Joe Bageant

New Year's Day in an old, old world

Joe,

I can feel your pain, Joe. I wish I could be just as starry eyed as I can get with a new sheriff in town, finally. I do so like the man and his family, and it's been so very long since anyone in that oval hole in the wall was anyone I'd have a beer with.

Has mere observation for shenanigans changed the observed, all quantum like? Or am I merely a better observer with a larger bed of knowledge?

A big part of me wants to to let go and let gawd, as they say, get an Obama tattoo for my geriatric years and learn to nod and smile. But then I had to be beaten out of love with Bill Clinton, so maybe I should be smarter. To what end I'm not entirely sure. I've been fighting so hard for so long, and I'm tired. What have I accomplished other than raising children who distrust authority, my own included? Shee-ut.

Hallelujah, Allahu Akbar and Merry Christmas

Dear Joe,

I'll say it up front, I'm writing to gloat a little. In early July of 2007 I wrote to you to complain about the massive media smear of two former students of mine, a young Jordanian married couple who were arrested in connection with the botched Glasgow Airport bombing last summer. You kindly printed my letter ("Lies about 'failed terror attacks' in UK") and moderated some of the responses to it. Because the media offered no evidence against them, I was very angry to see their names (Mohammad Asha and Marwa Da'ana) and pictures included among a sort of rogue's gallery of evildoers wherever I looked that week.

Although I had known them slightly as teenagers when I taught in their school for gifted students in Amman, Jordan, my judgement was not based on affection but on the total lack of evidence offered and the psychological tricks used in the media to make the accused seem already proven guilty. For example, footage of previous terror attacks in the U.K. were frequently shown in stories about the case, although those far more deadly atttacks were completely unrelated.

The Only Game in Town

By Joe Bageant

Now that Obama has announced most of his cabinet appointments, he is starting to take a little heat -- feeling those first few incoming rockets that are the rightful due of all presidents. To some of us, his appointments of the nation's newest big wheels don't look so new. They look like retreads of the old Clinton ride. And politically informed people know that Clinton indeed took us for a ride.

But Obama says, "It takes smart people with experience who know how to operate our system." In other words, slick educated people. No problem there. After eight years of observing an absolutely falling down stupid administration, not to mention one as mean as a rattlesnake on a griddle, most of us would agree that it takes smart people. But we are a bit hesitant about loading the system with "slick operators." There is also the fact that the system IS the problem. Right now though, we're being shouted down by giddy mobs of optimistic liberals intoxicated on an election victory and pure hope. And after eight years of stupidity and cruelty, who can blame them?

Obama's election will keep liberals happy

Dear Joe,

It has been a very sobering experience to see all my "liberal" friends rolling on the floor in the throes of ecstasy over Obama's win. Miraculously, the democrats succeeded at what the republicans have been proficiently doing for quite a long time; convincing a large number of people to be ecstatic about voting against their own interests. Maybe the self destructive red neck paradigm needs to be adjusted to include shell shocked liberals.

My friends are so overjoyed about all the 'change' that is certainly coming our way that I can't bring myself to spoil their happiness with rude facts about what political interests Obama represents or how his advisers are responsible for many of the problems facing working class people. My lack of enthusiasm over his victory creates awkwardness among my peers and heightens my feeling of political alienation. After the election I had the queasy sense of being on the outside edge of a mass delusion.

World ruled by 'juiced' gangsters and mobs

Joe,

When I was a kid, I went to the San Genaro festival which are held every year in Italian communities in the summer. It is basically a carnival that raises money for the local churches. Italian food, kiddie rides and "games of skill and chance" are the attractions there. One of the things you can do is play the quarter game. There were about four of these little games built into a little trailer which is attended by some guy in his twenties. Four people could play at a time.

The objective is to win by rolling quarters down a moving chute and knocking other quarters off a ledge. You win any quarters you manage to knock off. You can aim your quarters a little to the left or to the right, but the angle which the quarters hit the mirrored surface is fixed. The angle of the chute is set in such a way that the quarters almost never land where they can push the other quarters off the table. But I did not know that.

The dog realized, it ain't about the hide

Joe,

All the way from Africa, I found your web site and love your work. Articulate, funny and your perspective, well, exemplary. You strike me as a gifted orator and if you were here in Africa, well you would be the old man that all the village children crowd to for stories on the full moon nights by the open fires for a taste of good story telling. Am sure they wouldn't have enough of you.

I have pasted a parable below for your reading pleasure. Please spare some time to go through it. I am just a guy like many of your readers curious about this world we call home and about all our habits and cultures that define and separate us yet we may just all be rednecks in the inside. Its simple but I thought insightful.

Hope is a way of addressing imperfect world

Dear Joe,

It's interesting how you mention hope and optimism in your essay, "The Sucker Bait Called Hope". Strangely enough, I just finished reading an essay about Christopher Lasch by Louis Menand. Menand's essay is called "Christopher Lasch's Quarrel with Liberalism", and it's a very good read. I don't know if you've read Christopher Lasch, but as I have read your writing over the last year, it has struck me that you have a lot in common with him. Like you, Lasch deplored the "we know better" attitude of liberal elites. He also had a lot to say about mindless consumerism and narcissism.

In one of his last books, "The True and Only Heaven", Lasch entered into an extended discussion of liberalism's failures, and specifically sought to invoke the notion of "hope" as opposed to "optimism". For Lasch, hope is "an acceptance of limits, without despair" (Menand), not a blind and stupid hope, not a mug's game, not a gee-whiz optimism in the future, but something far more substantial, far more solid, far more well defined.

Thank you for the painful truth about hope

Dear Joe,

Thanks very much for writing "The Sucker Bait Called Hope." I just finished reading it this Thanksgiving Day morning.

Several times I wanted to stop reading. I wanted to go find an article on Obama's new cabinet appointments or go pour another cup of coffee and put more wood in the stove, anything but read more of the painful truth. And, of course, what you wrote is the truth.

I'm glad I finished reading the essay. Yes, yes. Vote for the spirit. It's an affirmation I needed right now.

The Sucker Bait Called Hope

Making the best of a slow apocalypse

By Joe Bageant

We just concluded an election in which both parties talked about hope, one more so than the other. Hope, that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force, perhaps Jesus, or modern science, or some great political leader, or other -- as yet unknown force -- will reverse our national or personal condition ... will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then ecologically: Decline and eventual collapse. There is quite a difference between hope and understanding the facts, then holding justified optimism. Hope is magical thinking, a sucker's game. Politicians the world 'round fully understand this.

Consequently, we go into a new year with millions of Americans still clinging to The Audacity of Hope. And we do so because we are victims of learned helplessness, learned from the cradle as it is rocked by the foot of the Capitalist consumer state. Sure we can hope for movement away from domination of the weak by the arrogant, away from ecocide and genocide toward a better world. What the hell, hope is one of the few free activities in this society. We don't even have to put down the remote and get off our asses to do it. In fact, its delivered through television.

Relax, the super-rich will take care of us

Joe,

Thank you for Deer Hunting with Jesus. Great book on Republican deception and those who fall for it. Just found your website, thanks to a link on Crooks and Liars or Firedog, and I just started reading your essays.

"Nine Billion Little Feet" hit on the major problem the world has yet to deal with -- apparently for fear of offending silly old assholes who think we're still living in biblical times, and not recognizing that we have a choice between birth control/abortion or starvation/illness/war as ways to keep population in balance with resources. All while the richest man on the planet contributes his wealth to finding better ways to keep more people alive so they can grow up to buy his software. Apparently he's doesn't understand the concept of Whole Systems.