Joe Bageant

Around my home town, with two stops for beer

These photos of Winchester, Virginia and nearby West Virginia were taken by New York photographer, Sean Gallagher. Most of my essays and stories are set and rooted in this old Virginia town and its surrounding area in the historic Shenandoah Valley. My original ancestor came here with the English General Braddock's army in the 1740s. We've been here ever since, and seem to have chiefly occupied our time geting fatter and more religious. Whatever the case, this is my home. Home to everything thoughtless and dangerous about America these days, home to most of the people I have loved and certainly home to all my ghosts.

Click here for a photo album of a trip around my home town, with two stops for beer.

The Simulacran Republic

The hologram ripples with the cry of a thrush

"It's a world of appearances ... packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com.  She asks her hairdresser for 'tinted highlights' he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he's accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she's asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online."
-- Writer and social critic Jennifer Matsui

By Joe Bageant

A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called "retro-reflectum." I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects glutted sensory environment.

The self-hate I was taught in church

Dear Mr. Bageant,

I cannot tell you how struck I was by a couple of important lines in your essay about the Left Behind series. I am one of those ex-fundamentalists who cannot escape what my childhood and teenage years in a Pentecostal church left me with. I have spent years in therapy trying to find out why I constantly sabotage my happiness, why no matter what I do I feel the nagging guilt that I haven't done enough. I never once connected this sense of self-hate with the self-hate I was taught in church.

Frightened into the fearful arms of Jesus

Joe,

As I sit here in south central Montana reading your blog, I can only recall the amazing days in the late sixties when a real change seemed possible, and even employees of the corporate military machine gleefully undermined their own agencies.

Australia is America in the fifties

G'day Joe:

Beaut piece, mate!

As your emigration dreams become more focused, I urge you to consider life in the Down Under. I migrated here from a Californicated Oregon about ten years ago, and if one avoids the big cities, regional Australia is the "America" I grew up in the fifties. No freeways, traffic lights or air pollution. No Wal-Marts (yet). Miles of beautiful empty beaches. Great grass! People still wave on the backroads when passing in their cars.

Orthdox Catholic monk rejects neocon fanatics

Mr. Bageant,

I have just read your article, "The Whore that Sitteth on Many Waters". Brilliant! You have encapsulated the very real, very serious threat posed by Fundamentalists/Evangelicals to our nation and to the world. It is indeed a very sick, a very twisted vision they embrace.

Yes, I'm an urban liberal

Joe,

I've read your essay "What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means." I've got a couple of comments I think you might find interesting regarding just who these fundamentalists are and what can be done. I'm going a bit of a circuitous route, though, so be warned.

I was in Huntsville, Alabama round about 1995 on business with several other computer geeks from all over the world. In between seminars, I got to know a database programmer from Ireland who would come to alter my worldview somewhat.

What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means

A Whore That Sitteth on Many Waters

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

"The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series

By Joe Bageant

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses" Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

Poor Mexican kid done got educated

Joe,

Your work hurts too damn much for my own good but like anything worth doing in life, etc. Anyway, I caught the Rhino piece and I just wanted to let you know that those ugly buggers have had coastal affiliation for many years here in California. You think you live in God's Own Rhino Habitat?