Joe Bageant writes an online column (www.joebageant.com) that has made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He has been interviewed on Air America and comments on America’s long history of religious fundamentalism in the BBC/Owl documentary The Vision- Americans on America. Until recently he worked as a senior editor for the Primedia History Magazine Group.

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

The Best of Joe Bageant

By Joe Bageant, Ken Smith

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Scribe Publications
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921844-51-5

Contents

Introduction,
[1] Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy,
[2] Sleepwalking to Fallujah,
[3] The Covert Kingdom,
[4] Staring Down the Jackals,
[5] Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck,
[6] It Ain’t Easy Being White,
[7] What the “Left Behind” Series Really Means,
[8] Revenge of the Mutt People,
[9] Madmen and Sedatives,
[10] Somewhere a Banker Smiles,
[11] Escape from America,
[12] In the Reign of the One-nutted King,
[13] A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard,
[14] Lost in the Hologram,
[15] Nine Billion Little Feet,
[16] The Audacity of Depression,
[17] Old Dogs and Hard Time,
[18] Meet the Leftnecks,
[19] Escape from the Zombie Food Court,
[20] A Redneck View of the Obamarama,
[21] The Devil and Mr. Obama,
[22] Live from Planet Norte,
[23] Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball,
[24] Algorithms and Red Wine,
[25] America: Y Ur Peeps B So Dum?,

CHAPTER 1

Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy

[March 25, 2004]

“Bluebird, bluebird
Take a letter up north for me
These folks is fixin’ to hurt somebody
And it sure ’nuff might be me.”

— From “Bluebird,” a traditional Blues song

How can the region of America that gave us lynching, Jim Crow, Harry Byrd, George Wallace, Taliban Christianity, David Duke, the KKK, Bible hair, Tammy Faye Bakker, congregational snake handling, the poll tax, inbreeding, and chitterlings possibly take another step back down the stairs of human evolution? Beats the hell out of me. But somehow, here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we have managed it.

Like most modern Southerners who’ve fled their native states for long periods of time, I have the standard love/hate relationship with my hometown — Winchester, Virginia. On the one hand, it is a backward and mostly irrelevant place where the question of whether Stonewall Jackson had jock itch at the Battle of Chancellorsville still rages right alongside evolution and abortion. To be sure, it is the standard venal Southern place, where poverty and ugliness are thrust into one’s face daily, with all the gothic family melodramas of greed and intrigue so often written about in Southern novels. On the other hand, it is the place that made me who I am — a moralizing, preachy, and essentially lazy bastard who likes to drink. I was raised a Pentecostal Baptist, steeped in the gloomy ultra-Protestant assumption that man is a worthless, evil thing from birth and only goes downhill from there. And I still managed to become a raving, socialist heathen. Which proves there’s hope for everyone.

But something new and more ominous is afoot down here. Something that scares even a hardened tobacco-stained old toad like me — a clammy, repressive chill. One that not only dampens all political conversation not Pro-Bush, but can even cost you your job in a small town like this one. I’m serious. When I invite like-minded people for cocktails, the atmosphere is distinctly that of a “safe house,” as the few local liberals all but whisper their opinions and eye one another, judging just how safe it is to speak one’s mind. It’s spooky, so spooky that almost none of us is willing to admit it.

I can remember the 1960s, when we still had a left, right, and center in politics, even here in Virginia. Gawd, I feel old. Remembering liberali