Joe Bageant

Difficult to be skeptical yet be optimistic

Hey Joe,

I've read Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War and most of your posts. Can't say there's much in any of what you say that I disagree with. In fact, I'm with ya.

Which brings me to the issue at hand. Curmudgeonliness. A good, healthy outlook, given present circumstances. I put myself squarely in that category alongside you and most of the really "aware" people I know.

But I'm a 62-year old teacher, working hard to help the next generation be readers and critical thinkers and perhaps contribute positively to the world. And somehow it seems to me that the curmudgeonly take on things just doesn't work for the young. Cynicism (or at least a robust skepticism bordering on pessimism) in those of our advanced age seems the only reasonable perspective to me. But in the young, it is sad, defeating, and tends to dim their inherent idealism (if it hasn't already been crushed by their direct circumstances.)

American literature has abandoned poor whites

Dear Joe,

First of all, please, I apologize my poor English. I’m writing to you from Spain where we have a very deficient education system and a natural tendency to fail on learning foreign languages.

Now, after being intentionally modest, I have to say that I’m an avid reader of your work and that your Deer Hunting with Jesus has been an inspiration for my end of graduate essay, a kind of a small thesis. The subject of my essay is the relation between literature (and also popular culture in general) and America’s white underclass. The main idea is to see which image of the white low classes is being exported from the US and how, for example, Europeans like me receive it.

On literature I found out that during the first half of the Twentieth Century, American authors used to talk about the poor whites, especially the most representative novelist of that era (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Caldwell). So, there was a quite general interest on portraying that reality from the canonic literature. But, after the forties, this interest seems to vanish (at least as a major theme.

Half measures never accomplished anything

Hey Joe,

I've written to you before. I said that you had pointed me in the right direction about dealing with class and race and all. I think I spoke too soon.

I'm not working class. At least, not really.

For starters, I'm Asian.

I'm not the kind of Asian that runs donut shops and runs from the immigration officers, nor one of the poor bastards that flee sweatshops on one side of the Pacific to get stuck in sweatshops on the other side. I'm luckier. I was born Stateside, to college educated parents with green cards.

Americans have become weak and fearful things

Joe,

Today, a friend forwarded to me a news article with this headline: "Fines proposed for going without health insurance." Here are some things I don't get:

1) If folks can't afford to reroof the Old Manse or buy groceries or put retreads on the Jimmy, how (and why) are they going to get insurance, and

2) If they can't afford insurance, how are they going to afford the alleged fine, and

3) Who is the Insurance Police, who's going to rat me out, and

4) Why did The Bastards wait until the whole country is unemployed to pull this shit, and

An equal opportunity malcontent, not sexist

Hi Joe,

I read your column ("How much freedom can one man stand?") today and you mentioned two women bloggers that are looked upon as irrelevant. You couldn't find two irrelevant male bloggers? One, even? Do you make the mistake of when thinking about irrelevance, you automatically think of women? That's not very fair minded, you know.

I don't think that dude at Daily Kos is all that great. Of course he thinks women are irrelevant, too. I don't go there anymore. He got snookered into backing Obama with all the Hope and Yes, We Can bull pucky. I certainly don't want to hear him whine now.