Joe Bageant

Two kingpins of the sweating class deconstruct popular culture, Jon Stewart as opiate of the liberal masses and the Lake Tohopekaliga Bassmaster five-fish Classic.

"Now you take Dick Cheney, a goddamned drunk if ever I saw one. How else would a man confuse a little bitty quail with a Texas judge? But Cheney better be careful, cause you go to pouring booze over a pacemaker, you’re asking for trouble, I don't care how much you paid for the pacemaker or the booze."
-- Virgil Jenkins, retired bulldozer operator.

You could say my friend Virgil Jenkins is an erudite and insightful student of American culture. You could say he has honed his understanding of America through decades of serious reading and contemplation. But it would be a damned lie. Mostly, Virgil does just what I do, drink and talk and watch television. Still, the dirt-eating truth of the situation is this: He's got more common sense and insight than 99% of the people who run this country. We seem to have gotten different results from the same regimen.

Mr. Bageant,

I've just discovered your website and find it very thought provoking and also very distressing at once. You seem to voice the very concerns I am quietly trying to sort out in my own heart. I still feel like a kid at forty years old, and perhaps you'll see me that way, too. But now I am reconsidering everything I once thought was right.

Hi,

Your commentary Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven is a great piece of writing. No cliches, no shrill ersatz plaintiveness, just cool dense writing. Excellent and sharp evocations too, from the 7-Eleven parking lot to the cold truthful insights (reduced humanity in return for consumerism for instance) to the issues like Virgil and dental insurance, elections, global capitalism, large-scale gutless passivity, you name it. I liked most especially your humor and honesty. Great stuff! And the bit about having to change the subject among friends. Yeah, there are some of us who seem to lead undercover lives because we can't seem to forget the world is such a stupendously horrific place.

Dear Joe:

You already know this, your voice is one of the most clear voices in the US and somehow in order to do that someone has to have titanium not merely in the brain and had to be passed through the grinding mill of the most rotten phase of capitalism in all of its most glorious debauchery inside the US intestines. My point is, how the hell can we do it? -- do it in order to pass it to American people of all flavours, in order to raise the rage, this very painful truth that is only accurately mirrored in the poorest parts of this planet. You are talking plain global truth about our global human condition from inside the beast.

Joe Bageant,

Goddamn, the way in which you put your thoughts to words is sweet.

Having pretty much given up on receiving any serious and inspirational wisdom from the TV, I spend some good time on the net. Don't remember how I first stumbled across you, but it was about three years ago, more or less, when I read you for the first time. Printed out a copy and gave it to a couple of my co-workers. A 22-year-old German-Russian-American and a 50-year-old American expat who'd lived in Germany for near on 20 years. Can't say they appreciated the beauty and honest ass-biting missives of yours as much as I did, but I was hooked, man.

Joe,

You're great. Period. Keep writing it, keep doing it.

One bone to pick, I'm an American woman, fiftyish, no husband and I have spent the last two-and-a-half years going back and forth between backwoods Florida and Salvador, Brazil. I think perhaps in one more year I will be able to live there. (I too came home after years in Manhattan, and the local state of mind needed kicking same as yours, but I think it is my own that got kicked.)

Dear Mr. Bageant:

YOU ARE MY HERO!!!!

Every day, before he died in October of 2003, my husband Michael would get us both a cup of coffee, sit down beside me in bed, and we would earnestly talk about moving from the good ole US of A to Amsterdam, or anywhere in that great little country your friend is from. Michael had a very serious health condition, and was in grave fear of losing his health insurance. Besides that though, he cared deeply about people and was nervious 24/7 about what the Bush Administration would do. It took me awhile to really hear what he was saying, but by the invasion of Iraq it finally hit me: most Americans are in for a living hell in this country if things get much worse. Which they are, by the hour.

Mr. Bageant,

I read your article on DissidentVoice.org. I hold a sign on Thursdays here in Tacoma, Washington. My sign says: "GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES ImpeachBush.org". I don't even pretend that my being there with the sign will make any difference at all. But I am compelled to be there. I can at least say I didn't just sit here and let these murderous racist bastards have it all. "I didn't just sit here."

Dear Mr. Bageant,

You don't know me, but my dad just emailed me a link to one of your articles, "Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven", and I have to say: this is probably the most scathing, satirical, have no mercy on anyone pieces of writing I've read and let me tell you, it's beautiful.

Democracy rots from the inside out as a nation of telemarketers and war criminals parties on amid the stench.

A spring Sunday morning and I am at the politically incorrect 7-Eleven buying my cholesterol loaded half-and-half for my peasant slave labor grown coffee.  In the parking lot, car speakers blare out Bob Marley from a grungy 1987 Olds Cutlass (the last year GM made 'em), while the owner, a Haitian guy, sits on the curb eating his Smokey Big Bite hot dog, sunshine pouring over the whole world sweet as that quart of chocolate milk he is going to wash it all down with. Bob Marley is singing "One Love" and that Smokey smells so damned good I order one for myself and settle in next to that Haitian dude. And I think, "Is this a great fucking country or what? Yessiree, the world's best hope."