Joe Bageant

No longer working class, so quit bitching

Dear Joe,

I've read your book Deer Hunting with Jesus and it reminded me of growing up in a small mill town on the Connecticut River called Bellows Falls. We used to call it Fellows Balls. When the paper mills closed and the railroads became a shadow of their previous selves, most workers traveled to Springfield, 12 miles north, to the machine tool plants, then those plants closed down.

It's an irritating litany repeated everywhere in this country. The little village of Bellows Falls couldn't even support the 12 or so bars for its 3,500 population. Bellows Falls is having a semi-gentrified cultural/arts/music scene revival, but the poor and working folks are still struggling to survive. Now I'm 58 and live in a hamlet of 250 just 20 minutes from Bellows Falls. Sometimes it seems like a thousand miles away. I enjoy reading your work in this dark age.

Steve

Hard times aren't coming, they're here

Good Afternoon Joe,

You can count me as a new reader. I found you down a trail of links. You write eloquently about what I call the spiritual blight in the good old USA.

I lived for years in and around Austin, Texas and I've had a belly full of arch "liberals" who look down there nose at anyone who doesn't get their organic free trade coffee beans from Whole Foods Market. (Driving there in their SUVs with a Save the Whales bumper sticker, no doubt). In other words people who think they are "liberal" because of what they CONSUME, and don't begin to understand how elitist and offensive they really are.

Back here on planet earth (deep east Texas now) you get what they sell at Wal-Mart or Brookshire Bros. because those are the only grocery stores in town. Of course you also have what you can grow, raise, or catch. East Texas may not be Belize, but it's a lot closer to the Third World than it is to Wall Street.

Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

By Joe Bageant

There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann's Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo.

And all because Obama mentioned something we've known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation's heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.

To quote Obama:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. ... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

Thank you for 'The Audacity of Depression'

Dear Joe:

As a long time reader of your prose, I've often thought about sending you an e-mail. As I read through your latest essay "The Audacity of Depression", complete with your riffs on musings from Adorno and Lyotard, I knew I just had to finally shoot you a note. While you have often weaved tidbits of forgotten wisdom into your essays (everything from the Rolling Stones to Gui Rochat), your current invocation of a prominent Frankfurt school thinker and one of the more salient French post-modernists is pretty damn apropos of our current political malaise. However, I was actually taken by the more central argument in your piece.

The Fight for Gauley Mountain

An introduction:

Bob Kincaid is a journalist, activist and co-founder of H.O.R.N.: (The Head-On Radio Network www.headonradionetwork.com) broadcasting from the heart of West Virginia's coal fields; from the heart of the whitewater rafting country. Founded specifically on the internet because, "barring a paradigm shift of monumental proportions," Bob says, "progressives will NEVER get a voice in terrestrial radio. HORN uses a a new form of radio format: "Conversation Radio," in which guests and callers get all the time they need to put their ideas forward. The host is not the star and does not ramrod the conversation. HORN has seven professional broadcast hosts, all doing shows every day without pay, with hosts in Chicago, Washington D.C., West Virginia, Florida and Australia, not to mention the only gay conversation program going on the internet. Bob is one of those people who talks straight, is tough as nails and stays broke so he can help sponsor the fight for the dignity of the ordinary working man. As far as I am concerned, Bob Kincaid is the only progressive talker in the medium with a Southern background, talking genuine progressive politics and still living in the South.
-- Joe Bageant

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Coal keeps the lights on and the workers locked in darkness

By Bob Kincaid

I live in Fayette County, West Virginia, the heart and soul of West Virginia's whitewater rafting tourism industry. Thousands and thousands of people come here every year to raft the New and Gauley Rivers. They roar down gorges as old as the earth itself, past the ghost towns that are all that's left of the mine wars of a century ago; towns where Mary Harris "Mother" Jones worked to organize the slaves of the coal industry: Thurmond and Glen Jean and Brooklyn and Cunard and Hawks Nest and Prince and McKendry; places that are little more than wide mossy spots by the riverside, with a few squared stones marking where entire generations played out. These are the Tombstones and Dodge Citys of Appalachia.

The Audacity of Depression

Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America

By Joe Bageant

One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.

So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers -- a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.

World's best sex manual, the Commie Sutra

How you is, Joe?

Primaries, candidates, elections "issues" (???!), pundits -- the silly season which lasts for years. Some things I can have a bit of fun with and laugh about. Others, well, do you run up a black or red flag before you declare war? I want to do the right thing, so I just write to the editors and such, indecision being upon us.

I'm 61-years-old and my life has been pretty much truncated. I probably won't be around this time next decade. But I wonder why people don't laugh and enjoy. A young friend of mine really has a hard time believing that I'm an atheist and a socialist. I'm not like the others. (No, he's never actually met any other atheists or "reds", but I'm "different", he says. Most people agree that I'm "different". Mainly my wife of forty years. Even though I showed my young friend my voter registration card and he's known me for years, he can't accept it. He has no Idea of what the socialist movement did in this country. Well, since it's being destroyed brick by brick, I suppose he can be excused a bit. But he asked me, really, "What had socialists done for the world?"

Choice of pregnancy or a new sewing machine

Dear Joe:

I just finished your entertaining rant about global population ("Nine Billion Little Feet"). I realize nothing will shake you in your convictions that all is going to hell. (I nearly erased this email at this point, as it is futile to argue facts against feelings.)

Look up some world demographics on Google. Population growth is crashing everywhere that women have a choice between pregnancy and a new sewing machine. The population will continue to grow until mid century -- caused by all those little kids you see out in the street -- and then begin a sudden plummet back to current or 1960's levels. The demographic decline is happening first among the rich, of whom you do not approve. But "rich" comes to mean anyone with a choice between another kid and a sewing machine, or washer. People behave rationally. When another child gets in the way of a real improvement in status or amenity, they stop having more children. But this, as I am sure you see, means they must be offered a choice between another child and the opportunity to own and operate something, of which you would disapprove on some ecological ground or another.