An Interview with Joe Bageant
Andrew Paterson—08/2004 |
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You have probably
read one of Bageant's articles, but who exactly
is Joe Bageant? We interview him on his life, his
work and his newly found internet cult status. |
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 WAS FIRST CONTACTED by Joe Bageant back in April this year,
when he sent me, out of the blue, his article Sleepwalking
to Fallujah. That article was written in a way
that only a top writer can, and soon afterwards, more
pieces followed. From his work and some email exchanges,
I realized that Bageant is an extraordinary man as
well as a very gifted writer, with a unique take on
the American political situation that ensures the huge
popularity of his articles and his growing internet
cult status. |
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| A product of a working class
Virginian background, 35 years experience as a writer
and editor, as well as personal friendships over many
years with some of the most progressive thinkers of
our time — including Timothy Leary, Stephen Gaskin,
Allen Ginsburg, Trungpa Rinpoche, William Burroughs,
John Lilly and Marshall Mcluhan — have given
Bageant an education that would be the envy of any
Ivy League graduate, a writing ability that is certainly
comparable to Gore Vidal's, and an obsessive drive
to champion the ordinary men and women of America. |
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| Many people mistakenly believe
that Bageant is somehow anti-American, that this openly
socialist writer hates his country and democracy. The
truth is Bageant absolutely loves his country and its
democratic ideals, which is why he writes such vitriolic
articles about what the Bush administration is doing
to these ideals — hijacking patriotism to support
a corrupt and insidious government that is rapidly
turning the US into an Orwellian police state, and
other countries around the world into US military bases.
In his view, America, the icon of freedom, is being
played in the same way that the Nazi Party played pre-war
Germany. Bageant is a man who, like Michael Moore,
feels compelled to speak out for freedom, justice and
democracy, the bedrock of the country he loves; although,
in our topsy-turvy world of disinformation and ignorance,
he fully accepts that such sentiments will often get
one labeled as "unpatriotic" or "anti-American". |
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| The reason that you have
probably not heard of him before, is that Bageant is
not an ambitious writer, and has been happy to live
the life of a low-profile magazine and newspaper editor,
although as a senior editor with Primedia Magazine
Corp., publishers of over 300 American magazines, he
is certainly highly regarded within his profession.
All that changed, however, when Bageant discovered
the internet earlier this year and realized that it
gave him the perfect platform to freely speak his truth.
Writing a string of uniquely perceptive articles during
these dark times in America's history have put an end
to that relative obscurity, thrusting Bageant and his
message of a true and caring democracy squarely into
public awareness. |
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| I am privileged here to
present an exclusive interview, the first as far as
I am aware, with this extraordinary writer: |
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| * * * |
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| AP: Thanks Joe for agreeing to be
interviewed by a tiny online magazine like ourselves.
I know that you are a person who has always championed
the little guy. Why is that? |
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| Bageant: Well,
hell. I come from a long line of little guys. My
daddy never made more than $55 a week in his life,
until he was finally so sick he had to go on the
dole and get Social Security. He never got past the
eighth grade and worked his dick into the dirt. Had
his first heart attack before he was 40. And I myself
have worked construction labour, in car washes, loaded
rail cars, even once had a job chopping up dead rotten
hogs with an axe on a big hog industrial farm. I
come from America's invisible and non represented
people, the ones who shovel the shit and seldom complain.
So now I am finally in the middle class, sort of,
but I still write from the vantage point of my people
because it's the only thing I really know much about.
That and lobbing hand grenades at this rogue nation
of mine. |
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| AP: Tell me something about your
childhood in Virginia? How did a Lefty come out from
the cradle of Neocon America? |
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| Bageant: I
grew up very poor at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains
on the Virginia/West Virginia line. My first 14 years
of life were spent in the country. Actually they
were rather happy years, despite the relative poverty.
Nearly everyone else there was poor too, and we never
thought much about it. We feared god, hunted deer,
worked hard and never expected much, materially speaking. |
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| But I was especially lucky because
I saw the end of an era in Appalachia, a peaceful subsistence
farming lifestyle of my grandparents. I went to a one-room
schoolhouse, the same one my father and grandfather
went to, carried water and chopped wood and had countless
hours of solitude playing in the forests and imagining
things. Hell, we didn't have a lot of toys and crap,
so we had to use our imaginations. I think it had a
lot to do with becoming a writer. |
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| Then when my dad moved us into
town so he could work at a gas station, life got complicated.
There were class issues among the town kids. In my
hometown of Winchester, Virginia we have a throwback
class system, left over from the days of English settlement.
If you don't have the right last name in my town, or
are not useful to someone who is from the right family,
your name is shit. You're gonna have to leave to be
anything in life. |
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| So I left. Quit school in the
11th grade and went into the Navy at age
16. Later I got a high school equivalency diploma and
went on with school. Much later.because when the Sixties
started happening I jumped in head first, stark nekkid
and screaming for glory. Headed west to join the counter
cultural revolution. Lived in a school bus, worked
all sorts of labour jobs, ate lots of acid and began
to write. That went well from the very beginning, in
as much as everything I wrote got published somewhere,
usually in hippie or student newspapers, and sometimes
in national mags. People seemed to like it. So I figured
what the hell? I must have found a vocation in life!
It also eased my soul a lot. I wrote approximately
in the same way then that I do now. It was shallower
though because I didn't have as much experience in
life. Fewer convictions. |
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| AP: Who were the people who were
most influential to you growing up? |
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| Bageant: At
first I worshipped my father and grandfather and
all my rough and tumble uncles who knew how to butcher
a hog, plant by the stars and fix any damned mechanical
thing that ever got broken. Real survivors. Real
men of the old school. But as I began to develop
an intellectual life, we had less and less in common.
Finally, by my early teens, we didn't understand
each other at all. I retreated into books about art
and music and never came back. |
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| As far as writing goes, I was
influenced by all the usual suspects of my generation,
Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Gaye Telese, William Styron,
Genet, and especially all the Southern writers, Welty,
Willie Morris… not to mention a lot of people
who never got the respect they deserved, especially
poets like Marc Campbell of Taos, New Mexico and Jack
Collum of Boulder, Colorado. Their works really clued
me in on the connection between words, your brain and
your heart. |
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| AP: Your writing is certainly passionate.
Tell me something of your years at college and how
they formed or changed you? Is that where you leaned
to write so lucidly? |
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| Bageant: College?
LOL! I took classes along the way, but never cared
about any kind of serious program. I just studied what
I wanted, painting, history, writing, comparative religion,
and journalism. It was the Sixties and I didn't give
a fuck about degrees or jobs. I wanted to design my
own intellectual life. I was already meeting what I
considered the important artists and writers of my
day, and professors were begging for introductions
to them. Also, I had a wife and son early in life and
was far more interested in my hippy family, communes,
and the self-realization movement. Like I said, everything
I wrote was getting published and I was getting choice
cultural and media assignments. For very small bucks
but I always got the good ones. So hell, I was a pretty
happy guy. |
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| AP: How did the likes of Timothy
Leary, Stephen Gaskin, Allen Ginsberg. Trungpa Rinpoche,
William Burroughts, John Lilly and Marshall Mcluhan
become your personal friends and mentors? |
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| Bageant: I spent
14 years in Boulder Colorado, much of that time interviewing
or writing about those people for regional arts and
culture and rock and roll rags. The counterculture's
heroes were always coming through town, or hanging
out at the Buddhist university there, Naropa. So I
got to know some of them. In fact, part of the reason
for writing for papers and mags was so I could get
to meet them and hang out. |
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| They were heroes of mine long
before I ever met them. For example, I named my son
for Timothy Leary before I ever encountered Leary personally.
As for them being mentors, nobody was sitting me on
their knee and telling me the secrets of writing and
magicianship. But I was accepted in their company and
at parties and got to watch them live their lives creatively
and with passion. I came to the conclusion that this
writing thing and the arts in general had as much to
do with how you lived as anything else. It was clear
to me that I should watch and learn from people like
Ginsberg, who was the most famous poet on the planet
for a reason.even if he couldn't keep his goddam hands
off your ass. And it only took a few minutes to see
for yourself that even though the shallow media never
understood him, Tim Leary was a scientist philosopher
bard, a Galileo of consciousness and one of the great
thinkers of our time who had lifted off from this earth
and didn't mind waving bye bye to the inhabitants of
planet yokel. |
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| As for Trungpa Rinpoche, I
never got him at first, and made fun of him the whole
time he was alive. Then years later, after his death,
he hit me like a sledgehammer. I finally got it.
Or at least enough of it to do some good. |
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| AP: You seem quite passionately
political, and yet you are also devoted to Buddhism,
a religious system that advocates detachment. How do
you hold such differing perspectives? |
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| Bageant: I do
not find them all that differing. Both are concerned
with mankind, people together and as a whole. Socialism
covers the material side of it, and Buddhism deals
with the spiritual aspects. But both acknowledge that
we are in this river of life together, that we are
presented with struggle from the day of our birth,
and that we have to make individual choices. That we
will only arrive at the other shore together. Both
are about the path, not religions. Sure, Marxists are
too much focused on the material aspects. But that
doesn't negate the deep wellspring of Marxist thought.
And Buddhism, despite the pop Euro and American notion
of its supposed bliss and pacifism, has a place for
violence in its cosmology. That's why there were many
Buddhist resistance fighters against the murderous
Chinese takeover of Tibet. |
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| AP: What is your biggest gripe about
America today? |
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| Bageant: At
my age and with my high blood pressure, I can't afford
to have heartburn type gripes with America. But I do
have a sadness about my country which, for the sake
of interest and readability, I express in, shall we
say, "highly animated fashion." I have always loved
my country — which is not by the way, the same
as loving your government. But now I fear it. |
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| I have fished for bass
at night in its once beautiful rivers, and I have
played stink finger with its young Southern girls
who wear no panties on August nights by the light
of its many moons. I have grown what can almost be
called old now, with its earth beneath my feet and
its legends in my eyes. And now a bunch of cheap
murderous cocksuckers have hijacked the place that
made me what I am and are busily turning it into
one vast capitalist gulag. Stealing my children's'
dreams… everything I ever experienced and
cared about has become irrelevant. I don't care about
my own experiences disappearing into the void so
much as I care about the blackness now descending.
I am here right now to tell you that America is a
rogue nation and the greatest threat afoot to civilization.
That doesn't mean that every American is Hitler and
it doesn't mean that there is no hope. But we gotta
cop to what is going on. When a nation refuses to
acknowledge the need for world tribunals for ethnic
cleansing and refutes the Kyoto agreements, and murders
tens of thousands to keep its stock market afloat,
then that nation must be called malignant upon this
earth. |
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| AP: When do you think the slide
towards a fascist totalitarian state started? |
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| Bageant: Immediately
after World War II, when that much-deified dickhead
druggist Harry Truman set in stone the intelligence
and military industrial complex that had been established
during the war. |
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| AP: I don't need to ask you your
opinion about President Bush — you make that
plain in many of your articles — but how do you
think someone so unsuitable could get elected to office? |
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| Bageant: Because
America has become an ignorant bloated culture of comfort
and consumption. Our religion is comfort and engorgement.
Not all of us, but enough of us to keep it all rolling.
Hell, even our churches preach a baptised version of
the American Dream, which comes down to "anything I
can get my goddam paws on and devour — fuck the
environment and screw the starving millions. We are
a nation of belligerent lard-asses willing to kill
anyone and everyone to keep our cars running and the
god dam Cheetos (which I openly admit that I eat when
I am blind drunk and stumbling under the thundering
of gins' poisoned hooves) on the coffee table. Angry?
Nope. Just the plain facts my Limey friends. You still
think your guy Blair can partner up with a psychopath
and ensure a supply of oil. Maybe even score one last
ruddy-nutted English victory over the sand niggers
you once ruled. Ya know, I don't think you Brits understand
that when the last blood of dinosaurs is drained from
the Middle East, we will bomb the fuck out of you in
the competition for the last drop. |
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| As for Bush getting elected,
it's the same as Hitler. Bush represents most Americans,
or at least a slim majority. But it's a mean majority
and we can expect a Reichstadt fire sometime during
the next 10 years. Bush may be gone, Kerry may get
elected, but we've got an oil habit kiddo, and a lust
for empire and you will be roadkill if you get in the
road. Sure, there will be some slobbering gutless Democrats
elected along the way, but all it will be is a feel-good
exercise of an expiring empire. People put too much
faith in political parties. They should have taken
to the streets 15 years ago. |
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| AP: In a nutshell, what has Bush
done for the average American? |
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| Bageant: Given
them faith in their own desperate hubris. |
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| AP: If that is the case, and the
average American is far worse off under Bush, then
why is it that he still has such strong support, often
from the very people whose quality of lives is most
depreciated by this government? |
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| Bageant: Because
we have institutionalised our hubris in the schools
and the churches and everywhere else. Because Americans
think obesity and belligerence are virtues, and that
Jesus Christ and a five piece band came down and made
them the new chosen people. |
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| AP: Why is somebody like yourself,
who champions the ordinary American, regarded as unpatriotic
for opposing a government and its policies that are
so clearly destroying the American ideals of democracy
and liberty? |
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| Bageant: Because
the government has nothing to do with real patriotism.
Patriotism is a love of the place and the people who
have shaped your heart and mind, not your willingness
to die for oil or, as Napoleon said "for those
baubles pinned on the chests of dead soldiers." |
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| AP: Coming from the South, your
views cannot be very popular with your neighbours.
How do you deal with them or protect yourself from
them? |
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| Bageant: Well.
for a while I was some kind of goddamed anti-Christ
around here. All kinds of scary threats, and such.
Now I have been laying low like old Bre'r Rabbit (You
Brits don't have the slave tales of Bre'r Rabbit do
you?). The locals are so consumed with being good Germans
amid their neighbours, they do not even think about
the internet stuff. They are busy keeping mental lists
of which liberals they are going to put on trial when
the Republican Reich finally dawns. |
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| AP: In your articles you seem to
indicate that it is hopeless trying to convince many
of your compatriots that they are actually supporting
a government that is not in the interests of the American
people or of American ideals. Do you see any way through
this? |
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| Bageant: Nope.
They gotta find their own way. That's what democracy
is about. People finding their own way. Or not finding
it. |
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| AP: In "The Covert Kingdom" you
illustrate the mentality of the Christian Fundamentalists
that the progressive left is up against, a mentality
that is only matched by Muslim Fundamentalism. How
can we, in a democratic system, keep such destructive
segments of society from harming the less vocal majority
(assuming that they are not a majority!)? |
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| Bageant: It
can't. Until the progressive left gets out there on
the street and recruits every ignorant piece of white
trash and person of colour it ain't gonna happen. But
here in the US, the so-called left is comfortable being
in the catering class of college professors, managers,
journalists, school teachers and others required to
keep the capitalist system humming, they ain't gonna
take any risks. They just don't get it that if they
do not love their labouring brothers, beer belly, ignorance,
crack habit and all, their ass is grass too. It's only
a matter of time. But they simply do not believe these
people are their brothers, or even human, for that
matter. America is a class system first and foremost. |
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| AP: Tell me some of your views on
freedom. Many would accuse you of being left or communist.
which can also be totalitarian. |
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| Bageant: I am
not a communist. I am a universalist humanist socialist.
I would be a commie, but for the fact that communism
seems too easily hijacked by despotic thugs. I don't
know why, and at this age I do not have the time to
find out. I'll run with what I know so far. Stick my
spear in the ground and tie my leg to it and do the
best I can. |
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| AP: If you were President, what
are the first things you would do to move the US away
from fascism and back to democracy? |
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| Bageant: I would
cut the Pentagon budget in half and spread the dough
around to health care and education here and in third
world countries, and spend billions on peace studies
and the ecology. I'm a simple fucker. |
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| AP: When did you first go on the
internet and what is your view of this medium? |
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| Bageant: In
April of this year. I loved the Internet from the very
beginning as I had decided a while back that I was
sick of the paint-by-numbers journalism that has ruined
the print world, and was looking for an outlet in which
I could say exactly what I wanted to the way I wanted
to.The internet may well be the political hope of the
world. Maybe someday we will have internet referendums
on what to do with the world's wheat supply. Maybe
someday the global corporations' knees will be broken
and every knee will bow in humble submission to the
needs of humanity. Every pharmaceutical company will
be distributing AIDS drug to the beating heart of Mother
Africa. But first there is going to be a lot of death
and destruction. The Twin Towers were just the cartoons
before the movie of global revolution. |
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| AP: Are you surprised at your meteoric
rise to cult internet writer considering you have only
been online such a short time? How do you account for
this? |
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| Bageant: Yes,
I am. I have always had good response to whatever I
put into print. But that stuff was always distributed
within defined circulation boundaries such as those
of a magazine or a newspaper. If a magazine has 150,000
readers, then that is about all a writer is going to
reach through that medium. But the internet can aggregate
people of similar opinion and outlook with power and
speed that is unimaginable in print. |
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| Working in magazines for so many
years, it seems to me that magazine and book publishers
still just do not "get" the internet. They still suffer
under the illusion that people will not read anything
over 1500 words, etc. Yet a reader is a reader. They
also get too trapped in "marketing segmentation," demographics,
psychographics, and all that crap that was so hot with
marketing people ten years ago. The net is an ocean
of human beings and you gotta swim among them to understand
them and what you need to do to stay afloat. There
is no magic marketing plan you can wire into, other
than provide what people really want on the sites they
go to get it. |
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| Half the nation doesn't read
and never will. So they will be looking for small takeaway
bites from the net. Fair enough. But people who care
about ideas and information will devote just as much
time to the net as to a book, and probably buy a book
related the internet source too if it further serves
their purpose. For example, I began restoring an ancient
slave banjo from information on the net. Then later
I bought a book by the same author I was reading on
the net. That would not have happened if the net had
not provided instant access to that luthier's advice.
It also happened a lot more quickly than if I had had
to research the subject by traditional means. |
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| By the way, I did not just recently
discover the net. I have been into it from the beginning.
However, I recently decided that it was better to give
my articles and essays away for free than to piss around
with any longer with the restrictions of print and
the talentless and gutless people and corporations
that so often own or manage it. And hell, I am one
of those people! So I understand why and how the corporatization
of media has reduced our once-thriving American dialogue
to a warm puddle of commercial piss. With the exception
of a few good magazines like Harpers, there's nothing
left to read in this country. Yet, I can go on the
net and find some extremely talented people with something
to say and web editors who are not afraid to let them
say it, if I devote time enough to the search. They
may not have the writer's craft, but their ideas and
insights as human beings move us and feed our minds. |
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| AP: How hopeful are you about the
future? |
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| Bageant: In
the long view, very. But we are talking about centuries
here. I won't be around to see it. Neither will you.
The bad news is that you young'uns are going to have
to take up the fight. A worse fight than I ever knew.
The good news is that it won't be over in your lifetime
either. So your victory does not have to be complete.
There are laws of physics and the universe neither
of us can change. Right now Americans believe they
can deny the second law of thermodynamics. |
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| But in the end some upright
hominid will be scraping lichens for food off a radio
active rock with a computer chip shard and once again
starting the slow upward trajectory of humankind
toward the stars. That's the thing about this smear
of biology on a speck of cosmic dust called earth.
It is a virulent strain, and assuming a new biology
on a ruined planet, it will send its silver seed,
even if robotically, away from this gravity well
called earth into the singing interstellar void.
As any Buddhist understands, it's never over. It's
just a ripple in the atomic tides of the universe. |
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| AP: Please describe to us your utopian
or ideal society. |
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| Bageant: Ain't
no such thing. Just struggle. Constant struggle,
and if you do it right, you get to struggle for beauty
and truth in a society that allows them to exist. |
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| AP: I understand you are a family
man. Tell me about your wife and children. |
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| Bageant: My
wife Barbara is a historical archivist and a feminist,
and was a Madison Wisconsin radical feminist during
the 1960s. She is currently involved in establishing
and restoring a slave school museum here in Clarke
County… a historical record of the post-slavery
experience in Virginia as expressed by their descendants.
She has a son, Spencer, who is a gifted popular culture
expert in Seattle. |
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| I have three children by two
previous marriages and I am now married for a third
time. Let's just say I have been happily married more
times than the average person. I have a 37-year old
son by my first wife, Cindy, named Tim — for
Timothy Leary. He grew up in the midst of the entire
Sixties adventure, saw it all go down… the glorious
and the ugly, the strangeness and the joy. Lived
in school buses, ate snails with Hunter Thompson, traveled
to Latin America with me… And because of all
that he understands me more than anyone else on this
earth. He is my deepest and most constant brother,
son and friend. In that I have been a lucky man. He
sees through this country's bullshit with x-ray vision. |
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| I have two other children by
my second marriage, Patrick, who is a good lefty and
getting ready for law school. And Elizabeth, who just
returned from a long stint as an AIDS worker in Mozambique.
She is destined to save the world. |
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| AP: How did you bring up your children… did
you do anything to try to make them more aware of what
was going on in society around them? |
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| Bageant: No,
mainly I just fucked up a lot in front of them and
they seem to have learned from my mistakes. |
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| AP: What do your family think of
what you write? |
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| Bageant: As
far as I know, they do not read what I write. They
have seen me be a writer for many, many years. It's
just a fact of life to them. I am not the center of
everything in my family. They are intensely involved
in their own lives because they are self-realizing
people with dreams of their own. It works really well
for all of us. I do suspect however, my wife Barbara
will probably read my book. She's a big reader and
will probably want to know where all the recent money
came from. |
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| AP: Finally, what are your personal
plans or goals for the future? Are you going to have
your own website soon, radio/TV show or write a book? |
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| Bageant: Dammit
kid! You ask NOTHING BUT hard questions! Can I adopt
you? I am starting to get book and movie offers.
Enough of them that I had to get an agent. Jimmy
Vines of New York. If they do come through, (and
I am not pounding my meat over the possibility) I
plan to have a cottage in someplace like Andalusia,
or French Martinique; someplace VERY cheap that I
can go and write and snipe at the Republic of terror.
One man never beat a mob in its own turf. I'll stroke
my wife's sweet snatch, pet my dogs and give heart
to my children (every one of whom is a good lefty)
in some dry place where my arthritic fingers will
loosen up enough to learn to play flamenco guitar.
I'm serious folks! There is not a person on this
earth who can say I never did what I promised… eventually.
And every reader here, every son and daughter of
good yeoman liberty and decency, as it is defined
by the suffering poor of this planet, is invited
to come visit, eat tapas and drink wine at my table. |
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Solidarity! |
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| Joe Bageant can be
contacted at joebageant@joebageant.com |
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