Joe Bageant

A redneck view of the Obamarama

This column originally appeared on the web site of the Australian Broadcasting Company.

By Joe Bageant

When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks. During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I've collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially President Barack Obama.

In America, all successful politicians are first and foremost successfully marketed brands. In fact, the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's 2008 marketer of the year. George W. Bush's brand may have "collapsed," as they say on Madison Avenue, but things don't change much. Rednecks instinctively know this: 

Dirt and family, sea foam and fate

Dear Readers,

On the back side of the small resort island Caye Caulker, offshore from Belize City, Belize, is a beached two-man sailing vessel which has been lying on its side in the Caribbean sun and winds for fifty years. That was a long time ago, yet the poor Black Carib people who occupy the back side of the caye ("bakkatown," the Black Caribs call it), the ones who wait on the tables of the rich and pilot their fishing boats, still fondly remember the man who once sailed that old wooden boat. "He wah English, a man of da watah an de soul," one old bakka town fisherman recalled to the younger ones, who invariably ask, sometime in the course of their lives, about the old boat resting so prominently there at the end of the sandy road leading to the lagoon.

Today I was fortunate enough to receive a letter from a similar soul, a seafaring man from Nova Scotia. As to the letter writer's question, Why can't media and political figures form genuine  sentiment or thought? My suspicion is this: Those who grow up in the childrens' wading pools of America, entranced by their toys and watched over by nanny capitalism in suburbia or Gotham, never glimpse the deep waters, and therefore live out their lives as children, capable only of childish perception. And in dispensing their perceptions as reality from their positions of power, they further infantilize our entire nation. 

-- Joe Bageant

Deer in the headlights of America

An interview with Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant at the Royal Tavern in Winchester, Virginia

The following interview originally appeared on the blog New American Dream.

Joe Bageant, 62, is the author of "Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War," (Random House Crown, 2007). He lives half the year in the black Carib Village of Hopkins, Belize, and half in his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. He writes commentary on America for numerous foreign media, including the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC (Canada) and numerous publications, ranging from Playboy Magazine to the UK's The New Statesman.

Religion confounds ideals and absolutes

Joe,

After reading through your pieces, I though I might offer up another perspective. I'm living in my parents' house, on a piece of land, a small part of what one of my ancestors won in a card game in 1714. Most of the intervening generations have lived within ten miles of here. I did a bit of traveling in my youth (I'm 49) and found the rest of the country had its own problems enough to know there wasn't any Shangri-la out there. So I figured the questions I needed to answer were in my head and I came home, helped the parents for some years, got married, had a daughter, split up and now back on the home farm. Renting my share of it to my sister and riding for her. We are in the horse racing business.

Abiders and leavers

Joe,

The subject you wrote of in "On Native Ground" has been gnawing at me these last few years. I struggle more and more with who I am and where I am from. Although my birth -- in a hospital -- took place in downtown Los Angeles, I have resided in Norway since I slipped through the cracks in the Green Machine in 1966 and absconded to a draft card free zone up on the northern rim of Europe. I planned to stay for three years, it's been over forty.

This is Scandinavia, not Virginia and the differences are much greater than any gaping, gasping tourist taking a two week cruise on the Hurtigruten can appreciate. We are not the descendants of colonizers; we have been here thousands of years. Here, where you come from is a matter of the first importance in any social situation. It places you; you're from there, not here. Or you're from here even if you don't sound like it. We still speak dialects that place you geographically.

In firelight and in darkness

Dear Joe,

Strictly speaking, my "geezerhood" is some distance from now, but it is nonetheless, within sight (like you, I am well-armed and well-provisioned with guns and liquor). As a 45-something who grew up in a smallish northeastern farming town, left home at 15, joined the Marines at 17, and spent the years between now and then travelling the world, ultimately to retire as an infantry captain and end up an accidental banker, in a newly minted career birthed in the throes of the most significant financial crisis in four generations. I can assure you that as a dispossesed vagabond whose roots were torn early and fully, there remains a connection to the native soil that darkened my knees as a child.