Joe Bageant

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

Deer in the headlights of America

An interview with Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant at the Royal Tavern in Winchester, Virginia

The following interview originally appeared on the blog New American Dream.

Joe Bageant, 62, is the author of "Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War," (Random House Crown, 2007). He lives half the year in the black Carib Village of Hopkins, Belize, and half in his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. He writes commentary on America for numerous foreign media, including the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC (Canada) and numerous publications, ranging from Playboy Magazine to the UK's The New Statesman.

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.

Abiders and leavers

Joe,

The subject you wrote of in "On Native Ground" has been gnawing at me these last few years. I struggle more and more with who I am and where I am from. Although my birth -- in a hospital -- took place in downtown Los Angeles, I have resided in Norway since I slipped through the cracks in the Green Machine in 1966 and absconded to a draft card free zone up on the northern rim of Europe. I planned to stay for three years, it's been over forty.

This is Scandinavia, not Virginia and the differences are much greater than any gaping, gasping tourist taking a two week cruise on the Hurtigruten can appreciate. We are not the descendants of colonizers; we have been here thousands of years. Here, where you come from is a matter of the first importance in any social situation. It places you; you're from there, not here. Or you're from here even if you don't sound like it. We still speak dialects that place you geographically.

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.

There are no geniuses in the outhouse

Troubador owner  Jim McCoy and "The Smoking Gun,"

a barbecue smoker that holds a whole pig,

The fire box is in the handle.

By Joe Bageant

Sometimes you overhear a remark so wonderfully prescient you wish you'd said it yourself. Especially if you are a writer. Sitting in back of the Troubadour Club, a West Virginia honky tonk high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I'm listening to Petie Yost, an auctioneer, talk to Bud Shanholtz, who lives on Social Security and drives a snowplow occasionally during the winter.

Now ole Petie uses exotic economic terms such as "investment return" and "percentage." He says things like, "I don't do household auctions 'cause there ain't no real percentage in it." Which makes him an economic expert in these beery circles. And right now he is telling Bud why our Social Security and the FDIC do not exist.

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.

On Native Ground

The art of abidance and staying home

The front porch of the crossroads store,

post office and mill at Unger Store, West Virginia.

In gathering material for his next book, Joe Bageant has been traveling the hills of Virginia and West Virginia where he grew up. Below is a short excerpt from his ongoing road journal.

By Joe Bageant

Driving Shanghai Road on the way to visit my childhood church in Unger Store, Morgan County, West Virginia, I crest the hill just above our old family farm. And spot something that makes me stop and turn off the truck motor, lest the moment be interrupted. Ahead of me in the Sunday morning sun stands an old farmer I've known all my life, Ray Luttrell, meditating on his hayfield. Standing on the very spot by the road where I've seen his late father Harry stand countless times, he is just looking at that hay field, motionless for many minutes.

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. 

Escape from the Zombie Food Court

Joe Bageant recently spoke at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University at Lexington, and the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he was invited to speak on American consciousness and what he dubbed "The American Hologram," in his book, Deer Hunting With Jesus. Here is a text version of the talks, assembled from his remarks at all three schools. 

By Joe Bageant

I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free. 

Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.