G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Are we there yet Pa? Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned
By Joe Bageant
Created Feb 6 2008 - 6:45am
John Raymond Castillo, age 81. Sunrise, January 14, 1917. Sunset, February
1, 2008. He leaves 21 children, 140 grandchildren and 302
great-grandchildren.
--Obituary announcement on Belize's LOVE Radio station
"The population of Belize? Officially it's about 300,000. But if you include
all the kids, it's probably three million."
--Greg, longtime expatriate American in Belize
HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE: The din of squealing, laughing children is the
background white noise of the Third World. In Belize, as in most of the
Third World, 45% of all people are under the age of 16. About a dozen of
that 45% swarm around me as I cut my toenails under the mango tree. A few
are picking on the mangy, quarreling dogs but the majority are drawn in
close, giving advise about how to cut gnarly, old man type toenails: "Saw
dem off wid a file" seems to be the consensus.
What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about
grades . unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race.
They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary
population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both
ever in human history.
Most families here have five or six kids and their kids will have a similar
number. I've yet to meet a native of the village who does not think half a
dozen is not a nice round number of offspring. My adopted family has six
kids and four adults living on a 100 x 300-foot lot. This does not include
the Guatemalan family of five living in a rented cabana at one corner of the
lot. Assuming all the children reach adulthood and procreate, the tally in
ten years will be about 50 people of all ages trying to exist on this square
of sewerage soaked sand.
But oh, were it that bright a future. As adults with families, these kids
won't even have this spot on which to live at all, much less live as well as
they live now. The resorts and condo rackets out of Canada, South Africa and
the U.S. are buying up these small plots. Unschooled in western financial
concepts and janked by the developers' offers of more money than they have
ever seen in their lives, locals sell. Usually they are broke within a year.
In any case their semi-literate children will join the next generation's
issuance of dispossessed poverty stricken young adults headed for elsewhere.
Just what the world does not need, not here in Central America, not in the
Middle East, not in Latin America or the U.S. But that's what we've got and
that's what we are going to get a lot more of.
Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our
approaching eco-disaster that that no one honestly talks about. On the left
we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to
prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore's advice, which somehow
never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets
feel-good electric car ads -- buy your way out of the problem, or at least
your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest
discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate
change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is
guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, "You can't run a
hundred head of cattle on half an acre."
Most of the developed world remains clueless as to how all this will affect
their own lives. But Americans in particular cannot get their head around
the impact these billions will have on the lifestyles they are driven like
rats in hell to sustain. About half of Americans.
THE SCREAMING MAN INSIDE MY HEAD: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS
BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL
THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER
HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE
WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. "LET'S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE
LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL ****ING YES, LET'EM ALL IN!" YEA, RIGHT. LET
EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A ****ING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD
AMERICA. HELL, IT'S ALREADY STARTED. THEY'RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS
BECAUSE THEY CAN'T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY'RE
KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY
CAN'T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH
DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.
Meanwhile, both camps of a nation with no sense of history beyond its own
state sponsored founding fathers mythology hasn't the slightest notion of
how population migrations from areas of scarcity to areas of plenty have
shaped human history perhaps more than any other force, including war (war
is just more dramatic when it happens and more entertaining to read about
when it's over.) The Vikings were a population shift from the limited arable
land resources of the north around the British coast to Normandy (and then
back to England by way of William the Conqueror, a Viking descendant.) The
Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Irish in America, Chinese into Tibet .
SCREAMING MAN: WELL BUBBA, LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU IN CRAYONS. IT'S
GETTING RIGHT BROWN OUT THERE IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. ALL THOSE SAWED-OFF
LITTLE DARK HAIRED ****ERS HAVEN'T COME UP HERE TO BE LAWN ORNAMENTS. AND
SINCE THEY EAT AND **** ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT AS YOU DO, THERE'S GONNA BE
SOME REDISTRIBUTION OF THE GOODIES. YOU'RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF AMERICAN
BLUBBER PARKED IN LINE ALONGSIDE SALVADORANS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS FULL OF
WORTHLESS GREENBACKS WAITING TO BUY BLACK BEANS AND MASA HARINA IN BULK -
THEN HITCHING A RIDE HOME ON A FLATBED TRUCK LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD
SOUTH OF LOREDO DOES. OR MAYBE TAKING THE CHICKEN COOP FIREWOOD EXPRESS
SURPLUS SCHOOL BUS BACK TO THE SAVAGE ARMED SUBURBS. A LITTLE TIP FROM THE
OLE SCREAMING MAN: IF THERE IS A BILLY GOAT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, RIDE UP
FRONT. IF THE DAMNED GOAT IS UP FRONT, RIDE ON THE ROOF. THERE IS USUALLY
SOMEBODY OR SOMETHING UP THERE TO HANG ONTO.
Hungry but still humpin'
Meanwhile, the truth stays buried in the crapola. According to the UN's
newest report on the planetary condition, crop production has improved but
has not kept up with population. World cereal production per person peaked
in the 1980s, and has since been decreasing. We have over six billion people
now -- there were far less than half that when I was born -- and there will
be roughly nine billion people by 2050. But the UN, being a world
organization that has to please a couple hundred governments, each beating
its own national drum to its people, pretending there is a long term
solution other that to eliminate two thirds of the world population within
the above mentioned kids' lifetimes. Thus, the UN issues "millennium
development goals." This neatly sidesteps the fact that if the present six
billion mouths and assholes running the world's resources through their
gullets like **** through a goose is unsustainable, then nine billion of the
same are waaaaaay beyond sustainable in any way worth calling human life.
For starters it would take a doubling of world food production to (A-) feed
the current victims of hunger, and (B-) to feed the additional three
billion. Theoretically, we're going to cut back. We'll feed the nine billion
by some unarguably admirable means, like cutting waste, not overeating,
biofuels, and ending meat consumption. Small problem here Jackson: We're
pretty much out of the phosphate fertilizer that is the foundation of world
agriculture. The soil itself collapsing in terms of human nutrition, as we
use up its finite reserves of vital elements - iodine, chromium salts and
other complex materials our six billion collective bodies need to function.
And farming has already sucked down the world's water supply to the danger
level. Yet somehow, we are going to come up with TWICE the water we now use
by 2050, global warming and drying be damned. The whole time we are fixing
global warming the population climbs.
Old Tom Malthus said something like this was gonna happen, although he got
some of the details wrong, which a person just might conceivably do in
predicting the fate of human civilization a couple hundred years in advance.
Call me a softie here, but I tend to give the guy a break for getting it 90%
right.
But then I'm no scientist. Supposedly sophisticated American scientists have
been pissing on the grave of poor Tom at least since I was a kid in school.
All my life American capitalist economists have proclaimed they've licked
the population problem by using the world up faster. "A failed prophet of
doom," I believe my high school teacher called Malthus. Even commies kicked
Tom's dog around. Engles called him a barbarian. Marx couldn't handle Tom's
action, either. Nor practically anyone else, from John Stuart Mill to Allen
Greenspan. And we still get the stale argument that "This planet isn't
crowded; it is just mismanaged." Even the greens seem to believe that we can
manage our way out of this fatal mess, if we just recycle, wear hemp and
vote for the candidate on the bicycle with the Celtic tattoo. The
alternative geeks swear nanotech is gonna pull us through. But last I heard
pandemic viruses were still smarter than carbon nanotubes. Something about
rapid adaptability. Those little ****ers seem to be fast on their feet, so
in a title match between nano tech (or any tech for that matter) managed in
the ring by nerds, and natural evolutionary biology -- which not only has
mother nature holding the towels in its corner, but also calling the
fight -- I'm damned sure betting on the biology.
At any rate, when it comes to the planet, now under the new global corporate
management, it looks to be managed to death, dirt, people and all. The new
management, kings and feudal lords of corporate finance to a man, peer down
happily from the forty-fourth floor at six billion potential slave wage
employees and wonder if you can feed'em on dirt and kudzoo.
Malthus must be thrashing inside his lead lined English coffin right now,
cackling, "Do the math, you ****ers!" But they won't. With the world's geet
presently being loaded into their yachts bound for the Caymans, they don't
have to. Not just yet, anyway. As for they guy on the bike with the Celtic
tattoo, if he peddles long enough he's bound to run into some of those
49,671 human beings born while I was writing this.
SCREAMING MAN: AND WHILE HE'SPEEDING HE CAN CLOSE HIS EYES AND MAKE A
****ING WISH WITH TINKERBELL! THAT NINE BILLION WILL BE HUMPING AWAY TRYING
TO CRACK THE TWELVE BILLION MARK. WHEN WE ARE ALL LIVING IN RENTALSTORAGE
LOCKERS AND EATING PURINA PEOPLE CHOW, ****ING WILL BE ONE OF THE LAST FREE
PASSTIMES LEFT, OTHER THAN LISTENING TO THE 24/7 ADVERTIZING PIPED IN
THROUGH OUR NECK CHIPS SELLING TEENSY STRAP ON YOUR ASS RUBBER BAND POWERED
CARS. SO WE'RE GONNA HAVE EITHER HOMELAND SECURITY **** POLICE, OR FORCED
STERILIZATION BY ICE PICK.
Actually, THE SCREAMING MAN is not so far off the mark. Human sterilizing
crops are being researched, and I'm not entirely sure I'm agin it, partner,
so long as they make the white people eat the stuff first.
In the meantime, the air is getting rather balmy in places it shouldn't.
Such as the North Pole. So the corporate and financial lizards at the top of
the world rock, in a last ditch effort to milk out a few bloody trillion
dollars more, has come up with a plan: carbon emissions trading.
Just as in a Mafia handshake and kiss on the neck "business agreement,"
there are no escape clauses in the laws of physics. In either case the rules
cannot be bent, though you ass may well end up worse than bent if you try to
escape the debt you have racked up, be it in greenbacks or the green life
supporting stuff of our planet. Both are finite and vital. Which means you
get killed if you try to scam the game, and you certainly don't get to write
yourself an escape clause after the fact. But that doesn't keep the high
rolling carnie hucksters we call legislators from trying. Naturally they
like carbon trading. To my mind at least, making a profit off the fact that
you did not piss into the community drinking gourd is the kind of logic only
obsessive, property based western world governments and corporations could
come up with. It assumes that (A) poisoning everyone else in the human
fishbowl is a right to start with, and (B) that right is a property which
can be bought and sold between corporate poisoners.
Traded or not, there will be plenty of carbon around, so don't worry about
not getting your fair share. In fact, we could park every car on the planet
and be assured of a nice steady supply of carbon pollution for our
great-great-great grandchildren. Turns out that, decades ahead of an already
grim global warming schedule, biological repositories of carbon are
beginning to release enough of the stuff to tide us over so our progeny can
gasp for breath as they skateboard piggyback to and from their barracks at
the Manpower gulag. Anyway, we can monetize pollution, and trade our
commonly shared hemlock back and forth, and we can call it a "partial
solution and a progressive step forward." But it's still hemlock.
Yet, economists assure us that it makes good sense propertize, then buy and
sell catastrophe in the market of calamity.
SCREAMING MAN: LOOK HERE SPORT. THEY'RE POLISHING A TURD SO THEY CAN SHAKE
DOWN THE YOKELS. AND THE DUMB MAMMY JAMMING PUBLIC BUYS IT! HELL, AN
ECONOMIST SAID IT AND AN ECOLOGIST AGREED, SO IT MUST BE A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT?
BUT WHEN ALL THOSE MOOKS WITHOUT ECONOMICS DEGREES FIGURE OUT THAT TURD IS
NEVER GONNA SHINE, THE GAME WILL BE UP. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BEGIN TO
ASSOCIATE POLLUTION WITH THE FACT THAT THEIR KIDS ARE BEING BORN WITH 177
TEETH AND AN I.Q. OF 33.
The Great Commons Shell Game
Civilization's most fatal folly was monetization and propertizing of the
natural world that is humanity's great common. In fact those two things -
monetization and propertization -- have come to mean civilization from the
perspective of most ordinary people over the increasingly brutal centuries
they have enabled. If modern cumulative civilization is not perceived as
being very brutal by, say, the average hedge fund manager or Russian
oligarch with a cell phone jacked into one ear and hurtling through the
earth's commons in a new BMW toward either the Outback Steakhouse or an
appointment with is mistress, well, theirs is certainly a minority
perspective. Ask any indigenous person.
"Commons" may be the current precious little term embraced by
environmentally concerned American writers and activists - including me -
but it rests on old European "ours together and my own private" concepts of
the earth. That green foliage stuff whizzing by our windshields is more than
commonly shared space. It is our commonly shared oxygenic and chlorophylic
blood. And the "dirt" scraped and hammered into sterility and smothered
under the asphalt is the armature, the bones of our existence. It was never
possible for anyone to "own" any part of this so-called common, a word that
only exists so someone else --usually a less than nice fellow surrounded by
thugs in armor and whatnot -- could call a piece of it his private property.
You dared kill and eat one of my grouse! Die peasant mother****er!
But once the delusion set in, and the peasants were allowed to scratch out a
living on "their own" miserable designated little square, there was no
turning back. Especially if you were European or derivative thereof, and
ultimately ended up on the winning side of the delusion, otherwise called
empire. But there never was a "mine and theirs," when it comes to breathing
clean air or drinking clean water. It only appeared so to propertized minds
and cultures busy conquering and killing and pillaging other people's
natural world. And thanks to feudalism's greatest shape shifting trick of
all, capitalism, there ain't much left to pillage.
For Americans this is particularly ironic, especially in terms of politics.
Just as we started ballyhooing the triumph of America consumer capitalism
over communism, the world's ecology started backing up like a redneck septic
tank. And Castro's Cuba, of all places, emerged as a beacon of relatively
petroleum free eco-enlightenment, organic farming and clean air, thanks to
our 45-year embargo and the Ruskies turning off cigarland's oil spigot in
1990. And now, despite it toxic track record, we find China, the same
goddamned anthill people who flat out starved 30 million people (there's
population control for ya) to make weight for a great leap forward, are
running the two largest eco-reclamation projects on earth -- the Natural
Forest Protection and the Sloping Land Conversion Programs. These are
admirable efforts in the world's eyes, even if the air over the cities is
still so foul buzzards fly into it and drop dead. It certainly beats the
U.S. refusing to stop in at the Kyoto Conference, not even for the hors
d'oeuvres.
Or going to the Bali Eco Summit just to pick fights with the French. George
Bush might claim to be from Texas, but he plays global poker like a drunk.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are still reaping the benefits of offing those 30
million because, voila! They never reproduced. Are those guys inscrutable or
what?
So we what's an all-American guy to do but drive around the suburbs looking
for fried chicken, watching the weeds grown up on the foreclosed lawns, and
slobber into our cell phones regarding our geographic location, having lost
all sense of historical and moral location. "I'm going down Shirley Drive.
Where are you?" "Me? I'm eating a pizza and watching some hot blonde on
Animal Planet smootch upon bonobo chimps. It's educational. Kinda sexy too,
in a weird way." Now this folks, is called our "socio-economic environment."
It may be social, and it may be economic, but it sure as hell ain't much of
an environment. Unless you happen to be a chimp. Of course like the chimps,
we are "prime apes." And as such, we're supposed to have big brains that
account for our "success as a species." We're gonna have to rethink that
one. I'm not seeing much success here, hoss. Are you?
Let somebody else fix it while I grab a salad
Sad lot that we are as a species, not everyone is a moral pig. Millions of
individuals, some governments even, are unnerved by what is happening. In
America the best among us are outraged, and protest that officialdom has
failed us. Unfortunately, we are officialdom, indirectly as that may be.
Because we are mankind and mankind is all inclusive, organically and
forever - forever having turned out to be rather shorter than we thought. If
officialdom has failed us, it is because we have failed ourselves, and in
many respects, our official governments provide us with a collective excuse
not to act personally.
Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to
make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days,
programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the "cheap oil fiesta"
that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a
time to show some guts, it's now. Not by protesting - which has become a
security state supervised liberal ***** sport -- but by giving up the
material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those
leftie and alternative books from Amazon -- sitting on our asses reading and
drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of
inaction and consumerism. It's the only real act of protest possible by the
prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you'll be just one
iPodless, and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United
States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you're still capable of any kind of
life after the stellazine mind conditioning we've all been administered for
past 40 years, I've got folding cash that says you will own your life in a
way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is
over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City
are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on
Jabba's corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he's alive and yank
the feeding tube?
Scoffers abound, those lurching, undead cud chewers whose best lick is: "Aw,
if things were really that bad somebody would be doing something about it."
Asked who that somebody might be, they usually come up with "the
government." Or science or the stupidest of all, the Free Market Solution.
In other words, they haven't the slightest ****ing notion other than that
there is some great governmental or commercial force that governs their
destiny - one so vast that, like god, they don't have to understand it, just
swear by it and trust it, even if they don't know exactly what the hell it
is. What it is of course is good old fashioned pillage. But Even Alaric the
Goth limited pillage to three days - with an extra day of rape thrown in if
it had been a particularly good siege.
The gun and cheeseburger ethic
In Hopkins Village, one can find examples of everything that is both
destroying the world (scarcely a villager here would not live the America
lifestyle given half a chance) and good about the world (this morning I took
a bath in the sea at dawn, then ate fresh papaya with one of the kids now
supervising my pedicure.) Americans constitute 5% of the world's population
but consume at least 28% of the world's resources. This is a primary
contributor to the fact that the kids around me, Kirky, Lian, Ebony, Dennis
and the rest have no future. Is that out fault? You and I are but two of 280
million Americans. Yet just because one's contribution to global misery
seems small, it does not mean exemption from responsibility. If I took part
in the mass stoning of a child, would you be less guilty because the stone I
threw was a smaller than the rest?
Compassion figures somewhere into all this. Or is supposed to anyway.
Without it, we are lost. Being born America, I have as little as anyone
else. Last week a young Garifuna woman in our village, a neighbor and
friend, lost her baby son in a terrible truck crash. That night, with
neighbors gathered round her in the dim light of her shack, her grief was
beyond grief. Unable even walk, she lay on the bed issuing a low feral
gurgling howl. And as I stood there packed in among the black faces I felt
nothing, except a strong sense of looking at a National Geographic
documentary. Exotic dark people mourning in a strange setting. That's what
American media does to human consciousness. Provides inhuman reference
points in the brain/mind to replace experience and feeling. As a people who
demonstrably show no guts and even less compassion about the rest of the
world, we are in real trouble.
Comfortable as we have been in our plentitude, and confident as we have been
in our providence---or perhaps because of these things---we Americans are
now at the most critical and terrible moral and ethical juncture in our
history. Do we care at all about anybody but ourselves? Is the reader, who
has never met Ebony, Lian, Kirky or Dennis, responsible for accommodating
any kind of future for them? Are we responsible that they be fed adequately
full well knowing that the world has far too many babies anyway?
Not many Americans would eat a cheeseburger in front of a starving African
child. But is it OK to eat the cheeseburger behind the child's back, out of
sight of the child? How far must we get from the starving child to make it
OK? What if we worked very hard to buy that cheeseburger? Does hard work
justify everything? What is our responsibility? Or are we just helpless in
the face of such things?
That we look to other people, politicians, police, and supposed experts to
solve our problems demonstrates that we have learned to be helpless --
learned helplessness. None of us is helpless. The fact is that at any given
moment in any given day, we can do something to help eliminate world misery
and disparity. As any Third World priest can tell you, this is done mostly
face to face, people helping people one at a time. But America's strictly
enforced and fearful class lines prevent us from even associating with those
we can actively help. The single mother, the felon just released from
prison, the Mexican with four kids who empties your office waste basket at
night.
Americans and people of the developed world are in an unusual position. We
can help by doing nothing. Simply by sitting on our asses and not buying
stuff, not driving to the Gap or the organic market, not turning on our
televisions, which is the ultimate act of protest, since it both denies
access to our minds by corporate interests, and denies media monoliths that
all important sea of eyeballs. We can refuse to consume. By not consuming we
can create our own economic cutbacks. Otherwise, economic cutbacks are not
going to happen and endless war is the inevitable outcome. People will be
killed so others survive, advanced nations with sophisticated weaponry will
kill off the people from weaker nations so as to grab their land and
resources. It happens. And if we let it get that far (well, much farther,
since we're already doing it) Americans will be in favor because we live
here and not in a poor country. Evil as it sounds, we will have no choice
because it is human to prefer to see others die and our own families
survive. Morals never get in the way of ultimate survival. In the end, there
is no other way, except universal legislation to push our bloated material
standard of living back three generations. Clearly democracy cannot make
this happen. Unless it is the democracy of the human heart, that internal
thing that seeks justice.
Overcoming our worst instincts is hard enough. But we also have an array of
genuine enemies lined up before us, many but not all of our own making.
Being the toughest kid on the global block, we long ago chose a
geo-strategic struggle for dwindling energy resources rather than
conservation. Simply because we could. The richest, strongest among us, the
global schoolyard bullies, the ones with the power and holding all our
national wealth (they hold the wealth, we hold the debt) are seeing the same
thing coming down the pike that we see, and are building their forts around
the planetary neighborhood, consolidating as much wealth and power among as
few people as possible.
Yet no one is much alarmed by this because they are incapable of being
alarmed by anything except what the state message tells them to be alarmed
about, mainly terrorism, which is a form of chickens coming home to roost.
America is moreover a nation of state supervised zombies. This used to scare
the piss out of me, but now they have so long been the national furniture,
they are merely depressing. Especially considering that, despite the
Republican historical rewrite of the era, we, meaning my generation, had a
real crack at turning this thing around during the Sixties. And we failed.
We failed ourselves, failed our children. And as if that were not enough, we
failed the planet and humanity itself. ****ing up doesn't come bigger than
that. I spent at least a decade nailing the bling. The only excuse I can
offer is that I didn't know any better. And I didn't. But somehow that seems
so lame.
I'm trying to atone. Yes, that is the right word here - atone -- for my part
in this unholy mess. I try to live on about $4000 -- $5000 a year and come
close to pulling it off. I share the rest with the world's needy, almost
never drive, refuse to own a cell phone or anything else that requires earth
killing batteries other than the laptop that now provides my livelihood,
yada yada . you know the drill. Lest I sound holier than thou, let me
confess to my continuing part in ****ing up the earth's food chain due to a
love of pork. But on the whole, I'm not too ashamed these days of my role in
the ongoing disaster called America, though there is more I could do. Almost
weekly I seriously consider refusing to pay income taxes as an act of
personal resistance. But I ain't Joan Baez and this ain't the Sixties, and
I'm
scared shitless of going it alone. (Work with me here people!) Besides that,
my wife is unenthusiastic about the idea of her geezer playing dressups in
the Big House. The relatives would talk.
Thus, I am moreover just waiting it out. Either I'll watch my sorry assed
species will walk right off that cliff, or I will croak first. Crappy set of
choices. Meanwhile, on a good day I realize that I've still got horses to
break, ball games to fix and beer to drink.
Live real. Love hard. Stay strong.
Joe Bageant is the Author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from
America's class war (Random House Crown). His complete essays and discussion
of class issues by working Americans may be found at joebageant.com.
_______
Joe Bageant is the author of the recently released Random House book, "Deer
Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America
By Joe Bageant
Created Feb 6 2008 - 6:45am
John Raymond Castillo, age 81. Sunrise, January 14, 1917. Sunset, February
1, 2008. He leaves 21 children, 140 grandchildren and 302
great-grandchildren.
--Obituary announcement on Belize's LOVE Radio station
"The population of Belize? Officially it's about 300,000. But if you include
all the kids, it's probably three million."
--Greg, longtime expatriate American in Belize
HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE: The din of squealing, laughing children is the
background white noise of the Third World. In Belize, as in most of the
Third World, 45% of all people are under the age of 16. About a dozen of
that 45% swarm around me as I cut my toenails under the mango tree. A few
are picking on the mangy, quarreling dogs but the majority are drawn in
close, giving advise about how to cut gnarly, old man type toenails: "Saw
dem off wid a file" seems to be the consensus.
What I see are children I help with homework and feed, and admonish about
grades . unanxious and reasonably happy little members of the human race.
They do not look much like a global migration or crushing planetary
population pressure. Yet they are among the most incredible wave of both
ever in human history.
Most families here have five or six kids and their kids will have a similar
number. I've yet to meet a native of the village who does not think half a
dozen is not a nice round number of offspring. My adopted family has six
kids and four adults living on a 100 x 300-foot lot. This does not include
the Guatemalan family of five living in a rented cabana at one corner of the
lot. Assuming all the children reach adulthood and procreate, the tally in
ten years will be about 50 people of all ages trying to exist on this square
of sewerage soaked sand.
But oh, were it that bright a future. As adults with families, these kids
won't even have this spot on which to live at all, much less live as well as
they live now. The resorts and condo rackets out of Canada, South Africa and
the U.S. are buying up these small plots. Unschooled in western financial
concepts and janked by the developers' offers of more money than they have
ever seen in their lives, locals sell. Usually they are broke within a year.
In any case their semi-literate children will join the next generation's
issuance of dispossessed poverty stricken young adults headed for elsewhere.
Just what the world does not need, not here in Central America, not in the
Middle East, not in Latin America or the U.S. But that's what we've got and
that's what we are going to get a lot more of.
Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our
approaching eco-disaster that that no one honestly talks about. On the left
we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to
prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore's advice, which somehow
never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets
feel-good electric car ads -- buy your way out of the problem, or at least
your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest
discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate
change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is
guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, "You can't run a
hundred head of cattle on half an acre."
Most of the developed world remains clueless as to how all this will affect
their own lives. But Americans in particular cannot get their head around
the impact these billions will have on the lifestyles they are driven like
rats in hell to sustain. About half of Americans.
THE SCREAMING MAN INSIDE MY HEAD: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS
BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL
THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER
HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE
WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. "LET'S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE
LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL ****ING YES, LET'EM ALL IN!" YEA, RIGHT. LET
EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A ****ING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD
AMERICA. HELL, IT'S ALREADY STARTED. THEY'RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS
BECAUSE THEY CAN'T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY'RE
KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY
CAN'T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH
DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.
Meanwhile, both camps of a nation with no sense of history beyond its own
state sponsored founding fathers mythology hasn't the slightest notion of
how population migrations from areas of scarcity to areas of plenty have
shaped human history perhaps more than any other force, including war (war
is just more dramatic when it happens and more entertaining to read about
when it's over.) The Vikings were a population shift from the limited arable
land resources of the north around the British coast to Normandy (and then
back to England by way of William the Conqueror, a Viking descendant.) The
Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Irish in America, Chinese into Tibet .
SCREAMING MAN: WELL BUBBA, LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU IN CRAYONS. IT'S
GETTING RIGHT BROWN OUT THERE IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. ALL THOSE SAWED-OFF
LITTLE DARK HAIRED ****ERS HAVEN'T COME UP HERE TO BE LAWN ORNAMENTS. AND
SINCE THEY EAT AND **** ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT AS YOU DO, THERE'S GONNA BE
SOME REDISTRIBUTION OF THE GOODIES. YOU'RE GONNA SEE A LOT OF AMERICAN
BLUBBER PARKED IN LINE ALONGSIDE SALVADORANS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS FULL OF
WORTHLESS GREENBACKS WAITING TO BUY BLACK BEANS AND MASA HARINA IN BULK -
THEN HITCHING A RIDE HOME ON A FLATBED TRUCK LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD
SOUTH OF LOREDO DOES. OR MAYBE TAKING THE CHICKEN COOP FIREWOOD EXPRESS
SURPLUS SCHOOL BUS BACK TO THE SAVAGE ARMED SUBURBS. A LITTLE TIP FROM THE
OLE SCREAMING MAN: IF THERE IS A BILLY GOAT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, RIDE UP
FRONT. IF THE DAMNED GOAT IS UP FRONT, RIDE ON THE ROOF. THERE IS USUALLY
SOMEBODY OR SOMETHING UP THERE TO HANG ONTO.
Hungry but still humpin'
Meanwhile, the truth stays buried in the crapola. According to the UN's
newest report on the planetary condition, crop production has improved but
has not kept up with population. World cereal production per person peaked
in the 1980s, and has since been decreasing. We have over six billion people
now -- there were far less than half that when I was born -- and there will
be roughly nine billion people by 2050. But the UN, being a world
organization that has to please a couple hundred governments, each beating
its own national drum to its people, pretending there is a long term
solution other that to eliminate two thirds of the world population within
the above mentioned kids' lifetimes. Thus, the UN issues "millennium
development goals." This neatly sidesteps the fact that if the present six
billion mouths and assholes running the world's resources through their
gullets like **** through a goose is unsustainable, then nine billion of the
same are waaaaaay beyond sustainable in any way worth calling human life.
For starters it would take a doubling of world food production to (A-) feed
the current victims of hunger, and (B-) to feed the additional three
billion. Theoretically, we're going to cut back. We'll feed the nine billion
by some unarguably admirable means, like cutting waste, not overeating,
biofuels, and ending meat consumption. Small problem here Jackson: We're
pretty much out of the phosphate fertilizer that is the foundation of world
agriculture. The soil itself collapsing in terms of human nutrition, as we
use up its finite reserves of vital elements - iodine, chromium salts and
other complex materials our six billion collective bodies need to function.
And farming has already sucked down the world's water supply to the danger
level. Yet somehow, we are going to come up with TWICE the water we now use
by 2050, global warming and drying be damned. The whole time we are fixing
global warming the population climbs.
Old Tom Malthus said something like this was gonna happen, although he got
some of the details wrong, which a person just might conceivably do in
predicting the fate of human civilization a couple hundred years in advance.
Call me a softie here, but I tend to give the guy a break for getting it 90%
right.
But then I'm no scientist. Supposedly sophisticated American scientists have
been pissing on the grave of poor Tom at least since I was a kid in school.
All my life American capitalist economists have proclaimed they've licked
the population problem by using the world up faster. "A failed prophet of
doom," I believe my high school teacher called Malthus. Even commies kicked
Tom's dog around. Engles called him a barbarian. Marx couldn't handle Tom's
action, either. Nor practically anyone else, from John Stuart Mill to Allen
Greenspan. And we still get the stale argument that "This planet isn't
crowded; it is just mismanaged." Even the greens seem to believe that we can
manage our way out of this fatal mess, if we just recycle, wear hemp and
vote for the candidate on the bicycle with the Celtic tattoo. The
alternative geeks swear nanotech is gonna pull us through. But last I heard
pandemic viruses were still smarter than carbon nanotubes. Something about
rapid adaptability. Those little ****ers seem to be fast on their feet, so
in a title match between nano tech (or any tech for that matter) managed in
the ring by nerds, and natural evolutionary biology -- which not only has
mother nature holding the towels in its corner, but also calling the
fight -- I'm damned sure betting on the biology.
At any rate, when it comes to the planet, now under the new global corporate
management, it looks to be managed to death, dirt, people and all. The new
management, kings and feudal lords of corporate finance to a man, peer down
happily from the forty-fourth floor at six billion potential slave wage
employees and wonder if you can feed'em on dirt and kudzoo.
Malthus must be thrashing inside his lead lined English coffin right now,
cackling, "Do the math, you ****ers!" But they won't. With the world's geet
presently being loaded into their yachts bound for the Caymans, they don't
have to. Not just yet, anyway. As for they guy on the bike with the Celtic
tattoo, if he peddles long enough he's bound to run into some of those
49,671 human beings born while I was writing this.
SCREAMING MAN: AND WHILE HE'SPEEDING HE CAN CLOSE HIS EYES AND MAKE A
****ING WISH WITH TINKERBELL! THAT NINE BILLION WILL BE HUMPING AWAY TRYING
TO CRACK THE TWELVE BILLION MARK. WHEN WE ARE ALL LIVING IN RENTALSTORAGE
LOCKERS AND EATING PURINA PEOPLE CHOW, ****ING WILL BE ONE OF THE LAST FREE
PASSTIMES LEFT, OTHER THAN LISTENING TO THE 24/7 ADVERTIZING PIPED IN
THROUGH OUR NECK CHIPS SELLING TEENSY STRAP ON YOUR ASS RUBBER BAND POWERED
CARS. SO WE'RE GONNA HAVE EITHER HOMELAND SECURITY **** POLICE, OR FORCED
STERILIZATION BY ICE PICK.
Actually, THE SCREAMING MAN is not so far off the mark. Human sterilizing
crops are being researched, and I'm not entirely sure I'm agin it, partner,
so long as they make the white people eat the stuff first.
In the meantime, the air is getting rather balmy in places it shouldn't.
Such as the North Pole. So the corporate and financial lizards at the top of
the world rock, in a last ditch effort to milk out a few bloody trillion
dollars more, has come up with a plan: carbon emissions trading.
Just as in a Mafia handshake and kiss on the neck "business agreement,"
there are no escape clauses in the laws of physics. In either case the rules
cannot be bent, though you ass may well end up worse than bent if you try to
escape the debt you have racked up, be it in greenbacks or the green life
supporting stuff of our planet. Both are finite and vital. Which means you
get killed if you try to scam the game, and you certainly don't get to write
yourself an escape clause after the fact. But that doesn't keep the high
rolling carnie hucksters we call legislators from trying. Naturally they
like carbon trading. To my mind at least, making a profit off the fact that
you did not piss into the community drinking gourd is the kind of logic only
obsessive, property based western world governments and corporations could
come up with. It assumes that (A) poisoning everyone else in the human
fishbowl is a right to start with, and (B) that right is a property which
can be bought and sold between corporate poisoners.
Traded or not, there will be plenty of carbon around, so don't worry about
not getting your fair share. In fact, we could park every car on the planet
and be assured of a nice steady supply of carbon pollution for our
great-great-great grandchildren. Turns out that, decades ahead of an already
grim global warming schedule, biological repositories of carbon are
beginning to release enough of the stuff to tide us over so our progeny can
gasp for breath as they skateboard piggyback to and from their barracks at
the Manpower gulag. Anyway, we can monetize pollution, and trade our
commonly shared hemlock back and forth, and we can call it a "partial
solution and a progressive step forward." But it's still hemlock.
Yet, economists assure us that it makes good sense propertize, then buy and
sell catastrophe in the market of calamity.
SCREAMING MAN: LOOK HERE SPORT. THEY'RE POLISHING A TURD SO THEY CAN SHAKE
DOWN THE YOKELS. AND THE DUMB MAMMY JAMMING PUBLIC BUYS IT! HELL, AN
ECONOMIST SAID IT AND AN ECOLOGIST AGREED, SO IT MUST BE A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT?
BUT WHEN ALL THOSE MOOKS WITHOUT ECONOMICS DEGREES FIGURE OUT THAT TURD IS
NEVER GONNA SHINE, THE GAME WILL BE UP. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BEGIN TO
ASSOCIATE POLLUTION WITH THE FACT THAT THEIR KIDS ARE BEING BORN WITH 177
TEETH AND AN I.Q. OF 33.
The Great Commons Shell Game
Civilization's most fatal folly was monetization and propertizing of the
natural world that is humanity's great common. In fact those two things -
monetization and propertization -- have come to mean civilization from the
perspective of most ordinary people over the increasingly brutal centuries
they have enabled. If modern cumulative civilization is not perceived as
being very brutal by, say, the average hedge fund manager or Russian
oligarch with a cell phone jacked into one ear and hurtling through the
earth's commons in a new BMW toward either the Outback Steakhouse or an
appointment with is mistress, well, theirs is certainly a minority
perspective. Ask any indigenous person.
"Commons" may be the current precious little term embraced by
environmentally concerned American writers and activists - including me -
but it rests on old European "ours together and my own private" concepts of
the earth. That green foliage stuff whizzing by our windshields is more than
commonly shared space. It is our commonly shared oxygenic and chlorophylic
blood. And the "dirt" scraped and hammered into sterility and smothered
under the asphalt is the armature, the bones of our existence. It was never
possible for anyone to "own" any part of this so-called common, a word that
only exists so someone else --usually a less than nice fellow surrounded by
thugs in armor and whatnot -- could call a piece of it his private property.
You dared kill and eat one of my grouse! Die peasant mother****er!
But once the delusion set in, and the peasants were allowed to scratch out a
living on "their own" miserable designated little square, there was no
turning back. Especially if you were European or derivative thereof, and
ultimately ended up on the winning side of the delusion, otherwise called
empire. But there never was a "mine and theirs," when it comes to breathing
clean air or drinking clean water. It only appeared so to propertized minds
and cultures busy conquering and killing and pillaging other people's
natural world. And thanks to feudalism's greatest shape shifting trick of
all, capitalism, there ain't much left to pillage.
For Americans this is particularly ironic, especially in terms of politics.
Just as we started ballyhooing the triumph of America consumer capitalism
over communism, the world's ecology started backing up like a redneck septic
tank. And Castro's Cuba, of all places, emerged as a beacon of relatively
petroleum free eco-enlightenment, organic farming and clean air, thanks to
our 45-year embargo and the Ruskies turning off cigarland's oil spigot in
1990. And now, despite it toxic track record, we find China, the same
goddamned anthill people who flat out starved 30 million people (there's
population control for ya) to make weight for a great leap forward, are
running the two largest eco-reclamation projects on earth -- the Natural
Forest Protection and the Sloping Land Conversion Programs. These are
admirable efforts in the world's eyes, even if the air over the cities is
still so foul buzzards fly into it and drop dead. It certainly beats the
U.S. refusing to stop in at the Kyoto Conference, not even for the hors
d'oeuvres.
Or going to the Bali Eco Summit just to pick fights with the French. George
Bush might claim to be from Texas, but he plays global poker like a drunk.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are still reaping the benefits of offing those 30
million because, voila! They never reproduced. Are those guys inscrutable or
what?
So we what's an all-American guy to do but drive around the suburbs looking
for fried chicken, watching the weeds grown up on the foreclosed lawns, and
slobber into our cell phones regarding our geographic location, having lost
all sense of historical and moral location. "I'm going down Shirley Drive.
Where are you?" "Me? I'm eating a pizza and watching some hot blonde on
Animal Planet smootch upon bonobo chimps. It's educational. Kinda sexy too,
in a weird way." Now this folks, is called our "socio-economic environment."
It may be social, and it may be economic, but it sure as hell ain't much of
an environment. Unless you happen to be a chimp. Of course like the chimps,
we are "prime apes." And as such, we're supposed to have big brains that
account for our "success as a species." We're gonna have to rethink that
one. I'm not seeing much success here, hoss. Are you?
Let somebody else fix it while I grab a salad
Sad lot that we are as a species, not everyone is a moral pig. Millions of
individuals, some governments even, are unnerved by what is happening. In
America the best among us are outraged, and protest that officialdom has
failed us. Unfortunately, we are officialdom, indirectly as that may be.
Because we are mankind and mankind is all inclusive, organically and
forever - forever having turned out to be rather shorter than we thought. If
officialdom has failed us, it is because we have failed ourselves, and in
many respects, our official governments provide us with a collective excuse
not to act personally.
Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to
make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days,
programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the "cheap oil fiesta"
that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a
time to show some guts, it's now. Not by protesting - which has become a
security state supervised liberal ***** sport -- but by giving up the
material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those
leftie and alternative books from Amazon -- sitting on our asses reading and
drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of
inaction and consumerism. It's the only real act of protest possible by the
prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you'll be just one
iPodless, and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United
States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you're still capable of any kind of
life after the stellazine mind conditioning we've all been administered for
past 40 years, I've got folding cash that says you will own your life in a
way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is
over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City
are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on
Jabba's corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he's alive and yank
the feeding tube?
Scoffers abound, those lurching, undead cud chewers whose best lick is: "Aw,
if things were really that bad somebody would be doing something about it."
Asked who that somebody might be, they usually come up with "the
government." Or science or the stupidest of all, the Free Market Solution.
In other words, they haven't the slightest ****ing notion other than that
there is some great governmental or commercial force that governs their
destiny - one so vast that, like god, they don't have to understand it, just
swear by it and trust it, even if they don't know exactly what the hell it
is. What it is of course is good old fashioned pillage. But Even Alaric the
Goth limited pillage to three days - with an extra day of rape thrown in if
it had been a particularly good siege.
The gun and cheeseburger ethic
In Hopkins Village, one can find examples of everything that is both
destroying the world (scarcely a villager here would not live the America
lifestyle given half a chance) and good about the world (this morning I took
a bath in the sea at dawn, then ate fresh papaya with one of the kids now
supervising my pedicure.) Americans constitute 5% of the world's population
but consume at least 28% of the world's resources. This is a primary
contributor to the fact that the kids around me, Kirky, Lian, Ebony, Dennis
and the rest have no future. Is that out fault? You and I are but two of 280
million Americans. Yet just because one's contribution to global misery
seems small, it does not mean exemption from responsibility. If I took part
in the mass stoning of a child, would you be less guilty because the stone I
threw was a smaller than the rest?
Compassion figures somewhere into all this. Or is supposed to anyway.
Without it, we are lost. Being born America, I have as little as anyone
else. Last week a young Garifuna woman in our village, a neighbor and
friend, lost her baby son in a terrible truck crash. That night, with
neighbors gathered round her in the dim light of her shack, her grief was
beyond grief. Unable even walk, she lay on the bed issuing a low feral
gurgling howl. And as I stood there packed in among the black faces I felt
nothing, except a strong sense of looking at a National Geographic
documentary. Exotic dark people mourning in a strange setting. That's what
American media does to human consciousness. Provides inhuman reference
points in the brain/mind to replace experience and feeling. As a people who
demonstrably show no guts and even less compassion about the rest of the
world, we are in real trouble.
Comfortable as we have been in our plentitude, and confident as we have been
in our providence---or perhaps because of these things---we Americans are
now at the most critical and terrible moral and ethical juncture in our
history. Do we care at all about anybody but ourselves? Is the reader, who
has never met Ebony, Lian, Kirky or Dennis, responsible for accommodating
any kind of future for them? Are we responsible that they be fed adequately
full well knowing that the world has far too many babies anyway?
Not many Americans would eat a cheeseburger in front of a starving African
child. But is it OK to eat the cheeseburger behind the child's back, out of
sight of the child? How far must we get from the starving child to make it
OK? What if we worked very hard to buy that cheeseburger? Does hard work
justify everything? What is our responsibility? Or are we just helpless in
the face of such things?
That we look to other people, politicians, police, and supposed experts to
solve our problems demonstrates that we have learned to be helpless --
learned helplessness. None of us is helpless. The fact is that at any given
moment in any given day, we can do something to help eliminate world misery
and disparity. As any Third World priest can tell you, this is done mostly
face to face, people helping people one at a time. But America's strictly
enforced and fearful class lines prevent us from even associating with those
we can actively help. The single mother, the felon just released from
prison, the Mexican with four kids who empties your office waste basket at
night.
Americans and people of the developed world are in an unusual position. We
can help by doing nothing. Simply by sitting on our asses and not buying
stuff, not driving to the Gap or the organic market, not turning on our
televisions, which is the ultimate act of protest, since it both denies
access to our minds by corporate interests, and denies media monoliths that
all important sea of eyeballs. We can refuse to consume. By not consuming we
can create our own economic cutbacks. Otherwise, economic cutbacks are not
going to happen and endless war is the inevitable outcome. People will be
killed so others survive, advanced nations with sophisticated weaponry will
kill off the people from weaker nations so as to grab their land and
resources. It happens. And if we let it get that far (well, much farther,
since we're already doing it) Americans will be in favor because we live
here and not in a poor country. Evil as it sounds, we will have no choice
because it is human to prefer to see others die and our own families
survive. Morals never get in the way of ultimate survival. In the end, there
is no other way, except universal legislation to push our bloated material
standard of living back three generations. Clearly democracy cannot make
this happen. Unless it is the democracy of the human heart, that internal
thing that seeks justice.
Overcoming our worst instincts is hard enough. But we also have an array of
genuine enemies lined up before us, many but not all of our own making.
Being the toughest kid on the global block, we long ago chose a
geo-strategic struggle for dwindling energy resources rather than
conservation. Simply because we could. The richest, strongest among us, the
global schoolyard bullies, the ones with the power and holding all our
national wealth (they hold the wealth, we hold the debt) are seeing the same
thing coming down the pike that we see, and are building their forts around
the planetary neighborhood, consolidating as much wealth and power among as
few people as possible.
Yet no one is much alarmed by this because they are incapable of being
alarmed by anything except what the state message tells them to be alarmed
about, mainly terrorism, which is a form of chickens coming home to roost.
America is moreover a nation of state supervised zombies. This used to scare
the piss out of me, but now they have so long been the national furniture,
they are merely depressing. Especially considering that, despite the
Republican historical rewrite of the era, we, meaning my generation, had a
real crack at turning this thing around during the Sixties. And we failed.
We failed ourselves, failed our children. And as if that were not enough, we
failed the planet and humanity itself. ****ing up doesn't come bigger than
that. I spent at least a decade nailing the bling. The only excuse I can
offer is that I didn't know any better. And I didn't. But somehow that seems
so lame.
I'm trying to atone. Yes, that is the right word here - atone -- for my part
in this unholy mess. I try to live on about $4000 -- $5000 a year and come
close to pulling it off. I share the rest with the world's needy, almost
never drive, refuse to own a cell phone or anything else that requires earth
killing batteries other than the laptop that now provides my livelihood,
yada yada . you know the drill. Lest I sound holier than thou, let me
confess to my continuing part in ****ing up the earth's food chain due to a
love of pork. But on the whole, I'm not too ashamed these days of my role in
the ongoing disaster called America, though there is more I could do. Almost
weekly I seriously consider refusing to pay income taxes as an act of
personal resistance. But I ain't Joan Baez and this ain't the Sixties, and
I'm
scared shitless of going it alone. (Work with me here people!) Besides that,
my wife is unenthusiastic about the idea of her geezer playing dressups in
the Big House. The relatives would talk.
Thus, I am moreover just waiting it out. Either I'll watch my sorry assed
species will walk right off that cliff, or I will croak first. Crappy set of
choices. Meanwhile, on a good day I realize that I've still got horses to
break, ball games to fix and beer to drink.
Live real. Love hard. Stay strong.
Joe Bageant is the Author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from
America's class war (Random House Crown). His complete essays and discussion
of class issues by working Americans may be found at joebageant.com.
_______
Joe Bageant is the author of the recently released Random House book, "Deer
Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America