A few random Joe Bageant quotes and a song
Thinking about Joe Bageant again, and thought I'd post a few quotes from Deer Hunting with Jesus that I particularly liked. And, don't say I never did nothing for you, an outtake from M.A. Littler's mighty Kingdom of Survival, Bageant playing a song called "Hemingway's Whiskey."
Quotes first:
On the history of what Bageant calls "Borderers." I.e., those Scots-Irish immigrants who've done most of the heavy lifting in the creation of the American Empire, and always seem to be first on the front line to get their asses blown away for somebody else's pocketbook.
Speaking of cabins, given the unceasing looting, burning, and moving, the Borderers built impermanent earth and log dwellings called "cabbins." Within their smoky confines they lived a quick-tempered, hard-drinking, volatile lifestyle, one that anthropologists say is still evident in some American trailer courts today. So the next time you see one of us drunkenly kicking in a neighbor's car door in a trailer court parking lot at 1 a.m., try to remember: That's not a brawl you're witnessing, it's cultural diversity.
And:
We rural and small-town mutt people seem by an early age to have a special capacity for cruelty. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecrack up a toad's ass and light it? George W. Bush and I have that in common. As nonwhites the world round understand, white people can be mean, especially if they feel threatened–and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide a certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as approval from God and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers. You get Abu Ghraib.
On self-expression in consumer culture:
The difficulties of self-expression having been neatly eliminated through standardization, adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to see, eat, wear, hear, and drive. Your baby can wave from her $400 car seat in the Volvo, perhaps drawing an observer close enough to see the "Pacifist's Pledge" imprinted on her 100 percent hemp T-shirt. When enough of your own kind coagulate around nothing, you have a "lifestyle" on your hands. If nothing jells around your own assembled coolness, then you join some larger lifestyle. A thousand magazines give directions how to do it: Elle, Savvy Senior, Today's Black Woman, Trailer Life, Harper's Bazaar, Cabin Life, Town and Country, and, for the affluent, Grand (a magazine for well-heeled grandparents), not to mention good ole High Times.
Now the song:
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