Joe Bageant

Blogging toward the Kingdom

Booze, rage and justice in the participation age

Hey Joe,

I know it's painful for you to observe what is happening here in America, and a lot easier to stay drunk and not think about it in Mexico, but some of us are still sticking it out here and we depend on you to help us feel less isolated. That's probably more responsibility than you or anyone would want, but you started the conversation that confirmed our vague feelings of being screwed. Now you're the de facto leader of your own political movement. Betcha didn't mean to do that, huh?

Please don't make us all wait so long for each new essay, don't be one more person that hangs us out to dry. Sober up and post more often. The laboring classes need you and, believe it or not, your voice makes a difference to this country. Help us take it back from FOX, CNBC, and CBS.

There ain't no escape from collapse

Joe,

In response to a letter from a reader (Joe, why did you crap out on us?), you wrote: "Places like Ecuador, northern California -- all sorts of places -- creating little spots of sustainability as best as possible."

Since the US is the nexus of all the fraud, empire, control, and will thus be the center of the pain in the upcoming financial collapse (AND contains a huge percentage of "useless eaters", i.e. superfluous workers) have you given any thought as to where the best places/countries in the world will be to "hang out" while the Collective Madness and Economic Collapse take over?

Thanks,
Kevin

Joe, why did you crap out on us?

Joe,

Did everything get so hopeless you just gave up? I liked your fighting spirit here, in 2004, and feel when you've got a voice, as you have, we'd appreciate hearing it as a call to arms instead of an old man's complaints. I can say this without being ageist, I'm probably older than you.

So get out of my way and Katy bar the door! I for one am taking to the streets, joining every damned faggot commie tree hugging protest march that comes rattling the pike. I don't care if these are the last days of the empire of the locusts. I don't care if the entire jackal nation is at our very throats. Let whatever history remains record that some of us went down with a fight, and that perhaps a few of us indeed became "sages with transfigured faces".

Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies

Joe,

Reading you is like drinking those bottles full of clear liquids the night before a colonoscopy. The next day I survive the test and am told that I do not have colon cancer -- yet. Still, I am getting the test in spite of the fact that I know that my pack a day cigarette habit coupled with 12 fancy beers a day is probably gonna kill me first. I've been working for a very large corporation for the last 20 years as a print advertising designer. I am on the Endangered Species list at 58. I have been playing the consumer game for the past 45 years. I've known that the whole thing was a lie since I was 13 -- before that I lived in a world that was so monochromatic that when I heard the Beatles I thought that heaven had come to earth.

I wanted to tell you my whole story, but have decided to spare you that. I have one simple question: seeing what you see, knowing what you know, what are your recommendations for how to proceed? Because I am seeing that just drinking hard enough to not think about it is no way to live. Or is it? When the best hopes being offered are simply the offerings of another corporate lackey, how does one live?

Canadian asks: Who you gonna bomb next, eh?

Hi Joe,

Greetings from one of the attic dwellers in Canada. We've been mocked as being eternally uninvited to the party going on downstairs. However, lately it seems more like someone has called in the cops to break up the bash. Canadians probably obsess over "America" even more than the Europeans and pretty much every other country, and why wouldn't we? You guys are the 800-pound gorilla in the global room, and when thing start going to shit down there, you can bet it's going to hit the fan up here too.

I was a year old when Vietnam ended, and I'm wondering how low the national mood was back then compared to today. Vietam was obviously an epic American ass-kicking, and the sense I get from some of your articles is that many Americans are finally waking up to the fact that they've been getting kicked in the teeth by their own governments and corporations for another 35 years since then. In clinical terms, you would be looking at a major PTSD patient whose shattered delusions of grandeur have been twisted into an ugly rage spiral -- all of which is now being expressed in, um, the Tea Party Movement?

Tea Baggers are our canary in the coal mine

Joe recently asked our "masked political consultant," a well known West Coast political adviser for his quick take on the Tea Party movement. He is now writing under the pseudonym John Brown (Email: [email protected]. His previous contributions to this site are:"Not New Ideas, but Identifying New Enemies", "Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus", and "Life in the Post Political Age".  As usual, the masked consultant cuts through the bullshit like a laser. Here is their exchange:

Dear John,

I don't get it about the Tea Party movement. After eight years of of a super right wing administration destroying jobs and what social safety net there was ... "the people"  have suddenly decided: "Now that I'm unemployed, I think I'll form a grassroots movement to destroy my health care too. It seems that no one in the mainstream media finds it a bit suspicious that this so-called grassroots popular movement sounds an awful lot like the neocons we just dumped. Hell, in my home town the Tea Bagger leadership pretty much comes from the ranks of the movers and shakers in the local Republican Party. This is a populist movement?

Cars fed on corn, people fed on horseshit

Dave and Joe ponder socialism and the Tea Party

Dear Joe,

The Tea Parties started out as Ron Paul supporters in protest of both the neocons and the faux bleeding heart liberals and have been co-opted and corrupted by others so unfortunately are not what they started out to be.

I agree both Dems and Reps have been and are horribly corrupt and just two sides of the same worthless coin flipped for our confusion and division and "their" amusement and profit. My view of Dems and Reps has always been the Dems take your money and give it to people that don't deserve it to get votes and the Reps take you money and keep it for themselves. They are learning much from each other and the main difference now are the sound bites. One of the reasons I have not watched TV for the last 15 years. Few ever wonder why there is almost always a 50/50 split and we just flip back and forth thinking we finally got rid of the last bastards.

Cultural orphan of the class struggle

Hi Joe,

I just found your site a few weeks ago, computer-phobe and migraine sufferer that I am, but it seems like the more I read of you, the more I understand of myself. I'm from southern Illinois, born and raised, although I lived away from here for a short time.

Now I'm back living in Williamson county, in a town where our last major factory closed two years ago, and coal mining, what's left of it, is not much more than an irritating reminder of better times long gone. But I give the folks around here a lot of credit. They're always looking to get beyond the disappointments of the present, find ways to attract new business, and keep the population from decreasing. We've held at a steady 10,000 for a good thirty years, and although it might seem laughable to some, that's a victory in itself, considering everything we've lost, believe me.

One party has no heart, the other no spine

Joe,

Nothing has ever been fixed by conservatives, by definition. You and many others say the thing that I hear back all the time as a pox on both your houses. I see the same corruption as do you, but I don't think there is any support for the thesis that it is equal. There are looters and the looted. Saying that they are all equal will in fact make any solution impossible. All the twelve step programs and all homespun psychology agrees that a first step in any improvement is admitting to your wrongs. Not admitting that other people are wrong. That helps nothing except people continuing to make excuses for themselves and their conservative party.

There are myriad things wrong with the left but when the question is asked, "who might just barely conceivably listen to your views," there is no doubt in my mind. Democrats are screwed up but the problems are at least occasionally acknowledged and sometimes steps are taken to fix a few small areas around the edge. We elected a black president. We did all the Roosevelt stuff. We did voting rights. We did civil rights. Over the dead bodies of Republicans. Hopefully we are about to start to fix health care. Again over the dead bodies of Republicans.

Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers

(This is a long letter, with an even longer reply, but this reader has several excellent points, including the politicization of smoking and over-eating. -- Joe Bageant.)

Dear Joe,

I smoke cigarettes. This is my 49th or 50th year -- don't know which.

When this war on smokers really heated up, in the late 90's, I wrote to a friend in San Francisco, and asked her what was going on. "Is this some kind of grassroots movement?," I asked, in caps. She said she didn't know what it was, exactly, but that it couldn't be a grassroots deal, because they were very, very rich, and very powerful, and they had the full support of governments, corporations, and all of the media, without exception. They were getting lots of tax money, she said -- hundreds of millions -- and there were rumors that the big pharmaceutical companies were involved in funding and planning operations. "After all," she added: "They want to sell nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and a shitload of tranquilizers to the masses who quit as they get the piss pounded out of them." She said that a mutual friend had remarked that it was sure to become the largest social engineering project in the history of the world, and that, though he didn't smoke -- he found it frightening.