raymond Castillo, age 91. Sunrise, January 14, 1917. Sunset, February 1, 2008. He leaves 21 children, 140 grandchildren and 302 great-grandchildren."
-- Obituary announcement on Belize’s LOVE Radio station

"The population of Belize? Officially it's about 300,000. But if you include all the kids, it's probably three million."
-- Greg, longtime expatriate American in Belize

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

The din of squealing, laughing children is the background white noise of the Third World. In Belize, as in most of the Third World, 45% of all people are under the age of 16. About a dozen of that 45% swarm around me as I cut my toenails under the mango tree. A few are picking on the mangy, quarreling dogs but the majority are drawn in close, giving advice about how to cut gnarly, old man type toenails: "Saw dem off wid a file" seems to be the consensus.

What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about grades, unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race. They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both ever in human history.

Crime, Punishment and the Efficacy of Pigs

Random Notes on Belize

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

In the Caribbean, the gears of the machinery of justice somehow never quite seem to engage, probably because they were toothless to begin with, but mostly because nobody knows they are supposed to. Crime and punishment are for the most part, completely unrelated elements here on the Garifuna coast of Belize. Whether something is a crime or not depends more or less upon whom it was committed, whether it is a "white fella," a tourist, a neighbor or a stranger. And punishment, well, that's something that happens by the unfettered caprice of sheer fate, an impenetrable mystery in which the police and judicial system somehow play a part, though no one seems quite sure just what part.

Take my buddy Griggs, who was awakened at midnight by the dark form of someone rifling through his bedroom. "Hold it motherfucker!" he yells, switching on the light to find a young man, a local well known in this small seaside village where everyone is well known to everyone else. The young man goes by the nickname of Skankin', after the stoned groove Caribbean dance style, or Skank for short. Skank jumps back out the window he came in through and Griggs, a pepper bearded man in his late forties, owner of a small group of rental cabanas and in good enough shape not to be fucked with, is mad as hell. "Get the police!" he yells to his wife, Rhoda.

Getting Out the Bling Vote

From Kibby's Cool Spot in Belize, politics makes sense -- sort of

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

I know it's unpatriotic as hell, but I just cannot get a hard-on about the '08 American presidential elections. As in, I haven't read or heard a word about them in a couple of weeks and could not care less whether Hillary showed publicly some emotion, which was the big news when I left the States. The will just isn't there. And it's even more difficult from here in this Central American village where so many people have real problems. The kind that that come with being born under one empire, the British one, and living in the shadow of the present American living in the shadow of its walled fortress of armed privilege. One of those problems is who to sell your vote to and for how much.

"I wan too hunred an feefty dollah for my vote," Marie declares as she chops up bananas to make tapo for dinner. I got feefty for my vote las' time, but some people got two feefty."

To the Princes of Gringolia

Wanting everything is not the problem. Always getting what we want is.

(Editor's note: A version of this essay was posted here last August. This longer and more polished version was published last week on AlterNet.)

By Joe Bageant

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE

Right now I am doing something only someone as fucked up as an American-style lefty could possibly do: waiting for Hurricane Dean to strike my rickety shack and masturbating an indignant essay about "the global class struggle."

It seems we Americans as a people are much given to personal indignation, if not national action, excepting perhaps aerial bombing and mass surveillance. But the poor of these Caribbean villages struggling for merest daily sustenance -- the money for which is so often doled out by a well-scrubbed white hand much like my own -- cannot afford open indignation much less "class struggle."

Meanwhile, 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.

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.

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.

The Ants of Gaia

It's only the end of the world, so quit bitching

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
-- Thomas Malthus, 1798

By Joe Bageant

As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I'd guess that it was the lack of water that finally got 'em.

But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper's grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.

Smirking Allies: Nazi Brown and Kevlar Black

By Joe Bageant

Americans are addicted to spectacle, especially those involving absurdity, sex, violence and the icons of violence. Which makes America's tiny "Nazi Party" fringe a magnet for TV cameras anywhere it shows up in public. We like our bad guys so blatantly labeled a four-year-old can read them.

The formal name of the largest Nazi organization in America is the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP). Of course having the word "socialist" in its name plays so neatly into the corporate government of America's hands, one wonders just who is funding ANSWP's glossy magazine, or National Commander Bill White's dozens of radio broadcasts and appearances around the country. Then too, ANSWP marchers carrying signs reading "What Would Hitler Do?" almost too conveniently fit the bill in a nation where anti-hate is a big and hyperbolic business.