Joe Bageant

My Brother Joe

By Tony Sutton
Editor, ColdType.net

Joe Bageant was my brother. Not in a literal sense, of course: we came from different countries, although with similar rural backgrounds, he from Virginia, I from Lincolnshire in England.

Nor do I have any need for a surrogate brother, having five real ones, including a twin. Joe was my intellectual brother: we cared about the same things, shared the same, socialist, dreams and loved to articulate the thoughts that most men keep to themselves. The rhetoric did, occasionally, drift into the fanciful, such as the time he confided his plans for the future to my wife Jools and I over a well-liquored dinner at his home in Winchester, Virginia. At the time Joe was splitting his life between there and Belize, but the latter haven was becoming too small for him. “I’m off to India,” he said, “to talk to the wise and holy men in the mountains and on the plains. And, in a few years, when I die, I’m going to be cremated in a blazing barge on the Ganges.” Me? I’d be happy for my remains to be packed in a refuse bag and dumped on a wooded slope back home in England, I replied.

Lost in the American Undertow

The following is the introduction to Joe Bageant's newly released book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

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Did you ever stand and shiver, because you was lookin’ in a river ...?
— Folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

By Joe Bageant

The United States has always maintained a white underclass — citizens whose role in the greater scheme of things has been to cushion national economic shocks through the disposability of their labor, with occasional time off to serve as bullet magnets in defense of the Empire. Until the post-World War II era, the existence of such an underclass was widely acknowledged. During the Civil War, for instance, many northern abolitionists also called for the liberation of “four million miserable white southerners held in bondage by the wealthy planter class”. Planter elites, who often held several large plantations which, together, constituted much or most of a county’s economy, saw to it that poor whites got no schooling, money, or political power. Poll taxes and literacy requirements kept white subsistence farmers and poor laborers from entering voting booths. Often accounting for up to 70 percent of many deep-Southern counties, they could not vote, and thus could never challenge the status quo.

Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass; or, being firmly placed in the true middle class themselves, can even agree that such a thing exists. Apparently, you can’t smell the rabble from the putting green.

The Permanent White Underclass

A review of Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

By Gary Corseri

Lose all your troubles, kick up some sand
And follow me, buddy, to the Promised Land.
I’m here to tell you, and I wouldn’t lie,
You’ll wear ten-dollar shoes and eat rainbow pie.
— “The Sugar Dumpling Line,” American hobo song.

“Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass,” writes Joe Bageant on page 2 of his second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.

So what’s this self-professed and proud-of-it “redneck” do? This memoirist combination John Steinbeck, Michael Harrington, Henry Thoreau — with a funny bone to wallop your gut — what’s he do but produce the best book on the unsung 60 million (cozened to vote against their own self-interest, fodder for corporations’ wars) — write the best book on them that anyone of his generation has written!

Joe Bageant's Option for Hillbillies

By Michael Loughnane
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia 

"Poet", "prophet", "hillbilly revolutionary", "progressive redneck with a conscience" — these are some of the descriptive terms that have been conferred on Joe Bageant who died on March 26. Steve Austin of the Australian Broadcasting Company called him "The Woody Guthrie of the typewriter" for he championed the cause of the "redneck", a social group he saw as being one of the most marginalized and disenfranchised in America. 

Joe was a man of wisdom, intelligence and penetrating insight, but what made him really special was his warm, wry — sometimes acerbic — sense of humor and his direct no-frills honesty. He was also, in my view, a kind of a genuine working class liberation theologian — at least he would have been had he believed in God!

Rainbow Pie: Attention Must Be Paid

By Bob Kincaid
Head On Radio Network

Let me be up front about things: I want you to buy Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. I want you to buy it not because I have any financial interest in it. I don't. I want you to buy this book because it is a magnificent memorial both by and to one of the best American writers of the waning of the 20th and dawning of the 21st centuries. I want you to buy this book because, as the line from "Death of a Salesman" notes, "Attention must be paid".

I met Joe Bageant online in 2007. After reading Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War and many of his essays online, I sought Joe out for an on-air interview, which he gave me with what I came to know as his characteristic great good humor. From that conversation (the only one in which I have given over an entire show to a guest) forward, I knew I had a friend and comrade. Our conversations thereafter only cemented that understanding.

Joe Bageant: Poet, Redneck Revolutionary, R.I.P.

Joe in Hopkins Village, Belize

By Marc Campbell

Joe Bageant was an extraordinarily gifted writer and thinker. Author of Deer Hunting with Jesus and countless essays and editorials on politics and society, Joe was a champion of human rights and a fearless critic of our government’s mistreatment of its working class. His writing is imbued with compassion but also a caustic wit that laid bare the working class’s tendency to do what is in their own worst interests. Watching Joe tear into the Teabaggers was like watching an extremely large feral cat play with its food. His death comes at a time when his voice is needed more than ever. I’m not sure there’s anyone out there that can fill the void.

This is not an obituary. I’m not trying to give the reader an overview of Joe’s life in a few paragraphs. I am sharing a few of my memories of Joe as a friend and writer.

Small Talk

Gary Corseri was a good friend of Joe's. This poem was originally published in Poets’ Basement, September 2008.

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By Gary Corseri

In memoriam, for Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

 

This one—tack-witted, sharp of tongue—

thinks he’ll die soon, and so,

smokes on (although he loves his wife).

 

He has made peace at 62 (my age)

with demons, destiny, and even

the C.O.P.D. that will

kick him in.

White Underclass Crushed By Economy

A Review of Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

Cotton never saw much cash, and never got rich by any means. Not on the ten-cent and fifteen-cent purchases that farmers made there for over one hundred years. Yet he could pay Jackson Luttrell for the tomato hauling -- in credit at the store. That enabled Jackson to buy seed, feed, hardware, fertilizer, tools, and gasoline, and farm until harvest time with very little cash, leaving him with enough to invest in a truck. Unger could run his tomato cannery and transform local produce into cash, because he could barter credit for farm products and services. This was a community economic ecology that blended labor, money, and goods to sustain a modest but satisfactory life for all.
--  from Rainbow Pie

By William Bowles
www.williambowles.info 

I don't know where to start with Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. It's a book of two sides, two faces even. On the one hand there's Joe's evocative, heartfelt nostalgia for a life destroyed by corporate capital and on the other, his anger and frustrations, rants on occasion, as if analyzing sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction to how capitalism destroys human beings and all in the name of free choice! It's a frustration many of us lefties feel, a sense of powerlessness made all the worse by the knowing.

Joe Bageant picks and sings

There was another side of Joe Bageant that may come as a pleasant surprise to those who know him only through his books and online essays. Music was important in his life. He never played professionally, never on stage, but he practiced with his guitar every day. The guitar and singing was how Joe relaxed after many hours of beating the hell out of his laptop keyboard, writing and re-writing another essay. Occasionally, he would sing and play in his home for friends.

Several years ago, Phil Rockstroh and his wife Angie visited for a weekend with Joe and his wife Barbara in Winchester, Virginia. Angie wanted to learn more about guitar chords and Joe was pleased to give lessons. Phil video-taped these lessons and here are some short clips.

-- Ken Smith