Joe Bageant

Sons of a Laboring God

Getting Down and Dumb at Burt's Tavern

"Too much public education only gets working people riled up and full of backsass."
-- Virginia Senator Harry Flood Byrd

By Joe Bageant

My home town is one of those slowly rotting East Coast burgs that makes passers-through think to themselves: "What the hell is this? Mayberry USA on crack?"  The town's 250-year old core is a blighted clot of ramshackle houses carved into apartments and cheesy businesses. Its outer rim of slurb is the typical ugly gash of commercial hell, an assortment of mindlessly jammed-together tire dealers, grim asphalt, slurp and burps, and car dealerships of the type that make the U.S. one of the ugliest nations on earth. A sign in the median strip of this gash proclaims Winchester an official U.S. "All-American Town."

Mash Note for the 'Girl with the Leash'

Military conscription is alive and well in the dominion of the whip

"Good for you, Lynndie England, you chinless, inbred, runty, androgynous backwoods mutt! When you mimed a crotch-shot at that hooded detainee, you reminded us all of what Imperial service should be like: one long S&M tour of the tropics, where every man, woman and child of the conquered peoples exists solely as an object for your pleasure."
-- John Dolan, columnist for the website, Exile

By Joe Bageant

When I saw the above arrogant, piece of witty horseshit, I wanted to go strangle John Dolan myself. Then I came back to the realization that all writing is masturbation, mine included, and that some of us do it with our eyes closed -- as John Dolan does. If he had even one eye open he would have seen the pathos and national hypocrisy represented by "the girl with the leash."