‘Poet’, ‘prophet’, ‘hillbilly revolutionary’, ‘progressive redneck with a conscience’ – these are some of the epithets that have been conferred on Joe Bageant who died on March 26. The ABC’s Steve Austin called him 'The Woody Guthrie of the typewriter' for he championed the cause of the ‘white redneck’, a social group he saw as being one of the most marginalised and disenfranchised in America.
Joe was a man of wisdom, intelligence and penetrating insight, but what made him really special was his warm, wry – sometimes acerbic – sense of humour and his direct no-frills honesty. He was also, in my view, a kind of a genuine working class liberation theologian – at least he would have been had he believed in God!
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Today liberation theology appears dead (it is certainly in cold storage), and while there are strong voices advocating on behalf of the poor and disempowered, there is little conversation about the transformation of unjust social and economic structures and virtually no conversation at all about class. Bageant bypassed our denial mechanism and laid bare the despair, the sense of indignant outrage, the oppression of 60 million white Americans whose spirit has been burned dry ‘like raisins in the sun’ by American corporate power.
Bageant was very proud to be one of his people, and spoke and thought in the vernacular of the ‘redneck’. Witness this opening statement at a recent talk:
'I don’t like middle class people very much; they tend to be smug and they tend to look down on my people …'
A nice opening gambit to capture the hearts of his cultured, liberal, middle class audience! He was a mischievous ‘stirrer’; he liked to feed and subvert the stereotypes, preconceptions and misconceptions of his readers and listeners.
Bageant saw class as being the basis of all politics – which is, in his view, the primary reason we don’t wish to talk about it. The silencing of such conversation is an essential strategy of the few who benefit from the present structures – the one percent of the population that owns 45 percent of America’s wealth.
With one well-formed sentence he could burst the illusory bubble of America as ‘the land of opportunity’: ‘If yer mamma was waitress and yer pappa worked in the mill, if there ain’t a book in the house, well, you’re not goin’ to be in the Whitehouse kid …' – a bull’s eye