I was stumbling around the web this afternoon, when I happened to meet up with
Joe Bageant. wood s lot links to him, and has a snippet of his piercing and insightful essay,
Revenge Of The Mutt People on their page today. I've never heard of the guy before, but I think it's safe to say he should be known a lot more widely in these circles.
"Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d'Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates -- bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d'Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn't even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: "Only a white man would work there.""
So begins a journey into the America that I know so intimately, from living deep in the middle of it for so many years. Joe Bageant has a way of relating what he's seen that cuts to the heart of the problem we have in America today. It's possible he may be recording the tales of the last days of the republic, from what I can see. I have to say I have seen and lived much of what he writes of, and he is one of the few that comes away seeing it for what it is, with his spirituality intact.
Maybe my thinking is colored from a conversation last night with my friend who used to work for Halliburton over in Iraq. We were talking about an e-mail he had sent me, which inspired me to write a diary, and I thought I had better give him a heads-up about any fallout he might get from his friend who originally wrote the e-mail. My friend remarked, "Y'know, genocide is a good thing in some ways. The problem we have over there is we aren't doing it right. We should have levelled the place." He then went on to compare the people there to "diseased coyotes that need to be killed". I told him he better go home and read his Bible, because Jesus never said a goddamn thing about genocide being good.
On the other hand, maybe Joe Bageant is right. My friend said all this standing in the parking lot of an Assembly Of God church.