‘Eliminate suffering and peace with follow’

American author Joe Bageant talks to Insights about peace, Christmas, Obama and hope.

Last December Insights reviewed Joe Bageant’s acclaimed book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

Bageant’s publicists told us if we really wanted to understand why America’s working class voted Republican, why poor people without medical insurance were opposed to expanded access to health care, we had to read Bageant’s book. Because he knew from personal experience what those voters were thinking.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is the story of the great unwashed working-class poor white America; the churchgoing, hunting and fishing, Bud Light-drinking, provincial America; conservative, politically misinformed or oblivious, and patriotic to their own detriment.

It describes an underclass invisible in a society and a media accustomed to associating poverty with minorities and immigrants despite the fact that poor whites — earning $9 an hour with no health insurance and no job security — outnumber all poor minorities combined ... at least 19 million at last count.

Bageant takes us to their workplaces, places of worship, taverns, and neighbourhoods. We get-together with the heartland gun culture, buy a mobile home, and meet with some Christians who want a theocratic state.

Deer Hunting with Jesus was lauded by one reviewer as a “raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck”. Another described it as “one of the most prescient pieces of analysis about American politics and culture in this election year”.

The book also lays bare the roots of this year’s financial crisis and why dirt poor white America is still fiercely patriotic, anti-union and proudly votes Republican.

Using their own words, Bageant shows why this class of Americans carried George W. Bush to victory. Twice. And why they seemed likely to look for someone just like him in 2008 — despite economic policies that had wrecked their lives and futures, and their children’s futures.

But it didn’t happen that way. Even Bageant’s home state, Virginia, went Democrat for the first time in over 40 years.

So what happened in November?

Insights asked Joe Bageant.

How did he feel about the election result? Did the Democratic Party succeed because it took some of the advice offered in his book and found a way to get the working class vote?  

Oh I doubt Obama’s people need me to point out the obvious fact that the Democrats had no grassroots organisation and needed to develop one. His campaign was the most astute and functional in American history.

Remember that most Americans voted their party. What Obama did was go deep into enemy territory and get the votes one by one, and register new voters, mostly under-30 voters, which tended to be for Obama, even in very red [Republican] states.

These people saw their votes have an effect against incredible odds. They will be tomorrow’s voters, and in that way he has significantly affected future American politics.

Hell, my generation dominates now, but we’re dying off. Never thought I’d see the day when I was cheering the demise of the Baby Boomers for the sake of the Republc.

To what did he attribute Virginia going Democratic for the first time in over 40 years?

Like I said, most people voted the same way as always. But two things had an effect. One was that many more liberal people have moved into the northern part of the state from Washington D.C.December 11, 2008ation drive, which picked up 320,000 new voters, mostly Obamaites.

And again, like most states, Obama won here by relatively thin margin. The same tactics we talked about worked here too. Obama had 50 offices and 200 workers here. And they were deep into the most remote conservative parts of the state too.

As far as I know, McCain had none. He had far less money and far too much confidence in his hold on Virginia.

Apparently America’s fundamentalist Protestant white folk, frequently the subject of Bageant’s book, still voted Republican.

No, they really didn’t vote differently.

Insights was struck by the number of times the word “hope” came up in post-election news coverage in Australia. People interviewed in the streets said things like, “Now we have hope.”

Well, hope is just a four letter word best suited for Hallmark greeting cards. It can mean anything to anybody, and politicians exploit that.

But to some degree at least, Obama’s victory is a national rejection of the phony and expensive war on terror (a victory by a brown guy whose middle name is Hussein, no less.)

This will keep millions of American liberals and much of the world deliriously happy for some time to come.

And it truly is a step forward. But let’s not overstate the significance of a black man (or a white woman) sitting behind the old mahogany bomber in the Oval Office. Neither sex nor melanin is a key factor in negotiating trade agreements or unleashing cruise missiles.

Yup, he’s black and that makes his election a historic event. But even if Obama delivers his inaugural address backed up by Jesus Christ and a five piece band, he is nonetheless taking charge of a bankrupt nation, an empire collapsing in late stage capitalism, with the sharks circling.

One newspaper headline described hope as an American ideal. Australian broadcaster Geraldine Doogue said that the constant references to hope made post-election festivities sound more religious than political. English author Jeannette Winterson said, “Obama can’t save us but he embodies the hope and strength we need to save ourselves.”

And Bageant, in essays on his website, had already picked up on the language of Obama’s Audacity of Hope. He had written:

“We are victims of learned helplessness, learned at the foot of the state. Learned though every pore in our body from birth. We can imagine, and the stupidest among us can ‘hope’.

“But the fact is that if we even once seriously considered the action required to establish such a merciful movement, Christian or otherwise, we would blanch, run away in fear, and erect a wall of denial and excuses for our refusal to do that thing.”

“Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one.”

Hope, he wrote, is “that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.”

He said, “hope is a sucker’s game, even a religion for millions of ‘people of faith’ who believe hope and faith are the same thing. Ah hope!”

So what does it mean that people say they now have hope? Is it warranted or are people the world over still doomed to “a New American Dark Age that comes cloaked in glittering technology instead of a coarse woollen cowl”?

It means that the American people, politically speaking, are essentially like children. They will need to grow up and actually think if they are to preserve their republic from themselves.

Bageant once said, “Your ignorance is someone’s tool.” Are the people with “hope” still being used? Is this still the work of the corporate mindscape? Will they still succumb to the “inevitable brutality of capitalism’s march through history?”

Are the people with hope being used? Well, sure. We are all being used all the time in this system. The trick is to get used by a force for good. Odds are not good.

Political decision making in American style democracy works like this: Ambitious individuals acquire the power to rule over less ambitious folks by grappling with other ambitious people for the popular vote.

The people’s role is to accept their pandering for the public’s involvement. With luck, they will incite some part of the public to involvement in manipulated issues such as family values, animal rights or gay marriage.

Then in a final consummating act, they pull the voting lever in favour of the candidate who put on the best show, or provided the most engaging spectacle during the two bone grinding years of televised political mud wrestling.

This legitimises the mud grapplers and their affiliated party’s legislative agenda. Once elected, the candidate joins the American political class in manufacturing legislation of two types.

A - crowd pleasing laws promised during the national marketing campaign, laws against blowjobs and shapeless little stem cells, or cruelty to chickens and hogs in farm production; and

B - new laws that allow the diversion of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of the owning classes.

Ten months before the election Bageant said, “Neither a Ron Paul, nor a McCain nor a Huckabee nor Obama or anybody else is going to blow the trumpet and have the walls of Jericho’s corporate gulag/surveillance state fall down. They’ll fall down as the walls of empires always do, when the rot inside them becomes too great, when it is stretched too thin and runs its course.”

Does Obama then have anything to offer? Or, like other democrats and liberals, will he never be able to change people’s hearts?

The question is that, assuming he does have a lot to offer, and I believe he does, will he be allowed to create any real change. Deep change of the sort that can save our nation.

This nation has managed to f*** things up even under some pretty good presidents.

There are many, many destructive forces far larger than the president. That’s what makes it so hard.

In what Bageant called the “fuzzy-hearted Hallmark world of mass produced sentiment and emotions … where thinking is regarded as a rat in the larder of bourgeois smugness”, will Obama simply let people feel even more comfortably smug?

 That remains to be seen.

Barbara Ehrenreich, reviewed in December Insights, says, “The greatest capitalist innovations of this past decade have been in the realm of squeezing money out of those who have little to spare: taking away workers’ pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime.

“But somewhere along the line, the ethos changed from we’re all in this together to get what you can while the getting is good. Let the environment decay, the infrastructure crumble, the public hospitals close, the schools get by on bake sales, the workers drop from exhaustion – who cares? Raise the premiums, reduce the wages, add new mystery fees to each bill, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only when the poor suckers at the bottom stopped buying and defaulted on their mortgages did anyone notice them.”

Well, Barbara and I have done some appearances together, and I always come away in admiration of her take on things. The only thing I’d add is that when they notice the poor sucker at the bottom is down, they kick the hell out of him in hopes it will motivate him to get up again.

Bageant once said many people didn’t have any idea of the common good. But he also thought the American Dream was about fairness, justice and the thing that’s right and that everyone had the “eternal scale”. “If you go to the most fundamental level of what is just, every man will recognise it.” Obama, he said, represents that for liberals: “It’s all rhetoric but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good”.

So is he optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the (American) human condition?

 Well, if we define optimism as a more rational and informed form of hope, at this point I’d have to say no. There will be a few fake “recoveries” stimulated by the governmental and corporate picking of our pockets in the form of bailouts of the already rich, and we are certain to see some of Bush’s most egregious executive order breaches of our civil liberties reversed.

A new president can reverse those the same way the old one established them. But that still leaves some mighty big items that will never be dealt with: The impeachment of Bush and Cheney; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; single payer health care insurance; adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory US policy in the Middle East.

What did he like about living in Winchester, Virginia?

 Well, I live in Winchester only about half the year at this point in my life. I live the other half in Hopkins Village, Belize, from whence I conduct my own small third world development projects ... children’s health, housing, schoolbooks, and so on. I live on $5,000 a year (more or less), regardless of which country I am in. The rest of my income goes to my third world projects.

As for living in Winchester, it’s the place that shaped my existence. I tried to leave America in protest of George Bush’s regime, hence going to Belize a few years ago. But I found that no matter where I go the same moral problems plague me, even though the opportunity to do more meaningful things with my life are better in the third world.

For me, Winchester is full of comforting ghosts ... the ghost of my youth, the ghosts of my father and old girlfriends and ancestors. So when I walk its old streets I am wrapped in a deep sense of familiarity. Not many Americans today are fortunate enough to have roots. Winchester provides me with the answer to the most important question of mankind as a social animal: “Who are my people?”

Bageant said he was not a Christian but he thought there was a spiritual side, a moral side, to humanity; it was there for us to share together. Could he elaborate?

 I don’t have any lofty language for that. Either a person can feel, or can learn to feel the common soul and essence of man coursing in all human beings, and feel joy and unity in that, or he cannot.

Either compassion enters the heart through suffering and contemplation of that suffering and the suffering of all sentient beings, or it does not. But I think it is incumbent upon each of us to try to bring about a world in which that occurs in the maximum number of our fellow men. In the end, compassion is the only human value of any value. In it rests justice.

Apart from the “keep on buying” message, was there anything good about Christmas?

 The keep on buying message is the deadliest message on the planet. It means “keep on consuming the earth”. The sound of humanity is munch, munch, munch, and we’ve just about munched away the planet’s most vital resources. Even the atmosphere.

But there is plenty to contemplate in Christmas, plenty from which to draw peace, strength and insight.

I have not much use for institutionalised religion on the whole, but the essence of the message of Jesus Christ — assuming one can find it amid the chaos, wreckage and deception fundamentalists and religious bureaucrats have made of Christianity — is undeniably one path by which a person can find inner light, moral decency and, yes, even redemption.

Assuming one understands that we are not born perfect and certainly are shaped by an imperfect society from birth. Of all the messages of Christ, to me the most profound is “Feed my sheep.”

When we realise that we are indeed our brother’s keeper, and that being our brother’s keeper is more important than anything else we can do with our allotted life span and resources, we are set free to experience compassion.

If I have learned nothing else, I have come to learn that Western materialism enslaves the spirit and causes mass blindness. It is a consensual hallucination that only leads to increased greed and ultimately violence of one sort or another upon distant peoples, usually indigene, in the quest for resources to feed the furnace of our material desires.

We cause great misery at a distance and no small amount of it upon our neighbours at home in the practice of consumerism.

True freedom is living among the community of all humankind, looking each person we encounter in the eye, and acting from the reservoir of our humanity. Eliminating suffering of all kinds, to the extent we can do so.

Direct and unmediated action. Not some mediated experience that makes us feel good temporarily, such as donating money to vast “charitable institutions”, most of which are simply institutions. Institutions do not have souls or hearts, no matter what we have been taught to believe. Yes, they do good but true mercy and compassion, by their very nature, cannot be practiced by proxy.

The cover line for our December issue is about communication for peace. How important is communication?

 Communication, dialogue and so on are just words. And much abused ones at that.

Let’s not kid ourselves that if we only talk more the world and mankind will somehow heal themselves.

It’s easy for the wealthy of the earth such as you and me to want to believe that. But the true solutions begin with a more contemplative and reflective life, and the care of the soul ... and are necessarily thwarted by the wasteful daily busyness of our materialism.

Jesus did not text message his truth, and the Buddha did not have a cell phone. Yet we still hear their truth through the ages. They simply practised compassion for all sentient beings.

Communication in and of itself does not bring peace. Peace comes about when the souls of men find peace. By eliminating suffering in our fellow beings, we create the spiritual soil in which peace can flourish.

What is Joe Bageant reading now?

 Right now I am reading three books simultaneously: Southern writer and theologian Will Campbell’s moral memoir, Forty Acres and a Goat; Howard Zinn’s Passionate Declarations, and Trading With the Enemy, a marvellous first hand account of life in Cuba by Tom Miller.

Stephen Webb