Joe Bageant

There will be no mass exodus of Americans

Joe,

I spent a wonderful week in Belize back about 1999 or so. I thought it would be a great place to move to. I've been thinking about it a lot for the last couple years (gee, wonder why) but I'm stuck here basically dealing with aging parent issues. That could last years or it could end next month -- totally unpredictable. My fear is that by the time I'm free, places like Belize will have already absorbed as many disaffected Americans as they can, and that I would simply not be allowed in.

I'm not endorsing drinking and driving

Hello Joe,

I've just finished reading and enjoying your "Escape from America" essay. I've always enjoyed the Escape from America concept, maybe because I haven't escaped yet. So hats off to you.

Having said that most of what you talked about wasn't a surprise to me. I don't consider myself very well travelled, but by most people's standards I fear that I probably am. I've experienced many of the things you talk about and I've seen enough families of five on a bicycle in my life to be able put most of the whines I hear from people in my "real" life into it's proper context.

It's over for significant chunk of mankind

Joe,

I've just had a very interesting (and ultimately strange) hour or so. I stumbled across one of your essays (on Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists and MidTribulationists and what-all), and followed it back to your web site to read some more essays. My compliments to you on your writing style, and on your clarity of thought. We happen to be about the same age, but I grew up in Wisconsin, mostly Norwegian-German, but with, indeed, a small dose of Scots Irish, so our windows on reality do have different transmission characteristics. I am, as it happens, pretty much a suburban, lower middle class liberal intellectual puke, but I did spend a bit under four years in the USAF, where -- to my amazement -- I discovered that there were other people in America. So, while I do not have a serious familial acquaintance with the Christian jihad, I am uncomfortably aware that it exists, and is probably still growing.

Letting Empire's evil run its course

Hey Joe !

Just read your last instalment, "Escape from America". It was a strange feeling to watch your progress through all the discovery stages of eureka and rapture and fascination to the getting familiar stages of familiarity and solidarity to the final stage of resignation and quiet personal revolution. Strange in that I experienced many of the same reactions during my thirty plus years of itinerancy as an English teacher, sheepherder, boat nigger then captain, carpenter, and a few other things as I traced a crooked impulsive path around the Mediterranean, here and there in the States.

Escape from America

Gin meditations on outlaw roosters, tin cup martinis and my bust-out from Mammon's guilded cage

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

It is near midnight and the dogs sleeping in the sand under my cabana, Rex and Pluto, emit happy, gurgling growls, as if chasing imaginary rabbits in their dreams. I lie in bed just breathing in and breathing out and feeling so free that I've laughed out loud a couple of times tonight, something I have never done in my life. At least not while simply looking at the ceiling. Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle. After more than two years of effort, I'm outta the gilded gulag, by damned, and tell myself that I have at last quit being part of the problem -- or at least as much as much as anyone can without living stark naked in a Himalayan cave and toasting insects over a dung fire.

Business as usual from the Democrats

Joe,

Thank you for your web site. I read the letter "Happy Without Money or Social Position" and your response, and tears rolled down my cheek. In September of 2005, I sat in hot long lines, my windows rolled down so my car would not over heat, my family and I were running from Hurricane Rita. I was nearly overcome with exhaust fumes, then I overheated. Leaving the Golden Triangle of Texas (Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange) was another beginning of my realizing what was truly important. As an artist, it nearly tore my heart out to leave my art studio to weather the storm. I lost 57 paintings to Rita.

Essays seen as secular humanist rants

Joe,

I too am adrift in this nation state, often feeling force-fenced into a kind of below deck steerage. I guess I am just along for the bitter ride out. And sometimes I find myself isolated in a vast and horrifying historical context in which I will sooner or later have to make that leap of faith to actually stand up to homegrown evil for the last time. I create amusing nightmares of being present at some sort of heresy trial and facing off with some Bubba Crypto-Christian. The rest of this vision is murky but too often it can end up with me actually giving up my life to die on behalf of basic decency and the small town values I grew up with.