Joe Bageant
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Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings By Joe Bageant
Cognitive capitalism — just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed. For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people’s thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators… Continue reading
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Joe Bageant: A Yard Sale in Chernoybl
‘It’s only a system,’ she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket’s gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. ‘THE HELL IT IS! It’s a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony,’ I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America’s simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street… Continue reading
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Joe Bageant: The Bastards Never Die
Well, for starters, the above title is a damned lie, since this little screed is not a history. It’s just rumination on the tilting point at which Americans started the slide into the deepest sort of cultivated consumer consciousness — which is to say our corporate managed engorgement and swinedom at the service of the… Continue reading
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America’s White Underclass By Joe Bageant
‘White underclass’ is a term I’ve used often in my writing, and most American readers seem to know what I mean. They’ve got eyes and live in the same nation I do. But in a sudden burst of journalistic responsibility, I decided that if I am going to throw around the word underclass, then I… Continue reading
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Worker rights: No balls, no gains By Joe Bageant
From the Depression through World War II the Teamsters Union became a powerful entity, and a popular one too because of such things as its pledge never to strike during the war or a national emergency. President Roosevelt even had a special designated liaison to the Teamsters. But power and money eventually drew the usual… Continue reading
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Joe Bageant: A redneck view of the Obamarama
When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks. During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I’ve collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially President Barack Obama. Continue reading
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Joe Bageant: Skinny Dipping in Reality
For the first time in years, my life in that small town was very enjoyable. In fact Winchester soon spawned its own small psychedelic scene, one among thousands in heartland America at the time. Continue reading
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A Commodity Called Misery By Joe Bageant
Why is there enough pain and alienation to sustain America’s umpteen billion dollar mental health business and its 400-plus specialties, not to mention the inner self-help industry and Deepak Chopra’s royal court. Continue reading
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Joe Bageant: The bail out in plain English — Yea though we walk in the valley of debt, we speak with the tongues of brokers
The ultimate coup was to convince the entire nation that the well being of the rich, meaning the well being of Wall Street, was indeed the common man’s well being. Continue reading
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The Audacity of Depression By Joe Bageant
Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind Continue reading
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Are we there yet Pa? By Joe Bageant
John Raymond Castillo, age 81. Sunrise, January 14, 1917. Sunset, February 11, 2008. He leaves 21 children, 140 grandchildren and 302 great-grandchildren… — Obituary announcement on Belize’s LOVE Radio station â€The population of Belize? Officially it’s about 300,000. But if you include all the kids, it’s probably three million.†— Greg, longtime expatriate American in Continue reading
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Getting Out the Bling Vote By Joe Bageant
HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE: I know it’s unpatriotic as hell, but I just cannot get a hard-on about the ’08 American presidential elections. As in, I haven’t read or heard a word about them in a couple of weeks and could care less whether Hillary showed publicly some emotion, which was the big news when I… Continue reading
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Revenge of the Mutt People Joe Bageant
Source: Revenge of the Mutt People by Joe Bageant January 12, 2006 Bred for meanness ‘There are some things so disgusting that only a white man would be willing to do them.’ — Walter Wildshoe, Coeur d’Alene Indian Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe Continue reading
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Dead Man Shopping by Joe Bageant
—Stonewall Jackson prays for retail sales in the lost potpourri zone (CONSUMER WARNING: This essay contains no rant material.) By Joe Bageant Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation. —Ronald Reagan I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the Continue reading
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Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson By Joe Bageant
In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I’ve been lucky enough — or sometimes unlucky enough — to meet and write about many of America’s “somebodies,” mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians. When I was young, so-called “media journalism” then was just what it is now, what we called “starfucking,”… Continue reading
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Rising Above Politics — Can we quit talking and start walking? By Joe Bageant
8 May 2007 — Joe Bageant Well, lo and beshit! I never thought I’d ever see the day. But even in my hardcore Republican run hometown, many conservatives are quietly sneaking away from the sing-along around the campfire of George Bush’s war-crazed hootenanny. Most of them are ordinary bona fide conservatives. But others slipping off under Continue reading
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Three Nights in Philly By Joe Bageant
24 April 2007 — Joe Bageant Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes By Joe Bageant A fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America, which I now consider my home: “America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday Continue reading
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A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard By Joe Bageant
If there is one bright spot in the bleak absurdity of slogging along in our new totalist American state, it is that ordinary working Americans are undisciplined as hell. We are genuine moral and intellectual slobs whose consciousness is pretty much glued onto an armature of noise, sports, sex, sugar and saturated fats. Oh, we… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 