This tribute to Joe Bageant originally appeared last May in La Cuadra, a print magazine published in Guatemala. The magazine recently posted the following to the web, and here it is.
Joe Bageant is dead, Joe Bageant is dead. Now hang down your head, Joe Bageant is dead.
It is with a heavy heart that we share that news. Cancer got him in the end. Regular readers will recognize his name as Joe was a steady contributor to La Cuadra over the years. Your editors had been fans of his for a long time, but when we first started this project we never imagined we’d actually land his great talents for our magazine. Then, one evening back in 2008, as we were necking beers with our good friend Earl The Retired Bank Robber, Joe’s name came up. I’d just stumbled upon Joe’s website and discovered a trove of essays I’d not seen before. When I asked Earl if he’d ever read Joe’s stuff, he grinned and said, “Been friends with that old bastard for years. You want me to call him up and see if he’d do something for the rag?”
Kingdom of Survival, a documentary film in which Joe Bageant is a focal point, will premier at the World Film Festival (Festival des Films du Monde) in Montreal, August 18 through August 28. The segments of the film with Joe were made more than a year ago. Before he died last March, Joe had seen an unfinished version of the documentary and told director M. A. Littler that he was pleased to be a part of the film. In addition to Joe, the documentary has interviews with Noam Chomsky and Mark Mirabello -- plus a reclusive cabin builder, an anarchist book publisher, and a folk musician.
Here is a trailer for Kingdom of Survival. For those who don't know Joe Bageant, he is the second speaker in this clip.
The festival will have a total of 383 films from 70 countries. The awards jury will be presided over by Spanish director Vicente Aranda. Other highlights of the festival are a tribute to Catherine Deneuve and a master class in filmmaking with Claude Lelouch.
Kingdom of Survival press release (français ci-dessous)
THE KINGDOM OF SURVIVAL seeks out radical and alternative visions that challenge the status quo and features Prof. Noam Chomsky, Joe Bageant, and Mark Mirabello.
The Kingdom of Survival is an interdisciplinary documentary combining speculative travelogue and investigative journalism in order to trace possible links between survivalism, spirituality, art, radical politics, outlaw culture, alternative media and fringe philosophy. Circling through themes of utopianism, globalized capitalism, anarchism, intellectual and spiritual self-defense, religion and art, the film investigates physical and psychological survival strategies practiced by groups and individuals in a conflict-ridden and confused post-post- modern world.
Maverick writer and filmmaker M. A. Littler hits the outlaw highway in search of visions that challenge the status quo.
On his journey Littler crosses paths with renowned linguist and dissident Prof. Noam Chomsky, outlaw historian Dr. Mark Mirabello, gonzo journalist Joe Bageant, legendary reclusive cabin builder Mike Oehler, anarchist book publisher Ramsey Kanaan, egalitarian radio host Sasha Lilley and folk musician Will "The Bull" Taylor.
Together they explore radical and alternative visions for the 21st century.
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The Kingdom of Survival est un documentaire interdisciplinaire qui combine enquête-itinérante-spéculative et journalisme d'investigation afin de tracer des liens possibles entre le survivalisme, la spiritualité, l'art, la radicalité politique, la culture hors-la-loi, les contre-médias et la philosophie de marge.
Naviguant autour des thèmes de l'utopie, du capitalisme mondialisé, de l'anarchie, de l'auto-défense intellectuelle et spirituelle, de la religion et de l'art, le film étudie des stratégies de survie physique et psychologique telles qu'elles peuvent être pratiquées par des groupes ou des individus qui ne se reconnaissent plus dans une société post-moderne régie par la confusion et les conflits permanents. M. A Littler, écrivain et cinéaste dissident, taille la route à travers l'Amérique à la recherche de visions qui défient le statut quo.
Au cours de son voyage il croise le chemin d'un objecteur de consciences et linguiste renommé, Noam Chomsky, d'un universitaire spécialisé dans l'histoire des Hors-la-lois, Mark Mirabello, d'un écrivain et journaliste gonzo, Joe Bageant, d'un légendaire ermite et constructeur de cabanes à 50 dollars, Mike Oheler, d'un éditeur de littérature anarchiste, Ramsey Kanaan, d'une productrice de radio égalitaire, Sasha Lilley, et d'un musicien de Folk, Will « the Bull » Taylor.
Ensemble ils explorent et proposent des visions radicales et alternatives pour le XXI ème siècle.
Here is an outtake from The Kingdom of Survival, a documentary now in production that includes interviews with Joe Bageant, Noam Chomsky, a radical book publisher, a cabin builder, a musician, and a radio host. This segment was shot one year ago when Joe was visiting his home in Winchester, Virginia.
"Hemingway's Whisky" was written by Guy Clark and became the title for Kenny Chesney's recent album.
Given how much we had in common, it’s perhaps a bit odd that Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I never met (although I think we did correspond at one point). He even wound up living in Mexico a good part of the time. But the real connection between us is the congruence of perception regarding the United States. Joe came from unlikely roots to have formulated the political viewpoint that he did: working-class, right-wing, anti-intellectual, flag-waving, small-town Virginia. A “leftneck,” someone dubbed him; it’s not a bad description.
There aren’t too many leftnecks in the United States; of that, we can be sure. This was the source of Joe’s frustration: extreme isolation. Because he realized that the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time. He likened the place to a hologram, in which everyone in the country was trapped inside, with no knowledge that the world (U.S. included) was not what U.S. government propaganda, or just everyday cultural propaganda, said it was. He watched his kinfolk and neighbors vote repeatedly against their own interests, and there was little he could do about it. The similarity between his last book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, and my forthcoming Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline, is in fact quite startling. True, I’m analytical where Joe is homey, and my historical perspective is that of 400 years rather than just the twentieth century; but Joe’s way of addressing the issues is gritty, and right on the money. One can only hope that his book gets the posthumous attention it deserves.
It was difficult not to take an instant liking to Joe Bageant.
Soon after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential elections, Socialist Review called him up for his opinion on the matter: "I always say that if Obama was delivered to the White House with Jesus Christ, a five-piece band and six gilded seraphims holding up his fucking balls he still won't be able to do anything because the country's broke and Congress is bought and sold."
It was with that one long, angry sentence, I became an admirer of this "redneck revolutionary".
Joe's wit tore through the fog of myth which surrounds the poorest working class people in the US. For Joe, they weren't the lazy, stupid caricatures drawn by the establishment media and politicians. They had a heart, but they had been used up and forgotten by capitalism.
One of the reviews on Amazon suggested that Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir should be required reading for all American schoolchildren, and I heartily agree. The picture Joe paints of what’s happened “his people” in the rural south applies to working men and women everywhere in America. Far from being only the family memoir I expected, Rainbow Pie is really a story of the corporate takeover of America from the point-of-view of the common working man and woman. There is essentially no difference between what has become of the world Joe describes around Winchester, Virginia, and the world I grew up in near New Haven, Connecticut. In both cases, the good jobs are gone, both on the land and in the factories.
The chief difference between the two is that, while “Joe’s people” are clinging to their guns and religion to protect them from what they see as an overreaching government, mine, in the liberal north, are clinging to the faint hope that Obama, the magic-man is going to somehow save them from their own stupidity. Both ideas are equally divorced from reality.
How has the community you grew up in changed today?
Today there are the old ones who remember, but they're dying. There are people in my generation, but we ain't spring chickens ourselves. Then there is a small contingent of hippies who moved there to look after the land. They are wonderful. Then there are a lot of well to do people from Washington DC who have their hobby farms. The closest ancient old town, George Washington's Bathtub, is very fortunate that the gay community took it up as a place to come on weekends or to buy up little farms. But the average person is definitely among the high unemployed. The county I describe is one of the richest in West Virginia. Can you imagine what the poorest are like? They are goddamn horrible.
Joe Bageant was my brother. Not in a literal sense, of course: we came from different countries, although with similar rural backgrounds, he from Virginia, I from Lincolnshire in England.
Nor do I have any need for a surrogate brother, having five real ones, including a twin. Joe was my intellectual brother: we cared about the same things, shared the same, socialist, dreams and loved to articulate the thoughts that most men keep to themselves. The rhetoric did, occasionally, drift into the fanciful, such as the time he confided his plans for the future to my wife Jools and I over a well-liquored dinner at his home in Winchester, Virginia. At the time Joe was splitting his life between there and Belize, but the latter haven was becoming too small for him. “I’m off to India,” he said, “to talk to the wise and holy men in the mountains and on the plains. And, in a few years, when I die, I’m going to be cremated in a blazing barge on the Ganges.” Me? I’d be happy for my remains to be packed in a refuse bag and dumped on a wooded slope back home in England, I replied.
Did you ever stand and shiver, because you was lookin’ in a river ...? — Folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
By Joe Bageant
The United States has always maintained a white underclass — citizens whose role in the greater scheme of things has been to cushion national economic shocks through the disposability of their labor, with occasional time off to serve as bullet magnets in defense of the Empire. Until the post-World War II era, the existence of such an underclass was widely acknowledged. During the Civil War, for instance, many northern abolitionists also called for the liberation of “four million miserable white southerners held in bondage by the wealthy planter class”. Planter elites, who often held several large plantations which, together, constituted much or most of a county’s economy, saw to it that poor whites got no schooling, money, or political power. Poll taxes and literacy requirements kept white subsistence farmers and poor laborers from entering voting booths. Often accounting for up to 70 percent of many deep-Southern counties, they could not vote, and thus could never challenge the status quo.
Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass; or, being firmly placed in the true middle class themselves, can even agree that such a thing exists. Apparently, you can’t smell the rabble from the putting green.
Lose all your troubles, kick up some sand And follow me, buddy, to the Promised Land. I’m here to tell you, and I wouldn’t lie, You’ll wear ten-dollar shoes and eat rainbow pie. — “The Sugar Dumpling Line,” American hobo song.
“Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass,” writes Joe Bageant on page 2 of his second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.
So what’s this self-professed and proud-of-it “redneck” do? This memoirist combination John Steinbeck, Michael Harrington, Henry Thoreau — with a funny bone to wallop your gut — what’s he do but produce the best book on the unsung 60 million (cozened to vote against their own self-interest, fodder for corporations’ wars) — write the best book on them that anyone of his generation has written!
"Poet", "prophet", "hillbilly revolutionary", "progressive redneck with a conscience" — these are some of the descriptive terms that have been conferred on Joe Bageant who died on March 26. Steve Austin of the Australian Broadcasting Company called him "The Woody Guthrie of the typewriter" for he championed the cause of the "redneck", a social group he saw as being one of the most marginalized and disenfranchised in America.
Joe was a man of wisdom, intelligence and penetrating insight, but what made him really special was his warm, wry — sometimes acerbic — sense of humor and his direct no-frills honesty. He was also, in my view, a kind of a genuine working class liberation theologian — at least he would have been had he believed in God!
Let me be up front about things: I want you to buy Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. I want you to buy it not because I have any financial interest in it. I don't. I want you to buy this book because it is a magnificent memorial both by and to one of the best American writers of the waning of the 20th and dawning of the 21st centuries. I want you to buy this book because, as the line from "Death of a Salesman" notes, "Attention must be paid".
I met Joe Bageant online in 2007. After reading Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War and many of his essays online, I sought Joe out for an on-air interview, which he gave me with what I came to know as his characteristic great good humor. From that conversation (the only one in which I have given over an entire show to a guest) forward, I knew I had a friend and comrade. Our conversations thereafter only cemented that understanding.
Joe Bageant was an extraordinarily gifted writer and thinker. Author of Deer Hunting with Jesus and countless essays and editorials on politics and society, Joe was a champion of human rights and a fearless critic of our government’s mistreatment of its working class. His writing is imbued with compassion but also a caustic wit that laid bare the working class’s tendency to do what is in their own worst interests. Watching Joe tear into the Teabaggers was like watching an extremely large feral cat play with its food. His death comes at a time when his voice is needed more than ever. I’m not sure there’s anyone out there that can fill the void.
This is not an obituary. I’m not trying to give the reader an overview of Joe’s life in a few paragraphs. I am sharing a few of my memories of Joe as a friend and writer.
A Review of Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir
Cotton never saw much cash, and never got rich by any means. Not on the ten-cent and fifteen-cent purchases that farmers made there for over one hundred years. Yet he could pay Jackson Luttrell for the tomato hauling -- in credit at the store. That enabled Jackson to buy seed, feed, hardware, fertilizer, tools, and gasoline, and farm until harvest time with very little cash, leaving him with enough to invest in a truck. Unger could run his tomato cannery and transform local produce into cash, because he could barter credit for farm products and services. This was a community economic ecology that blended labor, money, and goods to sustain a modest but satisfactory life for all. -- from Rainbow Pie
I don't know where to start with Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. It's a book of two sides, two faces even. On the one hand there's Joe's evocative, heartfelt nostalgia for a life destroyed by corporate capital and on the other, his anger and frustrations, rants on occasion, as if analyzing sets off an uncontrollable chain reaction to how capitalism destroys human beings and all in the name of free choice! It's a frustration many of us lefties feel, a sense of powerlessness made all the worse by the knowing.
Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant will be published by by Penguin and Scribe (Australia) in late November in Australia and South Africa and some time next year in the US, UK and Canada. This is a selection of 25 of Joe's online essays. Before he died, Joe and I had talked about such a book, even though he initially had doubts that people would pay for something that's available for free on the web. But, many emails from his readers convinced him that there are sufficient number of people who prefer the feel of a real book rather than reading on a computer screen.
I am already anticipating questions from readers: "How could you possibly have left out my favorite essay?" Well, I had to cut 50 essays to get under the 80,000 word limit. Two of my favorites by Joe didn't make it. If the book sells well enough, maybe there will be another volume.
Any proceeds from sales of the book will go to Joe's favorite charities.
Joe died last March, but his email is still being read. His wife and children send their deep appreciation to his friends and readers for all their kind words.
, is in fact quite startling. True, I’m analytical where Joe is homey, and my historical perspective is that of 400 years rather than just the twentieth century; but Joe’s way of addressing the issues is gritty, and right on the money. One can only hope that his book gets the posthumous attention it deserves.
