Shortly before the first election of the second President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced his third wife that they should move from Oregon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled literary aspirations, was editing an agribusiness newsletter. They had money and lived well, but when Military History magazine offered him a job in Virginia, Joe saw it as an opportunity to return to his hometown of Winchester. He hadn’t been back in decades, and like many displaced Southern men on the far side of middle age, he felt the pull of home. The people were real there, he told his wife. They took care of each other. Without spending too much, Joe and Barbara could buy a colonial with a porch, right downtown, and say hello to a dozen friends every time they walked to the store.So they moved. Bought the colonial, downtown as promised, and settled into the nominal capital of the Shenandoah Valley, a 250-year-old, tradition-bound town that had given George Washington his first political victory and Patsy Cline her first stable home. Before long, Joe shook off the cultivated air he’d acquired in his west-coast days. He started dressing in cheap work clothes and guzzling beer alongside the rednecks he’d grown up with. At karaoke nights and in the 7-Eleven parking lot, he listened to his people rail about their menial jobs, their healthcare debt, and their proud anti-liberalism.
Joe was familiar with the shitkicker ethos, but he was unprepared for the tone of panic and resentment that charged his old friends’ conversations. Increasingly despondent, he vented his frustrations in writing, first in chatrooms, and then in the galloping voice that he’d honed as a Hunter S. Thompson–obsessed newspaper columnist in his earlier life. “Something new and . . . ominous is afoot down here,” he wrote in 2004, in the first essay to appear on his website, joebageant.com:
Our girthsome, ill-educated polity hoots, cheers and guffaws at a Fox network made-for-the masses political movie called America, the Baddest Dog on the Block, as the power elite pick every pocket in the audience through regressive taxes, stopping only to loot the local treasury on their way out the back door to that money-insulated estate they bought for a song.That essay, “Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy,” invoked a hellscape of blue-collar anger. Before long, similar tracts—about guns, real estate, alcohol, Pentecostalism, and other aspects of the Scots-Irish Southern trailer lifestyle—started appearing more frequently than most people exercise, and by the time Bush left the White House, Joe Bageant had detailed Winchester’s spiritual and economic devolution in dozens of elite-indicting online tirades, a book of which, Deer Hunting with Jesus, brought him a six-figure advance from Random House and blurbs from Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn.
His return home, as described in that book, had convinced Joe that American culture “is based on two things: television and petroleum.” We live “in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords.” He reserved his greatest ferocity for the liberals who let it all happen, with their thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every thinking white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb rightly called America’s “paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.” Whether educated liberals believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots Irish and thousands of Scots Irish–influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.
Joe’s book prompted speaking invitations in England, Italy, and Australia. His ideas were quoted approvingly by the New York Times, NPR, and the BBC, particularly as the 2008 presidential election neared. His rage became his brand, a fishing vest and beer gut his uniform, and before Barack Obama began campaigning for a second term, Joe Bageant was dead, at age sixty-four. It was cancer, not suicide, but by the end he’d grown so angry about the root cruelty and unfairness of American-style capitalism that the only solace he allowed himself in his columns was a firm belief in the oncoming collapse. “It is seeing everything in material terms, just like our avaricious capitalist overlords, that holds us back,” he wrote just months before learning of the tumor that had clenched around his intestines like a fist. “We are in the sixth great species die-off here.”
Returning as he did to Winchester right as Bush took office, Joe Bageant stepped into a writer’s dream—a perfect confluence of subject, setting, and personal knowledge—and he responded with fury, writing essay after raging essay, a dazzling output that collectively foresaw the housing crisis and recession, Obamacare, and “the 1 percent” as a rhetorical tool. Yet four years after his death, he’s remembered for one book and a corresponding moment of semi-fame as “America’s Most Literate Redneck,” if he’s remembered at all.
From the outside, Joe Bageant’s career and image seemed to materialize spontaneously, but for all his bubba bona fides, Joe’s outlook was equally the product of LSD, Buddhism, American Indian activists, Timothy Leary, and the back-to-the-land movement. In fact, the twenty-first century’s foremost chronicler of red-state dispossession was more than just a literate redneck—he was an avenging angel of the forgotten rural hippie movement. If his work—particularly his vivid second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, which remains without a U.S. publisher—were more deeply and widely read and his life more fully understood, Joe’s most radical propositions might seem worth considering: he insisted that tree-huggers are the natural allies of trailer trash, and that the political disasters of the last few decades are a result of the mainstream left’s disavowal of them both.
by John Lingan, Baffler | Read more:
Image: Stephen Kroninger
[ed. Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy]
