Joe Bageant

Our American culture is the Titanic

Hey Joe,

Regarding the letter "The masses have become lazy, fat and stupid": Oh to be 27 again, having accomplished graduation and pulled oneself up from nothing, master of all one surveys. Now Kelly and her $75,000 a year income are faced with choices. Let's pretend Kelly is an average heterosexual woman, and she marries a man who makes, say $100,000 a year for a round number. Now, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly will earn $175,000 a year for a couple of years. Then they might want to have kids. Kelly will have to decide what to do.

The masses have become lazy, fat and stupid

Joe,

In your essay "Sons of a Laboring God", you wrote: "Anyone who actually believes that all these poor working puds can beat this system, lift themselves up by their bootstraps, is either a neo-con ideologue or the child of advantage." I grew up on welfare. I had no central heat, our well ran dry most summers for up to a month, and at one point I only had two pairs of ripped, ill-fitting jeans and five stained T-shirts to wear for several months.

Escaping the middle class requires courage

Dear Joe,

I've read "Welcome to Middle Class Lockdown" and I want to say thank you, thank you, for articulating my daily struggle with the vacuousness of life in a wealthy, Republican suburb. I just returned to West Chester, Pennsylvania after a year and a half stint in Madison, Wisconsin. It's been an adjustment, to say the least.

My day consists of listening to the inane chatter of nurses. They discuss the very same things they talked of a year and a half ago when I left -- food, the next trip to Disney World, the latest weight loss scheme, food, Christmas shopping (this talk starts in July), food, weight loss, food, weight loss, food. To top it off, a bunch of them home school their kids.

The importance of knowing basic skills

Joe,

I read your essay "Somewhere a Banker Smiles" and I'm with you on this conspiracy of the elite thing, but I don't really know that it's even conscious on their parts. It's just a matter of living on a spiral staircase and having very little perspective or concern for how they ended up there. The American phalanx of this will crash. I doubt it can be prevented. Millions of people with little concern for anything else but acquisition will eventually burn out. It's being supported now by debt. At some point, the folks doing the lending will start wondering about their investments, and when the haves finally suck us so far into debt that we can't support their lives by borrowing against our future income anymore, the American economy will collapse.

Somewhere a Banker Smiles

Muffled noises from the ranks of the babbling paranoid

By Joe Bageant

It's hard as hell to keep conspiracy theories out of one's mind these days. And I'm not talking about "Who really brought down the Twin Towers? or the "Are Zionists behind the Iraq War?" kind of stuff. The booger stalking my ragged old mind these days puts both of those in the shade. And it runs like this:

Is the consumerist totalization of this country and the world really a conscious plot by a handful of powerful corporate and financial masters? If we answer "yes" we find ourselves trundled off toward the babbling ranks of the paranoid. Still though, it's easy enough to name those who would piss themselves with joy over the prospect of a One World corporate state, with billions of people begging to work for their 1,500 calories a day and an xBox chip in their necks. It's too bad our news media quit hunting with live ammo decades ago, leaving us with no one to track the activities and progress of what sure as hell seem to be global elites, judging from the financial spoor we find along every pathway of modern life.

Retail Therapy and the Prozac Shopping Derby

"When there is a mismatch between the way you are living a life and the structure of meaning that tells you how to live a life ... it makes some sense to say that sometimes a person should be alienated. Given certain circumstances, alienation is the proper response."

-- Carl Elliott in his essay "Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless: Prozac and the American Dream"

By Joe Bageant

Carl Elliott gives the example of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. Sisyphus may be happier sweating under that rock with a stiff dose of Prozac, but it's still a damned rock and his life is still pointless, despite his improved sense of well-being and acceptance of what made him sick in the first place. Based upon my own experience, I may have to differ with Carl a bit on that one. Throw in 200 milligrams of Provigil and a decent opiate and even a rock becomes imbued with deep meaning.