Joe Bageant

Australian shocked by US poverty

Dear Mr Bageant,

I noticed your book Deer Hunting with Jesus at Borders while killing time waiting for my plane, bought it and couldn't stop reading. I just loved it, although you do paint a very sad picture. However, if sad is the truth then there is no point sugar-coating it, and you haven't.

I am 32 and my only overseas trips (I'm Australian) have been to America. I went in 2005 and again last year, with my ex. We could have afforded to go anywhere in the world, but both had our heart set on going to America. What has Europe got that can be more fun than America? Our 2005 trip was non-stop fun, including Vegas, Grand Canyon, Manhattan, New Orleans, Miami and San Francisco. It was a big adventure in a booming economy where everyone had lots to spend. After one month, we had to leave, but promised to come back because we loved it.

Live simply and do what feels right

Hey Joe,

I have been reading your stuff online for a few years now and finally ordered a copy of your book. Imagine my surprise to see my high school get such a prominent mention. When you broke out the numbers on the New York lovely upstate village where I was raised, and compared them to your own hometown, I understood why I felt like I knew so many of the people you were talking about.

I may have had a stranger time of coming up in my part of the "global south" than you did. My Mom's side of the family were middle American types who were recovering from my definitely white trash grandparents. And I don't mean redneck. My Mom left this nest at age 13, spirited into the foster care system along with her sisters.

Q&A about Virginia Senator Jim Webb

Joe,

Please answer a few questions for me.

1. Your article regarding your father was powerful and disturbing. Of course, you like to shake things up, even if the lotus eaters end up with indigestion. In this article you mentioned speed, greenies, black-beauties, etc. etc. Do you think the DEA caused the present speed epidemic by essentially banning these substances and making things even worse?

Joe: No. I think misery, oppression and ignorance and hopelessness imposed upon poor working class whites caused the epidemic. I don't see any millionaires cooking meth in their mansions. The farther down the social and economic scale you go, the more meth pipes you find tucked down in the couch cushions.

The full US/UK spin on events in Iran

Hi Joe,

Am I the only one not celebrating the violent turmoil and chaos in Iran? To me it has the same feel as the phony "color revolutions" that were engineered by the "National Endowment for Democracy", a benign sounding organization that in fact masks a cadre of spooks working to enrich corporate interests by destabilizing governments that don't toe the neo-liberal corporate globalist line.

It appears very much like the neo-cons on the march again, only this time the well meaning naïve "liberals" aren't going to say anything about U.S. imperialism because they are entranced by the super slick public relations machine Obama has. This worries me because at least Bush was awkward enough that many people could see through his malicious schemes, it seems this time around that 90% of the population is going to swallow the endless imperialist interventionist Kool-Aid.

Oligarchy, corporations and unions

Hello, Joe,

I am a union man. Like my Dad, I've always believed in unions. My Dad worked for the Post Office for 46 years. He was a member of the Railway Mail Employees Union, and he helped smooth the way for the first African-American member of that union, Brother Scott.

I was a member of the Teamsters & Hotel Workers, Local 5, in Honolulu, as a dishwasher for a hotel. Later, as an air courier, I organized my brothers into the Teamsters Union twice, and the courier service bosses fired me twice.

For the last 20 years, I've worked for a city government and been an active member of SEIU. I was very involved for years in contract campaigns and organizing; in helping my fellow members with problems with their bosses. Then the Local stopped being interested in empowering the members. I got discouraged and I dropped out of active participation.

Dirt and family, sea foam and fate

Dear Readers,

On the back side of the small resort island Caye Caulker, offshore from Belize City, Belize, is a beached two-man sailing vessel which has been lying on its side in the Caribbean sun and winds for fifty years. That was a long time ago, yet the poor Black Carib people who occupy the back side of the caye ("bakkatown," the Black Caribs call it), the ones who wait on the tables of the rich and pilot their fishing boats, still fondly remember the man who once sailed that old wooden boat. "He wah English, a man of da watah an de soul," one old bakka town fisherman recalled to the younger ones, who invariably ask, sometime in the course of their lives, about the old boat resting so prominently there at the end of the sandy road leading to the lagoon.

Today I was fortunate enough to receive a letter from a similar soul, a seafaring man from Nova Scotia. As to the letter writer's question, Why can't media and political figures form genuine  sentiment or thought? My suspicion is this: Those who grow up in the childrens' wading pools of America, entranced by their toys and watched over by nanny capitalism in suburbia or Gotham, never glimpse the deep waters, and therefore live out their lives as children, capable only of childish perception. And in dispensing their perceptions as reality from their positions of power, they further infantilize our entire nation. 

-- Joe Bageant

Religion confounds ideals and absolutes

Joe,

After reading through your pieces, I though I might offer up another perspective. I'm living in my parents' house, on a piece of land, a small part of what one of my ancestors won in a card game in 1714. Most of the intervening generations have lived within ten miles of here. I did a bit of traveling in my youth (I'm 49) and found the rest of the country had its own problems enough to know there wasn't any Shangri-la out there. So I figured the questions I needed to answer were in my head and I came home, helped the parents for some years, got married, had a daughter, split up and now back on the home farm. Renting my share of it to my sister and riding for her. We are in the horse racing business.

In firelight and in darkness

Dear Joe,

Strictly speaking, my "geezerhood" is some distance from now, but it is nonetheless, within sight (like you, I am well-armed and well-provisioned with guns and liquor). As a 45-something who grew up in a smallish northeastern farming town, left home at 15, joined the Marines at 17, and spent the years between now and then travelling the world, ultimately to retire as an infantry captain and end up an accidental banker, in a newly minted career birthed in the throes of the most significant financial crisis in four generations. I can assure you that as a dispossesed vagabond whose roots were torn early and fully, there remains a connection to the native soil that darkened my knees as a child.

Spake the geezer to the stripling youth

Joe Bageant awaiting senility in his reclining rocker

with gun and bourbon. (Photo by Steve Lilibeck.)

This letter from a reader is in response to Joe's short essay "On Native Ground".

Joe,

You're old.

For those of us who aren't old -- yet -- roots are not a commodity that can be easily obtained. If we were to wake up tomorrow morning and find that a populist revolution had disposed Obama and put half of the federal government in prison for war crimes and treason and all of our elected leaders and judges were replaced by frothing populists and our economy was overhauled to serve the interests of the common person, we'd still have a hard time "settling down." Fluid labor movement is a great asset to both management and labor in a good economy (I grant that it’s only a strong asset to management, not labor, in our present economy). It is impossible to maintain that asset and make a society that encourages the establishment of roots in one place. A good chunk of the population will remain fluid no matter what.

The problem is conditioned laziness

Joe,

The problem with Americans is that they prefer the matrix because it is easy. Man's sensual lazy side overrides the recognition for what brings true happiness -- selflessness and sacrifice. When I was young, my dad taught us the value of hard physical manual labor. Of course we did not think it was valuable at the time, but looking back you can see how it was. After building fences or splitting logs all day, or cutting another six-inch piece of bar metal in the band saw hour after hour at my father's machine shop, you realize it is a battle. A mental battle between self-discipline and laziness. One voice saying I hate this, the other saying but money and work is important. Looking back it was not the money or work, but the development of relationships and self-esteem that came from these experiences that was valuable.