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This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people
the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire
exist in every state in our nation. Maybe the next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be the kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mohandas Gandhi smile.
Joe Bageant Quotes: This book is written from
What white middle America loathes these days are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer. They will swear on a stack of Lands' End catalogs that they are not bigots, but, human nature being what it is, we are all kicking someone else's dog around, whether we admit it or not.
Joe Bageant Quotes: What white middle America loathes
Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's
Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to misunderstimate her.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually
The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire's far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor's eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia's Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.

Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they - and we - refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate f
Joe Bageant Quotes: The tide of our national
Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theater of the free market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working people to accept the American empire's wars without a blink.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Getting a lousy education, then
Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Never experiencing the life of
Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some sort of unvarnished foundational political truths. I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what psychiatrists call "no insight".Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those who are more educated to "bite my ass!
Joe Bageant Quotes: Along with the concept of
What could be better on the nearly empty return voyage than a weighty cargo, no matter how drunk and unsavory, a cargo that could load and unload itself and was actually willing to pay to serve as ballast? So unsavory were Borderer habits that upon arrival in America even fellow Calvinists, the New England Puritans, would not accept them.
Joe Bageant Quotes: What could be better on
Remember when welfare mothers were robbing us all blind and driving Cadillacs?
Joe Bageant Quotes: Remember when welfare mothers were
Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills
swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Nelson, do you remember the
The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda
Joe Bageant Quotes: The four cornerstones of the
Somebody left the American Dream in the toaster too long. It's now burnt to a crisp.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Somebody left the American Dream
Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Republican or Democrat, this nation's
Nearly all of these successful folks have made it in the business world by sticking with the free market ideal of survival of the fittest over everything else. They believe in giving no quarter, and consequently they are antiunion, pro-death penalty, and pro-war- that is, until they actually feel the war's cost in their own wallets and a big voice coming out of the sky says: You could grab more money if we did not have this war to pay for! This is America, where greed is christened "drive" and is deemed a virtue.
Joe Bageant Quotes: Nearly all of these successful
They [Christian rednecks] were so stupid that they couldn't pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were printed on the bottom.
Joe Bageant Quotes: They [Christian rednecks] were so
The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken. We don't manufacture much. We just burn up ever scarcer petroleum in the ever-expanding suburbs built with mortgage money lent to people who haven't a clue.
Joe Bageant Quotes: The reality is that our
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