Joe Bageant

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.

Sarah Palin is the Future of Conservatism

Dear Readers: Here we have a fourth article by An Anonymous Political Consultant, now writing under the pseudonym John Brown (Email: postpolitico@yahoo.com). His previous contributions to this site are: "Not New Ideas, but Identifying New Enemies", "Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus", and "Life in the Post Political Age".
-- Joe

---

By John Brown

When we look back with the benefit of hindsight at this year's presidential election, we will remember two noteworthy developments. The first and the most obvious one is the historic victory of Senator Barack Obama, and the other and much less noted one is the political birth of Governor Sarah Palin or more importantly the new prototype of conservatism her emergence represents.

Senator Obama's victory is most important in what it negated, the primary political narrative of our time. The conservative political and economic consensus, which has dominated this country since the start of the Reagan administration, is no more. Governor Sarah Palin's emergence is important in what it revealed, a snap shot into how and in what form the American right makes its comeback.

American problems are familiar in Spain

Dear Mr Bageant,

I am writing to tell you how much I have enjoyed Deer Hunting with Jesus, which I finished just this morning. I read the Spanish edition, Crónicas de la América profunda. 

I found your book by chance, thanks to a notice in my local library (the reason why I read in Spanish and not in English, although I will try to get in the original language and have a go at it again, it's really worth it). Here in Spain, the only picture we get from your country is through the movies and the television series. We eat your food, we wear your clothes and our kids copy the ways of the downtown kids in your country (talk about paranoia -- it's really disturbing to see a Colombian kid who has barely spent two months here, living in one of the slums in Madrid, Spain, and dressing and gesticulating as a bro in the hood), but there is a great deal we miss, because it is not the stuff of television.

Joe discusses the election and poor whites

The American News Project traveled to Winchester, Virginia to get Joe Bageant on video, talking about his book Deer Hunting with Jesus, the upcoming election, corporate control of damn near everything, and why poor people without medical insurance are opposed to expanded access to health care. On its web site introduction, the American News Project described Joe's book as "one of the most prescient pieces of analysis about American politics and culture in this election year."

The seven-minute video closes with 20 seconds of Joe picking his mandolin and singing.

-- Ken Smith

Sick and tired of re-fighting Vietnam War

Dear Joe,

Here's one of the reasons I'm voting for (in fact, already voted for) Obama: he is untainted by the Vietnam War.

McCain is a very dangerous man because he is so hungry to win a war, that is, to win Vietnam. I even heard him say in one of the so-called debates, "I know how to win a war." Oh, yeah? Not much evidence of that particular competence, but lots of evidence of a deep desire -- let's say, acute obsession.

Bible advice for the Barberette of Beza

Hey Joe,

I am not a Democrat, nor a Republican. I hail from the great state of Vermont, with our independent Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the few sane voices in Washington. I am going to vote for Obama. There is no choice as far as I see.

Well, I made a deal with the devil last week while cutting hair in prison. Seems all the heroin addicts that have found Jesus are voting for McCain (yes, they can vote). Tormented by the fact that I am an atheist, and on my way to hell, they agreed to watch the debates with an open mind towards Obama if I in turn would read the Bible. Ha, I of course, was thinking Wine Lovers Bible, or Poisonwood Bible, or my mom's great Gardening Bible.

USA betrayed itself and all its friends

Joe,

Hi from Australia. I've just read your essay, "The Bailout in Plain English". It's all too true. Of late, Henry Paulson, your Treasury guy, was quoted as saying that he finds the recent US government move to buy shares in Wall Street banks is necessary but as objectionable to those bankers as it is to him.

Joe, as a retiree in Australia who worked his ass off for 44 years to get enough money on which to live and now finds 40% of his retirement fund is gone, will you please tell Hank Paulson what's fuckin' objectionable. It goes like this, "Hank, you and your Wall Street hyenas with your unregulated, unfettered free market Greenspan baloney allowed this voodoo money to be AAA rated by the world's most trusted ratings agency, that icon Standard and Poor's, so that the multi-trillion dollar load of dog shit could be exported to banks around the rest of the world.