Joe Bageant

Back to the Ancient Future

Chewing Raw Grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man'

By Joe Bageant

I spent the middle weekend in April with a group of artists and thinkers called the April Fools Group. Put together by Brad Blanton, psychotherapist and creator of "radical honesty" politics and therapy, the three-day meeting was set on a farm down the Shenandoah Valley amid the battlefields and rolling countryside of Newmarket, Virginia. Brad, a world famous redneck headshrinker, had put together old hippies, theoreticians, musicians, young anarchists, beautiful brilliant women and aging writers to yap, drink and plot against the Bush administration. So when I pulled into Brad's driveway to find him and a fellow named Hank parked in lawn chairs up on the roof with a bottle of bourbon I knew this thing was off to a good start.

The Onion Eater

By Joe Bageant

It was spring 1966 and down at the end of fraternity row in the exclusive new brick high-rise apartment building, the children of the rich and the few were partying hard. On the second floor balcony they socialized, cooked and drank beer with beautiful girls. The building even had a pool, a rare luxury in those times, and was the kind of place where only a few high-enders could afford to live while in school. That day a homeless person, an even rarer thing back then, shuffled by. Seeing them on the balcony, he asked for food.  His attitude was one of a supplicant at the feet of God:  "Pardon me, sirs ..."

Let's Drink to the Slobbering Classes

A sordid tale of work release, hyenas and liberal weakness

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let's drink to the uncounted heads
Let's think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
-- "Salt of the Earth," The Rolling Stones

I stopped into Larry's Gas 'n Grubs for my regular morning commuter coffee mug refill and lo and be damned! There was my hirsute 300-pound friend Poot working at the counter. I said, "What the hell are you doing ringing up my coffee at this crap stand? You're supposed to be a welder, fat boy!"

My wife and I cried together, drunk as bluesmen

Mr. Bageant,

I just finished your essay, and i wanted to say "thanks" and that I respect your insight and skillful articulation of it. Your description of yourself reads like a diary entry I might write in a decade. I'm a fellow southerner, recently graduated from UGA with a master's in nonprofit management, which I hoped to use helping some progressive organization in a green city, but it's slim pickins, and most of the big NGOs are hollow and sold.

In Praise of Holy Madness

The Wild Palms of Etowah

By Joe Bageant

One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe who could be found on America's streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adepts and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India's avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores.