Joe Bageant

When did America become a goddamn homeland?

Mr. Bageant,

Your Bass Boats and Queer Marriage is a great article about the American "middle class", whatever the hell that is.

I am an old working class person, a human being. I had working class parents and grandparents. It is all I ever was or wanted to be. I remember an old definition of the "middle class", way back in the mid 60's, my high school days. It all had to do with income, of course. Not sure what the numbers were back then, but it was above working class pay, for sure.

I had four years in the Marines and a tour in Vietnam. Then, I went back to being a working class guy. Got married, bought a house, had and lost a child, then lost the wife to brain cancer.

Bass Boats and Queer Marriage

The battle for the American soul is over and Jay Leno won
 
By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

Holy smoking Jesus, America is losing its middle class! "We're taxing the middle class out of existence," charge the conservatives. "The middle class is being hollowed out," wail the liberals, pouring forth great mock turtle tears (although one wonders how such a vacuum, as middle class life in America could be further hollowed).

For both political camps, high dudgeon over "the vanishing middle class" is supposed to represent some sort of "new populism." Not that the populace disagrees with them, mainly because the populace, if we are referring to the genuine America populace, hasn't the slightest notion of the definition of populism. But the word sounds like it has to do with popularity, the highest virtue in the American mind, and can even lead to the celestial heights called celebrity. So what the hell, they're willing to run with it.

Taking Tea with the Lizards

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

The Republican Party will beat the living piss out of anybody for a buck. The Democrats will fly the flag of FDR, even as they pirate the public coffers on behalf of Wall Street. Don't think the American people have not noticed these things. After thirty years of pistol whipping and emptying of their wallets, they've started to figure out there just may be a public robbery underway, with both parties as accomplices.

And so Americans at both ends of the political spectrum are finally wising up to the need for a third party. Even if it is a third party within their own party, which is no third party at all, of course. However, for Americans it's all about branding, what you call a thing, that's important. Call a six-ounce block of corn sugar with sunflower seeds and raisins stuck on the outside an "Organic Energy Bar" and by god, you have natural food right there on the 7-Eleven shelf. What a thing is called is how a nation a people carefully bred for consumption will see it, thanks to that advertising arm of American capitalism called the news media

Reading Joe's essays on an iPhone

(Note from Ken Smith, web grunt here at Bageant Central.)

Joe is taking a short break from writing, so I'm using this opportunity to explore a technical issue. This may be of interest only to a small percentage of Joe's online readers. Or, we might be surprised to learn that many people want to read Joe's essays on mobile devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia and other handhelds.

I recently installed a new traffic counter called Clicky. Among many other things, Clicky tracks the total and type of mobile phones accessing this site. I was surprised to learn that on some days up to 2% of the traffic is coming from mobile devices, and two-thirds of those are site visits from Apple iPhones. The 30-day average of readers accessing this site on mobile devices is about 1.5%. This is a surprisingly high percentage, considering that the site is not optimized for the smaller screens.

So, we are testing two systems that optimize this site for mobile.

The Devil and Mr. Obama

Barack promised change -- and sure enough, things changed for the worse

(Note: Patrick Ward, associate editor of the UK's Socialist Review asked Joe to write a piece for the party publication. This is the unabridged text of Joe's submission.)

By Joe Bageant

Well lookee here! An invite from my limey comrades to recap Barack Obama's first year in office. Well comrades, I can do this thing two ways. I can simply state that the great mocha hope turned out to be a Trojan horse for Wall Street and the Pentagon. Or I can lay in an all-night stock of tequila, limes and reefer and puke up the entire miserable tale like some 5,000 word tequila purged Congolese stomach worm. I have chosen to do the latter.

As you may know, Obama's public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don't construe this as support for the GOP. It's just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans' party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.

Cultural orphan of the class struggle

Hi Joe,

I just found your site a few weeks ago, computer-phobe and migraine sufferer that I am, but it seems like the more I read of you, the more I understand of myself. I'm from southern Illinois, born and raised, although I lived away from here for a short time.

Now I'm back living in Williamson county, in a town where our last major factory closed two years ago, and coal mining, what's left of it, is not much more than an irritating reminder of better times long gone. But I give the folks around here a lot of credit. They're always looking to get beyond the disappointments of the present, find ways to attract new business, and keep the population from decreasing. We've held at a steady 10,000 for a good thirty years, and although it might seem laughable to some, that's a victory in itself, considering everything we've lost, believe me.

One party has no heart, the other no spine

Joe,

Nothing has ever been fixed by conservatives, by definition. You and many others say the thing that I hear back all the time as a pox on both your houses. I see the same corruption as do you, but I don't think there is any support for the thesis that it is equal. There are looters and the looted. Saying that they are all equal will in fact make any solution impossible. All the twelve step programs and all homespun psychology agrees that a first step in any improvement is admitting to your wrongs. Not admitting that other people are wrong. That helps nothing except people continuing to make excuses for themselves and their conservative party.

There are myriad things wrong with the left but when the question is asked, "who might just barely conceivably listen to your views," there is no doubt in my mind. Democrats are screwed up but the problems are at least occasionally acknowledged and sometimes steps are taken to fix a few small areas around the edge. We elected a black president. We did all the Roosevelt stuff. We did voting rights. We did civil rights. Over the dead bodies of Republicans. Hopefully we are about to start to fix health care. Again over the dead bodies of Republicans.

Buddy, can you spare me a lek?

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

People often comment on the intelligence and insight, the humor and sincerity, of the letters Ken and I receive on joebageant.com. And they say that the readers write as if we have known each other all our lives. I respond that yes, we have, but just did not know each other's names. And that many of us have been pretty much invisible and voiceless except to each other. And that, yes, my friends out there are indeed intelligent and clear eyed citizens. The American populace is often underestimated.

The fact is that America's finest minds and souls have no voice in this chilling new corporate state that has evolved. And if we are not allowed a voice, if our monolithic system ignores us, pretends we do not exist, then for all practical purposes we do not exist. Therefore it does not have to offer us political candidates representing our views or change laws to reflect them. Nevertheless, we are out there -- millions of us.

Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers

(This is a long letter, with an even longer reply, but this reader has several excellent points, including the politicization of smoking and over-eating. -- Joe Bageant.)

Dear Joe,

I smoke cigarettes. This is my 49th or 50th year -- don't know which.

When this war on smokers really heated up, in the late 90's, I wrote to a friend in San Francisco, and asked her what was going on. "Is this some kind of grassroots movement?," I asked, in caps. She said she didn't know what it was, exactly, but that it couldn't be a grassroots deal, because they were very, very rich, and very powerful, and they had the full support of governments, corporations, and all of the media, without exception. They were getting lots of tax money, she said -- hundreds of millions -- and there were rumors that the big pharmaceutical companies were involved in funding and planning operations. "After all," she added: "They want to sell nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and a shitload of tranquilizers to the masses who quit as they get the piss pounded out of them." She said that a mutual friend had remarked that it was sure to become the largest social engineering project in the history of the world, and that, though he didn't smoke -- he found it frightening.

Working his ass off, eating sausage gravy

Hey there, Mr. Modelo,

I really don't follow your posts on a regular basis, although you're "bookmarked" on my browser.

Read your post "The Iron Cheer of Empire" tonight, and will comment with the following:

You gave up, huh? Moved to your perceived land of milk and honey, and now you've found it in yourself (between Modelos) to try and convince me that I'm a piece of shit for staying in the Motherland, trying to better myself in my company so I have a job next year, and the 15 years after that, while worrying my fucking head off every day about the economy, while you can walk down your alley and buy rooster sperm eggs, tacos and local produce, then stroll past the locals as they sit on their front porches each night and discuss with their friends how the made the right choice buying their wares that day.