Raising up dead horses

Joe Bageant isn't happy as he surveys the detritus of what was the American dream. This guy is a downer. And unfortunately Peacenik saw Peacenik's self in Joe's article "you got your common man living on hope, lottery tickets, or the dogs and ponies." Yes Peacenik buys lottery tickets. Peacenik feels modestly anxious that Peacenik hasn't bought a 649 ticket for Saturday night.

But Peacenik said it before, Peacenik would rather trust the future to lottery tickets than to Stephen Harper or the rest of our oleaginous leaders or the corrupt and crooked stock exchanges. The DOW and TSX are in the red and only 4 hours to go till the closing bell. Does it matter? Do you have your lottery tickets?

By Joe Bageant



When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

Read on...

A Yard Sale in Chernobyl

After a long weekend Joe Bageant is like a tonic to clear the cob webs away. Here Joe is ruminating on what a disaster the U.S. has become. And how the sheeple have been propagandized into submission. Joe has a point. Peacenik is sometimes ridiculed when Peacenik offers a negative perspective on the end of the recession or the world. Negativity is somehow socially unacceptable. Enough said. Read Joe.



C hernobyl

by Joe Bageant

"It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.

And all those hushed and not so hushed shopper cell phone conversations, this one consoling someone at the home base pod:

"Oh I am so sorry, baby, but I think they've quit making the Ranch flavored Pringles. Yes I know you don't like the jalapeno Pringles. I am so sorry. Really I am." Both parties seemed genuinely distraught.

Read on...

A Redneck View of Obama's Presidency

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted May 27, 2009.

"It don't matter who gets to warm his butt in the White House chair. The top dogs eat high on the hog and the little dogs eat the tails and ears."

When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks. During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I've collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially President Barack Obama.

In America, all successful politicians are first and foremost successfully marketed brands. In fact, the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's 2008 marketer of the year. George W. Bush's brand may have "collapsed," as they say on Madison Avenue, but things don't change much. Rednecks instinctively know this:

Read on...

Peacenik wishes Joe Bageant sounded a little more outraged in this piece, rather than sounding resigned to what is going on. Meanwhile, in Canada, Flaherty announces that the deficit will be $50 billion. $50 billion. Flaherty has all the credibility of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. By the way, no mention of bank bailouts in the deficit story in the Globe. The suggestion is that all those bad unemployed people are causing the ballooning deficit. Joe Bageant may be happy going out and getting tanked but Peacenik wishes someone would grab a pitchfork and start the revolution.

Don't forget the Bush Protest at Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Friday at 3p.m. www.protestbush.com

The Audacity of Depression

punditman says...
Joe Bageant takes up where Hunter S. Thompson left off. Read the whole thing. You will even chuckle.

Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America

By Joe Bageant

One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.

So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers -- a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.

Immensely energetic and a lifelong activist for literacy and informed thought, this cigarette voiced Northumberland librarian has built the county's new little library, and even managed to coax enough money out of the local government for two employees. In a county with a population of 12,000, that's no small political feat.

At the moment though, politically speaking, the Obama-Hillary dirt fight is in full fury, so I asked the obligatory question of the week, "Who will you vote for?"

"Oh, Obama, I guess. It's so hard to get excited over the elections. Lately I've been just plain depressed," she said.

"About what?"

"Oh just everything. It seems to have become so pointless in America, as if we are entering a Dark Age. I've come to wonder why I do anything at all."

Keep Reading Joe Bageant's essay...