I'm behind on linking to Joe Bageant. The silver tounged devil has been busy. I might add that he has a book coming out, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. He has been on a book tour and he is having a review copy sent to me, which I will be reading as soon as it arrives. Anyway, here's three from Joe.

Three Nights in Philly
Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes

A fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America, which I now consider my home: "America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday money and business stuff alone will trap you like fucking flypaper." And that keeps ringing in my head during this current return to sell my house and fulfill my promotional obligations for the book I just published here. Which could take months. But it's sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age, it's surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban self-important horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just around too many bland American "sluburbs" for too long before I skipped the country. Old men see a lot of phantoms when they revisit the scenes of their youth. Philly is like that for me. I was stationed at the now-defunct South Philly Naval Base in 1965. And it was in roaming that city during off-duty hours that city I experienced my first intellectual awakening, or at least the first one that had other human participants. I hung out at places like the Artist's Hut or the Guilded Cage off Rittenhouse Square, learned of the folk music and peace protest movements and heard poetry read live by real poets for the fist time.

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Rising Above Politics
Can we quit talking and start walking?

Well, lo and beshit! I never thought I’d ever see the day. But even in my hardcore Republican run hometown, many conservatives are quietly sneaking away from the sing-along around the campfire of George Bush’s war-crazed hootenanny. Most of them are ordinary bona fide conservatives. But others slipping off under cover of darkness are among our richest Republicans who profiteered mightily in the security, construction and service businesses that sprouted like mushrooms from every aspect of the Iraq War. Either they have suddenly developed a steak of conscience, or they simply don’t want to be associated with the trail of crime, blood and feces Bush and his cronies have obviously tracked across the carpet of American history. My bet is on the latter. But even the little fish who voted for Bush are starting to squirm. My neighbor, Big Larry, who is usually ecstatic here at the beginning of baseball season, and never gives politics the slightest thought except on Election Day, is rather glum now and starting to grumble about the state of the republic. This time last year he was pulling down good dough “driving truck” for Toll Brothers, complaining about his ‘roids a bit, but was otherwise the same sort of more or less unquestioning and nonpolitical working guy one finds just about anywhere in America. Now his driving hours are half of what he was getting last year and look to get slimmer yet, even as unemployed carpenters and electricians, casualties of the collapsing housing construction bubble, come knocking at our doors looking for handyman work. How can it be that the newspapers say the economy is booming? And so now, after the deepest sort of political meditation, Larry has concluded that “This Iraq War thing just might spell trouble for us in the long run.” Not, mind you, because of the war’s sheer bloody folly, but because “It has run up the price of concrete and plywood so much that people can’t afford to build houses anymore.” Some people will add two plus two and get five every time. So when it comes to Larry, it’s pretty easy to resist a discussion of the subprime mortgage rate implosion.

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Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson
Freedom vs. Authority under the 40-foot pulsating rainbow vagina

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It's all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It's mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska. -- Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I've been lucky enough -- or sometimes unlucky enough -- to meet and write about many of America's "somebodies," mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians. When I was young, so-called "media journalism" then was just what it is now, what we called "starfucking", and amounted to writing PR for media corporations in "music journals" of the time. But we covered a few worthwhile iconic figures in the mix as well -- the kind that stick around in the background of one's thinking forever. At my age now, I find a lot of them are dying off, the Hunter Thompsons, Susan Sontags, Ken Keseys and Kurt Vonneguts. However, I have a self-imposed policy not to eulogize them because the hundreds of sentimental Internet tributes that flourish upon their deaths somehow seem ghoulish, and because it is a universal truth that we writers will do anything for an audience, and celebrity death is one of the easiest ways to attract one. On rare occasions though, usually while writing late at night, the ghost of one of these people, the shade of an especially prescient writer or thinker, sneaks up, slaps me across the back of the head and says: "I told you so!" And when two appear in a single night, well, you gotta write about it.

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