Joe Bageant

Bageant’s Frustration: Extreme Isolation

By Morris Berman
morrisberman.blogspot.com 

Given how much we had in common, it’s perhaps a bit odd that Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I never met (although I think we did correspond at one point). He even wound up living in Mexico a good part of the time. But the real connection between us is the congruence of perception regarding the United States. Joe came from unlikely roots to have formulated the political viewpoint that he did: working-class, right-wing, anti-intellectual, flag-waving, small-town Virginia. A “leftneck,” someone dubbed him; it’s not a bad description.

There aren’t too many leftnecks in the United States; of that, we can be sure. This was the source of Joe’s frustration: extreme isolation. Because he realized that the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time. He likened the place to a hologram, in which everyone in the country was trapped inside, with no knowledge that the world (U.S. included) was not what U.S. government propaganda, or just everyday cultural propaganda, said it was. He watched his kinfolk and neighbors vote repeatedly against their own interests, and there was little he could do about it. The similarity between his last book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, and my forthcoming Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline, is in fact quite startling. True, I’m analytical where Joe is homey, and my historical perspective is that of 400 years rather than just the twentieth century; but Joe’s way of addressing the issues is gritty, and right on the money. One can only hope that his book gets the posthumous attention it deserves.

Remembering Joe, a redneck revolutionary

By Patrick Ward
www.socialistreview.org.uk

It was difficult not to take an instant liking to Joe Bageant.

Soon after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential elections, Socialist Review called him up for his opinion on the matter: "I always say that if Obama was delivered to the White House with Jesus Christ, a five-piece band and six gilded seraphims holding up his fucking balls he still won't be able to do anything because the country's broke and Congress is bought and sold."

It was with that one long, angry sentence, I became an admirer of this "redneck revolutionary".

Joe's wit tore through the fog of myth which surrounds the poorest working class people in the US. For Joe, they weren't the lazy, stupid caricatures drawn by the establishment media and politicians. They had a heart, but they had been used up and forgotten by capitalism.

Rainbow Pie should be required reading

Review by Pete Soderman
pwsoderman.wordpress.com

One of the reviews on Amazon suggested that Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir should be required reading for all American schoolchildren, and I heartily agree. The picture Joe paints of what’s happened “his people” in the rural south applies to working men and women everywhere in America. Far from being only the family memoir I expected, Rainbow Pie is really a story of the corporate takeover of America from the point-of-view of the common working man and woman. There is essentially no difference between what has become of the world Joe describes around Winchester, Virginia, and the world I grew up in near New Haven, Connecticut. In both cases, the good jobs are gone, both on the land and in the factories.

The chief difference between the two is that, while “Joe’s people” are clinging to their guns and religion to protect them from what they see as an overreaching government, mine, in the liberal north, are clinging to the faint hope that Obama, the magic-man is going to somehow save them from their own stupidity. Both ideas are equally divorced from reality.

Champion of the forgotten underclass

Joe with younger brother Mike, 1951

(This interview with Joe Bageant by Patrick Ward first appeared in the November 2010 issue of UK's Socialist Review. In his previous book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, Bageant took on the media's portrayal of the "redneck" community he grew up in. Here, he talks about his second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.)

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Interview by Patrick Ward
www.socialistreview.org.uk 

How has the community you grew up in changed today?

Today there are the old ones who remember, but they're dying. There are people in my generation, but we ain't spring chickens ourselves. Then there is a small contingent of hippies who moved there to look after the land. They are wonderful. Then there are a lot of well to do people from Washington DC who have their hobby farms. The closest ancient old town, George Washington's Bathtub, is very fortunate that the gay community took it up as a place to come on weekends or to buy up little farms. But the average person is definitely among the high unemployed. The county I describe is one of the richest in West Virginia. Can you imagine what the poorest are like? They are goddamn horrible.