Joe Bageant

Fidel wants Bush to run for third term

Joe,

Regarding your description of Cuban medical missions in Belize: Way to make a loudmouth put his money (or body) where his mouth is, mate! I'm interested in learning more. One problem -- as an American expat my ability to stay in Australia is tied to me working for my hospital. I'm here on an employer-sponsored work visa, meaning as long as I labour for the government hospital, I have the right to remain here. Essentially, an indentured servant. If I don't work, I'm illegal, and unlike the U.S., they're serious about making non-citizens move on home.

All the outrages of the mass die-off

Joe,

Wow. Your A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard is so well said. And to think that all this ignominy is not the name of the rose, but the name of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, now mounted and strapping their steeds on with greater and greater urgency. This refusal of reality implies the end of much human life, and right quick. We, you and me, I presume, are required while living to attend to a logarithmically increasing number of wakes. How's that for some kind of terminal future, expressed as bullshit intellectual newspeak?

I can still get a chill from this, though:

The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

So it goes.

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard

Hang the Professors, Save the Eunuchs for Later

By JOE BAGEANT

It is time to close America's universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. American universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
-- Fred Reed, American expatriate writer and "equal-opportunity irritant"

If there is one bright spot in the bleak absurdity of slogging along in our new totalist American state, it is that ordinary working Americans are undisciplined as hell. We are genuine moral and intellectual slobs whose consciousness is pretty much glued onto an armature of noise, sports, sex, sugar and saturated fats. Oh, we nod toward the government bullhorns of ideology, even throw beer cans and cheer when told we are winning some war or Olympic sports event. But when it comes right down to it, we could generally give a rat's ass about government institutions and are congenitally more skeptical of government than most nations, especially nations that get things like good teeth and free higher education for their tax dollars.

Remembering Colonel Tony Herbert

Dear Friends,

As we now find ourselves engaged in yet another Vietnam, I would like to share a letter I just received regarding an often reprinted story I wrote in the 1970s for the Los Angeles Free Press about Lt. Col. Tony Herbert, an officer in Vietnam whose career and life were ruined because he told the truth about what was going on there long before My Lai and other truths about the Vietnamese war were exposed.

I hope this old soldier's letter helps all of us remember the meatgrinder of terror and courage that every man and woman sent into a war faces, regardless of the nation or government that sent him or her. And especially regardless of our political opinions here on the left. Opinion is merely opinion but death is real, whether it be that of an Iraqi child or a teenager from Wheeling, West Virginia with a private's stripes on his camos.

A quiet place to stay out of the crap

Joe,

Jeezus, I have laughed, sitting here in Boca del Rio having discovered your site about 20 minutes ago! I mean seriously! And yep you have it exactly right on a hell of a lot that matters. Like you I grew up in the age when there was still community. People here ask me if I miss my home culture in the US (Mobile, Alabama) and I tell 'em, no it does not exist any longer.

Federal Reserve puts us all in debt

Mr. Bageant,

I've read a handful of your fine essays. One of the subjects you write about is our awful banking system. It is even worse than any Ponzi Scheme which is what you compare this bank system to.

A simple example explains it all. When the Federal Reserve lends money to the big banks something more miraculous than Jesus's multiplication of the fishes and loaves takes place! It's known as the money multiplier and it uses a trick called fractional reserve banking.

Joe talks about his roots and writing

After his talk last Tuesday at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, Joe Bageant continued talking about writing at a nearby bar. He was joined by his host Linh Dinh (left), a poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Teresa Leo (right), a  contributing editor of CrossConnect and The American Poetry Review.

Text of Joe Bageant's talk at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, Tuesday, April 3:

Thank you for the kind introduction Linh.

I've been writing for nearly 40 years. I've been a news reporter, a magazine writer and editor, and written a thousand puff pieces for celebrities of every imaginable sort. And now, at this late age, I found myself back in my home town writing about the poor and working poor folks I grew up with. Most of what I write is about class issues in America -- mainly because being born in lower class poverty leaves a person with a sense of insecurity and class awareness that remains for a life time, regardless of one's later success.

No excuse for rampant personal greed

Hey Joe,

My admiration for your writing is extreme, boundless. There is a touch of noble ennui, of a strange melancholy that I glean from your essays. The intensity of childhood reality, with its antebellum flowers and breezes, wafts around your words, words implicitly shedding the abstract foolishness of adult normality. Might I even ascribe a tiny measure of the mystical to your turning away from corporatist demons and tempters?