Joe Bageant

Elusive American dream found in China

Joe,

I've just read your essay "Poor, White and Pissed: A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals." Here's a response from an American living in the People's Republic of China. I agree with you 100%, except many of us with a college education are no better off than those that have none. Those Wal-Mart dead end jobs have my name on them too.

Do you think free people made your clothes?

Hi Joe,

I'm writing you from the edge of the Western Australian wastes to share some random thoughts and to ask you a question. I'll share the thoughts first out of some courtesy, and ask a question later out of need. Often while drinking my thoughts take a more fluid turn, and recently while enjoying a bottle of Guinness I realised that the very topic of my master's thesis -- A Triumph of Accident over Design -- could be applied with great fit as a description of our recent historical experience. For some reason, divine grace, or perhaps divine graceless, we keep beating the odds that seemed stacked against our survival. No plagues, catastrophic wars, earthquakes or any other phenomena that we are constantly told could bring our world down -- phenomena we are told are not merely possible, but probable in time.

Cannuckistan-Korean survives small town

Joe,

I somehow found a link on your essay on Left Behind on an internet forum that I read on a daily basis. I read the rest of your essays and I gotta say that I'm pretty sure you've got the pulse of the backwoods and company towns. A lot of my urban educated friends don't seem to get it as they've never grown up with these folks or lived in a small town. They have a hard time trying to come to grips with the last US presidential election even up here in Cannuckistan.

Taiwan punk rocker for social justice

Dear Uncle Joe,

Although I had never been too involved or interested in politics until my last year of college, when I went overseas I started to witness how other people in places most Americans don't care to see are exploited and oppressed by our government and corporations. I don't think terms like "corporate slavery" and "colonialism" need to be as abstract as what regular Westerners perceive them to be. When you spend time with these people, party with them, stay in their homes, and walk the streets of their cities and towns, the "invisible hand" of corporate greed and exploitation doesn't seem so concealed anymore -- it's romping all over the countryside and cities pillaging and looting like the Addam's Family's thing with a fucking viking helmet.

$21 an hour, trapped in slave labor cycle

You have written some of the most logical essays I have ever read that describe the current state of affairs here in America. Times are changing in many ways very rapidly. Your description of yourself and how you were raised is almost a carbon copy of myself. I was raised in Cynthiana, Kentucky. This was a booming town of about 5,000 when I was a young cracklet. It is about 15,000 now.

Dumber and dumber and less empowered

Dear Mr. Bageant,

Thank you so much! I am a 27-year-old political science major who grew up mostly in Brevard County Florida ( a redneck haven town ) feeling like I was the crazy person! Your analysis of the current malaise that exists within America today is dead on, many educated Libs from less southern areas think that the massive levels of ignorance and poverty prevalent throughout rural and southern America pose no danger to this Democratic Republic. But of course they are "mis-underestimating" the combined power of religious fundamentalism, perception, propaganda, and social conditioning

Good old days weren't always so good

Dear Joe,

We're neighbors. I spent five years growing up in Cumberland, Maryland, so I know where you hail from. A lot of folks in Cumberland commute down to the Winchester Mall for work. Can't afford to buy anything there. Your essays resonate in so many ways that it's hard for me to know where to begin. I suspect I may just break my thoughts into a couple of different emails, so forgive my meanderings. But most of your essays have hit home in very personal ways.