Joe Bageant passes away

Joe Bageant, a man of great conscience and insight, as well as a wicked sense of humor, died March 27 after a battle with a particularly aggressive form of cancer. A note about it on his blog is here. 

I met Joe two years ago when he came to speak at Adler School of Professional Psychology and we went out to jam with students and faculty members afterward. (Joe is the one in the baseball cap). I played Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.” It seemed like an appropriate song for the times.

April 2009 Jam Paul Fitzgerald and Joe Bageant

Joe spoke at Adler about the “American Hologram,” a term he used to describe the set of assumptions, myths, and other fictions that passes for a national narrative these days. He had recently published Deer Hunting with Jesus, a book that described his neighbors in Virginia and tried to explain why they seemed to take political positions that worked against their own best interests.

One example of a piece of Joe’s “American Hologram” was the idea that we have a patriotic duty to support the economy of our country by being good consumers. Another was the myth that citizens have more to fear from their own government than from those who would profit from encouraging them to overextend themselves. It strikes me that the current eagerness to pile on public employees while corporations pay no taxes would serve Joe as yet another example of this hologram.

We need more voices like Joe. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, but he was, like Studs Terkel, Mark Twain, U. Utah Phillips, and Woody Guthrie, a wonderfully subversive humorist and social observer. He will be missed.

Joe Bageant passes away by Fitzgerald Counseling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.