Joe Bageant

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.

Recruiting Trench Liberals and Leftnecks

By Joe Bageant

Despite what Internet liberals may think, most real working class Americans, and I mean the people who tune up your Prius or press your dry cleaning, haven't given a flying fock about the Iraq war for the last couple of years now. Not until recently, when it became pretty clear we are losing it -- losing being the worst possible thing in a society force fed on sports and the winner-loser mentality which created the uniquely American contemptuous epithet, "a loser." But now as my friend Buddy, who at middle age has been reduced to bagging groceries and "shagging carts" in the parking lot at one of the local Food Lion supermarkets says, "If we ain't losing, we seem to been over there entirely too long to be winnin'. That's for shore."

Dead Man Shopping

Stonewall Jackson prays for retail sales in the lost potpourri zone

[CONSUMER WARNING: This essay contains no rant material]

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation.
-- Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn't have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales.
-- Mad Dog Howard

By Joe Bageant

Like many older married men, I'd rather have my fingernails pulled out with heated pliers than go with my wife to an allegedly cultural event, which in our still quite Southern town of Winchester, Virginia, usually means attending yet another local history or genealogy lecture. And I'd rather have the late Uday Hussein personally administer the ball shockers to me than attend one of our town's many commercial events such as First Night, First Friday, or any "celebration of" (pick your own noun) such as Winchester's spring festival of the apple blossom, downtown days, historic main street or any of the other thinly masked events which I call "Chamber of Commerce coordinated purchasing opportunities."

Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson

Freedom vs. Authority under the 40-foot pulsating rainbow vagina

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It's all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It's mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.
-- Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader

By Joe Bageant

In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I've been lucky enough -- or sometimes unlucky enough -- to meet and write about many of America's "somebodies," mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians. When I was young, so-called "media journalism" then was just what it is now, what we called "starfucking", and amounted to writing PR for media corporations in "music journals" of the time. But we covered a few worthwhile iconic figures in the mix as well -- the kind that stick around in the background of one's thinking forever. At my age now, I find a lot of them are dying off, the Hunter Thompsons, Susan Sontags, Ken Keseys and Kurt Vonneguts. However, I have a self-imposed policy not to eulogize them because the hundreds of sentimental Internet tributes that flourish upon their deaths somehow seem ghoulish, and because it is a universal truth that we writers will do anything for an audience, and celebrity death is one of the easiest ways to attract one.

Rising Above Politics

Can we quit talking and start walking?

By Joe Bageant

Well, lo and beshit! I never thought I’d ever see the day. But even in my hardcore Republican run hometown, many conservatives are quietly sneaking away from the sing-along around the campfire of George Bush’s war-crazed hootenanny. Most of them are ordinary bona fide conservatives. But others slipping off under cover of darkness are among our richest Republicans who profiteered mightily in the security, construction and service businesses that sprouted like mushrooms from every aspect of the Iraq War. Either they have suddenly developed a steak of conscience, or they simply don’t want to be associated with the trail of crime, blood and feces Bush and his cronies have obviously tracked across the carpet of American history. My bet is on the latter.

Redneck Liberation Theology

Why are leftists so damn afraid of God?

By Joe Bageant

Six or seven years ago I wrote my first essays about how America's fundamentalist churches had gone batshit crazy, were casting demons out of car engine blocks and making covert plans to exchange the Constitution for the Book of Revelation. Those few readers I had at the time, mostly in urban liberal strongholds, tended to think, "Well, these hayseeds out there in the hinterlands are scary fuckers, but Joe overstates the case a bit. The god-whacks can never put together the kind of political power he's describing." The political landscape has changed since then, and there are now more books and documentary films sounding the alarm than you can shake a stick at. Which warms the gin soaked cockles of my heart (whatever the hell heart cockles are.)

Three Nights in Philly

Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes

By Joe Bageant

A fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America, which I now consider my home: "America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday money and business stuff alone will trap you like fucking flypaper." And that keeps ringing in my head during this current return to sell my house and fulfill my promotional obligations for the book I just published here. Which could take months.

But it's sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age, it's surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban self-important horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just around too many bland American "sluburbs" for too long before I skipped the country.

A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard

Hang the Professors, Save the Eunuchs for Later

By JOE BAGEANT

It is time to close America's universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. American universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
-- Fred Reed, American expatriate writer and "equal-opportunity irritant"

If there is one bright spot in the bleak absurdity of slogging along in our new totalist American state, it is that ordinary working Americans are undisciplined as hell. We are genuine moral and intellectual slobs whose consciousness is pretty much glued onto an armature of noise, sports, sex, sugar and saturated fats. Oh, we nod toward the government bullhorns of ideology, even throw beer cans and cheer when told we are winning some war or Olympic sports event. But when it comes right down to it, we could generally give a rat's ass about government institutions and are congenitally more skeptical of government than most nations, especially nations that get things like good teeth and free higher education for their tax dollars.

No excuse for rampant personal greed

Hey Joe,

My admiration for your writing is extreme, boundless. There is a touch of noble ennui, of a strange melancholy that I glean from your essays. The intensity of childhood reality, with its antebellum flowers and breezes, wafts around your words, words implicitly shedding the abstract foolishness of adult normality. Might I even ascribe a tiny measure of the mystical to your turning away from corporatist demons and tempters?

In the Reign of the One-nutted King

Janked rats cried for blood and the prosthetic hand of love waved good-bye to reason

By Joe Bageant

Not long ago protesting Danish construction workers won a historic victory against workplace tyranny -- they retained their company sponsored on-the-job beer breaks. Heartless employers being what they are, had asked workers to pay half the cost of the beer. Oppression is ever boundless.
About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture, nevertheless managed to do what most comkon folks in the world do -- send the kids off to school every morning, cursed Baghdad's traffic, and perhaps a little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great public expense, and for no apparent reason?

Escape from America

Gin meditations on outlaw roosters, tin cup martinis and my bust-out from Mammon's guilded cage

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

It is near midnight and the dogs sleeping in the sand under my cabana, Rex and Pluto, emit happy, gurgling growls, as if chasing imaginary rabbits in their dreams. I lie in bed just breathing in and breathing out and feeling so free that I've laughed out loud a couple of times tonight, something I have never done in my life. At least not while simply looking at the ceiling. Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle. After more than two years of effort, I'm outta the gilded gulag, by damned, and tell myself that I have at last quit being part of the problem -- or at least as much as much as anyone can without living stark naked in a Himalayan cave and toasting insects over a dung fire.

Dispatch from the Chinese Landfill

Sure it's the Devil's fine red tongue, but it's too much fun to quit

By Joe Bageant

Despite the bad name he has with liberals these days, Jesus did have the right idea. He'd get right down there on the street and grunt with the people, feeling them all over and healing their boils, feeding them and preaching his ass off while everybody hollered and saw the light as blind men popped open their eyes and lame folks started doing the Dead Sea Macarena. No maintaining a professional distance, no opinion polls for that guy. He just went out there and "got 'er done" in plain sight of everybody. Including the Jewish religious mafia and the Roman super-state thugs of the time -- which is why he got whacked.  But he left the world impressed enough that an influential book about his exploits is still on the best seller list today, dispelling publishing industry wisdom that people will not read a book over 300 pages. Jesus seems to have left no heirs to receive royalties, contrary to the speculations of Da Vinci Code readers, The Da Vinci Code being the middle-class equivalent of the Left Behind series. Anyway, Jesus ain't on my shit list and I surely hope I am not on his.

Somewhere a Banker Smiles

Muffled noises from the ranks of the babbling paranoid

By Joe Bageant

It's hard as hell to keep conspiracy theories out of one's mind these days. And I'm not talking about "Who really brought down the Twin Towers? or the "Are Zionists behind the Iraq War?" kind of stuff. The booger stalking my ragged old mind these days puts both of those in the shade. And it runs like this:

Is the consumerist totalization of this country and the world really a conscious plot by a handful of powerful corporate and financial masters? If we answer "yes" we find ourselves trundled off toward the babbling ranks of the paranoid. Still though, it's easy enough to name those who would piss themselves with joy over the prospect of a One World corporate state, with billions of people begging to work for their 1,500 calories a day and an xBox chip in their necks. It's too bad our news media quit hunting with live ammo decades ago, leaving us with no one to track the activities and progress of what sure as hell seem to be global elites, judging from the financial spoor we find along every pathway of modern life.

Pissing in the Liberal Punchbowl Again

The Democratic Conga Line in the American House of Lords

Saw the talking heads today, speaking the priestly tongue. Saw them nodding seriously, using words like 'gravitas' and a few others that originated in the bosom of Americana. Heard one of the newly elected basically state that things would be business as usual, don't expect a lot of changes. Rather scornfully and testily the idea of impeaching W was dismissed. Well, why the hell not? No answer, just the satisfied, mildly contemptuous smile. Oh, yes, and there'll be a lot of 'bipartisan' things going on.
-- Key Bugle, Internet denizen, retired army seargent

By Joe Bageant

Democrats are dancing around the head of Donald Rumsfeld like a scene from Lord of the Flies, heating up the tar buckets and plucking the goose in eager, nay, wild, anticipation. Personally, I love the smell of tar and feathers in the morning and am quite willing to march on the White House as we speak. I like revenge as well as the next guy. But I also consider myself a compassionate man, one perfectly willing to let Bush's cabinet choose whether they wanna play the mommy or the daddy in the Big House, then move on to the real problems, such as the fact that a gallon of Old Grandad is nearly 50 bucks here in Virginia, or the fact that we are still a nation of people, half of whom were happy to elect a bunch of war criminals -- TWICE! -- and still are.

Madmen and Sedatives: Inside the Iron Theater

By JOE BAGEANT

Nobody talks about it out loud, but a few million Americans are seriously doubting their sanity these days. Or having their sanity doubted. Or both. They seldom speak their minds because what is going on in there is a vision of society that conjures grave doubt, if not outright horror. It is the kind of stuff that will get your ass kicked off the island in a heartbeat. Nobody wants to hear it.

Roy's People

Can American liberalism rise from Washington's two-bed brothel to dance with the ghost of Roy Orbison and eat garden tomatoes?

By JOE BAGEANT

The Shenandoah is not a bar. It's not a tavern. It's a beer joint. The kind that does cash-only business and scratches hard for every nickel it turns. And lately, it is about the only place in my life slowed down and dumbed down enough to honestly relax. It takes a couple of hours. Nearly everyone here on this Sunday morning lives or grew up within blocks of the place and feels most at home here -- which is not unlike myself, who used to sell newspapers on the corner here at age 12 and who, if the light is right, can imagine that pale, scruffy youngster shouting Paaaaaapers! NoozPaaaaaapers! Such nostalgia eases the frustrated wildness in old men.

Adam Smith Meets Cousin Ronnie's Boy

That ain't no class underclass; it's 250 million rugged individuals being pissed on.

By JOE BAGEANT

Unbelievable as it seems today, there was a time when such people as doctors and lawyers did not necessarily live apart from the dirt front yards and Saturday night domestic scraps of the laboring class. The doctor who delivered me in 1946, the most prosperous in town by all accounts, lived just a few short blocks from the rundown Kent Street "white trash and nigger street" my parents called home. His fee for dragging my screaming ass into the light was an exorbitant $100 -- and for a caesarian birth at that -- because the US Army was writing the check. The good doctor lived close enough that my old man could walk a five-dollar payment over to his house on payday, close enough that I could see his rooftop from my upstairs bedroom window. As a kid, knowing such an educated, prosperous man lived so near was somehow comforting. And at least it gave an example of what one might possibly aspire to, given the education.

The Beauty of the System

A tale of shopping, blackmail and slow death in the lost Cul de Sac

By JOE BAGEANT

America is a dark half continent of grotesque notions made manifest, such as Scientology, the GOP and the McDonald's "Big Bowl" meal. Americans seem to possess psychic flypaper that attracts strange unsavory notions. Worse yet, we act upon them. One notion we got into our heads right after World War II was that each generation must live better than the previous one. Not such a bad idea at the time, considering the number of folks in the previous generation who grew up during the Depression and knew what it was like to scratch with the chickens to survive.

Contemplations from the Cheap Beer Zone

Two kingpins of the sweating class deconstruct popular culture, Jon Stewart as opiate of the liberal masses and the Lake Tohopekaliga Bassmaster five-fish Classic.

"Now you take Dick Cheney, a goddamned drunk if ever I saw one. How else would a man confuse a little bitty quail with a Texas judge? But Cheney better be careful, cause you go to pouring booze over a pacemaker, you’re asking for trouble, I don't care how much you paid for the pacemaker or the booze."
-- Virgil Jenkins, retired bulldozer operator.

By JOE BAGEANT

You could say my friend Virgil Jenkins is an erudite and insightful student of American culture. You could say he has honed his understanding of America through decades of serious reading and contemplation. But it would be a damned lie. Mostly, Virgil does just what I do, drink and talk and watch television. Still, the dirt-eating truth of the situation is this: He's got more common sense and insight than 99% of the people who run this country. We seem to have gotten different results from the same regimen.

Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven

Democracy rots from the inside out as a nation of telemarketers and war criminals parties on amid the stench.

A spring Sunday morning and I am at the politically incorrect 7-Eleven buying my cholesterol loaded half-and-half for my peasant slave labor grown coffee.  In the parking lot, car speakers blare out Bob Marley from a grungy 1987 Olds Cutlass (the last year GM made 'em), while the owner, a Haitian guy, sits on the curb eating his Smokey Big Bite hot dog, sunshine pouring over the whole world sweet as that quart of chocolate milk he is going to wash it all down with. Bob Marley is singing "One Love" and that Smokey smells so damned good I order one for myself and settle in next to that Haitian dude. And I think, "Is this a great fucking country or what? Yessiree, the world's best hope."

Under the Blue Mango

Belize on 5-K and a pack of smokes

There are superficial people everywhere, but a whole section of the human soul is simply missing in Americans. Most foreigners can never understand it unless they have lived inside America's total dominance of the material slave-state -- Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
-- Gui Rochat

By Joe Bageant

Once one becomes aware of that babies die in the third world as an indirect result of our simplest choices such as buying Ziploc plastic bags or bottled water or driving a car, life changes for any approximately moral American. Restlessness sets in, a nagging guilt that only swells with time until finally night thoughts grow so damned anxious that something has to be done. It's been that way with me for a long time. About a year ago I decided to do something more about it than pat myself on the back for recycling the mountain of bottles and unread magazines our household seems to generate. So last fall I vowed to find a decent third world family and put up the money to do something together to better their lives and my own. The issue was so unbearable by spring this year that, by god, I was determined to get it done.

(Following this essay, there's a link to an album of photos taken by my good friend Arvin Hill.)

Springtime in the Republic of Larry

Amid the comforts of empire, the citizens blithely bumble

YOU SPEAK OF LIBERTY? OF AN ENLIGHTENED POLITY? YOU BEER-SOAKED KNUCKLE DRAGGERS AND PRECIOUS WET-LIPPED LIBERALS WOULDN'T KNOW LIBERTY FROM A CONGOLESE  ASS-EATING TAPEWORM! YOU HAVEN’T GOT  THE INSIGHT OF A GODDAM FRUIT FLY, MUCH LESS ENOUGH TO VOTE.
-- Northern Virginia internet denizen called THE SCREAMING MAN!

“Grrrrrrrr!”
-- Bingo, the philosopher dog

By Joe Bageant

Spring has truly arrived when I once again find myself in the garden shed with my dog Bingo while pretending to fix the lawn mower. Meaning that I need to clean out the stale gas that I purposefully leave in the tank each fall so my wife will have to ask me to tinker with the mower every spring. Screwing around in the garden shed, pretending to do maintenance only a man is supposed to be capable of, is one of the many ruses that keeps me from having to do actual yard work. I love to watch a woman do yard work, what with the bending over in shorts and all.

Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown

Now shut up and buy something

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them."
-- James "Mad Dog" Howard

By Joe Bageant

When I was a boy on my grandparents' farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads. One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible -- or at least was at one time in this country. And if I ever doubt it I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail.

Goodbye Terry Gross, We Niver Knew Ye

On liberal media denial

By Joe Bageant

Having come to understand that mainstream media are in the business of selling fried chicken and cars, giving Wall Street head, and stealing bandwidth from the public's airwaves, none of us expect them to question anything afoot in the empire. We quite understand they cannot be wasting profitable air time on a nation whose collective memory is 30 seconds long. So we watch them pull their punches and wait for the commercials, which are their whole point anyway. If, god forbid, you are the pointy headed type interested in details, turn on NPR. And if you consider yourself hipper than the couch taters out here in Budland, go onto the net and visit Salon. Or if you are so worldly and hip you are a downright commie, then subscribe to Mother Jones. That's the way it used to be.

Revenge of the Mutt People

Bred for meanness

“There are some things so disgusting that only a white man would be willing to do them.”
-- Walter Wildshoe, Coeur d’Alene Indian

By Joe Bageant

Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates -- bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d’Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn’t even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: “Only a white man would work there.”

The Simulacran Republic

The hologram ripples with the cry of a thrush

"It's a world of appearances ... packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com.  She asks her hairdresser for 'tinted highlights' he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he's accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she's asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online."
-- Writer and social critic Jennifer Matsui

By Joe Bageant

A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called "retro-reflectum." I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects glutted sensory environment.

What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means

A Whore That Sitteth on Many Waters

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

"The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series

By Joe Bageant

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses" Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

One Last Kick at Liberal Dogs

Just to Hear Them Bark

"Why do you rope-belted redneck mouthbreathers assume that if a liberal drinks a glass of wine they are going to attack people like you? You know, it is just possible that someone can eat a piece of cheese for some other reason than hating rednecks."
-- Posted on Smirking Chimp website by Wile E. Chimp Supergenius

By Joe Bageant

Many American liberals believe working class conservatives see them as the enemy -- that they stereotype liberals as a bunch of over-educated quasi-queers sucking down cappuccinos at Starbucks or spreading brie at a self-help book signing, or something like that. We can thank television for such ignorance.

Free People Do Bad Things

Overall, we can expect more of the same

By Joe Bageant

A while back there was a wrestling promotion campaign in which young children were encouraged to attend local wrestling bringing weapons of their own creation. The weapons would later be used in the ring. One small boy returned with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Asked about the wisdom of encouraging the child to create such brutal weapons, the kid's father appeared dumbfounded: "This is just entertainment! It's fun!" World Champion Wrestling's Vince McMahon's indignant response was, "This is still a free country. I will not let anyone stop me." The implication being of course, "I am a great defender of freedom against evil liberal regulation." Then he looked into the camera to his fans and said: "DON'T LET ANYONE STOP YOU!"

Carpooling with Adolf Eichmann

Dark mutterings from the sidelines on Prozac cookies and our disturbing sort of sanity

By Joe Bageant

One of the most unsettling things about this country is that the following people are considered perfectly sane by American standards: Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Deepak Chopra, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Pat Robertson, Grover Nordquist, and Michelle Malkin. See anybody in that list even remotely normal? Every one of them lives in an egomaniacal la-la-land of his or her imagination and manages to get paid to do it. Believe me when I say that just about any face you see on your television or in the newspaper is a nutjob. I used to interview such freaks for a living. Of course, given that American journalists and interviewers have become mindless suck-asses, I understand that I may have a credibility problem here. But onward!

Back to the Ancient Future

Chewing Raw Grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man'

By Joe Bageant

I spent the middle weekend in April with a group of artists and thinkers called the April Fools Group. Put together by Brad Blanton, psychotherapist and creator of "radical honesty" politics and therapy, the three-day meeting was set on a farm down the Shenandoah Valley amid the battlefields and rolling countryside of Newmarket, Virginia. Brad, a world famous redneck headshrinker, had put together old hippies, theoreticians, musicians, young anarchists, beautiful brilliant women and aging writers to yap, drink and plot against the Bush administration. So when I pulled into Brad's driveway to find him and a fellow named Hank parked in lawn chairs up on the roof with a bottle of bourbon I knew this thing was off to a good start.

The Onion Eater

By Joe Bageant

It was spring 1966 and down at the end of fraternity row in the exclusive new brick high-rise apartment building, the children of the rich and the few were partying hard. On the second floor balcony they socialized, cooked and drank beer with beautiful girls. The building even had a pool, a rare luxury in those times, and was the kind of place where only a few high-enders could afford to live while in school. That day a homeless person, an even rarer thing back then, shuffled by. Seeing them on the balcony, he asked for food.  His attitude was one of a supplicant at the feet of God:  "Pardon me, sirs ..."

Let's Drink to the Slobbering Classes

A sordid tale of work release, hyenas and liberal weakness

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let's drink to the uncounted heads
Let's think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
-- "Salt of the Earth," The Rolling Stones

I stopped into Larry's Gas 'n Grubs for my regular morning commuter coffee mug refill and lo and be damned! There was my hirsute 300-pound friend Poot working at the counter. I said, "What the hell are you doing ringing up my coffee at this crap stand? You're supposed to be a welder, fat boy!"

In Praise of Holy Madness

The Wild Palms of Etowah

By Joe Bageant

One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe who could be found on America's streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adepts and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India's avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores.

Finding Jesus at the Cracker Barrel

Sunday in a Red State

"If Jesus reappeared on earth tomorrow it would probably be at Daytona or a Cracker Barrel Restaurant."
-- Punk Wilson, local wiseass

By Joe Bageant

Indeed, Cracker Barrel has to be the most appropriately named restaurant chain in America. The last time I entered one with an out-of-town black friend, nearly all heads turned in unison toward us. My friend took one look at the wall-to-wall porky white faces and said, "Get me back to the fucking car. I can grab a happy meal on the way out of Deliverance."

A Republic of Pickle Vendors

The devil does not live in the American heartland, he just shits here

By Joe Bageant

When my old friend Dickie Holme told me that the black maid, Vernie, who had raised him while his family was busy stealing half the county, still cooked Xmas dinner at his house every year, I nearly spit vodka tonic onto the front of his Yonex badminton shirt. "Jezits Christ Dickie, she's 80 years old and has a family of her own to celebrate Christmas with. Slavery has been over in Virginia for 20 years now. Didn't you get the memo?"

It Ain't Easy Being White

Down at Burt's Tavern

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged."
-- Justice William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice

"Would the sonovabitch who super-glued my hair to the bar when I passed out please come take your goddamned beating like a man!'
-- Pooty Jenkins, welder

By Joe Bageant

"Pooty don't you ever wash them booger hooks of yours?" That's Carol the bartender watching Poot pick up his Royal Burger with two blackened hairy paws that look like they just finished welding a greasy transmission housing back together -- which is exactly what they did. "Carol Darlin," Poot replies, "FUCK YOU."

Poor, White and Pissed

A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals

By Joe Bageant

If you are reading this it is very likely that you are a liberal, maybe even an outright screaming burn down the goddam country commie -- in which case I say, "Come sit by me comrade!" (Especially if you are a blonde.) Like most lefties you probably live in an urban area, or someplace with reasonable cultural diversity. More than likely you are educated and can read this without moving your lips. Maybe you even live in the freethinking People's Republic of Berkeley, or bustle along under the fabled lights of Manhattan where you can see independent films and buy such things as leeks and soy milk at your grocery store.

Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck

How the Scots Irish Screwed Up America

By Joe Bageant

You may not meet them among your circle of friends, but there are millions of Americans who fiercely believe we should nuke North Korea and Iran, seize the Middle East's oil, and replace the U.S. Constitution with the Christian Bible. They believe the United States will conquer the entire world and convert it to our notions of democracy and fundamentalist Christian religion. And that will happen says my Christian neo-conservative friend Dave Henderson, "when we elect a man with the balls to use our nukes." You may not believe me, and if you don't I cannot blame you for never having been exposed to such folks. Only an idiot or a masochistic observer of the American scene would subject himself or herself to these Americans. I like to think I am the latter, but the jury is still out.

A Mean and Unholy Ditch

The Sleep of Reason Amid Wild Dogs and Gin

The hardest thing for garden variety American liberals to grasp is what a truly politicized and hateful place much of America has become -- one long mean ditch ruled by feral dogs where the standards of civility no longer apply. The second hardest thing for liberals is to admit that they are comfortably insulated in the middle class and are not going to take any risks in the battle for America's soul . . . not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. Call it the politics of the comfort zone.

Dining With the Rhinos

Eugene Ionesco and the Empire

By Joe Bageant

Thanks to an online friend, I recently rediscovered Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros -- the one about being fully human in a totalitarian state. Berenger, the play's protagonist, is a humanist stranded in a society slowly becoming monsters. Rhinoceroses to be exact, a symbol for a herding mindless ugliness in an unthinking stampede. Ultimately Berenger is the last pink flesh and blood man left in a stampeding rhinoceros herd, and comes to grasp that the stampede itself is what it is all about. It is the stampede, the mindless charging off together that causes the metamorphosis of people into rhinos.

Hung Over in the End Times

If liberal society is to survive the rise of the Godwacks, we need to start by calling them what they are

By Joe Bageant

Since George Bush’s reelection, the Christian nutjobs have mounted an assault on my block. In the five years I’ve lived in this neighborhood I’ve never had so much as one Jehovah’s Witness knock at the door. But last Saturday morning my neighbor Tinka-the-wool-weaver called to warn of approaching Bible thumpers working the doorbells on my side of the street. Sure enough, out the window were two women in long skirts with bad Bible hairdos headed my way. "Incoming Jesus freaks at nine o’clock high!" I yelled to my wife. We jumped back into bed and let 'em pound on the door and drop tracts in the mailbox while Barb read the Washington Post and I caught another 20 zees.

Lafayette Park Blues

By Joe Bageant

In the late 1960s I used to sit in Lafayette Park across from the White House, have spring picnics on the benches there with hippie girlfriends, reading Rimbaud, while waiting for the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit to open at the Corcoran Museum down the street. Usually there would be protesters across Pennsylvania Avenue, sometimes chained to the White House gate, a Buddhist monk or an anti-war group or mothers against whatever. Those were freer times. I know they were freer because I was there, I felt it and can remember it, as do millions of other Americans my age. So when we now look at the White House with its steel wire, concrete barricades, police dogs and snipers posted on rooftops we cannot help but ask ourselves: What the hell has happened to my country? Who imposed this national lockdown?

Karaoke Night in George Bush's America

Another Visit to Burt's Tavern

"73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!|
-- Men's room wall, Burt's Westside Tavern

By Joe Bageant

I know it makes me a dinosaur, but I still think there is much to be learned in America's small neighborhood taverns. I call it my "learning through drinking" program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt's Westside Tavern: 1, Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had, and 2, Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.

Driving on the Bones of God

You and I may get smoked, but the fat cats will dine on peacock tongues

By Joe Bageant

It is 7 am, already hot as hell and another code red day. I am cresting Mount Weather on Route 7 Virginia and into the face of a blood red sun behind a pink sticky haze that makes commuting so ghostlike here during the dog days of August. The code red is an atmospheric pollution rating, not a Homeland Security alert. It means the air is not safe to breathe unless you have to.

Cranky Reflections on the Fourth of July

Would somebody pleeeze turn off that goddam radio!

By Joe Bageant

This is the Fourth of July, 2004, it is muggy and judging from the sporadic concussive noises, every small boy in town is trying his damnedest to blow his thumb off. As a lover of anti-personnel fireworks myself, I would be right out there with them if it didn’t look so bad for an unshaven, late middle-aged tub of lard to be setting off cherry bombs along these venerable tree-lined streets. And besides, it would mean getting out of my boxer shorts before 4 PM on a Sunday, thereby breaking my cardinal rule: Never get dressed on the Sabbath until an hour at which it is appropriate to drink.

Is Our President a Wackjob?

Ordinary people are finally starting to ask, but does it really matter?

By Joe Bageant

Supposedly, if you put live frogs in a kettle of cold water on the stove, then raise the temperature very slowly, the frogs will eventually boil to death without trying to escape. I don't know if that is true, but it does seem the perfect, if sometimes overused, analogy for what we see going on around us in America. My guess is that we frogs are about medium done for. Having never cooked frogs or lived in a fascist state, I am not a practiced judge of these things, but I'm quite sure the end result of either is in no way desirable for frogs or human beings.

Sons of a Laboring God

Getting Down and Dumb at Burt's Tavern

"Too much public education only gets working people riled up and full of backsass."
-- Virginia Senator Harry Flood Byrd

By Joe Bageant

My home town is one of those slowly rotting East Coast burgs that makes passers-through think to themselves: "What the hell is this? Mayberry USA on crack?"  The town's 250-year old core is a blighted clot of ramshackle houses carved into apartments and cheesy businesses. Its outer rim of slurb is the typical ugly gash of commercial hell, an assortment of mindlessly jammed-together tire dealers, grim asphalt, slurp and burps, and car dealerships of the type that make the U.S. one of the ugliest nations on earth. A sign in the median strip of this gash proclaims Winchester an official U.S. "All-American Town."

Mash Note for the 'Girl with the Leash'

Military conscription is alive and well in the dominion of the whip

"Good for you, Lynndie England, you chinless, inbred, runty, androgynous backwoods mutt! When you mimed a crotch-shot at that hooded detainee, you reminded us all of what Imperial service should be like: one long S&M tour of the tropics, where every man, woman and child of the conquered peoples exists solely as an object for your pleasure."
-- John Dolan, columnist for the website, Exile

By Joe Bageant

When I saw the above arrogant, piece of witty horseshit, I wanted to go strangle John Dolan myself. Then I came back to the realization that all writing is masturbation, mine included, and that some of us do it with our eyes closed -- as John Dolan does. If he had even one eye open he would have seen the pathos and national hypocrisy represented by "the girl with the leash."

The Covert Kingdom

Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas

Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher's message echoed from within the plain wooden walls: "Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."

Staring Down the Jackals

Liberal Roadkill Along the High Road to Baghdad

By Joe Bageant

Somewhere in hell tonight, the Devil’s wife is setting out an extra dinner plate for America, where presumably we will be toasted by history’s other war criminals. Let’s face it. When we backed a maniac killer like Saddam Hussein, funded the Taliban, and slept with the treacherous Saudi Princes as the price of our national narcotic -- oil -- we’d pretty much bought a place at the dinner table. But when we embraced that murderous old sack of guts, Ariel Sharon, as international brother and accomplice in all things Middle Eastern, we were not merely displaying sick taste in friends; we acceded to becoming war criminals. The entire world sees that, and has seen it for years.

John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!

Talking the Homeland Security Blues with Bingo the Philosopher Dog

By Joe Bageant

I'd be the first to admit that sitting here in this garden shed drinking Jim Beam and feeding pork rinds to my dog Bingo (a black mutt of the type we call a "piss hound" around here) may not be the best vantage point from which to examine national security affairs. However, it must be said that when the nebulous tendrils of U.S. security policy begin to reach down this far into everyday life, far enough to rattle a 57-year-old pee dribbler such as myself, it sure as hell can be called pervasive, at the very least. Not only pervasive, but also downright personal too. John Ashcroft publicly insulted my wife. I kid you not. I never thought I'd see the day when I would be ready for a balls-to-the-wall scrap with the Attorney General of the United States.

Sleepwalking to Fallujah

By Joe Bageant

Each workday I commute toward Washington, D.C. along Route 7, where patriotic war slogans are spray painted on the overpasses, and homemade signs jut from the median in support of our "boys in Iraq." Mud-splattered construction trucks rip by with frayed flags popping in the wind, loaded with burly bearded men and looking very much like the footage of Afghanistan or Angola, minus the 50 caliber gun mounts. Yesterday I saw my first stretch Hummer, painted in desert tan and carrying half a dozen soccer mom types, which rather sums up the point I am trying to make here. There is a distinct martial ethos, the tang of steel and the smell of gun oil in the air around Washington these days, I swear it.

Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy

A Letter from Blue Ridge Bush Country

Bluebird, bluebird
Take a letter up north for me
These folks is fixin' to hurt somebody
And it sure 'nuff might be me.
-- From "Bluebird," a traditional blues song

By Joe Bageant

How can the region of America that gave us lynching, Jim Crow, Harry Byrd, George Wallace, Taliban Christianity, David Duke, the KKK, Bible hair, Tammy Fay Bakker, congregational snake handling, the poll tax, inbreeding, and chitterlings possibly take another step back down the stairs of human evolution? Beats the hell out of me. But somehow here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia we have managed it.