Joe Bageant

The Bailout in Plain English

Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers

By Joe Bageant

Any number of cultural historians have noted the American belief that success is a sign of God's favor. And over the past couple of decades he has had a downright love fest with the already-rich. So much so that the richest 400 Americans now have more money stashed away that the combined bottom 150 million Americans. Some $1.6 trillion bucks.

This was accomplished by selling off or shipping out ever available asset, from jobs to seaports, smashing usury and anti-monopoly laws, raiding the public coffers and manipulating the medium of exchange and blackmailing the peasantry regarding common needs such as heath care and energy to keep their asses warm -- to name a few. The ultimate coup was to convince the entire nation that the well being of the rich, meaning the well being of Wall Street, was indeed the common man's well being.

Sarah Palin, through the Toast Crumbs Dimly

Carstair's muse on Gidget, dominatrix of the North

By Joe Bageant

"I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America … who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town."
-- Sarah Palin in her speech to the Republican National Committee

Translation: "Along with John McCain, I am the only candidate who is not a lawyer. My old man has fished for a living and I have gutted those fish for dinner. And yup, we have a kid that got knocked up too."

In those few sentences Sarah Palin delivered the only legitimate populist message -- however thin -- we can expect to hear during the entire campaign season. Never mind that it is a fraught with contradictions. Whose life isn't? It's a political sop but it's a heartfelt sop, true and simple enough for ordinary heartland working folks to grasp amid the shitstorm of political jargon and crafted messages that say exactly nothing.

Old Dogs and Hard Time

The following is an expanded and rewritten version of Joe's reply to a letter from a reader, "A sex offender and his sick dog".

By Joe Bageant

Late at night through my window by the computer I can see my neighbor Stokes bicycling at 10 p.m. to the local convenience store to buy groceries. Not only is that an expensive way to feed one's self, but it is the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting thrown in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not allowed to come in proximity with young women in a supermarket checkout line. Nor is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own grandchild, even though he is not a child molester by the court's own admission. He is not allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even allowed to read Playboy Magazine.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison), got caught by police in a, shall we say, "a vehicular sexual incident" with a married woman. They were both drunk. Big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by the time they got to court the lady's testimony was that it was all against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender while his public defender all but slept through the trial.

With Todd Vachon in Connecticut

By Joe Bageant

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days of hard traveling back and forth across Connecticut's Second Congressional District. The Second District is not the Connecticut where Paul Newman lives and Katherine Hepburn is buried. The one with the marvelously tasteful old homes set against magnificent Yankee New England seascapes. It's the one where -- although quite pretty in its own right, with its small villages and winding roads -- the mills are closed, the housing bubble has popped and everyone fears what comes next. It is a place where good union men still stick together as best they can in the face of globalization, the sub prime collapse and a two-party system whose millionaire players are more married to the game than to the unheralded people who build their homes and make their world function every day.

Joe and Todd at WHUS

Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

By Joe Bageant

There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann's Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo.

And all because Obama mentioned something we've known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation's heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.

To quote Obama:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. ... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

Coffee, Consciousness and Revolution

It's not every day I get out of bed and have an insight, or what passes for insight for me these days, however small. But over my morning coffee, this came to mind. I would appreciate if any readers cared to share their responses, critical or otherwise.

As Americans, we have each done all the wrong things. Ruined the planet, crashed our own economy and perhaps the world's, created a meaningless society and abandoned the civil common good. Why? All for no other reason than that the society around us told us that as individuals, we'd be better off if we went along with the program. We were further reinforced in our behavior because we were the best at it.

Let's Dump Prepackaged Class Identities

By Joe Bageant

It never ceases to amaze how American capitalism can sell even our own identities back to us in such tantalizing fashion as to make a profit. Nobody is exempt. As in "Liberal ladies, buy your wardrobe at Target and you too will be a slim sexy humanitarian like Susan Sarandon." My eyeballs are in my lap every time that woman twists her stuff against that orange backdrop. My wife glowers from her armchair: "Buy me a quarter million dollar eye job, chin and butt tuck, and I'll shake all the damned booty you want, Buster." I'm seriously tempted by her offer.

Or we can gas up the car, drive to the suburban Cineplex and pay ten bucks to see Al Gore tell us to save energy by hanging your clothes outside on lines in An Inconvenient Truth, thereby striking a blow as an environmentalist. Never mind ole Al's 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom Nashville mansion and its $20,000 annual energy bill. Or his 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia, or that rolls rural estate in Carthage, Tennessee. Al and Tipper remind us that, because it was the despicable (which it is) Hoover Institute which plastered that inconvenient truth across the pages of USA Today, the houses do not count. They may not count, but their images seem to have been yanked off the Internet.

Our National Sociopathy

By Joe Bageant

There is a dark side to any state induced oblivion -- in this case, our national and international sociopathy, our unacknowledged inner and outer violence. By now it should be clear that our national and personal sociopathy stems more from our environment and culture than anything our mamas and daddies did to us in childhood, lousy as those things may have been for some. This ain't Kansas anymore and besides, our parents were products of the same culture, only less so.

Happy with Christ on Main Street

By Joe Bageant

Working class whites were happy with their town squares, Christmas season parades down Main Street, crooked councilmen, yokel sex scandals, free libraries and free water and gossip about niggers raping white girls. The Frontier spirit. "Freedom to kill rabbits." Then one day they looked up and, as Internet writer Andrea Black puts it,

They were being squeezed economically and the developed Western World and the US Govmint no longer approves of Betty Joe doin' abortions wearing her tennis shoes. The price of gas ... farms going bust. Mary Jo and so many others -- in prison. Turn on the tee-vee and see teen-age whores dumping on Christianity on Jerry Springer. Unnatural couples gettin' married, with rice and flowers. The Pres f*** in the White House. No, No, and No! G-damm libruls!

There is some truth to it though.

The hubris of the money-making townees who cared nothing about public education, or the cohesion of America, the pay packets of workers, farmer's plight. Sneering and sniping and sipping Starbucks koffee and eating sushi. Who just want to be fed and fed and fed -- salad and corn and squash and beef -- well, we all know who will have the last laugh. The Kristians. Fanciful?

Neurological Biocaste Blues

By Joe Bageant

As most of the world has noticed by now, very few Americans are critical thinkers. Most suffer from a collective learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. In this case, learning disability is a nice way of saying that we have become collectively stupid, muchless capable of insight.

Insight is scary to Americans so conditioned to rote consumption and substituting entertainment and illusion for actual involvement. When they realize something, and I mean genuine higher understanding of what the sum of the parts mean, not simply what they appear to be, their consciousness is altered and they become different inside. Suddenly the world is no longer the solid consumer state sonambulation they are accustomed to. They have no tools to deal with it. Beyond that least half of us are so conditioned we are incapable of human insight at all. We have the past two elections as proof.