R.I.P. Joe Bageant (1946-2011)

Joe Bageant, to his friends and readers, was known as a 'loveable curmudgeon.'

That's a strange word, "curmudgeon." It's generally defined as meaning an  ill-tempered, difficult, cantankerous, 'crusty' kind of person--usually referring to an old man.  Joe wasn't all that old but yes, one could say 'curmudgeon' fits.  His writings were often what you'd call cantankerous; sharply worded grumblings spewed forth in passionate bursts that rattled one's complacency.    But, as Jon Winokur once said, "Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap, in  the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee....   Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers ... Their awareness is a curse...   Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor."

I admit it, Joe Bageant's writings unsettled me. When I first looked at one of his columns I kind of winced--at the liberal use of the F word (it jarred my eye's ears, so to speak); he called feces: 'shit'; derriere: 'ass' and highly annoyed: 'pissed', spontaneous utterances of the sort that used to get bleeped out on TV, for example) but--damn, what he wrote made sense, was what I myself often suspected or thought or felt but was too timid to tackle writing about, and certainly not that bluntly.

Joe told it like it is,  no holds barred.  I found myself going back, again and again, reading his  take on events and people and issues which helped me sometimes see the story behind the story, and an intriguing analysis from a perspective I'd not considered.  And he made me laugh, out loud.   Joe woke me up with his columns, made me see other sides to a thing, from more than one perspective.

The same things that bothered him about certain matters also bothered me:

The Pentagon and the administration hail depleted uranium shells and armor as a breakthrough in modern warfare. U.S. Representative  Christopher Shays said that any health effects the Iraqis suffer from  depleted uranium -- kidney damage, lung cancer, mounting birth defects  -- "pale in comparison with the benefits of regime change in their  country." Well then! Fry my ass on a plutonium skillet! Bring on the  bunker busters! Iraqi and Afghani mothers seem unimpressed with regime  change, even as they weep over twisted, blind infants. [From a posting by Joe on 5/23/05]

It wasn't just his choice of topics--it was the sustained outrage at and concern about things and the evident passion behind the words that resonated, from this (as Joe once referred to himself) "imperfect synthesis of snot-assed liberal and redneck Southern dirt eater."
[From a posting on 3/11/05.]

News of his passing saddened me.  In "Staring Down the Jackals," one of Bageant's posts from 2004, he wrote "There are still some of us old bastards around who have seen enough in our lifetimes to call things what they really are."  He described, in refreshing clarity, what some of us feared America was turning into but we couldn't say it, at least not in certain venues.  In August of that same year, he wrote about the "repressive stench" in Washington, saying "If the worst does happen in my lifetime, I want history to record and my  grandchildren to know that I gave honest voice to the chill I felt in  the air during my times."

Click here to sample The Best of Joe Bageant essays. 

When I heard about Joe's passing in an email this morning, I started thinking for some reason, about Molly Ivins,  newspaper columnist, political commentator, humorist and author, who died of cancer four years ago.  Like Joe Bageant, Molly used satire as a 'weapon of the powerless against the powerful'. Critic James Thurman said of her, " When Ivins writes, there has to be a jalapeno in every line." She, like Joe Bageant, "raised hell," with her words. 

I like to think maybe they'll somehow connect with each other in the Great Hereafter, as fellow former hell raisers, maybe even get to go deer hunting with Jesus (title of one of Joe's books).

I thought, too, this morning, of an elderly friend, J.F., who passed away some years ago in Vermont. Like Molly Ivins, J.F. too was what they called "feisty" (perhaps the female equivalent of 'curmudgeon'), where 'feisty' is defined both as spirited, spunky, plucky, full of animation, energy or courage (if you like the person); and pushy, ill-tempered, pugnacious, touchy and aggressive (if you don't). There's 'feisty' charming and 'feisty' annoying, apparently, depending on the observer's perception.

My friend J.F., too, was outspoken, that is, she spoke out, and loudly, about stuff that bothered her.  Not just the little stuff (like a poorly cooked, tasteless meal), but larger things--like a caretaker going through her jewelry box and stealing a family heirloom; the outrageous monthly charges for her tiny, rented room; or the determined, stunningly cruel actions of certain family members and sometimes, of mankind in general. She, too, was knowledgeable and articulate ...and funny. She chuckled even at herself, telling me one time that she was tired, she wanted to die--but apparently "Neither God nor the Devil want me.  So here I am, what can I do, ha ha ha ha ha ha," and she'd toss back her head and roar with laughter.

Joe Bageant, on the unwakefulness around us:

Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its entirety. The tadpole cannot conceive of the banks of the pond, much less the wooded watershed that feeds it. But old frogs glimpse of it.

Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice -- the moral one. Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted to the rationality and embrace the spirit...

This sort of suggestion, I've discovered, isn't all that enthusiastically embraced by most.)

All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot  fix  what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the  ruination slightly more bearable. Species gluttony is nearly over and  we've eaten the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are  cruel by nature (though a case might be made for stupidity) but because  the existence of consciousness necessarily implies each of us as its  individual center, the individual point of all experience and thus all  knowing. The accumulated personal and collective wounds fester and  become fatal because there is no way to inform the world that we must  surrender our assumptions, even if we wanted to. Which we do not because  assumptions are the unseen cultural glue, the DNA of civilization. If  we did so, the crash would be immediate.

No one yet knows with absolute certainty the outcome of our terrible  common plunge toward truth. But even in the worst of times, there is  glory in the sheer electricity of life ...  Life is never completely joyless...

What could be better than a meaningful life during meaningless times? 

  [Excerpts from The Ants of Gaia: "It's only the end of the world; quit bitching"].
 

My friend, J. F., was not a writer, yet I remembered the words of our many little conversations, as I have of some of Joe's and Molly's written words. They made an impact.  J.F. taught me that you can depart this life, carrying sadness, yet still look back on life with fondness, as in  "Life was a hoot.  It was .... interesting.  I had my say. Thanks for the ride."

 Molly Ivins reminded me that it's not easy, calling attention to darkness, or to an injustice--sometimes you just have to take to the streets banging pots and pans, if that's what it takes.  She meant that literally, by the way; but one can also bang with words--words that break down barriers of inattention, walls of indifference, words that make you perk up, that seep into your consciousness so you can't ignore them, words that compel you to think, and sometimes to act.

 Joe Bageant's words did that for me.  Paraphrased from the previous long quote:

~ ~ Find the truth and act on it.

~ ~ Do what you can to help others who
      who are suffering.

~ ~ You can say No to something you   
      feel is wrong; don't stay silent.

~ ~ Even if you live in meaningless times, 
      make your life meaningful.
 

So, thinking of Joe Bageant today, and Molly Ivins, and my friend, J.F.--feisty, funny spirits all (who some people would describe as "characters")--what they have in common, for me especially, is that they've made a difference, made me more aware, unknowingly encouraged me to stand up and fight back, make my words and actions count, find humor in even the darkest situations.  I applaud their indomitable spirit, their gutsy gumption, their wholehearted "Bring-it-on!-no-matter-what involvement in life -- but most of all, their unending resolve, to-the-very-end, to keep stoking that inner fire, still burning, still caring, still 'speaking'.

________________________________

*Joe Bageant's last book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir comes out on March 30th and is available for pre-order here. 

*Remembering Joe Bageant, on Dangerous Minds.

Joe B. on going inward

Apropos yesterday's insanely long self-reflecting pseudo-poem I was interested to read Joe Bageant's column today where he gives his personal solution to something I've been struggling with lately, namely, the individual's response to particular devastating events and progressively alarming situations nationally and globally vis-a-vis human rights, the current wars, the deteriorating economy, the maddening political climate and/or our eroding environment.  Whew.  All the distressing stuff all in one big overflowing basket.

Some people work very hard, to address and try to alleviate certain of these situations, in however small a capacity.  Others  register awareness, are concerned, may even be well informed, but continue life habits that contribute to the very problems causing the concerns.  For most, it's all just something one sees on the news, nothing that affects one personally, except perhaps the vague awareness that money (i.e., lack thereof) seems to be a big problem lately.  Life is still lived, pretty much as it's always been though, nothing's changed, really, in one's overall outlook. People, in general, though, do seem more worried.  At least that is the impression I get from all quarters.

Writer Joe Bageant left the U.S. and moved to Mexico where he pens dispatches about America's class war, among other things.  He touched on a dilemma I myself have been wondering about, i.e., what can one individual do about the stuff that's happening lately?  These are not happy times.  They're becoming increasingly uncomfortable times.  You hear phrases like "another Great Depression coming" and "World War III" and  "Armageddon".  (Not that everyone believes these will really occur, but it's in the air, so to speak.)

Anyway, a few try to steer civilization in a more evolved direction by tackling one issue at a time, and are failing.  "Why do we lose the important fights so consistently?" Joe asks.  "What has kept us from establishing a more just kingdom?"  Something is missing, he says, and he thinks it is, in a word, "the spiritual":

... the stuff that sustained Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and gave them the kind of calm deliberate guts we are not seeing today. I am not talking about religion, but the spirit in each of us, that solitary non-material essence, none the less shared by all humans because we are human.

Of course this is where a fourth of the people stop reading.  It's those words  "kingdom" and "spiritual." 

While those elite forces can own everything around us, and have proven they can make life quite miserable if they care to, they cannot own that thing inside us. The one that gives out the last sigh before sleep, and travels the realms of the great human collective consciousness alone. This is the consciousness that ebbs and flows between all external events. There is nothing mystical about it. Go sit in any quiet place with your eyes closed for a half hour or so, and that self will invariably say hello.

And this is where half the readers left will depart, because of the words "elite forces", "collective consciousness", and "mystical", ha ha.

This is also the self that our oppressors can never allow a moment's rest. Because when it finds rest, it finds insight, and can fuse the spiritual, psychological and material worlds into some transcendent vision that can at last [be] seen and sought after. It makes Buddhist monks rebel in Sri Lanka and creates indigenous liberation theologians in Latin America.

And there go the rest of the readers, because of the words "our oppressors", "transcendent" and "Buddhist monks".

Okay, I exaggerate.  But its true.  Certain words are "buzz words" for certain people and when one encounters them, they immediately impart a signal to the brain that warns:  "Oh oh, don't go there.  The writer is a such-and-such."  I have to laugh.  I, too, react to certain buzzwords.  When I first landed on Joe's website many moons ago and saw the heading: "Deer Hunting with Jesus", I almost turned away.  Glad I didn't. What a character.  And I say character with the utmost admiration.  Joe is what many of us today are reluctant to be:  Totally honest about who we are and what we think.  Joe can be rather blunt.  He cusses and says things that make you squirm --'cause it hits home.  But he's right on the mark more times than not, and writes what many think but don't dare say because it's too, well, blunt--almost, gasp, revolutionary. Not everyone's style or way of expressing things.

Continuing on:

Fortunately for Wall Street, the world's bankers, the military industrial complex, there is science, which they love so dearly they purchased it outright. Scientism has successfully sold the notion that spiritual awareness is superstition. By that accounting, the mind is no more than the brain, and love is a body sack of chemicals interacting. (A stunningly successful new public relations campaign by BASF chemical corporation campaign actually declares that love is chemical. Its success both here and in China would give Orwell the heebie jeebies.)

I know about Orwellian heebie-jeebies.  Recent history's full of them, though often too subtle to notice, unless you're paying close attention.  Didn't know about the BASF thing though.

Joe, like his readers, is "ordinary and fearful," reminding us that we all "live on the same planet watching the unnerving events around us, things the majority does not seem to see."   And while bloggerdom and the Internet bring together many of us who've never met but somehow emotionally or psychologically connect with one another, sharing the same affinities/outlooks/concerns, etc.,  "beyond that, we are each on our own, most of our waking hours, for the rest of our days."  Something a little hard to acknowledge, for some.  Anyway, Joe plans to pursue the 'kingdom within', "which is individual and does not much involve rage or politics--in other words, shut my pie hole and grow stronger, and with luck, a little wiser."  So next year by this time (he says), he's shutting down his website.  He's already written his last book, doesn't plan to write another, and the connection with his readers, I guess, will end.

That's a weird feeling, you know, to be abruptly connectionless.  Imagine--everybody suddenly no longer there within a phone call or keystroke away--all those people, loved ones included, no longer "connected" to you.  You're on your own.  Totally.  I mean, what if it weren't just bloggerland or distant  friends, etc.  What if it were everybody you know, including your entire family,and closest and dearest companion?  I'm not being morbid here.  Thousands of people all over the world go through this, every day.

But playing the "What If" game is very practical sometimes.  You learn to devise possible solutions to imaginary what-ifs so that if the time ever comes--and it horribly, sometimes does--then you've at least once considered the possibility and it might be a bit  less soul-shattering.  Or not.  You never know about these things.  Basically I'm an optimist, my mate even more so than I. And experience helps.  If you ever got out of--at the time--a life-shattering situation, and are now okay, you can look back and see what worked and what didn't, how long it took, what you could have done differently, both before and after, etc.  You do this by going inward, and you can call the lessons learned "spiritual" or not, that's just a term--for getting in touch with the part of you that knows, even when you don't, and you sometimes have to just stop, and listen.  I think that's what Joe means by going inward.  It's at least what I mean by it and they seem similar--his version of it and mine.

I was still wondering though, whether individual responses have to be an Either/Or choice. Either join a group and raise a stink and fight the Whatever, or go get quiet and change your life and find your inner peace.   

In any case, you do what you can, where you can, when you can, and never stop.  It shouldn't be a sometime thing, though.  It should be a way of life.  Not everybody thinks like that, not everybody cares. And even if they do, is that enough?  What can one person do?  Well it's not just one person actually.  It's one person here, one person there; three people here, five people there; a hundred people here, five hundred people there;   a hundred thousand here, two hundred thousand there, scattered over many theres, and I think they're increasing rather than diminishing.  I could be wrong.  And never, of course, anywhere near the majority.  But still ...

How many dozens of people, in their small way, helping one another, tiny random acts that're never noticed, ever publicized, seldom acknowledged, completely forgotten, in every pocket of the universe -- they've got to count for something.  Calm , deliberate guts"  (Joe's phrase).  Not fearful, crazed and worrying, swallowed up in uncertainty, but Calm.  Deliberate. And with Guts.  A stance that could get you through just about any situation.  Gandhi had it.  Martin Luther King had it.  Aung San Suu Kyi has it.  Not just the 'giants' but all the others, mostly nameless people living (and sometimes giving) their lives for justice sake, have it.

Joe was right that no one can "own that thing inside us. The one that gives out the last sigh before sleep, and travels the realms of the great human collective consciousness alone."  

This is beginning to sound like a speech, groan.  What you call getting carried away in the moment.  Unintentional, but you see what words do to you sometimes, they open up all kinds of doors and stuff comes tumbling out, making you think, so you start thinking out loud, the fingers start tapping, you're suddenly a-sea in a wash of words, reader beware.  Good thing only three people read this blog, ha ha.  But thank you Joe, you ol' curmudgeon down Mexico-way.  A bunch of words on a webpage, a line in a poem in a library book, a random phrase overheard in someone else's conversation-- how the written or spoken word can jar the consciousness, bring understanding--or at least open the gate to it, instill one to action, give a sense of hope--all of the above. 

Going inward, not as an escape, but to draw from a well of resources you didn't know were there.  And not just "spiritual" stuff but ... Going for a root canal, even:  Calm. Deliberate. And with Guts.  So not just the biggies but the little everyday things as well.

Thanks Joe.

Update:
And thanks to another Joe (Hutchison by name) for sharing the "pale blue dot" and quote from Sagan, demonstrating "the folly of human conceits" of which we have many.   He was absolutely right (Sagan): "Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand," underscoring "our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another ... to preserve and cherish" it.
Amen to that!


________________________
oops, slipped off the Brevity Wagon again.

Sunday Morning

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair ...[1]

Except it's afternoon ... and it's a bulky sweater ... and tea ... and a pear
but sun, yes, there's still sun ...

Nine little punch-yourself-awake reminders from Joe Bageant (writing from Mexico last week) in his take on the state of the U.S. today:

• We burn the grain supplies of starving nations in our vehicles.  

• Skilled American construction workers now unemployed drive their big trucks into town and knock at my door asking to rake my leaves for ten bucks. There is nothing ironic in this to their minds. 
  

• Energy prices are predicted to stabilize because we intend to burn the state of West Virginia in our power plants. 

• The corpses of our young people are still being unloaded from cargo planes at Dover Delaware, but from two fronts now. 

•  Mortgage foreclosures are expected to double before they slacken.

• Unions have been neutered and taught to beg.

• We have established a permanent underclass and deindustrialized the country in favor of low wage service industries here and dirt cheap labor from abroad. 

• We've managed to harden the education and income gap into something an American oligarch can take pride in. 

• We are the very products and property of these people and their institutions.

"The fiesta is over," says Joe.  "The economy as we knew it is dead."  

He's convinced that "Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions" but they won't be tried because Big Money not only calls the shots but is "constitutionally protected."

Kinda makes you want to scream.

As for hoping for "change" -- Joe Bageant isn't terribly optimistic.  He's not alone. Rants and outrage pour out from scattered corners of the country seeping frequently into print or the blogosphere, but little comes of it.  Powerlessness is rampant.  I am optimistic ... but even from outside its borders I feel the collective powerlessness.

Words are sometimes not enough.  People have to care enough to act; and uncertainty, fear and/or apathy prevent most of us from doing anything--even those who most ardently want to.  (Do what, exactly?  If  "it takes a village to raise a child, "[2] what would it take to raise the consciousness of enough beings to work together long enough and hard enough to ensure that a nation--any nation--not collapse upon itself and disintegrate into something no longer recognizable, no longer sustainable, or even livable?)

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.[3]

Meanwhile, back on the tube:  "Balloon Boy Dad Confesses to Hoax."  News at Eleven.

Went out and raked the leaves.  Took a walk.   Made more tea. Things will arrange themselves.  All in good time.

Perhaps ...