Joe Bageant

Q&A about Virginia Senator Jim Webb

Joe,

Please answer a few questions for me.

1. Your article regarding your father was powerful and disturbing. Of course, you like to shake things up, even if the lotus eaters end up with indigestion. In this article you mentioned speed, greenies, black-beauties, etc. etc. Do you think the DEA caused the present speed epidemic by essentially banning these substances and making things even worse?

Joe: No. I think misery, oppression and ignorance and hopelessness imposed upon poor working class whites caused the epidemic. I don't see any millionaires cooking meth in their mansions. The farther down the social and economic scale you go, the more meth pipes you find tucked down in the couch cushions.

The full US/UK spin on events in Iran

Hi Joe,

Am I the only one not celebrating the violent turmoil and chaos in Iran? To me it has the same feel as the phony "color revolutions" that were engineered by the "National Endowment for Democracy", a benign sounding organization that in fact masks a cadre of spooks working to enrich corporate interests by destabilizing governments that don't toe the neo-liberal corporate globalist line.

It appears very much like the neo-cons on the march again, only this time the well meaning naïve "liberals" aren't going to say anything about U.S. imperialism because they are entranced by the super slick public relations machine Obama has. This worries me because at least Bush was awkward enough that many people could see through his malicious schemes, it seems this time around that 90% of the population is going to swallow the endless imperialist interventionist Kool-Aid.

My union brothers are lazy, complacent

Mr. Bageant,

I very much appreciated your new article on unions, and agree whole-heartedly about how the rotten "system" has wrecked our country and it's working families. I'm a union man all the way, in fact, a shop steward for the National Letter Carriers Union (an honest, democratic union, one of the few). So, I know all about the evils of management, working for the biggest bastard of all, our own government. But I would like to add to the argument if I may, and submit that it isn't only the system that has ruined labor unions, the workers themselves, especially union members, are also to blame for our downfall.

As a union officer, I'm duty-bound to represent the members of my union, within the local branch, and it's like pushing a boulder uphill. These people (some are very good hard-working folks ) don't know or care what happens to their jobs and lives. If they pay dues, they feel like that's all they need to do to get everything they want, and they think it gives them the right to bitch about everything without ever doing anything outside of their jobs. They don't believe that unionizing is part of their job, in fact they don't believe (or know) that the union is the reason they have decent jobs.

I now realize my father was a hero

Hey Joe,

Your essay "No Balls, No Gains" had me crying. Our fathers were very different kinds of men, but I remember that world just a little bit. My dad was a schoolteacher. In the mid-60s, when I was really, really little, he taught in the coal camps in the north end of our county.

At that school, he taught fifth through eigth grades in one of the two rooms. They've told me the woman who taught first through fourth cooked the free lunches and Dad's second chore in the school was to be the janitor. His third chore was being the principal.

I have vivid memories of a chili supper they had one night when I was three or four. I remember our car climbing up into the mountainous part of our county and being so scared of the curves and the bluffs. I remember running around screaming with a crowd of miners' kids and feeling that joy that never comes again in adulthood. (When grown-ups run around in circles screaming, it is never good. Part of me just doesn't understand why that is.)

Worker rights: No balls, no gains

By Joe Bageant

In looking back on growing up, I always remember 1957 and 1958 at "the two good years," They were the only years my working class redneck family ever caught a real break in their working lives, and that break came because of organized labor. After working as a farm hand, driving a hicktown taxi part ti me, and a dozen catch as catch can jobs, my father found himself owning a used semi-truck and hauling produce for a Teamster unionized trucking company called Blue Goose.

Daddy was making more money than he'd ever made in his life, about $4,000 a year. The median national household income at the time was $5,000, mostly thanks to America's unions. After years of moving from one rented dump to another, we bought a modest home, ($8,000) and felt like we might at last be getting some traction in achieving the so-called “American Dream.” Yup, Daddy was doing pretty good for a backwoods boy who'd quit school in the sixth or seventh grade -- he was never sure, which gives some idea how seriously the farm boy took his attendance at the one-room school we both attended in our lifetimes.

Oligarchy, corporations and unions

Hello, Joe,

I am a union man. Like my Dad, I've always believed in unions. My Dad worked for the Post Office for 46 years. He was a member of the Railway Mail Employees Union, and he helped smooth the way for the first African-American member of that union, Brother Scott.

I was a member of the Teamsters & Hotel Workers, Local 5, in Honolulu, as a dishwasher for a hotel. Later, as an air courier, I organized my brothers into the Teamsters Union twice, and the courier service bosses fired me twice.

For the last 20 years, I've worked for a city government and been an active member of SEIU. I was very involved for years in contract campaigns and organizing; in helping my fellow members with problems with their bosses. Then the Local stopped being interested in empowering the members. I got discouraged and I dropped out of active participation.

Joe's book published in 11 countries

In the two years since Deer Hunting with Jesus was published, Joe Bageant has been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to the book outside the United States, in addition to thousands of positive comments from his American readers. The book has gone into several printings in the US, and new editions have been published and distributed in eleven countries on four continents.

"When I was writing the book, I never considered that the rest of the world would be so interested in America's social class system," Joe said. "That's the class system that we Americans insist doesn't exist."

A redneck view of the Obamarama

This column originally appeared on the web site of the Australian Broadcasting Company.

By Joe Bageant

When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks. During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I've collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially President Barack Obama.

In America, all successful politicians are first and foremost successfully marketed brands. In fact, the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's 2008 marketer of the year. George W. Bush's brand may have "collapsed," as they say on Madison Avenue, but things don't change much. Rednecks instinctively know this: 

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.