Joe Bageant

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.

Retail Therapy and the Prozac Shopping Derby

"When there is a mismatch between the way you are living a life and the structure of meaning that tells you how to live a life ... it makes some sense to say that sometimes a person should be alienated. Given certain circumstances, alienation is the proper response."

-- Carl Elliott in his essay "Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless: Prozac and the American Dream"

By Joe Bageant

Carl Elliott gives the example of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. Sisyphus may be happier sweating under that rock with a stiff dose of Prozac, but it's still a damned rock and his life is still pointless, despite his improved sense of well-being and acceptance of what made him sick in the first place. Based upon my own experience, I may have to differ with Carl a bit on that one. Throw in 200 milligrams of Provigil and a decent opiate and even a rock becomes imbued with deep meaning.

Smell of tar and feathers in the morning

Well, what the fock? Why is it that a guy has to go clear the hell to Taipei to find anyone who agrees that the Democratic Pussy Mafia running the national party out of the Westhampton Country Club -- election results or not -- is still a bunch of idiots? See: http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/004326.php

As my newfound friends in Taipei probably already know, right now the Democrats over here are dancing around the head of Donald Rumsfeld like a scene from Lord of the Flies. And every other Yankee liberal north of  Virginia seems to think they are shitting in the tall cotton now, and all they gotta do from here on out is foist Hillary Clinton on the rest of us poor miserabe bastards unfortunate enough to be called Democrats because we don't have the balls to become heavily armed libertarians.

There is Always Treasure in Rome

By Joe Bageant

A friend in the mortgage business tells me he gets calls every day from people who want their house repossessed -- people want to walk away from those monster-bellums in which they have zero equity, thanks to the interest only and zero down loans the industry pushed in an effort to blow up the housing balloon for all it's worth. "Hell, I tell 'em to sit tight, stay there, because we are six months behind in repos and besides, we may be able to sell them on a negative amortization loan. Let 'em pay what they can and we refi the difference. In other words, their debt just gets bigger as they pay, but they stay in their houses and their kids stay in the same schools."

Growing Up Atomic

As hard as it is for us to imagine today, in 1946 some 54% of Americans thought the United Nations should control all the world’s major weapons, especially nuclear weapons, including those of the US. And a staggering 40% endorsed some form of One World government, according to Gallup polls. That same year 14 states adopted the Constitution for the Federation of the World, as an expression of their belief in "One World or None," and "Peace in the World -- or the World in Pieces" (Michael Scheibach, Atomic Narratives and American Youth.)