Joe Bageant

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.

The Iron Cheer of Empire

No free tortillas in the Workhouse Republic

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Mexico

Every afternoon when I knock off from writing, after I suck down a Modelo beer and take an hour nap, I step out onto the 400-year-old cobbled street, with its hap-scatter string of vendors lining both sides. All sorts of vendors -- vegetable vendors, vendors of tacos, chicharrones, chenille bedspreads and plucked chickens, cigarros, soft drinks, sopa and suet. Merchants whose business address consists of a card table in front of their casita.

Here in this working class neighborhood on Calle Zaragoza, tourists seldom venture, and the neighborhood merchants' customers are their neighbors. Their goods are the common fare of daily family life in Mexico. Today, at a table less than two blocks away, I purchased a dozen brown eggs, with the idea of making huevos rancheros. The purchase took three quarters of an hour, and included stumbling but cheerful half English/half Spanish conversations with the six vendors between my casita and the table of Gabriel, the old egg and cheese vendor with an artificial leg and wizened smile who assures me that rooster-fertilized eggs make a man go all night. "I am too old to care about that," I half speak, half gesture in that rudimentary sign language understood everywhere. "Hawwww" he chortles and says something in Spanish I cannot understand. An English speaking bystander, a teenager with a backward baseball cap and dressed in "L.A. sag," translates: "He says his pendejo is as hard as his plastic leg. You still alive! You never too old!"

Raising up dead horses

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

Corporations, government are dehumanizing us

Dear Joe,

After 56 years or so of watching the "powers that be" in operation, I have come to the conclusion that slowly, but surely, big corporations and the government are dehumanizing us.

I can recall a time when those who dealt with employee relationships were called "personnel departments and employees were referred to by name. The first step was to take away our names and give us "employee numbers", (under the guise of simplifying accounting procedures) so that we would no longer be thought of as a real person. Then it was to change the corporation department that deals with employees from the "personnel department" to the "human resources" department, which takes away our humanity altogether. With time and constant hearing of ourselves referred to in this manner we've come to accept it when we should be screaming at the top of our lungs against it. Even our media, whom I truly believe are on someone's propaganda payroll, refers to us in this manner.

Difficult to be skeptical yet be optimistic

Hey Joe,

I've read Deer Hunting with Jesus and most of your posts. Can't say there's much in any of what you say that I disagree with. In fact, I'm with ya.

Which brings me to the issue at hand. Curmudgeonliness. A good, healthy outlook, given present circumstances. I put myself squarely in that category alongside you and most of the really "aware" people I know.

But I'm a 62-year old teacher, working hard to help the next generation be readers and critical thinkers and perhaps contribute positively to the world. And somehow it seems to me that the curmudgeonly take on things just doesn't work for the young. Cynicism (or at least a robust skepticism bordering on pessimism) in those of our advanced age seems the only reasonable perspective to me. But in the young, it is sad, defeating, and tends to dim their inherent idealism (if it hasn't already been crushed by their direct circumstances.)

American literature has abandoned poor whites

Dear Joe,

First of all, please, I apologize my poor English. I’m writing to you from Spain where we have a very deficient education system and a natural tendency to fail on learning foreign languages.

Now, after being intentionally modest, I have to say that I’m an avid reader of your work and that your Deer Hunting with Jesus has been an inspiration for my end of graduate essay, a kind of a small thesis. The subject of my essay is the relation between literature (and also popular culture in general) and America’s white underclass. The main idea is to see which image of the white low classes is being exported from the US and how, for example, Europeans like me receive it.

On literature I found out that during the first half of the Twentieth Century, American authors used to talk about the poor whites, especially the most representative novelist of that era (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Caldwell). So, there was a quite general interest on portraying that reality from the canonic literature. But, after the forties, this interest seems to vanish (at least as a major theme.

Half measures never accomplished anything

Hey Joe,

I've written to you before. I said that you had pointed me in the right direction about dealing with class and race and all. I think I spoke too soon.

I'm not working class. At least, not really.

For starters, I'm Asian.

I'm not the kind of Asian that runs donut shops and runs from the immigration officers, nor one of the poor bastards that flee sweatshops on one side of the Pacific to get stuck in sweatshops on the other side. I'm luckier. I was born Stateside, to college educated parents with green cards.

Americans have become weak and fearful things

Joe,

Today, a friend forwarded to me a news article with this headline: "Fines proposed for going without health insurance." Here are some things I don't get:

1) If folks can't afford to reroof the Old Manse or buy groceries or put retreads on the Jimmy, how (and why) are they going to get insurance, and

2) If they can't afford insurance, how are they going to afford the alleged fine, and

3) Who is the Insurance Police, who's going to rat me out, and

4) Why did The Bastards wait until the whole country is unemployed to pull this shit, and

An equal opportunity malcontent, not sexist

Hi Joe,

I read your column ("How much freedom can one man stand?") today and you mentioned two women bloggers that are looked upon as irrelevant. You couldn't find two irrelevant male bloggers? One, even? Do you make the mistake of when thinking about irrelevance, you automatically think of women? That's not very fair minded, you know.

I don't think that dude at Daily Kos is all that great. Of course he thinks women are irrelevant, too. I don't go there anymore. He got snookered into backing Obama with all the Hope and Yes, We Can bull pucky. I certainly don't want to hear him whine now.

Obama's Fight for Reform

Lay off the footwork and throw a punch!

By Joe Bageant

Almost a year after the Great Giddy Swarming of the Obamians last November, some of the revelers are waking up with one booger of a hangover. And they are asking themselves, "What were we thinking when we had that tenth drink of Democratic Party Kool-Aid?" It was a clear cut case of seduction and date rape. The spike in the drink was, of course, hope. Poor pathetic American liberals. Forever doomed to be naive freshmen at the senior beer bash.

We try to take comfort in that we won't have to listen to or look at John McCain or Sarah Palin for four years, except in the American Legion Magazine and in Palin's case, as a centerfold in the next issue of Middle Aged Skin. OK, we really are grateful. But could the pathetic McCain-Palin clown act possibly have created much more havoc than what we are seeing?