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TechnoratiAmerica's Good Burghers Living in Debtors' Prison
Despite the bad name Jesus has with secular liberals these days, he did have the right idea. He'd get right down there on the street and grunt with the people, feeling them all over and healing their boils, feeding them and preaching his butt off while blind men popped open their eyes and lame folk started doing the Dead Sea Boogie.
No maintaining a professional distance for that guy. He just went out there and "got 'er done" in plain sight of everybody. Including the Hebrew religious mafia and the Roman superstate thugs of the time - which is why he got whacked.
Two thousand years later, the public expects more from their miracles than leprous hides instantly infused with the pink blush of health. Computer animation rendered all that passe decades ago. A wardrobe malfunction by Mary Magdalene might punch up the New Testament a little, but compassion for human suffering is never going to budge American TV ratings, and never going to register unless we see it in the cinema, where Jesus on a pole is occasionally acceptable, providing he spills enough blood a la Mel Gibson, while he is up there.
Call it media conditioned numbness, which it is. But it is safe to say most Americans don't give a damn about the rest of humanity, starving infants, the homeless and whatnot, so long as the unhygienic swarms stay the hell out of our yards and don't bring up that tired commie stuff about our lifestyle being based upon sweatshop misery. In that way, we all test positive for the devil's hickey.
Republicans may flaunt their hickeys like high school kids in the locker room, but guilt-plagued Democrats console themselves that they can banish it at the ballot box, if only they close their eyes and wish upon a star. Thus, their comfortable self-delusions that the Tiger Woods of the Democratic Party, the technically black, is somehow blessed with a melanin-based inner moral compass lacking in the rest of society, and therefore does not bear the damnable mark. Wiser souls, who are aware that Barack Obama possesses a net worth of several millions, a Harvard law degree and a career born in that venerable political whorehouse called Chicago, assume the mark is probably located where we cannot see it. Another political wish upon a star is that Hillary Clinton, a woman marked by so many hickeys she looks like a victim of massive subdermal haemorrhaging, will reform the brutal health care system without pulling up her skirt for the insurance industry. She says "there is no possible governmental solution that does not include the insurance industry".
Well, of course not. Industry is America's government. Voters merely decide which industries have front spots at the public trough. One's home is the new debtor's prison, a place where we sleep while we work off interest payments on the mortgage.
Meanwhile, out there in the vast looms of government-as-corporation, the fast food industry weaves the MacDonald's Cheeseburger Bill, giving itself immunity to lawsuits as it fattens a nation of steers whose sole purpose is to consume, never to be butchered, except in the wars that protect the corporate cheeseburger. Even on the battlefront, it turns profit on millions of burgers and fries that are served to those who fight America's oil and cheeseburger wars.
American consumers watch this on TV and see it as comfortably familiar. We cannot possibly be doing so badly in Iraq if a soldier can get a Red Bull energy drink and a Puff Daddy CD on the battlefield.
Right? Which is true enough, if you have been obliviously conditioned to see these as symbols of liberty and the utmost accomplishment of the republic - if you see it as "our way of life". And indeed our way of life is rapidly coming to that: oblivion with an order of fries.
Joe Bageant is the author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War.
Copyright © 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
15 Comments so far
Show AllPhooey...It was more fun if he was australian. Yes I assumed ... um... but can't we send back Murdoch anyway?
I would like to see more of Joe Bageant on CD.
Ummm, BugsBBunnyIII, just because an article is published in an Australian paper doesn't mean the author is Australian. Bageant is as American as they come.
From his own Website (http://www.joebageant.com):
"About Joe:
Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran.
After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast ... lived in communes, hippie school buses... started writing about holy men, countercultural figures, rock stars and the American scene in 1971 ... lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s ... 14 years in all ... became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist ... Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues...
Moved to the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years ... tended reservation bar (The Bald Eagle Bar), wrote for regional newspapers... generally festered on life in America ... Moved to Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there ... Then moved to Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide.
Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love'em but they need a good ass kicking.
Died in 2000 when George Bush got elected ... died along with 275 million other Americans ... Plan to rise again from the dead when he is tossed out ...maybe reincarnate as a Commie terrorist on Wall Street ... maybe as a sex worker in Amsterdam ... can't decide ... both have their advantages.
Joe Bageant"
BugsBBunny III,
I think Bageant relocated from the south somewhere, Atlanta? I'm not sure where. He relocated to Belize sometime last year or so and he travels to promote his book.
I'm pretty sure he's not Australian. Personally, I think it was kind of a cop out leaving for Belize the way he did. We need people like Joe around here, even if it's maybe easier being someplace else. Plus in a weird way it's kind of a double standard.
Yep Jesus did say think for yourselves and He did speak truth to power and empire. Yeah the romans didn't like liberals... lol. Joe I liked your gumption (an american word) and a no holds barred criticism. Being polite and humble doesn't do...um... bloody squat. Did I use that word correctly...lol.
But hey Aussie? Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Australia (Rupert Murdoch's Australia) just as capitalist and virtually the same as America in many of the criticisms you mentioned. Joe talk don't vent.
The other day an article published in Australia whined ...yes whined Joe... about a desalination plant run by energy provided by windmills because it was 'green' and apparently green is a new fad or something. Isn't Australia presently experiencing the worst drought conditions in a thousand years? Your author mocks people wanting green products etc.? Well dang it all but don't that sound just like the crap we see rammed down our throats (and up somewheres else) by our own corporate media.
Yeah Joe they dumb them down down under too. So Australia TV is a bastion of elegance and high cultural is it. Yeah Joe...yeah.
Okay ...ahem... one more question Joe? How come you Aussies wear one side of your hats pinned up (very cute) in a place where you need protection from the sun? One would imagine that a lot of you blokes (what the hell is the derivation of that word anyway?) walk around with half your faces sunburned? We'd call that half assed but that would be altogether too apt.
What does obama's melanin have to do with anything whatsoever...hypocrite? Yet you managed to work it in there in a sneaky sort of way. You are a bit of a jerk ...eh what?
Dumbed down down under... sadly you Aussies remind me of us.
P.S. If you want Murdoch back ...you can have him. He's one of the media numbing producers. Big time. I believe he is Australian.
"Deer Hunting With Jesus"--
"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base,' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state—and, therefore, ours—Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
—MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform
Many Americans are simply living off the fat of their empire.
Because their rulers aren't using them in productive agricultural or industrial work, they can only use them as consumers and those that service consumers.
As consumers, they are conditioned to take and not make.
However, all of the above is more understandable if one imposes the master-overseer-slave model of societies.
The masters control their slaves using carrots and sticks. In the imperial center, the masters tend to use carrots (consumerism);in the impoverished outer-reaches of the empire the stick is more apparent.
When the rulers cannot control their local slaves with the carrot, the stick will come for them, also.
Zoya, as far as "we stand for greatness, even if we've hit a rough patch just now," I think we can all agree on the general crappiness of that.
But the above author as required reading? This sample says too much "Christ is cool" and not enough "How the hell did we get here?" Not what our young people need, my friend.
zoya: Amen, brother!
The great thing about Bageant is that he sees America the way the rest of the world sees America. None of this crap about "we stand for greatness, even if we've hit a rough patch just now."
Bageant should be on the required reading list in every high school, college, and university in the USA.
there but for the grace of god.
This article is typically enabling of that ghastly desert religion that's nearly as bad as that other ghastly desert religion. Joe, while you're busy painting Jesus hip, you gloss over the fact that the kind of hierarchical non-thinking and tribalism espoused by His church has had plenty to do with what's got us here in the first place. Jesus never said "Think for yourself!" Instead, he suggested we be good sheep.
I think the devil's the one to listen to these days (as far as we need to hear out metaphorical figures, that is). He's the opposer, and the gods all know we need a lot more of that.
Thank you for this article. Reagan and other like-minded politicians have played a major role in making Americans greedy, self-centered, and xenophobic and uninformed. This malaise affects the right and left. When a jury can watch a child beaten to death and find all the aggressors (government employees)innocent - our morals are lost. When this fascist and racist beating and acquittal can go without outrage from all corners of the "progressive" world, our republic is lost. It did and we are.
Jesus doesn't have a bad name with liberal progressives these days so much Jesus' falling out with mainstream Christianity.
If Christ's teachings (forgiveness, love, sharing, material poverty, tolerance, etc.) are his living embodiments today, he's being recrucified by large segments his own church and the politicians who wrap themselves up in it.
There is arguably an essential (nearly lost) subtle gnostic teaching of the old dionysis/mithras/osirus man-god plays. The crucifixion and resurrection are ongoing things day-to-day, pedagogical vehicles, unrelated to place or time, and not to be read as literal history. i.e. waging war, hating your neighbor, seeking wealth, intolerance, etc. are all forms of ongoing crucifixion.
This article is a mirror held up from half-way across the world in which we have a chance to look at ourselves. Do we like what we see? Way to go Joe.