Joe Bageant

Redneck Liberation Theology

Why are leftists so damn afraid of God?

By Joe Bageant

Six or seven years ago I wrote my first essays about how America's fundamentalist churches had gone batshit crazy, were casting demons out of car engine blocks and making covert plans to exchange the Constitution for the Book of Revelation. Those few readers I had at the time, mostly in urban liberal strongholds, tended to think, "Well, these hayseeds out there in the hinterlands are scary fuckers, but Joe overstates the case a bit. The god-whacks can never put together the kind of political power he's describing." The political landscape has changed since then, and there are now more books and documentary films sounding the alarm than you can shake a stick at. Which warms the gin soaked cockles of my heart (whatever the hell heart cockles are.)

Entitlement whores want life guarantees

Joe,

Like you've mentioned before, the central theme of American life seems to revolve around security. The search for security, entertainment, comfort and convenience seem to explain almost everything that can be seen in the states these days.

I would have to say that many people, if they can, turn themselves into entitlement whores in order to get security. They get the degree or the training so they can get the sinecure, the guaranteed position. They get the guaranteed position not because of their ability to perform, but because of their "qualifications". Paper is trusted, but not people.

Three Nights in Philly

Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes

By Joe Bageant

A fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America, which I now consider my home: "America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday money and business stuff alone will trap you like fucking flypaper." And that keeps ringing in my head during this current return to sell my house and fulfill my promotional obligations for the book I just published here. Which could take months.

But it's sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age, it's surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban self-important horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just around too many bland American "sluburbs" for too long before I skipped the country.

Joe, you sound like an embittered man

G'day, Joe.

Having read your article, I suspect that you don't mind the people and surroundings in amongst which you live at all really. And you do have a computer!  I've retired long ago now, and was serving in the military during the years in which you say you were a young boy. I've lived in six countries and, despite having worked probably 56 to 60 hours a week for most of that time, I never managed to buy myself into the middle class. Oh, that I had!

Driving force behind ethanol is greed

Joe,

Since you were talking about corn in your essay "A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard", I thought I might tell you about a situation developing here on the great plains. In his book In the Center of the Nation, Dan O'Brian says, "When you get the feeling that the whole world can see you but no one is watching, you have come to the grasslands of North America." I sometimes feel that I am the only one who is watching here anymore (probably the result of spending the 70's working for McGovern, and saving the world). I thought the shit was over, but now it is beyond what any one of us could imagine. But that's another story.

The joy of being liberated from cults

Dear Joe,

I have just read your essay on "The Covert Kingdom" and it was very interesting to me when I think of my own long journey to having an open mind, from the time I was a young girl to my retirement. I was born in Durban, South Africa. I lived in Johannesburg, the murder capital of the world. So much of what you recount in your own journey seems similar to mine. From the book bought by my mother from the Seventh Day Adventist who called at the door one day, to the next step of sitting in to a so-called "Bible Study" with a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, and then being the daughter of a Freemason, and a mother who grew up as an Anglican.

Bright students are subtly discouraged

Dear Joe,

I've been reading your articles for almost a year now, and you've often written things that were so dead-on that I almost emailed you, but this last essay ("A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard") was so eerily in line with my own situation that I had to write back about it. I'm an undergraduate English major at Boston University (which you've clearly visited, since you know about our philosophy department's direct connection to the Almighty), and I came across your essay while putting off work on one of my final papers, a feminist analysis of James Joyce's The Dead. This time last semester, I was a philosophy major, and I was probably working on my discussion of Aristotle's conceptual debt to the Eleatics.

I don't know, Joe. Maybe I'm spoiled. I took the last year off and worked for a nonprofit downtown, where I could see the differences I was making, and could shake hands with the people I was helping. When I went back to school, I was struck by two things:

Joe debates reader on science, religion

Dear Joe,

While I concur with much of your lacerating of the business schools and political science schools (there's an oxymoron) I would wonder if you would have the same bitterness towards the "hard" sciences -- physics, chemistry, biology, engineering.

ECONOMICS IS NOT A SCIENCE! Anyhow...

The physicists have been beavering away for years, developing fusion bombs, yes, but also X-rays for broken bones, explaining why solar panels and how televisions work, winning World War II (largely by radar) and exploring the universe.

Adjunct professors are educated hobos

Joe,

Just finished reading your essay on academia vs. the working class ("A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard"). It reminds me of a business professor I once knew who told me something along the lines of "my job is to keep the little shits off the streets for four years in hopes that they grow up enough so that by the time they get out they won't shit on the carpets and chew on the drapes when they get hired."

I tended to hang around the offices of professors when I was in college. I was an older student without much in common with the "little shits" in my classes, and the professors were generally older, lonely, and happy to have someone to talk to for a few minutes who wasn't utterly brain dead like most of their students. I can't say that they educated me (I did that myself), but they certainly had some good pointers on how to get a real education. And the Internet has made that even easier.

Academic contempt for working class

Joe,

Look at Amazon, they're pairing your book up in a deal with Ann Coulter.

I've read your essat, "A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard". I've been working for a few years here with a UAW local made up of Southern migrants to the auto industry on what makes a union strong. The hatred and contempt I've heard other "academics" express here at my university for the working people here is the other side of your point. I worked blue collar jobs before and during my time at the university (to finance my education), was in the timberworkers union out west (learned how to use a chainsaw at 10) and worked on longliners in the Bering Sea.