AP: You seem quite passionately political, and yet you are also devoted to Buddhism, a religious system that advocates detachment. How do you hold such differing perspectives?
JB: I do not find them all that differing. Both are concerned with mankind, people together and as a whole. Socialism covers the material side of it, and Buddhism deals with the spiritual aspects. But both acknowledge that we are in this river of life together, that we are presented with struggle from the day of our birth, and that we have to make individual choices. That we will only arrive at the other shore together. Both are about the path, not religions. Sure, Marxists are too much focused on the material aspects. But that doesn't negate the deep wellspring of Marxist thought. And Buddhism, despite the pop Euro and American notion of its supposed bliss and pacifism, has a place for violence in its cosmology. That's why there were many Buddhist resistance fighters against the murderous Chinese takeover of Tibet.
AP: What is your biggest gripe about America today?
JB: At my age and with my high blood pressure, I can't afford to have heartburn type gripes with America. But I do have a sadness about my country which, for the sake of interest and readability, I express in, shall we say, "highly animated fashion." I have always loved my country — which is not by the way, the same as loving your government. But now I fear it.
I have fished for bass at night in its once beautiful rivers, and I have played stink finger with its young Southern girls who wear no panties on August nights by the light of its many moons. I have grown what can almost be called old now, with its earth beneath my feet and its legends in my eyes. And now a bunch of cheap murderous cocksuckers have hijacked the place that made me what I am and are busily turning it into one vast capitalist gulag. Stealing my children's' dreams… everything I ever experienced and cared about has become irrelevant. I don't care about my own experiences disappearing into the void so much as I care about the blackness now descending. I am here right now to tell you that America is a rogue nation and the greatest threat afoot to civilization. That doesn't mean that every American is Hitler and it doesn't mean that there is no hope. But we gotta cop to what is going on. When a nation refuses to acknowledge the need for world tribunals for ethnic cleansing and refutes the Kyoto agreements, and murders tens of thousands to keep its stock market afloat, then that nation must be called malignant upon this earth.
AP: When do you think the slide towards a fascist totalitarian state started?
JB: Immediately after World War II, when that much-deified dickhead druggist Harry Truman set in stone the intelligence and military industrial complex that had been established during the war.
AP: I don't need to ask you your opinion about President Bush — you make that plain in many of your articles — but how do you think someone so unsuitable could get elected to office?
JB: Because America has become an ignorant bloated culture of comfort and consumption. Our religion is comfort and engorgement. Not all of us, but enough of us to keep it all rolling. Hell, even our churches preach a baptised version of the American Dream, which comes down to "anything I can get my goddam paws on and devour — fuck the environment and screw the starving millions." We are a nation of belligerent lard-asses willing to kill anyone and everyone to keep our cars running and the god dam Cheetos (which I openly admit that I eat when I am blind drunk and stumbling under the thundering of gin's poisoned hooves) on the coffee table. Angry? Nope. Just the plain facts my Limey friends. You still think your guy Blair can partner up with a psychopath and ensure a supply of oil. Maybe even score one last ruddy-nutted English victory over the sand niggers you once ruled. Ya know, I don't think you Brits understand that when the last blood of dinosaurs is drained from the Middle East, we will bomb the fuck out of you in the competition for the last drop.
As for Bush getting elected, it's the same as Hitler. Bush represents most Americans, or at least a slim majority. But it's a mean majority and we can expect a Reichstadt fire sometime during the next 10 years. Bush may be gone, Kerry may get elected, but we've got an oil habit kiddo, and a lust for empire and you will be roadkill if you get in the road. Sure, there will be some slobbering gutless Democrats elected along the way, but all it will be is a feel-good exercise of an expiring empire. People put too much faith in political parties. They should have taken to the streets 15 years ago.
AP: In a nutshell, what has Bush done for the average American?
JB: Given them faith in their own desperate hubris.
AP: If that is the case, and the average American is far worse off under Bush, then why is it that he still has such strong support, often from the very people whose quality of lives is most depreciated by this government?
JB: Because we have institutionalised our hubris in the schools and the churches and everywhere else. Because Americans think obesity and belligerence are virtues, and that Jesus Christ and a five piece band came down and made them the new chosen people.
AP: Why is somebody like yourself, who champions the ordinary American, regarded as unpatriotic for opposing a government and its policies that are so clearly destroying the American ideals of democracy and liberty?
JB: Because the government has nothing to do with real patriotism. Patriotism is a love of the place and the people who have shaped your heart and mind. not your willingness to die for oil or, as Napoleon said "for those baubles pinned on the chests of dead soldiers."
AP: Coming from the South, your views cannot be very popular with your neighbours. How do you deal with them or protect yourself from them?
JB: Well. for a while I was some kind of goddamed anti-Christ around here. All kinds of scary threats, and such. Now I have been laying low like old Bre'r Rabbit (You Brits don't have the slave tales of Bre'r Rabbit do you?). The locals are so consumed with being good Germans amid their neighbours, they do not even think about the Internet stuff. They are busy keeping mental lists of which liberals they are going to put on trial when the Republican Reich finally dawns.
AP: In your articles you seem to indicate that it is hopeless trying to convince many of your compatriots that they are actually supporting a government that is not in the interests of the American people or of American ideals. Do you see any way through this?
JB: Nope. They gotta find their own way. That's what democracy is about. People finding their own way. Or not finding it.
AP: In "The Covert Kingdom" you illustrate the mentality of the Christian Fundamentalists that the progressive left is up against, a mentality that is only matched by Muslim Fundamentalism. How can we, in a democratic system, keep such destructive segments of society from harming the less vocal majority (assuming that they are not a majority!)?
JB: It can't. Until the progressive left gets out there on the street and recruits every ignorant piece of white trash and person of colour it ain't gonna happen. But here in the US, the so-called left is comfortable being in the catering class of college professors, managers, journalists, school teachers and others required to keep the capitalist system humming, they ain't gonna take any risks. They just don't get it that if they do not love their labouring brothers, beer belly, ignorance, crack habit and all, their ass is grass too. It's only a matter of time. But they simply do not believe these people are their brothers, or even human, for that matter. America is a class system first and foremost.
AP: Tell me some of your views on freedom. Many would accuse you of being left or communist, which can also be totalitarian.
JB: I am not a communist. I am a universalist humanist socialist. I would be a commie, but for the fact that communism seems too easily hijacked by despotic thugs. I don't know why, and at this age I do not have the time to find out. I'll run with what I know so far. Stick my spear in the ground and tie my leg to it and do the best I can.
AP: If you were President, what are the first things you would do to move the US away from fascism and back to democracy?
JB: I would cut the Pentagon budget in half and spread the dough around to health care and education here and in third world countries, and spend billions on peace studies and the ecology. I'm a simple fucker.
AP: When did you first go on the Internet and what is your view of this medium?
JB: In April of this year. I loved the Internet from the very beginning as I had decided a while back that I was sick of the paint-by-numbers journalism that has ruined the print world, and was looking for an outlet in which I could say exactly what I wanted to the way I wanted to.The Internet may well be the political hope of the world. Maybe someday we will have Internet referendums on what to do with the world's wheat supply. Maybe someday the global corporations' knees will be broken and every knee will bow in humble submission to the needs of humanity. Every pharmaceutical company will be distributing AIDS drug to the beating heart of Mother Africa. But first there is going to be a lot of death and destruction. The Twin Towers were just the cartoons before the movie of global revolution.
AP: Are you surprised at your meteoric rise to cult Internet writer considering you have only been online such a short time? How do you account for this?
JB: Yes, I am. I have always had good response to whatever I put into print. But that stuff was always distributed within defined circulation boundaries such as those of a magazine or a newspaper. If a magazine has 150,000 readers, then that is about all a writer is going to reach through that medium. But the Internet can aggregate people of similar opinion and outlook with power and speed that is unimaginable in print.
Working in magazines for so many years, it seems to me that magazine and book publishers still just do not "get" the Internet. They still suffer under the illusion that people will not read anything over 1500 words, etc. Yet a reader is a reader. They also get too trapped in "marketing segmentation," demographics, psychographics, and all that crap that was so hot with marketing people ten years ago. The net is an ocean of human beings and you gotta swim among them to understand them and what you need to do to stay afloat. There is no magic marketing plan you can wire into, other than provide what people really want on the sites they go to get it.
Half the nation doesn't read and never will. So they will be looking for small takeaway bites from the net. Fair enough. But people who care about ideas and information will devote just as much time to the net as to a book, and probably buy a book related the Internet source too if it further serves their purpose. For example, I began restoring an ancient slave banjo from information on the net. Then later I bought a book by the same author I was reading on the net. That would not have happened if the net had not provided instant access to that luthier's advice. It also happened a lot more quickly than if I had had to research the subject by traditional means.
By the way, I did not just recently discover the net. I have been into it from the beginning. However, I recently decided that it was better to give my articles and essays away for free than to piss around with any longer with the restrictions of print and the talentless and gutless people and corporations that so often own or manage it. And hell, I am one of those people! So I understand why and how the corporatization of media has reduced our once-thriving American dialogue to a warm puddle of commercial piss. With the exception of a few good magazines like Harpers, there's nothing left to read in this country. Yet, I can go on the net and find some extremely talented people with something to say and web editors who are not afraid to let them say it, if I devote time enough to the search. They may not have the writer's craft, but their ideas and insights as human beings move us and feed our minds.
AP: How hopeful are you about the future?
JB: In the long view, very. But we are talking about centuries here. I won't be around to see it. Neither will you. The bad news is that you young'uns are going to have to take up the fight. A worse fight than I ever knew. The good news is that it won't be over in your lifetime either. So your victory does not have to be complete. There are laws of physics and the universe neither of us can change. Right now Americans believe they can deny the second law of thermodynamics.
But in the end some upright hominid will be scraping lichens for food off a radio active rock with a computer chip shard and once again starting the slow upward trajectory of humankind toward the stars. That's the thing about this smear of biology on a speck of cosmic dust called earth. It is a virulent strain, and assuming a new biology on a ruined planet, it will send its silver seed, even if robotically, away from this gravity well called earth into the singing interstellar void. As any Buddhist understands, it's never over. It's just a ripple in the atomic tides of the universe.
AP: Please describe to us your utopian or ideal society.
JB: Ain't no such thing. Just struggle. Constant struggle, and if you do it right, you get to struggle for beauty and truth in a society that allows them to exist.
AP: I understand you are a family man. Tell me about your wife and children.
JB: My wife Barbara is a historical archivist and a feminist, and was a Madison Wisconsin radical feminist during the 1960s. She is currently involved in establishing and restoring a slave school museum here in Clarke County… a historical record of the post-slavery experience in Virginia as expressed by their descendants. She has a son, Spencer, who is a gifted popular culture expert in Seattle.
I have three children by two previous marriages and I am now married for a third time. Let's just say I have been happily married more times than the average person. I have a 37-year old son by my first wife, Cindy, named Tim — for Timothy Leary. He grew up in the midst of the entire Sixties adventure, saw it all go down… the glorious and the ugly, the strangeness and the joy. Lived in school buses, ate snails with Hunter Thompson, traveled to Latin America with me… And because of all that he understands me more than anyone else on this earth. He is my deepest and most constant brother, son and friend. In that I have been a lucky man. He sees through this country's bullshit with x-ray vision.
I have two other children by my second marriage, Patrick, who is a good lefty and getting ready for law school. And Elizabeth, who just returned from a long stint as an AIDS worker in Mozambique. She is destined to save the world.
AP: How did you bring up your children… did you do anything to try to make them more aware of what was going on in society around them?
JB: No, mainly I just fucked up a lot in front of them and they seem to have learned from my mistakes.
AP: What do your family think of what you write?
JB: As far as I know, they do not read what I write. They have seen me be a writer for many, many years. It's just a fact of life to them. I am not the center of everything in my family. They are intensely involved in their own lives because they are self-realizing people with dreams of their own. It works really well for all of us. I do suspect however, my wife Barbara will probably read my book. She's a big reader and will probably want to know where all the recent money came from.
AP: Finally, what are your personal plans or goals for the future? Are you going to have your own website soon, radio/TV show or write a book?
JB: Dammit kid! You ask NOTHING BUT hard questions! Can I adopt you? I am starting to get book and movie offers. Enough of them that I had to get an agent. Jimmy Vines of New York. If they do come through, (and I am not pounding my meat over the possibility) I plan to have a cottage in someplace like Andalusia, or French Martinique. someplace VERY cheap that I can go and write and snipe at the Republic of terror. One man never beat a mob in its own turf. I'll stroke my wife's sweet snatch, pet my dogs and give heart to my children (every one of whom is a good lefty) in some dry place where my arthritic fingers will loosen up enough to learn to play flamenco guitar. I'm serious folks! There is not a person on this earth who can say I never did what I promised… eventually. And every reader here, every son and daughter of good yeoman liberty and decency, as it is defined by the suffering poor of this planet, is invited to come visit, eat tapas and drink wine at my table.
Solidarity!
Andrew P. is the editor of the on-line political magazine EnergyGrid, from which this interview is a reprint. Joe Bageant can be contacted at bageantjb@netscape.net.