Jason Broadwater: Basically, just an intro here. I’ve seen a lot of interview of you starting to creep up. I’m sure that’s happened a lot in the past, and there will be more as your book comes out.
Joe Bageant: I forget how many there are. I’m going to be on Book TV and interviewed on NPR. All that stuff.
Jason Broadwater: Of course, of course.
Joe Bageant: I didn’t know, you see. They have publicists. I’m in shock. [Laughs.] Harper’s. The whole… arena. I’m kind of amazed.
Jason Broadwater: That’s terrific. I’ve heard you give a positive review, off-handedly, to Harper’s, saying that it’s one of the last good reading magazines around.
Joe Bageant: Yes, well, it depends of your definition of “good reading,” of course, and pretty much being a leftist. If Harper’s has a vice, it’s probably an overeducated group of people running it. But by God they tell the truth, you know, as they see it. They make some pretty good attempts. They have a lot of courage. As much as you can have and still be a publishing institution. Publishing in America is institutionalized. It doesn’t even know it’s trapped. I consider Harper’s the best of what’s available in America, but I’d much rather read an Italian leftist magazine. [Laughs.]
Jason Broadwater: So, do you think you can do anything within the system, within the institution? Do you think you can make change?
Joe Bageant: It depends, you know. Within the publishing world, you mean?
Jason Broadwater: Right.
Joe Bageant: Well, the publishing world operates on capitalist principles and, first and foremost, it must make a buck. Well, most of the greatest things said in this world, some of the greatest truths, wouldn’t turn a buck. But we’re information deprived by the mere machinery of the corpocracy that we have now. Thoreau couldn’t get published now.
Jason Broadwater: Do you think that capitalism, flat out, is bad, as a whole?
Joe Bageant: No. Karl Marx didn’t, either. He thought it was gonna save the world, if they read him closely. Of course, they didn’t know about ecological limits, then. But he said, at last we have a way to produce enough for everybody. He saw the inherent flaw in a feudalistic approach, an ownership approach, the control of money, fees, you know. And owning the means of production. No. I mean, there must be some reasonable balance. At the rate it’s going now, [unintelligible].
Jason Broadwater: It’s about self-preservation?
Joe Bageant: Well, when it pits people against each other. Workers have to own the means of production in some way or another.
Jason Broadwater: What about the concept that if you bring value, you will be rewarded, and that’s capitalism?
Joe Bageant: If you bring value, you will be rewarded? That’s an incomplete statement. I don’t know. That’s too hazy for me.
Jason Broadwater: A lot of the people, I’m sure, that interview you will try to either celebrate your leftism or to pin you down or challenge you…
Joe Bageant: Oh, I’ve been interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network. [Laughs.]
Jason Broadwater: Is it their job to try to bring balance to an interview, or just let you speak?
Joe Bageant: I really don’t know. I just sit here and try to make it up as I go. [Laughs.] The underlying points I try to make in the book and in the essays is brotherhood. The left thinks that’s a corny phrase. The right won’t even use it. They make no pretense. But, you know, we are our brother’s keeper. Somewhere underneath that, Marxists and Buddhists are linked together. It’s the common good. The American drive, the greedy drive that masks itself as individualism and accomplishment is so destructive to not just most of the rest of the world – the Third World in particular – it’s a destructive social contract, it’s destructive to our relationships with our community, with our family, and so on. Look how, in the name of success, families have been spread all across the nation, to where the jobs are, supposedly. Now, they’ve turned them into migrants, just for sustenance. Of course, in America, it’s the illusion of wealth, the illusion that someone is getting rich, the illusion that Formica counter top will spice up your life. It’s a mass hallucination that has been very consciously generated by marketing since the 1890s, you know? Certainly, it kicked off well after World War I. Right now, my argument is, we live in a hologram, created primarily by the media, not by some mean, evil scheme, but by ourselves, reinforcing the system. You know, capitalism is holistic and it comes together, but the thing is, that we live in a world of church spires and eagles and brave boys in Iraq. And all this stuff. Our languid south and the beautiful canyons of the west, and all this crap. America is mostly strip malls and suburbs and the guys in Iraq are getting screwed. We’re crushing another nation. We’re crushing duly elected officials. But Americans, at home, or in a bar room, or listening to a preacher in church, are constantly looking at the hologram. We’re trapped inside of it. All of our media spins this great, electronic message. And people can’t see outside of it. In fact, when they travel abroad, the average mook that goes abroad, and I don’t care if he’s a plumber or a university dean, travels with a bubble of America around him. He stays at a hotel and walks around and looks at Venice as if it were Disneyland. What’s going on there is a mass hallucination. It was bad enough when it was merely five percent of the world using up twenty-five percent of the resources. But, now that it’s become a dangerous, rogue machine, running across the planet with more arms than the rest of the world put together, it’s dangerous.
Jason Broadwater: With your background of the days you spent with Timothy Leary and [Allan] Ginsberg and the rest of the counter-culture and your introduction to Buddhism, would you say that any reality would be a hallucination?
Joe Bageant: Absolutely. You get the reality you want. We certainly are all islands of reality. But, a thing like television, a thing like movies, goes straight into the brain stem. It circumvents experience and you absorb that stuff, and you think you’re thinking about it, but you’re not. You know, you can’t. It plugs into the hard wiring at a very direct level. Your heart beats with the chase, you know? It’s real primal stuff. It changes consciousness. A lot of liberals think that we can blab on the internet and these words that we write and spin describe reality in some way. They’re nothing. They’re just words. Without action, we’re all trapped in it. The hardest thing for me is to even get outside of it at all, and I don’t, unless I go to another country. And I have to go to a third world country to even start feeling like a human being, to see what babies smell like, or the sun, and the wind, and the sea. After about two weeks of that, you go, “oh my God, what have I been doing?” What I’ve been doing is causing people to die because I want plastic bags. I ate a sandwich out of a plastic bag today. Look, I’m no organic hippie. Jesus Christ! I drink gin and I eat meat practically raw, but I’m looking at it and I’m realizing that the petroleum involved in its production, hauling, and manufacture, and so on. The wars for oil in the Middle East, the cheap oil fiesta as Kunstler calls it, a civilization built on the availability of it, an absolutely astounding amount of available, unnatural energy.
Jason Broadwater: Right. We fight off the energy of the sun by burning fossil fuels.
Joe Bageant: You know that you can’t ever build a solar collector that will pay itself back? A solar panel uses more energy in its production than it can ever produce in its lifetime. But that’s too large a thing to think about on the radio.
Jason Broadwater: In all this negativity, there’s all kinds of chords of truth being struck here. Is there hope? Do you see hope? Do you see a positive future?
Joe Bageant: For what? For civilization?
Jason Broadwater: For civilization, yourself, your children, your grandchildren.
Joe Bageant: Yes, though in a qualified way. Civilization, as Westerners currently describe it? What is hope? It certainly is not sustainable. And it’s collapse is imminent. If it collapsed in my grandchildren’s generation, I’d say that’d be imminent, that’d be close enough. That’d be bad. Nobody knows, but I’ll tell you what? There isn’t a petroleum geologist or thinker in the world that gives civilization as we know it a hundred years, based on oil. And there’s almost none of them that say we can make any kind of transition that can support the amount of people that we have now, much less an increase. This is beyond my expertise, though. I write about working class people in bars and in Christian churches.
Jason Broadwater: So why do you write about these things?
Joe Bageant: It’s the only thing I thoroughly understand and can speak about without feeling like I’m being a bit of a bullshitter.
Jason Broadwater: Do you find that there’s truth in talking about what you know, regardless of whether it’s just sitting on a corner, drinking a beer, or global warming or whatever it might be? Do you find truth in that?
Joe Bageant: I just write because I write. That’s what I’ve done all my life. And then the internet provided me an opportunity to get away from the paint by numbers crap that we get in newspapers and magazines. And I’m certainly not brilliant. I’m barely a good writer. I was absolutely stunned that, you know… I might be a little farther left than most liberals, but I’d be classified as a liberal and I was stunned at the average urban liberal’s incomprehension of working class people. I can say that most of the guys, if I go down to the tavern, most of the guys there are tough, God damned rednecks that will break your nose if you get them mad. And if I say the stupid, white, Southern, Scotch-Irish, murderous redneck gets back from Iraq, nobody will complain. Of course, if I say that he’s an overeducated, out of touch with reality, urban Jew, I’ll get a hundred damn e-mails. You know what I mean? We all have our problems, but we’ve got to start looking at one another, and not how we say it.
Jason Broadwater: When you write on the Internet, which you seem to have discovered relatively recently in terms of publishing lots of your work, do you find that you’re writing to the wrong people, or exactly to the kind of people that you should be writing to?
Joe Bageant: Oh, man, I used to think that you were just singing to the choir or whatever, but it became apparent pretty early, according to the e-mails, and there were a bunch of them, that it was a wide flight, much, much wider than I’d have ever guessed. Now, the book editors are looking at it another way, but as far as the internet, it’s amazingly democratic. Its ability to coalesce communities of people who are not necessarily alike. Last week, I got a letter from a twenty-four year old Marine, containing the deepest, most thoughtful things I’d ever seen. I get a lot of letters from eighty year old people. I got one from a woman whose father helped found the Nazi party. I get e-mail from Indians and Detrot blacks because all I’m talking about is class. Working class. And Americans have been led to believe that they’re all middle class. If the man tells you when to come to work, what to do, how to do it, what you’re gonna get paid, when you can have your time off, then you’re working class. [Laughs.] People have deluded themselves. Hospital technicians are working class. Class is about power, not wages. By that standard, then, there are only about eighteen to twenty-two percent of Americans that graduate from college or university, depending on whether you count community colleges and so on. Some of them constitute a managerial class, for the empire, and they don’t admit it. Half of them are liberals, half are conservatives. But the broadest swath of America, certainly seventy percent of it, is working class. The great lie is that they’re not. We still have the myth that the working class guy is on an assembly line, wearing a denim shirt. That assembly line’s in China. Everybody’s working class. Under the snow job, we’re all consumers now, not citizens. You have a choice of what you’re consuming. But what you are is a bunch of ants on an ant hill, being fed for profit by all the gizmos you can buy at Wal-Mart. So, if I have an argument or a plea, it’s to look at one another and see our lives. To see each other, across town. The guy in the little bungalow and the guy in the mansion. There’s plenty of people out here in these suburbs of D.C. in half million dollar houses, living from payday to payday. They’ve got to see their commonality and stop using the language of television. It’s a political language. It’s a language which excludes all the important things.
Jason Broadwater: Do you think the internet will fall into the same control?
Joe Bageant: I don’t know. I have no idea. I just know that it’s extremely useful. I’ll tell you, on the upside of it, I have never seen so… it’s half an antidote for the loneliness that comes with the American lifestyle, the materialist American lifestyle. You see these little communities form on the internet. I get a lot of crap saying they’re not real communities, but they’re a start at it. A real community is being able to walk down the street and know every one of your neighbors, where you can say hello and step inside and get a cup of coffee without having to phone ahead. I’m not saying we have to go back to the fifties, but a real community is where people know each other and look out for one another’s kids. I couldn’t get away with shit when I was a kid because the whole neighborhood would call my mom. The only downside of the internet is, and I look at mostly the left side of it – I get enough Christianity rammed down my throat here that I’m not going to go to any Christian sites – the only thing that bothers me is the energy exerted. Thinking about something and talking about something is not the same as doing something. You get the gratification. You get, in the Skinneristic sense, there’s a hundred people that agree with you. The first time I got a thousand e-mails or something over a story, the graification washed over me. It took a long time for me to realize that’s a false gratification. I must be doing something every day, in the first place, to be worthy, not just for agreement. If somebody is moved by something you write, you must go out and do something in the world to be worthy of it.
Jason Broadwater: Isn’t it important for people to find inspiration or connection with someone like-minded that turns them on to a new idea.
Joe Bageant: Could be. But I don’t find that it leads to any kind of physical action in the world, whatsoever. If we think that voting the right way, for either one of our parties is going to do anything, that’s a really tough delusion. The action may be political, but it doesn’t make a difference if we vote for Republicans or Democrats.
Jason Broadwater: Do we just retreat from the process? Focus on our inner self and find freedom in the midst of this craziness?
Joe Bageant: Nobody is ever going to convince us to leave the American lifestyle. All politicians support that. That’s what makes us a rogue nation. What do we have, two friends? Israel and Puerto Rico? But everywhere I go, people are so polite, once they know they can trust you. Do we want to be a rogue nation? Do we want to be an oppressor? Well, you know, as long as you like that SUV and that four hundred thousand dollar house, you’re going to be one whether you think you are or not. I don’t think anybody in America ought to be allowed to make over $20,000 a year.
Jason Broadwater: Really?
Joe Bageant: Let’s get down to some realistic level. Spread it around the world. That sounds weird to say that number. But I’ve seen a quality of life that didn’t require the quantity of gizmos that load your mind with exactly the holographic propaganda and stimuli that keeps you from being a human being. You know what it mean? Feeling good and hearing things and the experience culture. Right now, we’re developing a culture that self-experiences. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’ve been trying to find a way to write about it. It’s instead of a life. We really don’t need 80% of what we’ve got?
Jason Broadwater: How does it reconcile in your mind, being financially rewarded for what you do – probably more than $20,000?
Joe Bageant: Here’s what I’m doing. It’s underway and it’s going well. I’m going to live on four to five thousand dollars a year, starting in July 2007. Everything that I make from the book will be used in the third world, administered directly by me. Inherited wealth of any kind, even if it’s only fifty thousand dollars. This is kind of strange to people, who say, “it can’t be.” Get outside the hallucination of the United States and see what you think after your mind got clear after two weeks in the real world without anybody waiting on you or your radio on or something. And I’ve taken those steps. It’s complicated in America. My wife and I have had to separate our finances because I’m gonna quit paying income tax after 2007. They’ll come get it anyway, and that’s fine. It’s more in the act of not paying. They have their way of collecting. The book is one way of financing my next trip, deep into next summer, to do some housing and other things where they’re needed, in the interior. A little bit of money from a book goes a damn long way in those places. And we’re not talking about miserable, fly-blown poverty. I’m talking about the simple act of drilling a well that costs five hundred dollars and serves a thousand people. I don’t give to charities anymore, not American ones. I don’t think hey need administrative costs. You go over there, look people in the eyes, play with their babies and sing songs, you get drunk together, you go swimming, you catch some fish, you put in a hard day’s work, dig a drain field, whatever. And, man, it’s a real experience in the world, you know? It ain’t charity either. It’s friends, and brothers. It’s been a discovery late in my life. I’ve not always known these things.
Jason Broadwater: If it’s this same culture that gave us this amazing tool that is the internet, which allows us to hear views and perspectives from all over the world very easily, and it penetrates our culture, so that we’re not just brought up with Jesus as if that’s all we have ever known…
Joe Bageant: It derived from the inventiveness of man. We tend to attribute every good thing to some supposed virtue of capitalism. At this point, what is the internet but some entertainment device for most people? I don’t care if they’re sitting around talking about how far left they are. That’s what I do. It’s still a damn masturbatory device. I’ll believe in the internet as a viable service… believe me, I have friends in the Soviet Union and in the military in Egypt that write me, and it’s good that they do. When there’s a terminal in every village in India and people can vote on the price of wheat, then the internet will be doing something.
Jason Broadwater: But it couldn’t be there without someone making money to do it, don’t you think?
Joe Bageant: There’s a hell of a lot more systems than the capitalist system. At this point, capitalism is a militarily enforced belief system. I mean, I read this great thing the other day about how economics is just a belief system, and no economist will say that. But it is. It’s a damn mystical part science. It’s merely one little way of looking at things. There were these people in, I think it was the Solomon Islands, and their system of wealth was wrapped up in these three stone discs that laid in the middle of the beach. Nobody knew where they came from. A portion of ownership in these discs constituted symbolic wealth. That worked well until there were too many people and only three discs. All of a sudden, there were discs in the sea that nobody could see. And that allowed more people to have more symbolic wealth. These guys worked on this for five hundred years and had a society that build boats and traded and did just fine. It’s a belief system. That’s all it is. You can describe the world a lot of different ways. One guy was telling me – a mathematician – it’s not literal, but he said you could describe the sun as going around the earth, but the math would be too damn hard. I say, you have to step way outside, and that’s where I’m going to get mocked and stoned. I think Timothy Leary was the Galileo of consciousness. I learned a whole lot of that. I learned an equal amount from being in the military. Consciousness is what you make of it if it’s the only thing you’ve got. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. What passes for misery in this country would be comfort in another one. You just have to stand far enough back, and it’s more satisfying. Who would bother with it if it wasn’t more satisfying? It’s worth it to search for meaning. Everybody might find a different one, but there’s one common river of humanity. If you look long enough, you’ll find out it’s all the same.
Jason Broadwater: These salt of the earth folk that you write about often in the United States, these southerners. Do you find that this common concept of unless you accept specifically Jesus Christ as your savior that you’re doomed to an eternity of torture and awfulness, do you find that belief will always limit brotherhood?
Joe Bageant: No. I think the insistence that others believe it… and I know fundamentalists… Every fundamentalist is not a dominionist or a reconstructionist, believe me. But the leadership of those two lines of thinking have great proximity to power these days. The Republicans were not brilliant. The Republicans were not some great organized network. They had sense enough to know that fundamentalists had church lists. The people sitting in the pews, of course there are some fervent believers among them. The average guy’s trying to make his truck payment, and he’s going to the only remaining, functioning institution in America that’s giving him some sense of togetherness, of release. I can understand speaking in tongues. I come to tears nearly all the times I’ve been to a Pentacostal church. I feel the fire. It’s real. But it doesn’t mean you’ve got to bomb the piss out of Iran or someone else’s religion. I don’t know what it is about leftists and Democrats that want to write the hardest working people in America off. They go to the only damn community that they’re offered – a clean, healthy community for children, in the way that they understand it. No matter what they say, there’s an extreme lack of education in fundamentalist churches. They say, we have plenty of people with master’s degrees. But they’re all technological. Show me one that’s a Shakespeare scholar, damn you. Every one works in computers, or some form of technology, or accounting, finance. The thing is, they have forgotten the great throng. They didn’t forget them, they never knew them. It was just reasonable to assume, in the days when unions were strong, the Democratic Party knew where its best interests lay. But the Democratic Party is only interested in power. It’s not interested in workers. Jimmy didn’t like civil rights more than Johnson did, but the pressure was on.
Jason Broadwater: Isn’t any power figure or institution doomed to a self-preservation mode?
Joe Bageant: I don’t know. When you say it like that, I don’t know the answers to any of these things. I just say what my subjective experience has been. So, please don’t think that I know anything. I don’t know shit.
Jason Broadwater: I’m a 30-year-old man. You’ve lived a lot longer than I have. Is there anything you can tell me, any advice, any direction you’d like to point me in?
Joe Bageant: No. I’d rather not take on that role. Of course, you’re welcome to stop by anytime. We’ll cook, and drink beer, and play guitar anytime you want.
Jason Broadwater: That sounds nice.
Joe Bageant: I will tell you one thing. This next generation, the very first time someone ever interviewed me, boy, they got a harder fight than I ever saw. And I haven’t been a ver good fighter. I’ve screwed off half my life. If there’s gonna be any justice at all, man have they got a fight on their hands. Those of them that are even willing to. But, then again, my focus is on change. Before the average individual… I’ve got three kids. One’s 37, one’s 22, and one’s 24. And, what I want for them is that they have an inner life. Because as long as a long and rich and viable and I have to say moral and just inner life is preserved – and it’s preserved through fighting for it. You have to fight. You have to stand up. If you have moral values, you will be challenged for it almost daily. And most of it is in the form of conformity. Something will tell you to keep your mouth shut when you don’t need to. This next generation’s going to be living a heck of a lot smaller. I’m sorry that my generation – they were mostly Yuppies – despite all this bullshit about the sixties, 99% of them were a bunch of damn college kids that didn’t know shit from shinola. About one percent of them were serious. And they were real seekers. I told somebody in a letter the other day, they’re still out there, they’re sixty years old. They’re working in social work. They’ve been divorced twice. They’re still trying. But that was a very small number of people. You see the pictures of the big demonstrations. Hell! That’s just people along for the party. The media is just like them today, focused on the strangest looking and the wildest. There was nothing special about that generation as a whole. Thomas Frank’s, “The Selling of Cool,” is 99% true. The only reason it’s not 100% true is that he was a little too young and a middle class guy himself, so he didn’t get the whole thing. But the reason there’s all these old gray beards like me sitting around is because there was an opportunity for self-realization. The window, the door, whatever, was open. It was very clear, and having seen it once, you’d never forget it. You know what can be, and you never, ever forget what can be.
Jason Broadwater: Mr. Bageant, I very much appreciate your time. It was a wonderful interview and I wish you the best of luck.
Joe Bageant: I’m kind of meandering. I don’t now what to say at these things.
Jason Broadwater: It’s been great. I wanted it to be that way and not your stock interview that you’re going to have so many of coming up.
Joe Bageant: I’ve done some weird ones. I don’t turn down the Christian broadcasts either. They want to debate Biblical stuff. Nobody wins, nobody loses on this stuff. You’d be surprised how well fifty percent of them go. Of course, I never listen to them. I could be the devil when they’re done.
Jason Broadwater: Thank you very much.
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