Joe Bageant: Immersion in the shit storm of talk radio

[laststeamtrain]

Immersion in the shit storm of talk radio

Hello Joe:

When I was a boy the last item of the day for us kids was to kneel at our bedside and pray to an angry god, hoping against hope that he would spare us from his wrath and the destruction to come. It took a good chunk of my 51 years to finally realize I was talking to thin air and that there would be plenty of wrath and destruction to come from the misguided words and deeds of ordinary men and women bent on trying to be god and play god and get the "big" god to be on their side.

I mention this only as a point of contrast to the far more comforting and enlightening bedtime ritual I've adopted of late, courtesy of your spot-on, no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners writing. I prop up on a pillow, laptop on, navigate to your site and console my very troubled of late soul by reading what you have to say about a once great country that is going down very fast.

I can't help but envy those who die today a perfectly natural death of old age having lived and prospered through the best times this nation will ever see. I'm going to live long enough to see it fall off a cliff and there's not a whole damn lot I can do about it for my children, much less for the wife and me. After reading your "Audacity of Depression" essay, I felt for the first time I had connected just a bit with what has been gnawing at my insides the last few years, witnessing the impoverishment of the working class majority and the absolutely criminal self-enrichment of the political/corporate elite minority. Were there only a big man with a big stick somewhere up there, I'd go back to the bedtime prayers of my youth and ask him to whack the shit out of George W. Bush and his corporate minions who have done more damage to this country in eight years than any thinking intelligent person could have imagined.

You wouldn't guess this from a former conservative who will never forgive himself for voting Bush into office two times. Only in the last couple of years has the ether finally started to wear off and I now see how it really is and how perfectly you've nailed it in your book Deer Hunting with Jesus, where you correctly observe how our ilk have consistently selected to leadership those who have the greatest capacity and willingness to bend us over and screw us the hardest without mercy or regret.

So why the about face? In short, it was a fortuitous immersion in the very bullshit conservative media shit storm of talk radio that finally convinced me that I was very much on the wrong track. For many years now, I've spent three hours a day in my car commuting to and from work. A long while back I tired of books-on-tape and "Learn Spanish in Your Car" and the crap that passes for music on most top-40 stations. I listened to talk radio. Hour after hour, day after day, months into years. That kind of tiresome, repetitive exposure to "The Right" should long ago have solidly entrenched me on their side.

But something very different happened. The more I heard them talk, the more I realized what a disconnect I was observing between their lying bullshit and what I was observing around me. I was witnessing the general deterioration of the lives of hard-working people around me, simultaneously coming to see and know just how corrupt and evil are those we vote and depend on for leadership and security. Everything the talking heads on the right warned us about liberals and progressives never materialized. Most everything they promised would happen to our country in the honest capable hands of good conservative leadership never happened either. All that political capital that GWB boasted about after his second win was squandered through ignorance and sheer crookedness.

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For the rest of the letter & Joe's reply:http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/05/immersion-in-th.html

[Skittles]

1. if Jim in Houston thinks HE feels badly

guess how those of us not stupid enough to vote for that piece of SHIT bush feel? :puke: