Joe Bageant has two new essays up. Must reads.

Contemplations from the Cheap Beer Zone
Two kingpins of the sweating class deconstruct popular culture, Jon Stewart as opiate of the liberal masses and the Lake Tohopekaliga Bassmaster five-fish Classic.

What I like about Virgil is that, despite watching television half his waking hours, he seems to have escaped the effects of red state media here in Virginia, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network ("If I wanna know what God thinks, I'll ask him myself.") Or the Fox Network's Iraq War drums ("You gotta wonder where the coffins and the cripples are. Sumthin fishy there.") Or the effects of advertising ("If I could afford it I'd buy a case of that Cialis stuff and smuggle a boner downtown on Friday nights. And if it last over four hours that's just fine with me.") OK, so he hasn't completely escaped media's shaping effects. As for the rest of us, with the exception of those getting up at 4 a.m. for vespers in monasteries, most Americans under 70 live lives almost entirely shaped by media. The past two generations of Americans derive their functioning cultural knowledge and self-identity from media, though they will swear it ain't so, and indeed do not believe it themselves, so permeated is their existence. We reduce all things to personality, consumer products, celebrity and entertainment. Especially politics. For example, liberal TV watchers see Jon Stewart of The Daily Show as being political or about politics in some way. Of course it is about entertainment. Period. It's a comedic entertainment, created for profit by a global corporation and designed to fit the tastes and self-images of people who identify themselves as politically progressive. Stewart is a hip identity symbol for white middle class liberals. Which comes down to being, as Virgil terms it, "a smartass." Yet Stewart is a fundamental political input for millions, even though his show has about as much to do with an informative, actionable reality as Sponge Bob or ABC News (which delivered to my email this morning the following story: Castrated California Child Molester Wants His Freedom.) If you are a Stewart watcher who thinks you do not unquestioningly take him as a primary source of information, remember this: The Daily Show is being piped directly into your brain stem -- as any neuropsychologist or cognitive scientist can tell you, you don't have a choice in the matter.

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The Beauty of the System
A tale of shopping, blackmail and slow death in the lost Cul de Sac

America is a dark half continent of grotesque notions made manifest, such as Scientology, the GOP and the McDonald's "Big Bowl" meal. Americans seem to possess psychic flypaper that attracts strange unsavory notions. Worse yet, we act upon them. One notion we got into our heads right after World War II was that each generation must live better than the previous one. Not such a bad idea at the time, considering the number of folks in the previous generation who grew up during the Depression and knew what it was like to scratch with the chickens to survive. Consequently, the post-war generation was more than satisfied with a 900-square foot home, a refrigerator, a television, a car and presentable clothing -- any of which beat the hell out of drafty outhouses and scarlet fever. Throw in the GI bill entitlement for vets and you're looking at a pretty nice package for the post-war generation who brought us the baby boom and the two-ton, 17-foot 1954 Ford Customline 8 sedan. Further excess was inescapable. As Cotton Mather might well have said, had he the benefit of blasting down America's new interstates with a Chesterfield dangling from his lips and a cold Pabst in his pale Protestant claw, "BRING IT ON!" And so here we are sixty years after the Big War with an expanded American sense of middle class entitlement. Ramcharged by extreme American capitalism and abetted by the carnie barkers of Madison Avenue, everyone in the middle class now feels entitled to the full-blown suburban lifestyle, every last digitized, low fat, high density, energy sucking bit of it. It all starts with a college degree. Then in return for knocking down those hard earned Cs in university business or technical schools, the children and grandchildren of people who thought a big closet was one so deep you could reach your entire arm into it ("That sucker must be two feet deep Helen! Now THAT'S storage!") feel entitled to 3,000-4,000 square-foot houses. And forget the lone old family wagon. The suburban middle class expects a car for every family member, not to mention an investment portfolio, several household cell phones, multiple television screens, (36 percent of buyers under age 35 rated having a "home theater" as important or very important in their lives, according to National Association of Home Builders), multiple baths, central air conditioning, DVD players, washer-dryer combinations, laptops, iPods, answering machines, MP3 players, patio furniture, outdoor gas barbecues, digital cameras, car audio, security and navigational systems, microwave ovens, camcorders, HDTV receivers, satellite systems, VCRs, Xbox controllers, water purifiers, coffee/espresso maker combos, closet organizers, software, mountain bikes, camping and hiking equipment, software ... Phew! I can remember a time when my wife and I felt upscale because we bought a Sunbeam blender -- one of those solid chrome plated babies with the heavy glass 34-ounce jar. Hoooweee! Invite the neighbors. Banana smoothies for everybody! At any rate, Americans now have entire rooms specialized by appliance such as entertainment systems, home computers, and exercise equipment … It was not inevitable that we would arrive at such a point. It took a helluva lot of public greed and capitalist sucker-bait to make us the very spoiled and dangerous porcine folk we have become, people whose lives under the Empire constitute the most extreme material luxury and wealth the world has ever known, and the most oppressive and nihilistic one from a global standpoint.

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