Joe Bageant, R.I.P.

After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas.

According to Joe's wishes, he will be cremated. His family will hold a private memorial service.

About Joe

Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran.

After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast ... lived in communes, hippie school buses... started writing about holy men, countercultural figures, rock stars and the American scene in 1971 ... lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s ... 14 years in all ... became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist ... Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues...

Moved to the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years ... tended reservation bar (The Bald Eagle Bar), wrote for regional newspapers... generally festered on life in America ... Moved to Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there ... Then moved to Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide.

Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love'em but they need a good ass kicking.

Died in 2000 when George Bush got elected ... died along with 275 million other Americans ... Plan to rise again from the dead when he is tossed out ...maybe reincarnate as a Commie terrorist on Wall Street ... maybe as a sex worker in Amsterdam ... can't decide ... both have their advantages.

Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant dot com

Capitalist Industrial Commodity Disease

Joe Bageant on American acquiescence:

...One new favorite ["condition" "requiring" a psychoactive drug] is ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, in which children act like -- surprise, surprise -- the young assholes that children can sometimes be. Teenage rebellion becomes a psychological disorder. Diagnostic manual symptoms include "often argues with adults," an unheard of behavior of teenagers calling for antipsychotics such as Risperidone. Side effects of Risperidone include a mild speed like buzz, a super erection lasting hours, lactation and suicidal tendencies. Phew!

Big Pharma makes billions more in the name of alleviating the people's suffering. Obviously many millions are indeed suffering, but if that is the case, then American society is suffering. Never will it be asked publicly just what psychic anguish our society is suffering from. Because the answer is capitalist industrial commodity disease, and the psychic pathology of Americaness. That would mean consulting Mr. Marx, who predicted much of it, or Arthur Barsky, who brought the definition up to date.

For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government....[emphasis mine]

Joe Bageant On Liberalism

From Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant's Paragraph Of The Day

Moon Over Gringo Gulch
...
Every American, every man woman and child lives by the fruit of the empire's sword, fully expecting the lights to come on each evening, fresh coffee to gurgle in the morning and the car to start right up. The Internet connection to work and for Australian wine to be on the supermarket shelves. Those who do understand where it all comes from -- which is to say from an unsustainable commodity economy propped up by phony money at gunpoint -- seldom object publicly, if there is the slightest risk. The relative few who grasp the inevitable cruelties of empire, especially of empires in decline, are inwardly resigned to their own insignificance in the larger scheme of things. A slim minority of youth still have the energy and idealistic anger to protest, as in Seattle's WTO fracas a decade ago. But for every one of them there are hundreds of thousands of citizens who say, "Well there's not much I can do about it." Both sides are right of course. But one swamps the other, reducing it to entertainment value on the evening news.
...

"They Don't Hate, They Don't Fight..."

The nature of Tea Baggers from Joe Bageant's blog:

Second is the responses the Tea Baggers have solicited from progressives in general and the very large well funded Obama political organization. The Obama machine has no interest in fending them off since they have been excellent foil in keeping progressives in line and have pushed the health care debate in the direction of the deals they have already cut with the health care industry (pro-corporate and to the right), and away from more progressive vision of health care reform. And the progressives are fucking worthless -- they don't hate, they don't fight and then they wonder why no one is afraid of them.

Lastly and most importantly, I think the Tea Baggers are really our canary in the mine that we are entering our late empire period. Crisis and decline in such situations does not lead to discrediting the failed ideologies that caused the given crisis, but rather the belief that we are failing because we where not faith full enough to those ideals. (Think of the crisis in Islamic world and the rise of fundamentalism.)

When it comes to history, shit just flows down hill.

A Good, Socialist Rant

I really enjoy Joe Bageant's rants:

Bass Boats and Queer Marriage
The battle for the American soul is over and Jay Leno won

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

Holy smoking Jesus, America is losing its middle class! "We're taxing the middle class out of existence," charge the conservatives. "The middle class is being hollowed out," wail the liberals, pouring forth great mock turtle tears (although one wonders how such a vacuum, as middle class life in America could be further hollowed).

For both political camps, high dudgeon over "the vanishing middle class" is supposed to represent some sort of "new populism." Not that the populace disagrees with them, mainly because the populace, if we are referring to the genuine America populace, hasn't the slightest notion of the definition of populism. But the word sounds like it has to do with popularity, the highest virtue in the American mind, and can even lead to the celestial heights called celebrity. So what the hell, they're willing to run with it.

Read the whole thing here.

I Am A Socialist

From Joe Bageant

There are endless rationalizations proffered as to why Obama has not come within a mile of fulfilling the promise and potential of his presidency, and the Democratic Party is writing more of them every day. Disappointed Democratic voters grab at them, and desperately defend each one on internet forums and in letters to the editor. But we must use our own personal capabilities as free rational human beings to assess Obama, and decide why he is failing. Or not failing. To hell with highly crafted official explanations about "wars of necessity" and trillion dollar blackmail payments.

George W. Bush left office wearing the same smirk he came in with. Perhaps it's congenital. But if Bush was smirking when he left office, he must now be convulsed in crazed hysterical laughter. His gang not only got away clean, but Obama carries on the dark Bush-Cheney legacy. And, almost as if to top the whole black escapade with a cherry of irony, the most inarticulate president in American history is now on the motivational speaking circuit at $200,000 a pop. Never let it be said that the Devil does not care for his own.

Will Americans ever rise up in defense of their own common well being through such things as education, health and a productive peace caring society? Nope. Because it has been seen to that socialism -- the administration of the nation solely for the common good and benefit of all the people without preference or privilege -- doesn't stand a chance in America. For over a century those who have attempted to further socialism have been shot, hanged, burned alive in their beds on Christmas Eve, imprisoned, falsely accused of crimes and falsely convicted, and demonized by the capitalist elites of the corporate state. The cause of socialism has effectively been wiped out in the US. Few Americans can even define the word. Most think it is a political system when it is a social philosophy. Hell, half the socialists these days think it is entirely a political system.

But even if Americans understood socialism, they are too terrified to ever admit to its virtues, much less publicly support the cause. And without free and open public participation in some democratic form of socialism, regardless of the name or label given it, there can be no recognition of the people's common welfare and good. And so the most egalitarian social philosophy ever conceived dies within a nation, with very little chance of being reborn because such an ideal, by its definition, cannot exist within the narrow mindset of bankers and oligarchs.

"America is its own special hell"

From Joe Bageant:

...Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel).

Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes.  News gathering in America is its own special hell, and reduces its practitioners to banality and elite sycophancy. But Big Money calls the shots...