An Interview With Joe Bageant
Although it might seem that my people use the voting booth as an instrument of self-flagellation, the truth is that Dottie would vote for any candidate black, white, crippled, blind, or crazy who she thought would actually help her. I know because I have asked her if she would vote for a candidate who wanted a national health care program. ‘Vote for him? I’d go down on him!’ Voter approval does not get much stronger than that. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to offer national health care, not the genuine article, although I suspect the Democrats will bandy some phony version next election.
If Dot is lucky, a pollster might call her, take her political temperature over the phone to be fed into some computer. But that is about as much contact as our system is willing to have with a three-hundred-pound diabetic woman with a small bird and a husband too depressed to get out of his TV chair other than to piss or stumble off to his car-washing job.
– an excerpt from Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War
When Random House discovered Bageant’s online essays they asked him to write a book, which resulted in Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War. The level of feedback on Deer Hunting’s Amazon.com listing rivals that of many bestselling authors over a hundred reviews and counting. Not to mention the praise he has received from intellectual luminaries such as Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel and Jeffrey St. Clair…just to name a few. Bageant has attracted a cult-like following for his political commentaries on the American middle class, and part of his success can probably be attributed to his appeal to both sides of the political spectrum.
He may jokingly call himself a commie-liberal, but his caustic wit is bi-partisan. Naturally, he’s well read a consequence of those lonely days and nights on the farm. But he eschews stuffy academic fodder in his writings. When he does cite this statistic or that study he inserts these references without much reverence for their supposed authority. You can almost hear him saying: “I’m just giving you the facts-from-the-ground. Don’t believe me? Fine. Here’s some academic mumbo jumbo for ya. Now as I was saying…” No doubt, Bageant’s down-to-earth manner is the result of his roots firmly planted in Middle America. He grew up on a farm and dropped out of high school to serve in the Navy during Vietnam. He ran off to live with hippies when he returned home. And ultimately, forged a long and distinguished career as a journalist during an era when autodidacts could still prove themselves into a job. Bageant is currently working on new book while touring the U.S. as a public speaker. He took time out from his busy schedule to talk about his career, writing, and politics.
How did you end up in the world of newsprint? I started out writing for the underground and countercultural publications of the 1960s and 1970s, and was managing editor of a couple of them. Which meant mainly that you got lots of free dope and free concert tickets, and occasionally got arrested at demonstrations. Not much money though. Along the way national publications began giving me freelance assignments as a correspondent from the Rocky Mountain West and sometimes the West Coast – East Coast publishers did not seem to understand there is a difference. To them it was all just stuff over thataway. New York was the center of their world. So I covered all sorts of stuff, everything from hippie communes to movie stars in Aspen, oil shale production to regional and national politics. But my main income came from freelancing feature stories about American culture in the West, mostly for metropolitan city magazines such as Denver Magazine and San Diego Magazine. Also newspapers all over the country wanted some of the color of the regional cultures. By the mid 1980s I was working full-time on news staffs of various newspapers. I had to because my children were growing up and I needed things like health insurance and a steadier income than freelancing provided. Then I became editorial director of Media Products Corp., a magazine group. My final straight gig was as a senior editor for PRIMEDIA corporation’s history magazine group, [which has since been] sold to Weider Publications.
Was your career rewarding? Were you able to do the kind work you wanted to do? I don’t know if rewarding is the right word. Or even if the word career is appropriate. I saw it as making a living. Whether it was the kind you really wanted to do was never the question. You had to do it if you wanted to eat. The work was a real ballbuster if you did it right, so you didn’t have much time to think about whether it was rewarding. I didn’t get any sleep for years on end. And like many others, I drank and sometimes doped just to keep going. Or to relieve the unending pressure of deadlines and the demands of quality. But you got paid to go places and see things other people never would. Bob Dylan backstage treating people like shit, or the corpse of a modern day cattle rustler laid out in the Wyoming wilds head propped up on a rock like a pillow and arms crossed peacefully. The Dalai Lama and the black hat ceremony. All that sure beat the hell out of some other jobs I’ve held in my life. Like washing cars, feeding hogs, hot tar roofing
How did you feel about the corporatization of journalism? I became disenchanted with newspapers and magazines. Over the years they’d become increasingly bought up by corporations, and driven by demographics until they became what they are now: consumer zombie ass-wipe. Writing became defined as the company product.” Most magazines became consumer magazines in one way or another. And even what the reader was consuming was a self-identity, packaged in witty or snarky writing. In a nation of conditioned consumers, these identity magazines now dominate. Magazine such as GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Outdoors, even National Geographic for god sake. They are all consumer identity purchases, as in I’m the sort of person who reads such and such. Mind food is out of the question. Which speaks for more than just the magazine business. As for the printed news, the newspapers and news magazines are just cut and paste state propaganda. The only magazine I read faithfully is Harper’s, and even it gets a little effete and precious at times. Anyway, there is no longer a place for real writers or newsmen and newswomen gritty professionals who told it like it was, or tried to at least. You find them out there on the Internet more often than you find them in ink. Even then you gotta dig through a universe of tripe to locate them. And the best of them are not necessarily professionals. I watched it all happen and I don’t feel one bit shy about saying that the real professionals were replaced by clueless middle class puds with no guts. People who’d work for almost nothing, and be happy for a two-bit byline other people would read, because it gave them an identity as a journalist. Woo hoo! For that they are more than happy to quote the famous and the powerful and call that a story. These puds have risen in the corporate media structure and now run the publications. Which is one reason newspapers are dying the death they deserve. The Internet of course sucked away over half the advertising. But people would still read newspapers if they had real stuff in them, something not only worth reading, but necessary to know.
Is that why you decided to start a website? I didn’t exactly decide to. I never wanted to be a blogger and still don’t. With some exceptions, most blogging is for media wannabes. Or an outlet for the horrible frustration and alienation any intelligent and decent person feels in this criminal workhouse called America. Anyway, I was getting near the end of a career. I had a full-time job as a magazine editor, and the last thing I wanted to be was a blogger. But I was so bored with my magazine job I started closing my office door and writing what I wanted to write and sending it to lefty Internet sites. The stuff immediately took off. In a couple months I had few million readers on the net, aggregated through Counterpunch and other big, mostly lefty sites. That’s not as easy now because there are far more websites and blogs. Eventually my good friend Ken Smith convinced me that a blog is worth doing. And it has been. It’s a place to respond honestly to readers on a one-on-one basis, and to store my archive. Not to mention a venue to blow out my worthless screed at 1 a.m. in the morning when there is no one awake to bore.
Did you consider trying to write a column for the mainstream media before you started blogging? What do you mean by mainstream?
Non-counterculture? Big-time? Media as defined by middle America? I sort of feel like I’ve already done that. I’ve done weekly newspaper columns at every newspaper I ever worked at, in addition to whatever beat I was covering. I have maybe 600 of them in my files. And I’ve done opinion pieces in magazines like Playboy. I still do tons of political stuff for magazines, newspapers and radio abroad. Best of all, none of them pay me in US dollars that evaporate in value before they even arrive at my bank. I swear it’s like getting paid in ice cubes on a hot day.
What did you hope to achieve with the book and your other writings? Nothing that comes to mind. I fully understand that I am just another frustrated nobody in an empire of fellow nobodies. I write simply because I am a writer. I’m not much good for anything else now. You’ll have to trust me when I say that I used to be able to do an honest day’s work for a living. If I can be said to have a goal, it is simply to be on record after I die as one of the people in America that tried not to be complicit in the empire’s crimes: shakedown of its people; its murders of dark skinned children in the Middle east and elsewhere; its debasement and defiling of human culture for profit; its propagation of a malignant and destructive financial system around the globe; or any of the terrible things I have witnessed done in our names.
Do you think you’re achieving that goal? Well, my children and grandchildren can read my works, and decide if I did. Probably not though. I have a bad history of proving to be a windbag and a fuck-up. Ask any of my ex-wives. If I am lucky though, my stuff will provide sort of a record of the times, and the thoughts and feelings of those of us who did not go along with America’s crimes before the fall.
Can you talk about the new book you’re working on? Hmm. I’m half-afraid to because it changes in major ways as I go along. I don’t know the meaning of the word outline. I’m probably the only reasonably successful attention deficit writer in the world. Seriously though, it is approximately a memoir of the development of America’s huge white underclass, and the subversion of and the manipulation of the lives of 60 million people over three generations. It’s about our system’s purposeful destruction of the security and moral underpinnings of millions of its own citizens.
Do you hope to one-day achieve mainstream success with your writings? I hope I never achieve mainstream American success. That would mean I’d written something so dumbed down and trivial that I’d have to kiss Oprah Winfrey’s ass to sell more books. I’ve got several million steady readers and my books are published by foreign publishing houses. They sell well enough here and abroad. I’m not quite sure what else I am supposed to want. I’m too old to snort cocaine and chase wild pussy anymore. But for years I’ve dreamed of spending a couple of weeks in a plain room in Granada, Spain, high on Sacramonte near the gypsy caves. That would be nice.
Joe Bageant has a website, helpfully named joebageant.com.
(Originally published in The Spiteful Critic)
