Tag: Joe Bageant

Donald Trump and America’s Confused Values

Better days are here, for some of us.

W.J. Astore

Joe Bageant was a remarkable writer, the author of “Deer Hunting with Jesus” as well as “Rainbow Pie.”  A self-confessed “redneck,” he worked his way into the middle class as an editor, but he never forgot his roots in Appalachia and the subsistence farming of his Scots-Irish family. Bageant had a brutally honest and unadorned way of speaking and writing, and also a great affection and deep respect for traditional communal values in America.

bageant

The other day, I was reading an old essay Bageant wrote, “Live from Planet Norte” (June 2010), long before Donald Trump was even remotely considered to be presidential material.  As usual, Joe nailed it:

[I]n the process of building our own gilded rat-cage, we have proven that old saw about democracy eventually leading to mediocrity to be true. Especially if you keep dumbing down all the rats. After all, Dan Quayle, Donald Trump and George W. Bush hold advanced degrees from top universities in law, finance and business.

The head rats, our “leaders” (if it is even possible to lead anybody anywhere inside a cage), have proven to be as mediocre and clueless as anyone else. Which is sort of proof we are a democracy, if we want to look at it that way. While it is a myth that virtually anybody can grow up to be president, we have demonstrated that nitwits have more than a fighting chance. During my 40 years writing media ass-wipe for the public, I have interviewed many of “the best of my generation,” and, believe me, most of them were not much.

Naturally, they believe they are far superior by virtue of having made it to an elevated point in the gilded cage, closer to the feed, water and sex. Because they believe it, and the media–sycophants waiting for quotes–echoes their belief, discussing their every brain fart, we tend to believe it, too. Nothing shakes our belief, not even staring directly into the face of a congenital liar and nitwit like Sarah Palin, or a careening set of brainless balls like Donald Trump or a retarded jackal like George W. Bush.

Americans are unable to explain why such people “rise to the top” in our country. We just accept that they do, and assume that America’s process of natural selection – the survival of the wealthiest – is at work. These people are rich; therefore, they should run the country. God said so. It’s a uniquely American principal of governance, which in itself, makes the case for our stupidity.

Donald Trump is best at selling a certain image of himself: the self-made billionaire, the savvy deal-maker, the populist patriot who sides with the little guy.  But Joe Bageant had him pegged: a careening set of brainless balls is maybe the best, and certainly the most colorful, descriptor I’ve come across for Trump.

Bageant’s larger question is clear: How did Americans come to value such nitwits, halfwits, and dimwits? Just because they have money? Just because they have a veneer of “success” about them, when this “success” is evidenced by nothing more than money or fame and the sly charm of grifters?

Americans, who worship at the altar of success as measured by the almighty dollar, are kneeling to pray before the empty suits of men like Donald Trump.  Bageant knew better than to join that mindless cult; so should we all.

Talking to Trump Supporters

bageant

W.J. Astore

Is it possible to talk to working-class supporters of Donald Trump?  Of course it is.  It’s just that Democrats from Hillary Clinton’s crowd have a very difficult time reaching across the social, economic, and cultural divide that often separates them from Trump’s (often reluctant) supporters.

This lesson came home to me in Arlie Hochschild’s recent article for TomDispatch.com.  Arlie got to know Mike Schaff, a man whose home in the bayou of Louisiana was poisoned by an environmental disaster at the hands of big oil.  Despite this, Mike Schaff remains deeply skeptical of government oversight and says he wants to eliminate agencies like the EPA that help to prevent environmental damage.

Despite his bitter experience with corporate malfeasance, Schaff remains unsympathetic to the Democratic Party and its arguments for more government intervention in the name of protecting ordinary citizens from harm.  Schaff, in short, believes in individualism, hard work, and self-reliance, as well as working together with his neighbors in small communities.  He doesn’t buy the argument that big government is his friend.  He doesn’t want to be seen as dependent on welfare and other government handouts.  He mostly wants to be left alone, even as he professes belief in Trump’s sentiment that America needs to be made “great again,” in part by a government led by Trump.

I think I understand part of what drives Mike Schaff.  The “do-gooder” liberal Democrats don’t speak his language.  Their reliance on regulations, lawyers, and bureaucracy makes him feel out of sorts, inferior, even dumb.  Their talk about “victims” and government “rescuers” turns him off, even though he himself is a victim of an environmental disaster.  But the point is that he doesn’t see himself as a victim.  He sees himself as a self-reliant man, a man working through a tough time, getting by with a little help from his friends, with no need of help from the Suits in Washington.

A confession: I’m not the most mechanical guy (though I fix small stuff), but around a guy like Mike Schaff, a man who welds and spends his time constantly tinkering with machines, I’d feel a bit uncomfortable.  I’m used to slinging words, just as he’s used to working physically, with his hands.

But I could hang with him.  I did my time in the military.  I come from a working-class family.  I know guys like Mike Schaff.  I can empathize with him.  I can speak his language.

The message of politicians like Hillary Clinton will not resonate with Mike.  Guys like Mike prefer plain-speak.  Making America great again — hell ya, it’s about time!  As cynical and opportunistic as Trump may be, his message of self-reliance, his blunt talk, his braggadocio, and his calls for action (no matter how stupid) do resonate with Mike, even if his pro-corporate policies will only aggravate Mike’s situation.

What ever happened to tough democrats who could talk to guys like Mike?  Even Joe Biden, despite his hardscrabble Scranton origins, doesn’t quite fit.

Joe Bageant was great at this — his book “Deer Hunting with Jesus” told the story of a liberal gun-owning Southerner who lived the life of men (and women) like Mike Schaff.  But sadly Bageant died a few years ago.  (For some articles I’ve written about Bageant, see here and here and here.)

If Hillary Clinton loses in November, a big reason why will be that she simply couldn’t (or wouldn’t) speak the language of working-class Americans, people like Mike Schaff.

Everything is a Commodity

rainbow pie

It’s Joe Bageant week at The Contrary Perspective.  Bageant is best know for writing Deer Hunting with Jesus, but his second (and sadly his last) book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, is equally good.  Bageant, a self-confessed “redneck,” worked his way into the middle class as an editor.  But he never forgot his roots in Appalachia and the subsistence farming of his Scots-Irish family. Bageant had a brutally honest and unadorned way of speaking and writing, and also a great affection and respect for traditional communal values in America.

The theme of Rainbow Pie is loss: the loss of down homey (even homely) values and their replacement by a “monstrous fetish of commodities, their acquisition and their production through an insane scale of work and round-the-clock commerce and busyness” in America (Rainbow Pie, 68-69).

Joe Bageant in Belize
Joe Bageant in Belize

Here is an extended selection from Rainbow Pie, pp. 69-70.  I for one have never read a better description of what ails us as a country:

Is it at all possible to regain a meaningful, positive, and satisfying expression of character while working in such a monolithic, non-human scale of “production”? Anybody else feel like America is just one big workhouse, with time off to shit, shower, and shop? Or is it just me? Must our jobs necessarily be the most important thing in our lives?

Yeah, yeah, I know, them ain’t jobs. In America we don’t have jobs–we have careers. I’ve read the national script, and am quite aware that all those human assets writing computer code and advertising copy, or staring at screen monitors in the “human services” industry, are “performing meaningful and important work in a positive workplace environment.” “Performing?” Is this brain surgery? Or a stage act? If we are performing, then for whom? Exactly who is watching?

Proof abounds of the unending joy and importance of work and production in our wealth-based economy. Just read the job-recruitment ads. Or ask any of the people clinging fearfully by their fingernails to those four remaining jobs in America. But is a job–hopefully, a good one–and workplace striving really everything? Most of us would say, “Well, of course not.” But in a nation that now sends police to break up tent camps and car camps of homeless unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle class, it might very well be everything …

But you won’t hear anyone complaining. America doesn’t like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be here in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol-whipping or sedating its human assets into appropriate levels of cheerfulness.

Rainbow Pie is a searing memoir on the loss of community in the U.S. and its replacement by commodities.  Bageant shows how we came to embrace the lurid appeals of Pottersville at the expense of the humble values of Bedford Falls.  The result: it’s no longer a wonderful life.

W.J. Astore

The Education Business: Money, Money, Money (Updated)

W.J. Astore

As a college professor, I’m in the education business, a word that repels me but which nowadays is undeniably true.  One of the marketing slogans where I teach is “A degree is measured by its success in the workplace.”  In other words, if a college degree leads to a decent salary in the “workplace,” it’s worth it, but if the “workplace” does not reward you with a position with good pay and benefits, your degree is without merit.

Education in America has become just another business.  It’s increasingly monetized and corporatized.  Hence it’s unsurprising that educational results are measured increasingly by standardized tests developed by corporations.  If education is reducible to standardized metrics, you can run it and control it just like a business.  Professors become providers, students become consumers, and education becomes a commodity which is marketed and sold to consumers. Administrators are the middle managers who ultimately answer to corporate-dominated boards. “Success” for an administrator is measured mainly by money: funding drives, corporate donations, endowments, and similar issues related to budget and “the bottom line.”

As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score.  And he knew how to express it in pungent prose:

Now that education has been reduced to just another industry, a series of stratified job-training mills, ranging from the truck-driving schools to the state universities, our nation is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry.  Education is not supposed to be an industry.  Its proper use is not to serve industries, either by cranking out feckless little mid-management robots or through industry-purchased research chasing after a better hard-on drug.  Its proper use is to enable citizens to live responsible lives that create and enhance their democratic culture.  This cannot be merely by generating and accumulating mountains of information or facts without cultural, artistic, philosophical, and human context or priority.

Consider the harsh reality of Bageant’s statement: America “is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry.”  It’s impossible to deny this statement, especially when institutions of higher learning use the “workplace” as the measure of success for their degree programs.

Education today is disconnected from democracy.  It’s disconnected from producing an educated citizenry with critical thinking skills.  Rather, it’s connected to consumption; indeed, education is just another ephemeral consumable in a world of goods.  It’s valued only for its monetary fungibility, i.e. how much money can I make with this degree?  Alternatively, from a provider’s perspective, how much money can I make from offering these degrees?

Increasingly, there’s only one true degree offered by American colleges and universities: the business degree.  Such is the uniformity of market-driven ideology applied to education.

Say what you will of “diversity” in higher education as measured by differences in age, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, and all the rest.  Such diversity doesn’t matter much when all these “diverse” students are striving for the same thing: a fungible degree that’s translatable into money, money, money.

Show me the money!
Show me the money!

Update (12/4): When you treat students as consumers, there’s a tendency to buy the idea that “the customer is always right.” In other words, don’t offend the customer with disturbing ideas, such as the legacy of structural racism in society. Better to ignore such topics, especially when the “customer” complains about being offended by the ideas the professor (whoops — I meant the provider) introduces in class. See this story from Slate for more details.

On Black Friday, the Hologram Is Revealed

Today's Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities
Today’s Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities

W.J. Astore

It’s Black Friday: shop ’til you drop!  I watch my share of TV (mainly sports), and this week I’ve been subjected to a bumper crop of commercials showing me that my happiness–even my life–depends on buying more and more stuff.  People on these commercials experience paroxysms of pleasure when they save a few dollars on sweaters or shoes or electronic gizmos (probably all made in China).  Thank goodness I stopped watching morning “news” shows and other infotainment, which simply reinforce the drive to consume like gormless zombies.

Speaking of zombies, my favorite scene from the “Walking Dead” series came in Season 1 when our intrepid heroes are hiding in a department store among the racks of merchandise as hordes of zombies press against the doors, fighting desperately to gain access so they can consume some choice brains.  What a telling visual metaphor for brainless consumption!

As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score.  If you haven’t read his work, I strongly urge you to read “Deer Hunting with Jesus” or “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball.”  From the latter:

In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel–the shopping channel–and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction.  The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance.  In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted by satellites in outer space via bank transfers.  All things are purchasable and, indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase–even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver, and purchasing opportunities.  But, most of all, the hologram generates and guides us.

Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions.  No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead.  Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience…

Now, as walking advertisements for Nike and the Gap or Jenny Craig, and living by the grace of our Visa cards, we have become the artificial collective product of our corporately “administrated” modern state economy.  Which makes us property of the government.

Bageant, from another essay: “The media have colonized our inner lives like a virus.  The virus is not going away. The commoditization of our human consciousness is probably the most astounding, most chilling, accomplishment of American culture.”

Amen, Joe.  One thing that strikes me from the commercials I’ve seen: the depictions of people as they purchase that commodity they hold so dearly.  Their expressions are akin to religious or sexual ecstasy.  The message is simple: Here is your god.  Here is your loved one.  Here is your life. This commodity–buy it–now.  Rapture!

And that’s the true blackness of Black Friday.