Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

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1. Lost in the American Undertow
2. The Permanent White Underclass
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4. Search Joe Bageant
5. Prior Mailing Archive

Lost in the American Undertow

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.

The colloquial accents of America given to us by Hollywood, or your own discoveries if you've travelled there much. Where would you place him, Virginia or a product of California, polyglot.

Joe Bageant" - 1 new article

1. Bageant's Frustration: Extreme Isolation
2. More Recent Articles
3. Search Joe Bageant
4. Prior Mailing Archive

Bageant's Frustration: Extreme Isolation

There aren't too many leftnecks in the United States; of that, we can be sure. This was the source of Joe Bageant's frustration: extreme isolation. Because he realized that the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time.

From the last chapter of Rainbow Pie, "A Long-Promised Road":

"After he'd built his present house, Clayton (a relative) and his sons used the chicken house as a deer-hunting cabin. Somehow it was fitting that it be a place where the menfolk could butcher deer on the screened-in porch by lamplight, and sit around the woodstove retelling the ancient family fables of the many hunts that took place on this land.

"No more, though. Now, one of his sons, Clay Junior, a construction laborer, lives in the chicken house with his wife Krassie and their three children, after having lost their own home in the national mortgage rip-off. Among America's disposable millions with disposable jobs and disposable lives, and among the grandchildren of those 22 million displaced rural foks (after the Second World War), they were born into a parallel world to the middle class. For them, it was one of life's givens that they would long have been working while others were pursuing higher education. Consequently they are among the 50 million Americans who read at a fourth-grade or fifth-grade level.

"They can be thankful, though, that they are not quite among the 42 million American adults who read even more poorly. Nearly one-third of our nation's population is illiterate or barely literate, and cannot read predatory car loans, mortgage documents, or credit-card agreements. The first to be discarded from the work force, they composed the vanguard and the bulk of property foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. That was before the national mortgage rot began eating into the middle class - people who could read well enough, but apparently could not do the maths, or believed that their job tenure as the Empire's paper-shufflers was vouchsafed by God himself. The Krassies and Clay Juniors at least have the excuse of poor literacy.

"America's semi-literacy, our general inability to read about the workings of government and the outside world, never gets in the way of our self-esteem. Fed on the delusion that all wisdom resides in the common man, and that our opinions and judgement are all to be equally valued, no matter what frothy dreck issues from our mouths and minds, we never doubt ourselves. This 'every man is a natural fountain of wisdom' myth is a sop, of course, and compensates for the obvious disparities and injustices taking place before our very eyes. No matter how bad things get, the rest of the world is worse off, because 'By God, I live in the only free nation in a world of dictators and jealous terorists. I live in an anointed republic where my opinion is just as good as any king's! More so, because I am the common man in a realm where the common man is king, dammit!'

Semi-literacy endows its tribe with the absolute surety and conviction of those who don't know what they don't know, rendering them blustering, happy idiots who haven't the slightest damned notion of anything beyond appearances. Delighting in the simple-minded images and slogans that have come to replace language, they buy the T-shirts of Barack Obama dressed as bin Laden, or sporting a Hitler moustache, and believe that the Democratic Party is setting up death panels for the elderly to save on the national cost of healthcare. Most ominously, they are hostages to political manipulation.

In November 2008, during the last days of the presidential elections, I stopped by to visit Clay, Krassie, and the kids...Stepping into the porch of the chicken house, I found the front door wide open before me, despite the cold, and a wood-pellet stove struggled away at full blast. It crossed my mind that Pap (the late grandfather) would have kicked somebody's ass for wasting heat like that. Visible from the doorway were the three kids on the worn, dirty carpet in a sea of crumbs, eating bright-orange, hyper sweet cakes out of a box. Clay Junior was off somewhere in his truck scouting for deer signs - hunting season opened the next week. Sprawled on the couch in a grungy pink sweat-suit, Krassie, overweight and fast headed for that permanent post-third child white-trash obesity, was immersed in a Fox News program about the elections, now just a couple of days away.

"Somehow, I'd not imagined her having the slightest interest in politics or the elections. As it happened, though, Obama's race had grabbed Krassie's attention. More accurately, America's far right had taken up residence in her vacant political mind. More bluntly, the Republican Party had run its hand up her ass and was now operating her like a puppet, flapping her mouth. After the initial greetings and obligatory Southern small talk, she informed me that, 'If Obama is elected, every white woman will be a slave to some nigger.'

"Even I, a man who listens daily to some of the most ridiculous, ignorant sludge that the American mind has to offer, was floored. This was raw-hate stuff here, and Krassie is by no means a hateful person. Dumb as a sack of goat hair, yes, but hateful, absolutely not.

" 'Where did you learn that?' I asked.

" 'It's right here on the Internet. I'll show you.'

"She sat down at her computer in the kitchen,which was parked beneath a mounted deer head on the wall. We Southerners see no conflict between taxidermy and kitchen decor...It struck me how much my mountain tribe, meat hunters for two-and-a-half centuries in these hills, are truly people of the deer. It also struck me that as a child I had curled up in that very corner where the computer sat, listening to hunting stories, and/or reading library books. In one of those strange, flitting memory images, I recalled finishing up Jim Bishop's classic, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, right there in that corner, right in that spot during one of our Christmas-holiday stays.

"The computer was agonizingly slow. While we waited for it to gnaw its way through to a modem connection, Krassie's oldest daughter, age eleven, offered her opinion. 'I like Obama,' she said. 'He's very smart.' There was no objection on Krassie's part. Remember: our people are believers in and defenders of the right to opinion, even the most ill-informed - probably because we own the majority of them. Looking at the child, I thought, Now there's a little niece who's going to feel very trapped in this wasteland, if she doesn't alrady. The computer ground on and on. Finally, I hedged my way out of the wait with 'I'll take your word for it, Krassie.'

Returning to Virginia hill country and Bageant's explanation of their politics:

"The sad truth is that the pent-up anger has little to do with feelings about healthcare, but a helluva lot to do with all the shitty breaks, insults, and degradations that come with being an underclass citizen of the Empire. We are conditioned in much the same way as a dog is trained to bite on command. It doesn't matter who gets bitten - the dog gets the satisfaction of biting somebody for a change, and his master looks pleased when he does.

"Healthcare reform had 70 per cent support when it began. After a few weeks of orchestrated slap-downs of its proponents at town hall meetings, and staged citizen revolts, public opinion of healthcare reform was in the toilet. Ordinary, quiet people, who never evendiscuss poltics, started to have doubts when they saw folks like themselves on television rising up in what was touted by blonde meat-puppet anchorpersons and jowly, self-important male pundits as  'a nationwide protest by the common man'. Boucher could now go back to Capitol Hill and give evidence that voters in his white underclass district were vehemently against any kind of insurance-industry reform. They prefer the status quo. They like the fuck-job they are getting. They prefer being without health insurance, and going into medical bankruptcy, rather than enjoying the benefits of affordable healthcare.

"Once again, my people, the great unwashed and unlettered, had been sicced like dogs onto challengers of the status quo. Every time this kind of thing happens, a cheer goes up from American news consumers dining on the spectacle and hyperbole of it all. 'By God Helen! The common citizen, the working guy, the little guy, is standing up to Big Gubbyment. Says he ain't gonna take it anymore!'

"Ideas like that of 'a white woman slave to some nigger' play to our unlettered and uncultured redneck attraction to the extreme and entertaining. I've heard it said again and again that 'Old people will be killed off to save money when the government has to pay for nursing care,' and I've refrained from pointing out that the vast majority of America's elderly are in facilities that are already being paid for by the government. But the notion of government death panels killing dear Grandma is far more entertaining to our imaginations than guaranteed access to chest-screening tests and blood-pressure medicines. Two generations into this national infantilization, it's now the only political life that the underclass knows - the ideological spectacle made real. It serves the few against the many, the rich against the poor, in a last big grab at what dwindling wealth remains. Ideology has uttely triumphed. If reaching right down into Krassie's world, way out here on this ridge, isn't utter triumph, I don't know what is."

Absolutely, al-Q.  That is the refreshingly relevant -if bitter - message. 

The late Joe Bageant would invite the reader to "drop by my home in Winchester Virginia and get the tour... Dozens of foreign journalists do so each year." It was an "inconvenience" but "well worth the effort to watch their jaws drop in stupefaction. So step right up to the arcade of disposable minds and abandoned lives in the Ideological States of America, where we are always psyched and ready to fight for the beliefs we are told we hold. We always show up to fight on the wrong side, and end up killing one another, but we show up for the brawl, by God!

"Regardless of appearances, these people have normal IQs. They are born with the same number of brain cells and potential as anyone else. So why is it that when those with the most to lose to manage to rally for the fight, they always show up in the wrong camp?  As I am asked in early every interview, 'Why do they work so hard to screw themselves?'

"It is because the screwees have no language of their own in which to talk to themselves, or to discuss their condition with others of their own class. When they speak at all of these things, they speak in the language of their screwers, a language in which terms such as 'socialism', 'universal healthcaare', 'welfare society', 'citizen entitlement', 'social taxes', 'solidarity', 'fair go', and 'common weal' are deemed profanities. Without language and the education to use it in defining concepts, their intellectual life is a constellation of deeply internalized corporate state-media imagery - commercials for the American brand entertainingly presented in a theter of political and social kitsch.

"The people become bored at increasingly higher thresholds, as the media's depiction of life becomes more bizarre. ('Of course it's real, otherwise why would they call it a reality show/') And, like children, they delight in and expect a new and more mesmerizing spectacle daily, resulting in what can only be called an induced mass hallucination. Boundaries dissolve between plitics and personal fantasies: today they involve white slavery, voodoo, geriatric death panels, and whole political parties getting sex-change operations; tomorrow, it's swarthy terrorist cells in the cul de sacs of cupcake land, and flu vaccines bearing malevolent nano-chips into the public bloodstream.

"Entertaining and titillating as it is, life on Planet Tabloid is not as depressentg as real America is these days - and the America in which your son or daughter is doing a fourth rotation in Iraq because there are no jobs in the home of the brave. It's certainly better than contemplating America falling apart before your very eyes - not to mention the unnerving impression of inhabiting a spent empire locked in its inexorable orbit, and growing darker by the day."

At other times, Bageant expressed his concerns for the future, and wrote of his admiration for the work of James Howard Kunstler - The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophies of the Twenty-First Century; The Geography of Nowhere, etc.

In Rainbow Pie he finishes with his fears for a fascist outcome to recent developments:

"I have rattled on at such length about underclass political consciousness, especially the town hall meetings, because they represent a new development in which the white underclass plays a pivotal role.It feels to me like a build-up to an incitement of violence - if not now, then someday not far off - that will either be purposefully managed or will erupt spontaneously. There is an odour of fascism and nascent brownshirts about. A look around these meetings, for instance, will often reveal a firearm - not as a bulge under a coat or jacket, but worn openly on the hip or in a sholder-belt holster. This by no means illegal if the wearer has a weapons permit; guns are openly worn in this state and in many of the heartland realms I travel. I grew up accustomed to seeing guns, and seldom found it disconcerting. Until now. There is some new dimension to the presence of handguns at these public events, which are allegedly dedicated to civil public discourse. Until 2009, I never saw a gun worn at a public meeting or civic gathering. People with weapons permits have always considered such behaviour inappropriate and the sign of a boob. But now these guns in public view give me the willies.

"Ostensibly, the guns are a display of Second Amendment rights...(but) exactly who are the guns supposed to scare? I don't know - liberals I suppose. What breaks my heart is that the guntoters are invariably my own people. My family's people. Clayton's people. Krassie's people. What will happen when things get worse for them in this country? And they surely will. Hell, we've got car camps of homeless people now - in some cases, sanctioned and overseen by municipal governments.

"And by official count - which is always doctored by the regime in power to look better - one in eight Americans now suffer from food insecurity. Undoubtedly we will see a fraudulent, manufactured 'recovery'.  For a few years, the powers in charge will manage to waste our remaining resources, human and natural, extending a doomed system long enough to extract those last few trillions, instead of creating something more sustainable. At some point, the country will end up even worse off than now. And my people will be among the worst off. What then? Will they be sicced like dogs, as usual, or will they savage the same peole without having to be sicced?"