Here are a couple more pieces from our man in Winchester, Virginia: Joe Bageant. And don't forget that his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, is now available at all fine book stores. If it isn't, it damn well should be. (Here is my review of Deer Hunting with Jesus.)

The Ants of Gaia
It's only the end of the world, so quit bitching

As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I'd guess that it was the lack of water that finally got 'em. But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper's grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death. Now you'd think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, "Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off." Never mind that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99% of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism. Lovelock also convincingly argued that, due to the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles. As to be expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: "This guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types," both of which number among my favorite kinds of people. Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize about the earth's condition, and those scientists who did not require computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the most challenging of times in human history, "challenging" being a polite term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.

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Recruiting Trench Liberals and Leftnecks

Despite what Internet liberals may think, most real working class Americans, and I mean the people who tune up your Prius or press your dry cleaning, haven't given a flying fock about the Iraq war for the last couple of years now. Not until recently, when it became pretty clear we are losing it -- losing being the worst possible thing in a society force fed on sports and the winner-loser mentality which created the uniquely American contemptuous epithet, "a loser." But now as my friend Buddy, who at middle age has been reduced to bagging groceries and "shagging carts" in the parking lot at one of the local Food Lion supermarkets says, "If we ain't losing, we seem to been over there entirely too long to be winnin'. That's for shore." Buddy the bagboy hasn't the slightest notion of how national politics in any way affects his life. And so when the "Unfair Practices in Credit Cards Act" passes the Senate he will not know that the raising of his minimum payment had nothing to do with some well meaning but totally out of touch Democrats, who've never lived on $8.50 an hour. The paternalistic attempt of the bill's sponsors surely would protect future credit card racket victims. But Buddy and millions like him will be screwed the day it goes into effect by the new higher minimum payments, and he starts getting calls from people with an Indian accent regarding all three of his plastic cards. Sometimes Democrats can be as thankful as any Republican that most working folks don't examine politics too closely. Meanwhile the Republicans, like the Biblical King Balthazar and his court magicians, are watching in terror the writing on the wall by the mystic hand: "You're finished guys. Too many Halliburton and Diebold concubines hath drank from the golden cup." Thus the Democratic Party leadership headquartered at the Westchester Country Club will claim credit for many victories in the next elections, most of which will be handed them by the blowback of the worst presidency in American history. But that still leaves a lot of pissed off ordinary and uninformed Americans to placate on the wreckage of our domestic front. So the party of Roosevelt begins to dimly understand that now is the opportunity to re-associate itself with populism. The problem is that Democratic Party "leadership" has no notion of what populism means. First they ignored real working class people, then they forgot they existed.

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