Joe Bageant: Breaking The Beer Barrier

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

Text of Joe Bageant's Speech at The National Conference for Media Reform, 2008, Minneapolis Convention Center, Minneapolis MN

Joe Bageant

Redneck radical and author of “Deer Hunting With Jesus” on class and communication


BREAKING THE BEER BARRIER


Sponsored by WorldNewsTrust.com


Hello fellow members of the liberal media conspiracy. I’m happy to be here at the annual gathering of our secret cells.

My remarks today are about communication and class. And because class is the basis of all politics, they are necessarily political too.

Here’s my question: Why can’t progressive media ever learn to communicate in redneck and born again bubba? I would guess that a lot of you are thinking, “Why would anybody want to?” One answer is the election of George Bush -- but there are many others. For example, a third of all Americans live in the geographic South and over 50% live in the “cultural south,” … which is to say places with white Southern Scots-Irish values … places such as western Pennsylvania, central Missouri and southern Illinois, eastern Connecticut, northern New Hampshire, … and others we never think of as Southern. When you look at people in what has come to be called the red state heartland, most of their values are more or less traditional white Scots-Irish values.

Yet, as much talk as there is about these fellow Americans, particularly during election season, most liberal and alternative media never speak to them or for them. And that’s a shame, because when we do that … we abandon the project of equality for all Americans, – some of which happen to hunt, fish, drink Bud Light and enjoy NASCAR, Bon Jovi and Toby Keith.

Anyway, just telling our own truth to people who already agree with us isn't going to do anything, regardless of our illusions about the power of the “blogosphere,” etc. As Bill Moyers said last year at this conference, despite all the new information platforms, cable, the Internet, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and MySpace, … our resources for collective understanding as Americans are contracting, not expanding. To make matters worse, we progressives use these resources to talk to one another in a closed conversation, instead of reaching all the people.

I had an editor once, Mr. Miller, we called him respectfully. Mr. Miller was one of the old school shot-and-a-beer newsmen who’d come up through the ranks of reporters in the days when almost no newsman had a journalism degree. He told me: Joe, it’s a damned privilege to communicate to an audience of a dozen citizens, much less thousands or millions. Honor that privilege. Write for everyman. Don’t become a stenographer for the powerful, regardless of their politics or party.”

I still believe that. I would no more be a stenographer for Barack Obama than for George Bush. Whether we are on radio, TV or run a news blog, it's humanity and a nation we’re obligated to, not the opinions or political junkyism of groups or individuals, or political correctness.

Especially political correctness. Political correctness by definition excludes majorities and demonizes millions who do not see the world in terms of social politics.
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To put it in Redneck terms:

One big shitload more of Bageanty Goodness at: http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/breaking-the-beer-barrier.html

Poster and Editor's note: Joe is talking Very Important Shit here. Please pay attention.

[madeline_con]

1. I love Joe....

he's a hilarious writer! :hi:

www.joebageant.com

[Tace]

2. I'm Sitting Next To Joe At The World News Trust Table....

at the conference. He's delightful. : )

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. You watch yourself there.

I don't think you are up to hanging with Joe's muses. ;-)

[Wiley50]

4. Tell Him Wiley the Brokeback Carpet Layer Says Hello

Keep my best buddy out of trouble up there

He's got a thing for good bourbon and cheap guitars

But if you can get both in his hands at the same time

YOU'RE GONNA HEAR SOME FINE BLUES

[Tace]

11. He's Been Reading These Comments

He's real pleased at the response to the text. : )

[MedleyMisty]

5. K & R

Believe me, classism is alive and well in the Democratic party and it hurts liberal causes quite a bit.

The things that gave me pause - I do have trouble forgiving people for thinking that torture is okay. I don't care what education you have or what propaganda you hear, if you are a non-psychopath human you should know that torture is wrong. It's not that hard to think, "Hmm, causing extreme pain to others, especially on purpose and with the intent to break their spirit, is horribly horribly wrong and evil."

Also the bits about "special groups". There are no special groups. There are just humans, and there's no reason why we have to split them into groups and say, "Okay, we can only work on freedom for one group at a time so white working class people get screwed because we're caring about other oppressed groups at the moment." We should be striving for freedom and equality and justice for all humans. Actually all life.

And yes, I am a white working class person who lives in the South and went to the same damn schools and got the same education. True though, I am an autodidact.

[Wiley50]

6. This is the meat of the matter

Now here’s where the audience starts throwing the rotten tomatoes at me: When it comes to oppression and neglect, we need more voices than just the women's studies professors and the gay-rights activists. Sure, they have a just cause. But there is a larger issue. We have established a vast white underclass in America that looks to be a permanent fixture of the new global corporate order of things. And besides, it doesn’t matter if a gay man has a marriage license hanging in his cubicle if that cubicle is located in a corporate totalist state, a spiritual and moral gulag built upon a purposefully created and managed economic serfdom. So let’s concentrate on broadening our service base. And let rural and working class Midwesterners and Southerners know that, while we may not be Coors Light drinkers and never caught a catfish or tuned up an engine, we don’t hate people who do. And that we care about their problems too.

It is very uncomfortable for some of us to cross class lines to communicate with poorly educated folks who are obese, live in modular homes, or ride ATVs across wilderness because they do not know any better because public education has crashed and information sources are chiefly propaganda ... creating citizens whose politics include torture if their president says it does.

It is also uncomfortable for middle class people in media, even the most idealistic ones, to take serious risks. Especially when they are safely occupied among their own kind, even if their kind is only 20% of the American public these days. Yet, there is a battle going on for America’s soul. We can no longer afford to remain inside the politics of the comfort zone.

It's not as if we do not know what laboring America is about. Many among the middle class employed in media, … both liberal and conservative … had grandparents who farmed the Midwestern plains, sweated in hellish factories or pushed handcarts in places like New York City. Today, their middle class grandchildren … often unknowingly … they take a snide attitude toward and rural and working class values, tastes and lifestyles.

I myself spend a bit of time in the liberal comfort zone. I travel to America’s cities for media events, I eat sushi, and talk with Clinton-Obama worshiping lawyers, academics and publishers over martinis. And we discuss why the white rural working class so often votes against its own interests, when it comes to politics in real world America. I always wonder exactly where that is located. The real world, I mean.

Here’s a fact about real world America: Bowling alleys outnumber sushi bars more than three to one in this country. In fact, if you go over to the Bowl and Lounge in Columbia Heights, a few miles from here … you can get batter fried walleye, slaw and fries for six bucks. And over at Elsie’s on Marshall Street there’s beer and gravy fries and heavy metal bowling on Sundays. There are no sushi bars in bowling alleys. One man’s hell is another’s comfort zone.

And so, still I ask (and who am I to ask anything?): How many of us are willing to leave our comfort zone? Speak out for the rednecks and the poor working whites about their bad health and broken futures? And why their elderly parents rot in nursing homes owned by ex-car dealers … Or the dynamics of hopelessness that drives the meth epidemic among working class whites? It’s every bit as destructive as the black crack epidemic. Again, how many of us are willing to leave the comfort zone? You tell me.

[razors edge]

7. Unfortunately, it may be too late for that.

Growing up in Huntington WV, you could say I know a hillbilly or two. We never really think too much about what the upper classes want, since they have never shown anything but contempt for us. Although you do have my pity for never having caught a catfish. ;-)

Most of these people don't see that they have anything they should feel ashamed for in the distancing between themselves and the city folks. They didn't write and produce Deliverance, they didn't watch it and see their neighbors in a different light because of the stereotyping from Hollywood. They mostly thought, here we go again, more of the only socially accepted racism front and center.

After a century of this shit you are not so much racist yourself, as jealous that other minorities have made it out of that crap. The only people left lower on the totem pole are the ones who make totem poles. Knowing it will never change in your lifetime is not much incentive to try to change it. Most of us with two working brain cells get out asap, Marines for me, marriage to a city boy for my sister now running her own art studio in SF.

We visit family there once a year or so, they are happy to not have our worries, we are happy to have good jobs. When we take the four wheelers out for a ride through the wilderness, 98% of the ride is on gravel logging roads, coal mining roads, etc. My Grizzly 660 can't begin to cause the type of damage a Caterpillar D-8 does as it extracts the fuel to run our computers. That type of misunderstanding of the situation is typical, and completely understandable to me, but my brothers would just shake their heads and laugh, and they would never say it to your face, but they know they still live in the area that is mostly pristine wilderness that they love and respect, the area they know how to hunt and fish, while those who criticize them are living in concrete jungles strangling on smog doing the kind of work and play that leads to the real destruction of the planet. Our grandparents never built cars or nuclear bombs.

I would like to talk more, gotta a big storm hitting now.

[MedleyMisty]

8. Have other minorities really made it out?

How much melanin do people who live in "bad neighborhoods" have in their skin, on average? What about the percentages in the prison system or on death row?

And as a Southern white working class woman, I can tell you that ovaries are still a disadvantage. Plus, I don't exactly see gay marriage being legal in all 50 states.

If I were going to identify myself with a spiritual group, I would so be Buddhist.

It's just your perception that other oppressed groups have made it out of oppression because you see yourself and your group as "me" and the other groups as "them".

Imagine what we could do if we all saw all the other disenfranchised people as "us". The oligarchy has been trying to prevent that since...well, since white men came to North America. Frederick Douglass even talks about it in his book My Bondage and My Freedom about his life as a slave who eventually freed himself before the Civil War - how the slave owners pitted the poor whites against the slaves so that they wouldn't realize what they had in common and rise up against the slave owners. Over 160 years later we still haven't learned.

We can change it in our lifetime. Reach out to those other minorities. There are a lot more exploited people than there are exploiters. If we all stand up together, all of us, and say that we won't take it anymore - things could change.

I want to see a human pride parade. I want to see all of us - male and female, gay and straight and bi, all the beautiful skin tones in the world, people who were born into exploitation here and people who came here to escape from even worse conditions somewhere else - marching together. For freedom. For a final end to human slavery.

Shake off your chains of perception, of us and them and white and black and male and female and gay and straight and legal and illegal. See reality - see that we are all human and that we all deserve so much better than this.

Do you know what I could be if I hadn't had doors slammed in my face because my parents worked in mills, because I had ovaries, because I lived in a single wide trailer down a dirt road?

Multiply that by millions. Maybe the reasons for the closed doors are slighly different for other people, but we have all had the same experience. We have all been denied our humanity.

And we all still have potential. Maybe we didn't get to develop it and use it. Maybe the bitterness and the pain and the hopelessness took that potential and twisted it.

Untwist it. Dig down and find it and bring it out into the light and shove it in the faces of those who denied it. Force them to acknowledge it and acknowledge your right to exist as a full human being.

It starts with acknowledging the right of others to exist as full human beings. Not as a stereotype. Not as the frozen image that comes to mind when you hear the name of their group. Not as a mass of shadowy figures out there, competing with you for jobs and for political attention and for resources. But as their own full and complete person, with their own life and their own burdens. Burdens that look a lot like yours, so you may as well share the load.

[razors edge]

9. I wasn't talking about oppression.

I was talking about the acceptable practice of picking on hillbillies, in the media, on the internet, even here at times.

The electric here in East Toledo was down for four hours, and a high voltage power pole was cut in my plant requiring me to supervise a securing operation. I'm salary and just got off my second shift for the day' had I not dealt with the situation many workers would loose the overtime pay for the Saturday shift. I'm tired, and I have to go back to work at 7am, so please allow me to address you concerns at a later time.

BTW, half of the hillbillies are female.

[eridani]

10. Leftneck--great term!

Why hasn't someone taken it as a user name already?

[many a good man]

12. How to turn the Scots-Irish blue?

Ask Senator Jim Webb, author and decorated vet of Scots-Irish descent. He has the best understanding of this cultural group and better yet, he has a plan to turn them into populists who vote democratic.

Bet you all missed his article in the that literary gem of a publication called Parade Magazine. You need to check it out: http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/parade/bornfighting.htm

You can find a nice summary of his position in this article at HuffPost by Will Thomas: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/21/jim-webb-speaks-out-on-ra_n_102915.html

Here are some excerpts:

Webb sought to explain what motivates Scots-Irish Americans. First, says Webb, it's not a generic race or geographic label, but rather "a very powerful cultural group that's always underestimated, and it's not always in the Appalachian mountains." And the issue is not Obama himself, who Webb thinks is "saying a lot of good things that will appeal to this cultural group in time."

Rather, Webb -- whose previous book Born Fighting explores the effect of Scots-Irish culture on America's formation -- argued that Scots-Irish voters' unwillingness to support Obama is less about the candidate himself, than about a sense of injustice among the community manifested by the government assistance afforded to minorities in the post-Civil Rights Era:

This isn't Selma, 1965. This is a result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white, and these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. And they're basically saying let's pay attention to what has happened to this cultural group in terms of opportunities.

Webb even drew a parallel between this bloc and African Americans, suggesting that their grievances with and needs from the federal government are remarkably similar.

Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have long history and they both missed the boat when it came to the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive. There's a saying in the Appalachian mountains that they say to one another, and it's, "if you're poor and white, you're out of sight." ...


If this cultural group could get at the same table as black America you could rechange populist American politics. Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.

A powerful coalition indeed. If only there were two politicians who understood these cultures, and had the desire and capacity to unite them for a common cause...

[many a good man]

13. Kick for the next VPOTUS: Jim Webb!

We're about ready for a new New Deal.
:kick:

[NuttyFluffers]

14. wait. people speak of what they know, there's nothing wrong with that.

if there are "average Joe's" who want to speak for the voice of "armchair 'n brew America" please feel free to do so. but be well aware that just like certain circles seem foreign enclaves with their own language about chai, latte, and shiraz, other enclaves with their vienna sausages, fried bologna, and cheez whiz is just as foreign. expecting foreign groups within america to speak with this truth, what is questionably termed "down home, middle america" (however your america may have nothing to do with my america, them's just the facts of life), is asking foreign language speakers to speak with your native fluency. essentially it's a tired trope of unrealistic expectations.

there's nothing wrong with this difference. there really doesn't have to be anything class about it either. we just have to accept people speak of what they know -- and if your story isn't being told by a distant people, tell it yourself and quit complaining! you have local papers, computers, telephones, and mouths of your own, speak your story, don't expect another to speak it accurately for you. speaking your truth for you was never their job. that's how dialogue works, one speaks their truth, another speaks theirs, they hammer out the differences and hopefully respect each other's humanity. voila', done.

so good average Joe, speak your truth. but be aware there's just as much lost in translation from average Joe to latte Louis. and unless you want to get lost in silly pettiness, pointing fingers and claiming class and density divides, grow the fuck up and speak of what you know. and realize people on the other side is speaking of what they know. what's the truth? well maybe if you speak to each other long enough, instead of pointing fingers, you both might live to find out.