What Would Joe Bageant Do?

When Joe Bageant wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain in May, 2010, subtitled Big Brother's got that ju-ju, Gaia's got the blues, — hologram, carry me home, he only had about 10 months to live. Joe died on March 26, 2011. The other day the question why get out of bed? arose, for if all the news is as bad as I document here on DOTE everyday, there seems little point to doing anything.

Here in the United States we live in the Age of Decay. The glory days of the Empire in the decades after World War II are over. That much is clear to most of those who do not benefit directly from the Empire's decline, with only the most delusional of optimists clinging to the hope that those glory days can return.

Joe Bageant was living in Ajijic, Mexico when he wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain. His health was deteriorating and he must of have known the end was near. Joe had no illusions about the world he was leaving. Most of the essay discusses what he called "the (media) hologram" which creates an alternate universe where none of the world's problems exist. I urge you to read the entire essay, but here's a sample in which Joe talks about the hologram.

I've spent most of this week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It's a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical...

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it...

There's a lot more where that came from. Joe provides a clear-eyed view of the American world he was leaving behind. You can read it yourself. Joe's "answer" to the question why get out of bed? can be found in this text near the end of Lost.

Again, what will be left after the big collapse? Perhaps after a period of terror, violence and chaos, when the undeniable on-the-ground truth becomes apparent, through ecological disaster, war and other events, a more positive national cathexis will occur. If it does, it probably will not resemble anything we can conceive of in these times. If we can get past the terror involved from our present apprehensive vantage point, it is easy to see why positive national, even global cathexis may be unavoidable.

Cause for well-reasoned optimism exists. Its way the fuck out there, but it's there. Not that it is something to cling to, or even pursue. Clinging and desire are the cause of all suffering in the first place. Doing so only prolongs suffering, personal, national or planetary. The Buddhists are right about that one. So are the Baptists when they say "The world gets right when the people get right."

The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:

What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?

Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!

The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons -- only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.

This proposition is unappealing to Americans and just about everyone else in the western world. To be perfectly honest, a big screen TV, the Internet, and tickets to a Rams game are more accessible and immediately gratifying. Right action in the moment does not light up your neural pleasure centers like cheap sex or jalapeno Doritos. However, I am trying to do it anyway, at least until the opportunity for cheap sex presents itself. When it does, it will most likely be the right action for that moment. Funny how things work.

In any case, by the mundane right action of breakfast, I mean fixing breakfast to locate one's heart in that particular day. Then proceeding toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters, whether it be in bums, dogs, kids, plants, or the rich fucker next door moaning over his enormous tax bill. To him that is suffering. There's no sliding scale about this shit. I once worked for a guy who bawled when some kid keyed his Porsche. Misery is relative.  Compassion is sublime...

Bageant's answer may not be your answer. It's not even my answer, although I share much in common with him (living alone, being lonely, a lack of opportunities for cheap sex,  not having much money, though my health is OK so far.) We also shared in common that writing was the best, most appropriate response to a world this fucked-up. But I will never be a Buddhist, although I occasionally have Buddhist-like tendencies, like making my breakfast or playing music mindfully. Compassion may be sublime as Joe says but its not my strong suit, at least most of the time. Somewhere along the way I lost patience with people who don't get what I'm up to, what I'm telling them, and I sometimes tell them to get lost in overly strong terms or banish them. Mea culpa.

Oh, by the way, that reminds me of something. A person criticized me the other day, saying "it's all Dave, all the time" on DOTE. That's funny, it is my blog, is it not? What does he think? That DOTE is a Democracy? Where every vote counts? Ha!

The greater point is that for every person, there is a way through the darkness. It may not be Joe's way, it may not be my way, but it's your way. (I may break into song here, Frank Sinatra comes to my mind.) You don't have to be a Buddhist or a Liberal Democrat or anything else. Or maybe that's your way. Who knows?

So that's what Joe Bageant would do, and did do, near the end of his life. You're probably a lot better off than Joe or me. Speaking for myself, you may have—well, I hope you do—a healthy loving relationship, or children who love you, or close friends who don't live a million miles away, or some money and the freedom of choice it buys, or something else that keeps you going. Writing this blog, and composing, arranging and playing music keep me going (and let's not forget the occasional self-medication, aka. drinking, which is also essential for the lonely guy).

Don't despair when I tell you how bad this world has become, which I'm going to keep doing. That's not the point of being alive. Not at all. Figuring out what's real and what's not, a problem I'm trying to help you with, and Joe was trying to help you with, and George Carlin was trying to help you with, is merely the gateway to something else.

This is it. Your Big Moment. Everything's riding on the choices you make. This is not the Scholastic Aptitude Test. You don't get to take this test over again in the future if you fuck it up the first time. The future is now. There are no "right" answers although I can assure you that there are wrong ones.

What would you do in a world as fucked-up as this one?

Again, this is not a test, this is as real as it gets. Good luck.

Bonus Video — Philip Glass, Truman Sleeps

 

Comments

[pamela]

Ok, this was a brilliant post!
thanks for writing it and posting it.
I miss Joe too.

[Paul]

The Dalai Lama teaches us to have compassion for and pity our enemies.
How many of us are going to be able to do that?

[Chris]

The prophet inspires today, as he does from time to time. Thanks, Dave.

I miss Joe Bageant.

[Paul]

If I find that compassion for the bankers is too difficult to achieve then I intend to/have done the following:

Get out of debt.
Grow my own food.
Stop voting.
Use cash only.
Learn new skills - sewing, carpentry, first aid, bicycle repair.
Get fitter.
Eat healthy food only.
Fix broken things.
Build relationships within my community.
Read more.
Learn to play the harmonica.

And learn to be happy without stuff.

[xraymike79]

First of all, one must find the truth through all the sticky layers and tangled webs of corporate spin and propaganda. Without that, then you are simply stuck in the Delusional Hologram that Bageant so brilliantly described. Without the raw truth, then whose reality are we really living in, but the one created for us by the false self-serving agenda of others. I think that's one of the main purposes of DOTE. And to do that we have to pull some pretty gruesome things out of this country's closet, like how militarism is as American as apple pie (along with the whitewashing and revisionist history that follows):

The World War on Democracy

"America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none."

[bernard]

One of the reasons that I get out of bed each day is to read your post. Thanks for Bageant refresher . I discovered him just before he died.

[sharonsj]

Great stuff and quite depressing. I have a form of tinnitus and leave the TV on for hours, along with talk radio. However, I discount everything I hear and get my news from a huge list of internet sites that are centrist or progressive.

I cannot listen to conservatives or Republicans any more without wanting to put my foot through the TV or throw the radio out the window. I've kept a list of lies (verified by actual facts and data) and note that not a single commentator ever calls these liars to task. It is the main reason why the average citizen is just so dumb.

To the right-wingers out there: sorry, but your major spokespeople are crazy. Fox News says that there's never been a single case of mad cow disease in the U.S. but there have been many, along with mad deer disease. Limbaugh says the summer heat wave doesn't exist and no temperature records were broken when on the same day of his claim there are dozens of headlines saying that 55 separate heat records were broken. I could go on and on, but the really depressing part for me is that the conservatives out there refuse to listen to facts.

We still headed down the tubes, there is no recovery, and nothing will change without serious reform of campaign laws...and maybe booting out some of the guys on the Supreme Court who make up their own laws. Where the hell are the conservatives who are always screaming about activist judges now?

[Scott]

Never heard of Joe until today. What a shame he's gone now. =(

I find it amusing that a reader would say "it's all Dave, all the time." Funny. I had a (now former) friend who's a retired cop and Faux News/Glenn Beck junky flip out when I posted an anti-Republican and anti-war remarks on my own facebook page (which I use as a sort of poor man's blog). He just went positively _nuts_, said I had my "head up my ass," called me dishonet and a liar, lectured me on how "great" America is, et cetera, and demanded "an apology."

I concluded that, unbeknownst to me, he had an "authoritarian follower" type of personality, laughed it off, and deleted him. Welcome to the fascist-y world that is 21st Century AmeriKa.

Reflecting on Joe's remarks and yours, I am torn. I often thinking of leaving the US Empire and am doing my homework on that, making some preliminary plans and asking a lot of questions. I will have citizenship in two countries, soon.

But it's hard to leave, change is hard. I served 8 years in the US military and love this country. And, if I leave, it will be permanent, I'm sure. Things won't get better here in my lifetime, I'm sure.

Until then, to stay happy I...

Try to treasure every second with my wife, and be sweet to her
Love and care for my family as much as I can
Stay in touch with friends and other loved ones, spend time
Do a good job at work
Keep busy in the garden, planting, designing & changing things there
Buy some more silver coins or some more ammunition if I have any extra, uneeded money available...

Take care, Dave, and thanks for this blog.

[Wanooski]

Dave, I was wondering if you would be up to the task of eviscerating Newt's ridiculous moonbase nonsense in the coming days, I've really been waiting for someone to call that bullshit, but as of yet, nothing really seems to have surfaced. Please and maybe thank you.

And Joe Bageant really was an incredibly perceptive person, it really is too bad he didn't get to reach more people.

[Dave Cohen]

You got it, Wanooski.

Happy to oblige.

-- Dave

[Honesty]

Excellent blog entry, and excellent observations by Joe Bageant. My friends look at me as if I'm an escapee from a mental asylum whenever I try to discuss the topic this post deals with. They would rather argue about who is the better player between LeBron and Kobe.

[Wanooski]

Thanks a billion Dave, I look forward to it.

[Unbound]

Richard Heinberg, in his foreword to Fleeing Vesuvius, makes reference to PPA's:

"The authors have applied themselves to an analysis of the most important and fateful economic transition in human history. They are among the People who are Paying Attention (PPA)—an almost completely unorganized demographic consisting of individuals who have the privilege to devote a substantial amount of time to following world political, economic, and environmental news, but who are not blinded by any fixed religious or political ideology. PPA probably number globally no more than a few million, and (if I may speak for them) have generally come to the conclusion that the world is facing a triple crisis:
 
A. The depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals;
B. The proliferation of environmental impacts, principally climate change arising from both the extraction and use of resources (including the burning of fossil fuels)—leading to snowballing costs from both these impacts themselves and from efforts to avert them; and
C. Financial disruptions due to the inability of our existing monetary, banking, and investment systems to adjust to both resource scarcity and soaring environmental costs—and their inability (in the context of a shrinking economy) to service the enormous piles of government and private debt that have been generated over the past couple of decades."

I've shared this excerpt because Joe Bageant was a member of the PPA club, as was George Carlin and Bill Hicks; Dave, Nicole Foss and Heinberg too are members in good standing -- as are a hand-full of others I failed to mention.

As Heinberg pointed out, PPA's are negligible in numbers and their message remains relegated to the margins -- so a hat tip is in order to Dave for continuing to honor the voices of a Joe Bageant and George Carlin in his blog -- the need to carry the PPA tradition forward is imperative.

Here are some noteworthy Bageant quotes, enjoy!:

The four conerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda."

“(T)he big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit.”

“Corporatization of media has reduced our once-thriving American dialogue to a warm puddle of commercial piss.”

“The combination of our poorly educated workforce, and ruthless demagogic oligarchy are not a nationwide problem: they are a national tragedy. It’s one that’s getting worse and is not likely ever to be fixed. The Empire is collapsing inward upon its working base. The oligarchs have skipped town with the national treasury; many have multiple homes in other countries. The inherent natural resources upon which America was initially built by laboring men and women have been squandered. ... When empires die, they die broke.”

Type Joe Bageant into the Youtube search field for some poignant JB interviews.

[CB]

Yes I agree Joe Bageant was a hell of a writer and observer of human behavior. The comments qoute "The big money is constitutionally protected .... is classic.
As to why get up in the morning - mostly just the simple curiosity to see what happens next. Even if tomorrow is likely to be worse than today we are still curious to find out the details.

Truman Sleeps has a nice arc.
Do you ever post any of your original music?
I appreciate your point of view on this blog - don't always agree but it makes me think.

[Jay]

Nice writing Dave. First time comment from a regular reader & fellow burgh east-ender.

[Ian]

Matthew, have you read Jean Luc Nancy: Being suagilnr Plural?Also want to say, If you decide to come to London (UK), you have a home to stay. Just contact me.