[I_Like_Plants]

Reading Joe Bageant's web page that is!!

www.joebageant.com

What puzzles me is, he made all this noise about leaving the Empire and his wonderful Garifuna adopted family in Belize, and now he seems to be back in the Empire, no more mention of blue mangoes or tropical bliss, nothing to indicate he may have become disenchanted other than a comment to an emailer, that maybe it's better to rot inside the Empire.

I am curious, since I'd sent him a callous-sounding but well-meaning email asking what will happen when he's no longer able to "play Santa Claus".

He's writing a lot more lately, something like 2X as much, which for admirers of his writing is a good thing, but I was really hoping for his sake he'd make it in Belize, playing Beneficient Bwana or not.....

[JoeBageant]

I had to return to the US to fulfill my contractual obligations to Random House in promoting the book: "Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatcjhes from the American Class War."

But oh, believe me, we got a lot done down there and are doing some much bigger things when I return in late summer or early fall.

We put a young man in the construction biz, we put an older woman in the restaurant biz, we bought school books for kids, and on and on.

In June of next year we are reclaiming a huge gringo landgill waste dump into beachfront for native peoples who live there atop the mountain of waste. Gonna have a Chinese dredge come in and blow 6,000 tons of sand over the cleanup area. (I won't say where because the gringos, in collusion with government crooks will come and buy it up or steal it before we get it done.)

Meanwhile, I gotta return here a while longer to bring down the rest of the bucks to pay for this stuff. I didn't go there to retire...just to try to do a little more good than my rotten ass has done in this lifetime.

Hope I have answered your question.

Joe Bageant

[I_Like_Plants]

NO MONEY is emphatically not Joe's problem.

However, how to exist with NO MONEY is something that interests me too, since yes it will happen to a large number of us.

Freegans are people who dumpster dive, try to get everything for free (no that does not include stealing) and many are interested in free dwellings too so they are probably a good place to start studying.

Folks who are able to walk India, etc., with nothing but a flute or guitar or sketchbook interest me, I suppose they'd have a hard time walking the old USSR or the new US this way, Fascist states don't like such examples. But India is nice and inefficient, and that makes it possible. Some rural areas in the US are still that way, I think - but we're talking really rural.

It makes me wonder, if I were wealthy and wanted to live somewhere simple and tribal, would I really want to live in it as a person among people, or would I want to change it over in my own image? Would I end up creating a place with longer work hours, unrealistic expectations, and the kind of stress and strife I'd left?

[JoeBageant]

LOL!
I totally agree. But I did not do what I would have chosen to do. I did what THEY wanted to do. Like I said, I live on less than $4000 a year (and would live penniless in India if the government here would let me, which they will not), and I give the rest to Third World families to do what they feel they need.

There is no use to try to warn them, because the cultural and language differences are such that what lies ahead cannot be made real to them. On the other hand, they only have to step back about a half a step when peak hits. Plenty are already living off the grid and few of the rest are totally dependant on it. Hell, until very recently there was no road to many of these villages. Muchless electricity, phones etc.

But I am not some great Bwana who even suggests what they should do. I just enable them to do it, and I am simply happy to be part of their families, cook meals with them, fish, play music, and generaly participate in village life. I like being a godfather to their children and a member of the extended clan into which I have been accepted.

As for hitting the road with a flute and guitar, I am 60 years old and in very poor health. It's the hammock and the bicycle for me bud!

In art and labor,

joe

[Madpaddy]

You can't begin to imagine my disappointment when I realised this thread was not about masturbation.

[Madpaddy]

The meek shall inherit the earth.

[I_Like_Plants]

Joe - this is the same reason I strongly advised a friend of mine, who's old, to move to Vietnam. He's got a friend who moved back there, Vietnamese, who got sick and tired of the big con and rat-race the US is. Lucky him, he has a place to go back to. I got to talk to Trang a bit before he left, and we were both looking at each other going "Wow! You have to work so damned hard here!! Mom, Dad, everyone!". I feel my 70-year old friend would be MUCH better off over there with his essentially adopted family than here - so medicine is 30 years out of date, they'll drag ya to the hospital instead of letting you die in an alley like it is here, never getting the benefit of up-to-date medicine. But I have, apparently, a thing against the "bwana" attitude, which probably has a lot to do with ME.

You see, I grew up in Hawaii which in many places is trying to be "more Roman than the Romans" like you find at any outpost at the edge of Empire. But the place is ineffecient enough that a lot of pre-Empire ways of doing things remain. One thing is that the average person lives a lot more modestly than on the Mainland - a lot. Like, people who've never owned a car their entire lives, people living in rooming houses which are still a social institution there, etc. Everyone young wants to go to the Mainland though, and that included me. I got a chance to leave (there was no way I'd ever save up enough money on my own, a company moved me) and took it in the mid 80s. I thought I was going to be rich! Since I'd been told over and over again how expensive Hawaii is, I actually believed that in a year or two, I'd be able to buy first, a nice Toyota truck, then start looking at a house!

This turned out not to be. I turned from a good saver into someone who lived hand to mouth, and often pawned stuff to get by at the end of the month. One day I and my Vietnamese and Cambodian co-workers all sat around and looked at each other in astonishment, "What's going on here? Everyone has to work so hard! The mother, the father, the kids..... Back in Cambodia, the father works, that's it!" Hawaii's about halfway between the two extremes - in California you're fucked unless you have a damn good paying job. People who lose that end up working two jobs.... Hawaii can be like that, but you can also live on min. wage there. Not live like an American thinks they're entitled to, but live ok. I know, I did it.

So, in 2003 I get tired of the Empire and move back. Lo and behold I decide I needed a car and buy a big old Volvo wagon. That car would cost me, in the end, $1000 a month to own! Since I had a car, now I had to look for an apartment that had parking, and turned my nose up at perfectly nice rooms for $200-$300 a month. No parking. I ended up with a $600 a month place in Waikiki plus $100 a month more for parking..... Plus, I never drove the car that much because there's no parking most places! All the nifty little thrift shops etc I planned to find stuff at to put on Ebay, had no parking, so I had a hell of a time trying to make a living. I lasted 4 months. I fled and went up here to Silicon Valley, rang up huge debt getting started up here again, and now am in despair of ever paying that off. I may well end up back in Hawaii, playing music for tips on the street or drawing people, living on as little as possible, and hoping the prisons are too crowded to put me in one, as a debtor.

Even though I'd grown up there, I sure got away from my frugal roots. I moved back there trying to make the place work according to my Mainland rules, and I was not willing to live as I had before, according to its rules. I'd lived quite well on $5 an hour, before. The irony is that as mentioned I will probably have to flee to there, because it's the one place I know that I can live quite cheaply, and where I have people I actually care about. I can tell you it's a mind-twister to go back and find people I've not seen for 20 years, who greet me, know me, oh too bad we already rented out that room, etc. All the years I've lived on the mainland, there just hasn't been that feeling. Maybe if I were from out in Iowa or something, but I'm not. If I were, I guess I'd go back there.

So, I guess my desire to "fix" the place, in my own case to try to live Mainland style, sure didn't work.

And Hawaii is not perfect - everyone there sees all the advertising, they all want a new car, they all want to move to the Mainland and live in a huge house, etc. They don't realize as Monte says, all this STUFF is killing us! And "the natives" whereever you are, are taught that their own stuff, their own handicrafts, house-building techniques, etc are inferior, what's really good is some pressure-treated lumber and corrugated tin shipped in thousands of miles, that you have to go into debt for life for....

[Madpaddy]

Good post plants,

Does anyone actually think it is really by design that to get by now the same way your parents did both parents in a family must be working. It's such a new phenomenon where I live. Everyone has nicer cars and houses than their parents but no time to enjoy them or proper family life. I grew up in a village where the main road passed by my house. We used to play football on the road, walk to school and wander freely between each others houses.

Now it is dangerous to even cross the road (when I go home which is not often), nobody knows their neighbours and the kids aren't allowed out to play football unsupervised for fear they are kidnapped and killed.

[I_Like_Plants]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Madpaddy', '
')Now it is dangerous to even cross the road (when I go home which is not often), nobody knows their neighbours and the kids aren't allowed out to play football unsupervised for fear they are kidnapped and killed.