JOE BAGEANT'S PIECE COVERT KINGDOM STIRS CONTROVERSY
JOE BAGEANT'S BY NOW WELL KNOWN PIECE on Christian fundamentalist rednecks (his kin, by the author's admission) has stirred the usual controversy. A recent post by Joaquin Bustelo, a thinker of the left, which we reproduce below, takes issue with a number of aspects of Bageant's treatment. We welcome this discussion as the topic is an important one for all activists involved in neutralizing the toxic fumes emanating from this irrational quarter. (The originalBageant article is found at http://www.cjonline.org/bageantCovertKing.htm ). Cyrano's Editor filed a reply which also appears in this blog's archives.
posted by cyrano @ 5:54 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
In his characteristic incisive way, Joaquin [Bustelo] makes extremely cogent points in his analysis of Joe Bageant's piece, published on our site (Cyranos Journal Online, http://www.cjonline.org/bageantCovertKing.htm ), but, I think (and I offer these comment in a totally fraternal way--de compañero a compañero— since I know Joe well), that Joaquin may be overly harsh in his criticism of a man who stands side by side with him politically, and who has struggled all his life for the same principles and goals Joaquin so determinedly strives. What's more, Bageant is hardly blind to the racist undertones and overtones of the culture he so forcefully critiques.
Bageant in his piece is not trying to offer an exhaustive Marxist “technical” analysis of the role and origins of Christian Fundamentalism in America. I doubt that anyone can do that job in such a definitive way, and to the satisfaction of all comers, especially a Marxist audience, as the madness behind this phenomenon, as is true with all historical teguments, combines many historical streams in which the mental derangement of literalist religion may be just one.
There is no question that racism—witting or unwitting—is a huge component in the life and political attitudes of the (primarily) South/Western blue-collar and “redneck” cultural community (“primarily” because we all know damn well that this mentality obtains all over the nation; the geographic labels, therefore, are only departure points for further analysis.)
In my view, what Joaquin is momentarily forgetting is that reductionism can cut both ways: you can’t reduce, you can’t entirely explain, the American rightwing Christian and, in general, revolting religiosity phenomenon (inherent from its inception in this benighted republic’s DNA) by mere reference to racism. The mental rot characterizing “believers”—especially fierce believers—is a manifestation of a temperamental disposition, call it a genetic roulette, which has accursed members of our species since it climbed out of the primeval soup, and which, true, is most of the time cleverly exploited by the ruling circles.
But this regrettable, self-inflicted renunciation of reason may stand separate from the question of racism itself, even if both malignant plagues fester in the soil of ignorance and irrationality. If racism was always inherent in religiosity and vice versa we could comfortably equate all religion with racism, and leave it at that, but that would hardly explain the influence of religion as a normative bludgeon in societies where racialist homogeneity make the playing of that card of dubious usefulness to the controlling orders.
Joe Bageant’s article was a salvo to shake the complacency (and ignorance) of mainstream liberals, however hopeless that task may be. It may offer few (or many, depending on your intellectual constitution) valuable insights in connection with what is by wide admission a serious problem for anyone trying to move this nation to the left. It may not contain great revelations, especially to a scholarly crowd. But in order to be fair it should be received and understood in the spirit in which it was molded, and not with a pre-emptive blast better reserved for our true enemies, of which, need I remind anyone here, we have no shortage.
In view of the above, to accuse Bageant of not being properly inclusive of all ethnic and racial stripes of liberalism, i.e., of leaving behind Latino and Black liberals in his geographic/sociologic enumeration, somewhat misses the point, besides being a bit petty. Bageant is speaking to what he regards as the power fulcrums of liberalism, which, in political and economic terms, remain totally dominated by whites. Sure, there are many African and Latino middle-class liberals, an obvious fact not lost on Bageant, but, even assuming for a moment that his intent was to slight such comrades, which was certainly not the case, quite frankly, I fail to see how this supposedly exclusionary slap could be detected by his sketch of liberal geographic proclivity. Don’t we have a lot of Latino and Black fellow progressives living in the areas he describes?
For liberals to examine the current fundamentalist phenomenon in America is accept some hard truths. For starters, we libs are even more embattled than most of us choose to believe. Any significant liberal and progressive support is limited to a few urban pockets on each coast and along the upper edge of the Midwestern tier states. Most of the rest of the nation, the much-vaunted heartland, is the dominion of the conservative and charismatic Christian. Turf-wise, it's pretty much their country, which is to say it presently belongs to George W. Bush for some valid reasons. Remember: He did not have to steal the entire election, just a little piece of it in Florida. Evangelical born-again Christians of one stripe or another were then, and are now, 40% of the electorate, and they support Bush 3-1. And as long as their clergy and their worst instincts tell them to, they will keep on voting for him, or someone like him, regardless of what we view as his arrogant folly and sub-intelligence.
Okay. Maybe Bageant was too pessimistic for dramatic effect. Or too narrow in his geographic sweep. But even if we grant that point, we can scarcely make the leap from that to the imputed insensitivity to racism that Joaquin so fervently adduces. A case in point is Bageant’s example of the professor wishing to move to good ole ante-bellum Mississippi. This is advanced as an example of the recalcitrant, malignant idiocy we’re dealing with, of which racism is indeed a component. Anyone can understand that. Incidentally, while we’re on this topic, let us remind ourselves that, as argued elsewhere on this note, religion and the idea of salvation, even the ludicrous notion of preferential proprietary salvation according to race, is not limited to the white population, which, historically and by dint of simple majority, seems to easily monopolize the field of mean-spirited lunatic behavior. Historically, chauvinistic strands of religiosity can be found in almost all cultures and races.
In sum, Joe Bageant is NOT the enemy. And if anyone wishes to correct his record, or call him on his real or imagined shortcomings and prejudices, s/he can easily do so by writing to him directly (his address is published in the article in question) or, better still, by simply going to our blogs page [ http://www.cjonline.org/cjblogs.htm ] and posting a reply, or opening a thread on this topic. In fact, we urge you to do so, especially Joaquin, whose contributions we sincerely admire. I say to Joaquin: Leave your comments in this form for the benefit of a much wider audience. —P. Greanville, Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online
On Chewing The Lead Dog's Tail
Granted, in that its origins can be found in its followers’ sense of powerlessness, Christian Dominionism is akin to other expressions of
delusional white supremacy.
Nevertheless, this blog entry [Bustelo's] is a classic case of cognitive dissidence of the leftist ideological kind: it is emblematic of why the civil rights movement has stalled. However, perhaps helpfully, it does provide a glimpse into why present-day progressives have failed to offer a cogent response to the national ascendancy of the "values"
(closer to pathologies) of southern culture, in these late days of the American empire.
Joaquin Bustelo is reflecting the missteps that helped to create an environment where a crypto-racist Republican Party could gain near total dominance of the national political structure. Progressives have failed to take into account the plight of impoverished whites -- of the
ancestors of those who toiled as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, unskilled labors -- all of those who to this day remain crushed beneath the stratified order of the present-day corporatism. Wholly forgotten by progressives have been this laboring class (the so called white trash) who, in the same manner as generations of (so called) underclass
African Americans, have lived their lives with the polished boots of a corrupt aristocracy upon their throats.
Joe Bageant's work provides a much needed exploration into the world of these folks -- a people who were (and remain) prime pickings for
demagogues. Historically, the harshness of their lives made them harsh people. The constant humiliations rendered them vicious (cross
burning, lynching -- strange fruit swinging from the trees viscous). All they possessed was their white skin. And for all their supremacist
proclamations as to its value -- it wasn't worth very much if your family name didn't carry the proper pedigree ... For most, it was worth
a life of backbreaking labor.
The last thing that’s going to be effective -- if one is going to transform the social order -- are displays of finger-wagging scolding directed at people who have no power ... Instead, leftist activists should begin offering disenfranchised whites an empathic narrative; one that might resonate with the day-to-day realities of their beleaguered lives -- rather than reading them for filth at every occasion. Such shaming and hectoring (you're castigating a group of folks, here, who,
because of the inequities of hegemonic capitalism, don't exactly have a towering sense of self-worth to begin with) only serves to run them right into the camp of the rightist demagogues (from George Wallace, to Reagan, to Rove).
If progressive activists addressed the issues of their (and our own shared) helplessness before the mindless beast of the corporate state -- we might garner their trust and support. We should give it shot -- rather than our incessant tail-chewing of those who, like Joe Bageant, are running ahead of our mangy leftist pack, scouting the cultural wilderness before us.
Seems to me that Bustelo is going overboard with his complaint against Bageant, the kind of factionalist intolerant attitude that gives some on the left a bad name. One thing is to be rigorous about analysis, another to be unduly thin-skinned and even nitpicky. The latter propensity, if I am not mistaken, was extensibely discussed by none other than Lenin himself, as a "leftwing disorder." And George Jackson alludes to that problem, too. He was aware, as Malcolm also soon recognized in his political development, that building a broad revolutionary consciousness and movement is not a task for the petty or the intolerant, the kind that would find grounds for exclusion and derisive accusationon in just about any mistake or "imperfection" committed by their correligionists. By the way I'm a black American, self-taught in political questions, and do not profess to be an expert on the finer points of theory that Joaquin Bustelo is so clearly proficient. But I keep my eyes open, my mind open, and try to sort the thing out as well as I can. To me, the Bageant piece was very helpful in confirming some of my personal impressions.
Bageant and authors like him do us all a signal favor by pointing at the real "fifth column" facing American progressives in their backyard, the legions of nincompoops marching under the banner of a horribly misunderstood gospel.
For what I have seen, this site is not bad at all
- cyranosjournal.blogspot.com x
07 car civic honda
buy used car
car undefined used
used car bergen
used car oakland
used car greensboro
used car raleigh
used car killeen
used car vallejo
used car tacoma
MESSAGE
digital underwater camera
casio digital camera
fuji digital camera
kodak digital camera software
Hi there!
I didn’t want to waste any more time teasing her either, though. Instead, when I went down for what she thought would be another tantalising lick, I ran my lips as well as my tongue over her pussy, stretching the muscles in my jaw to try and encompass as much of her as I could. With my mouth clamped over her private parts like a suction cup, I settled down and began to eat. I tried just about everything I could think of; I stuck my tongue as far up her vaginal passage as I could, I took the loose skin on her clitoral hood into my mouth and sucked it out over and over again, I delved so deep and hard that my nose was pushed into her passage. I inhaled again - always inhale, I told myself flippantly.
I don’t know how much of what I did was me trying to imitate something I’d seen in porn, but it seemed to work. Holly settled down into a pattern of soft, subdued moans which made me tingle inside, punctuated by an occasional sharper cry when I switched to something different. She held my head firmly in place, running her fingers through my hair, and that sensation was doing good things to me as well.
I love sex :)
Young lolita it is a best !!!
__________________
http://www.xxx-01.com - New Teen Tgp Site! Visit it and have fun! Enjoy it!
http://www.xxx-01.com/index3.html - Free Porn directory
I am not kidding) xxx-01.com - is super hot )
Joaquin's piece did not get
posted, somehow.
I googled for it and found it
on the marxist mail list archive:
[Marxism] It's not about religion, it's about racism
-----------------
To: "'Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition'"
Subject: [Marxism] It's not about religion, it's about racism
From: Joaquín Bustelo
Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2005 14:05:47 -0400
Thread-index: AcV+z+JN3csCio+ERVyA9hdmI+CcHwANPY4g
----------------------
Cyrano Online posted a link highly recommending an article that offers us
the scary vision of this multi-millioned religious rapture crazed
fundamentalist know-nothing army waging an endless imperialist war abroad
and an unceasing culturekampf at home.
The author talks fervently about how his family have been Christian
fundamentalist since before the civil war or something and how benightedly
stupid these people are: "One university department head told me he is
moving to rural Mississippi where he can better recreate the lifestyle of
the antebellum South, and its 'Confederate Christian values.' It gets real
strange real quick."
Even stranger is that the author, one Joe Bageant, can have the cluetrain
stop at his doorstep, dump a huge load of racist dung on him as in the
passage I just quoted, and he *still* doesn't get it.
This stuff ain't about religion, it's about racism, their belief in being
"saved" by Jesus is only the fantastical expression of what society has told
them from the day they were born, that they're saved because they're white.
And the "rapture" they so fervently await is merely the reflection of the
reality than in THIS world most of these folks are getting screwed, and they
want their reward but heaven is a little too distant. In this sense it is
very much the classical "opium of the people," but opium laced with the
arsenic of racism, of white privilege.
What were the real "Confederate Christian values"? Genocide. Slavery. And
rape. Look at any random group of African-Americans and you will see before
your eyes the evidence of generations of rape of African girls and women by
their white masters. Thomas Jefferson wrote about the importance of breeding
slaves, because a new Black child was an addition to capital. And he
practiced what he preached.
Joe Bageant's nightmare America is a white America. Search as you might
throughout his article, you won't find Blacks or Latinos in it. "Muslims"
make a couple of cameo appearances (abroad, as targets of endless war) but
that's it. Instead he speaks gloomily of a "red state" nation:
"For liberals to examine the current fundamentalist phenomenon in America is
to accept some hard truths. For starters, we libs are even more embattled
than most of us choose to believe. Any significant liberal and progressive
support is limited to a few urban pockets on each coast and along the upper
edge of the Midwestern tier states. Most of the rest of the nation, the
much-vaunted heartland, is the dominion of the conservative and charismatic
Christian. Turf-wise, it's pretty much their country, which is to say it
presently belongs to George W. Bush for some valid reasons. Remember: He did
not have to steal the entire election, just a little piece of it in Florida.
Evangelical born-again Christians of one stripe or another were then, and
are now, 40% of the electorate, and they support Bush 3-1."
By liberals, he means, of course, white liberals, with white going unsaid in
typical white fashion.
Now look at his demographic geography. "Progressives" are limited to just a
few "pockets," like, you know, the two coasts and the heavily populated
Midwest. But that's most of the country's population.
And what are we to say about my own metro area, Atlanta, and DeKalb county
where I live, where "W" got 26% out of nearly 300,000 votes? This isn't the
coast and it isn't the Midwest, but it pretty much is the capital of the
South, in economic and social terms, and this is the region where 55% of
Blacks live and an increasing number of Latinos.
He talks of the 2000 election (the article was written before the 2004 vote,
apparently) and says Bush "only" had to steal Florida. He forgets that's
true "only" because of the slaveowner's Senate and electoral college setup.
If electoral votes were allocated to the states by representation in the
House, which is proportional to population, Bush would have lost not just in
2000, Florida or no Florida, but also in 2004. And if people in states like
New York and California knew every last one of their votes would count,
because the presidential election has been changed to one person, one vote,
the popular vote majority against Bush would have been quite decisive, too.
Joe Bageant speaks of the compact mass of 40 million Christian religious
fanatic voters, and how 30 million of them voted for Bush in 2000. You know,
30 million in a nation of nearly 300 million is hardly a dominant force.
Moreover, there is no more political or homogeneous voting bloc in the
United States than that of the Black nation. Despite having millions of
Blacks disenfranchised through the massive, generalized repression of the
"war on crime" and the "war on drugs," Blacks who can vote massively, and in
these two elections, they did so and 8 or 10 to 1 against Bush. If you don't
believe the exit polls, check out the precinct counts for those in Black
neighborhoods. Here are some from my county, W's percentage followed by the
precinct:
7.68% CLIFTON ELEM
6.61% COLUMBIA DRIVE
5.03% COLUMBIA ELEM
5.65% COLUMBIA MIDDLE
7.97% COUNTY LINE
7.28% COVINGTON
5.81% COVINGTON HWY LIBRARY
Latinos are now a significantly larger group than Blacks, officially 44
million compared to 37 million African-Americans. And if all the
undocumented were counted, the Latino figure would be close to 50 million.
This population is growing very rapidly, having doubled in size (and in
reality, probably more) since 1990.
Analyzing the Latino vote is more complicated because the Latino population
in some aspects is much less homogeneous and fewer than 2 in 5 Latinos in
this country can vote (compared with more than 3/4ths of white Anglos),
which exaggerates the heterogeneity. But Latinos also are a mass of people
who act in a much more conscious, coherent political fashion, similar to
Blacks, trying to find a way to defend their own interests as working
people, including in the electoral arena.
So even on the level of electoralism that Joe Bageant focuses on, the real
picture isn't at all what he portrays. But he is blind to the real conscious
progressive forces that are very much active, even in the narrow distorted
framework of bourgeois politics and electoralism, because that force is the
Black nation. And if he can't even see that, of course he's not going to
notice at all the emerging force of Latinos. I guess if I thought the only
thing standing in the way of the triumph of obscurantism and reaction were
white liberals, I, too, would be as despondent as this author seems to be.
I don't mean to imply, by the way, that I think the way forward for Blacks
and Latinos, or working people generally, is mostly or very significantly
through voting, and most certainly not through the vehicle of the Democrat
Party.
On the level of significant social and political change, what counts aren't
votes, but social forces in motion, mass movements. (There is a very
interesting article on this with a lot of useful ideas as the lead article
in the latest issue of Black Commentator:
http://www.blackcommentator.com/144/144_cover_movement.html
(Full disclosure: it was written by Bruce Dixon, a friend who is active in
the Atlanta Jobs for Justice coalition.)
Joe Bageant's failure to see "race" and racism --the national question-- as
central to U.S. political life also leads him to misunderstand where the
seeming power and influence of right-wing Christian fundamentalism comes
from and why it is evolving in the way that it is.
First, we should be clear: these sorts of religions in the United States are
expressions of racism in religious garb. What it comes down to is being
God's chosen *people,* and that has a very specific and concrete meaning in
the age of imperialism and nowhere more so than here. When you get a bunch
of white folks in a room in the United States saying that they and others
who agree with them (who also happen --what a coincidence!-- to all be
whites) are the chosen and the saved, that is not the dementia that is
religion, that is an expression of white supremacy in demented religious
form.
Second, these right wing fundamentalist church movements did not
spontaneously grow in influence or strength, they were empowered from above.
No, not from the heavens, but from the board rooms.
The ruling class has been systematically funding and promoting these people,
offering them, for example, multiple free propaganda outlets on cable,
financing their takeover of one after another AM radio station, giving them
millions to fund universities, holding back its news media from tearing them
to shreds, on the contrary, even using their supposedly prestigious "news"
outlets to pump up the credibility of creationism and similar aberrations of
human thought.
When dealing with that subject, for example, outlets like the Corporate News
Network, Faux News and their ilk all insist in talking about the
"controversy" and how "many" scientists reject this but so and so of some
very-scientific-sounding institute says the incompletion of the fossil
record and so on, and evolution is just a "theory" and we have a different
one, "intelligent design."
The truth is that NO reputable scientist believes it, and that the fake
"scientist" they have up there spouting all this garbage has *never*
published a paper in a peer reviewed journal expounding his views on the
subject, that there hasn't been a single gathering of any scientific society
in the last century or so where this "intelligent design" theses wouldn't
have been laughed out of the room with contempt.
Try to say that at MANY corporate news outlets TODAY, and you'll get raked
over the coals for bias if not fired on the spot, even though everyone knows
it is the truth because the level of simple minded ignorance required to
believe the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago is
simply too great to allow such a person to function in a newsroom, even the
corporate ones of today.
The *reason* the ruling class does this is that they desperately need a
reactionary bulwark against social progress and scientific ideas.
The 20th Century, despite its tremendous unevenness and many setbacks in
political terms, radically transformed the political and social attitudes
and culture of working people the world over, and, yes, even of white folks
in the United States.
Monarchy and empire, those two pillars of reaction in the XIX Century, have
been smashed. With a very few exceptions, direct colonialism has been wiped
from the face of the globe. Women, and even the native peoples of Bolivia,
have the formal right to vote. The idea that entire sections of humanity
can't be trusted or are not entitled to political participation because
they are so inferior is pretty much dead, yes that was the commonly accepted
idea among many white working people here and all over the world when my
grandparents were growing up.
Just consider this: a debate about gay marriage has broken out, something
which would have been unthinkable 100 years ago. And suddenly what are
politicians talking about? That all those committing crimes against nature
should be burned at the stake? No, the debate largely polarizes between
those that claim they want to recognize the civil rights of gay and lesbian
couples by establishing "domestic partnerships" or "civil unions" and those
who reject an inherently unequal second-class status and insist on the full
right to marry.
Even racist and white supremacist attitudes are breaking down. Today it is
quite common to see interracial couples in colleges and universities, even
in the South, where fifty years ago, the prohibition on these kinds of
relationships was still vigorously enforced -- through lynching.
The rise of Christian obscurantist know-nothing flat-earth rapture religions
is a big part of the ruling class's attempt to counter these changes. That
they have to resort to such extreme backwardness is because that is the
material that was to hand that suits their purpose. And it suggests to me
that, in the broad historical sweep of things, this is a ruling class that
is increasingly being cornered by social and historical development.
The increasingly world-wide social nature of production and capital's
desperate search for profits has a tendency to level and eliminate all sorts
of distinctions which the ruling class created and relies on to maintain its
rule.
Yet the ruling class can hardly afford to let white workers wake up to the
reality that when Malcolm X spoke about how this wasn't "our" country, how
this wasn't "our" government, he was speaking not just a Black truth but a
working class truth. When labor in white skin realizes that its power to
defend its own interests in sapped because it joins the ruling class in
branding labor in black skin, the game is over. That will be neither easy to
accomplish nor something that can be gotten to simply by preaching. What it
requires is white people consciously rejecting and combating white identity
and white privilege, even while they insist on recognizing and empowering
Black consciousness and privileging the interests of Blacks (and not just,
but also immigrants, Latinos, women, all specially oppressed sectors) as the
cause of the labor movement as a whole.
The ruling class knows this, they understand it (albeit in their own
distorted ideological way) and they desperately need to re-enforce white
supremacist ideology even while the economic evolution of their own system
undermines it.
Thus we get the increasing irrationality of U.S. public policy and
discourse. All sorts of phenomena, from the rise of the Christian right,
"back to basics" in education, three strikes and you're out in penal policy,
to the white damsel in distress and sexual predator stories that dominate
the news, are all aimed in the same direction.
Joaquín
Post a Comment
<< Home