Joe Bageant

Next generation must make brave choices

Joe,

Just finished your essay "Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown." The intellectual brain is still processing. The feeling part of my mind identifies with much of your imagery and descriptions. Whatever I have been longing for belongs to that more collective part that feels deeply about something (a lot of things) you have described. How to get off the merry-go-round seems to become the task.

I won't die in urine-stinking nursing home

Joe,

My friend Chutney, a Unitarian Universalist blogger, linked to your essay "Middle Class Lockdown" and I must thank you because it's the BEST FUCKING ARTICLE I'VE READ ALL YEAR. And I read a lot, because I'm a minister and I'm always having to say something about everything. I'm printing it out right now and am going to blog link it (I have a very modestly popular blog) and also forward it to my entire congregation.

Organizing for Guaranteed Livable Income

Hello Joe,

I read your article and it reflected much the same frustration that I've experienced for many years now. Grew up in an auto-wrecking yard in the north of Canada, in Alberta near a small town. No university education because of getting married, then moving from Alberta to urban southern British Columbia and raising three kids and ending up on welfare as a single mom.

Locked down in the prison of middle class

Joe,

Thanks for putting off the move for one more year. Every time I read about your plans to abandon us a cold shudder of fear runs up my spine. I too am locked down in the middle class prison with the unfortunate curse of being able to see the invisible walls that most of us can't see. My escape fantasy involves a small Airstream trailer overlooking the Gulf of California in Baja. Fresh fish, cold beer, my guitar, a massive heart attack on the beach in my mid 80's, who could ask for more? But the reality is I'm stuck. Two kids that are still young, a wife that wants them to grow up as decent, caring individuals. So I hold on to hope, hope that there are still enough of us out there who can turn things around. You have become, in the past year since I discovered your writing, a sustaining part of that hope. Our community no matter how tenuous or fragile, or perhaps because of its fragility, needs you.

No logical reasons for redneck bullshit

Joe Bageant,

There been a lot of talk these days of southern and "redneck" culture coming from a group of people that have been at times called "Borderers", "Scots-Irish", "Scotch-Irish", "Ulsterman", "Orangemen", "Protestant-Ulsterites" etc. The elders in my family used the term "Dirty Black Protestants from the North", to describe this tribe but I'd rather deal talk about their garbage as it is today.

Russian expat woman, 72, gives up chicken

Hi, Joe.

I was trying to grab some free time to send a couple comments about your "Simulacrum Republic" (powerful article!), when you handed me this whammy of your "Revenge of the Mutt People" today.  I say "whammy" because, among others this article did this for me: first, I cried. Especially at the beginning paragraphs.

Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown

Now shut up and buy something

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them."
-- James "Mad Dog" Howard

By Joe Bageant

When I was a boy on my grandparents' farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads. One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible -- or at least was at one time in this country. And if I ever doubt it I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail.

You are a voice from the wilderness

Big Joe,

Maybe you have to become the Martin Luther King of the Mutt People and lead them from the Valley of Nowhere. Or somebody else from the Valley who has climbed to a higher plane and can see the woods from the trees needs to do it. Martin was middle class, educated, and lived in a nice clean house, but he had heart for Rosa and his various brothers and sisters.

Southern soul slipping away in Connecticut

Hellfar Lawdgawdalmighty!

What a pleasure to discover your essays on your blog (linked by Neddie Jingo). I'm a working class South Arkansas white boy who sometimes feels his soul slipping away up here in Hartford, Connecticut.

Liberals must break the chains of comfort

Joe,

I have enjoyed your writing for a long time now, but I have refrained from contacting you because beyond praising your abilities, I couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to say. I think I have figured it out, but it turns out to be a question rather than a statement. Go figure.