Joe Bageant's Blog, page 4

White Underclass Crushed By Economy

I don't know where to start with Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. It's a book of two sides, two faces even. On the one hand there's Joe's evocative, heartfelt nostalgia for a life destroyed by corporate capital and on the other, his anger and frustrations, rants on occasion.

Joe Bageant picks and sings

Several years ago, Phil Rockstroh and his wife Angie visited Joe Bageant and his wife Barbara in Winchester, Virginia. Angie wanted to learn more about guitar chords and Joe was pleased to give lessons. Phil video-taped these lessons for Angie, and here are some short clips.

Recalling Joe's eagerness to help others

Joe Bageant Saturday. He was my father's very close friend over the past several years, and was an encouraging presence for me as well. This clip from the 2010 documentary, The Kingdom of Survival, shows him, I think, at his defiant best:

Bageant Moves On

Joe could fool you. He talked slow and Southern, lacked pretensions, and you could talk to him for weeks without realizing how very damned smart he was.
 One day we dropped in and he said he had just found that he had cancer. It went fast. He died Saturday.

Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four month struggle with cancer. He was 64.

Some Fight Back

A Review of Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. Nobody writes about class in America and about America's unacknowledged class war like Joe Bageant. Dubbed the "Sartre of Appalachia" by CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair, Joe writes about America's largest, yet invisible to most, class -- 60 million poor, undereducated white laborers.

Rainbow Pie listed on Amazon-US

Joe Bageant was pleased to learn this morning that his second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, has finally been listed for advance orders on Amazon-US. A shipment of Rainbow Pie has been sent to Amazon-US and deliveries to US buyers should begin within the next week or two.

Joe Bageant: an update

After a month in hospitals, cussing doctors and wanting to escape, Joe Bageant is back home in his own bed in Winchester. He is continuing his chemotherapy as an out-patient.

A note from Joe

As you may or may not know, I have been struck down by an extremely serious form of cancer. Presently I am back in the United States receiving treatment through the U.S. Veterans Administration hospital system.

AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?

If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit