Joe Bageant "Brings It" one more time: "Karaoke Night in Bush's America"

[dumpster_baby]

And, now, courtesy of http://www.counterpunch.org , I bring you the Ayatollah of Rock-n-Roll-ah...Joe Bageant!


September 9, 2004

Bageant takes "Another Visit to Burt's Tavern":


Selected Excerpts:

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73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!

---Men's room wall, Burt's Westside Tavern

I know it makes me a dinosaur, but I still think there is much to be learned in America's small neighborhood taverns. I call it my "learning through drinking" program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt's Westside Tavern: 1--- Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had 2---Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.

Learning through drinking was never dull. But when karaoke came to American bars it got even more entertaining, especially at Burt's where some participants get gussied up for their three weekly minutes of stardom. One of them is Dink, a stubble-faced 56-year-old guy presently dressed like Waylon Jennings. However, Dink's undying claim to fame in here in Winchester is not his Waylon imitation, which sucks. It is that he beat up the boxing chimpanzee at the carnival in 1963. This is a damned hard thing to do because chimpanzees are several times stronger than a human and capable of enough rage that the pugilistic primate wore a steel muzzle. Every good old boy in this place swears Dink pounded that chimpanzee so hard it climbed up the cage bars and refused to come back down and that Dink won the hundred dollars. I don't know. I wasn't there to see it because my good Christian family did not approve of attending such spectacles. One thing for sure, though. Dink is tough enough to have done it. (By the way, a note to readers who email me asking if names like Dink and Pootie are fictional devices. Hell no! Not only do we have a Dink and a Pootie here, we also have folks named Gator, Fido and Tumbug---who we simply call Bug.)

....

Although my people seem to step on their own dicks (I couldn't think of a female metaphor) every time they get near polling place, it is not entirely because we are drunken inbreds, although it is a contributing factor. The truth is that Dottie would vote for any candidate, black, white, crippled blind or crazy, that she thought would actually help her. I know because I have asked her if she would vote for a president who wanted a nationalized health care program?" "Vote for him? I'd go down on him!" Voter approval doesn't get much stronger than that.

....

But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to offer nationalized health care, not the genuine article. Of course we expect the Republicans to be pricks, but the Democrats are no better. Guys like John Kerry think they can stay in Washington and BUY progress with the money they take from health care industry lobbyists buying off both parties with campaign contributions. John Kerry does not know anybody in Dottie's class. John Edwards claims to, but he's not very convincing to these people. As Dink puts it, "Neither one of 'em gets me hard." If Dot is lucky, a Democratic pollster might call her, take her political temperature over the phone to be fed into some computer. But that is about as much contact as our system is willing to have with a 300 pound diabetic woman with a small bird and a husband too depressed to get out of his TV chair other than to piss or stumble off to his car washing job.

....

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more here:

WWW http://www.counterpunch.org

[dumpster_baby]

1. kick

[hatrack]

2. Damn - whatever you do tonight, read this!

Why haven't I ever heard of this guy before?

[dumpster_baby]

3. well, he is catching on pretty fast

I have not read anyone this good since I was into reading novels. This guy is one part Pat Conroy, one part Norman Mailer, one part Henry Miller, and one part Radical Leftist.

If you have a good comment, email him and he will respond.

THere is a lot of his stuff on the web. He puslishes regularly on the web. And he has several fervent fans here on DU who always post his new stuff. He comes out with new stuff several times a month. He REALLY wants to beat Bush, but he aint all that keen on the Dems.

I think he might have a book coming out soon.

[dumpster_baby]

4. some DUers probably don't like him because he is pretty hard on the Dems

The truth hurts!

And if the Dems want to return to full power, get all three branches back, and get something done, they need to start listening to guys like Bageant and Thomas Frank. They are both saying the same thing to the Dems: quit playing footsie with the elite dilettantes on the East and West, and instead get back to who brung them to the dance: the rural white lower class and lower middle class. Build a coalition with this groups, plus labor and the Hispanics and Blacks and the hard core liberal activists, and the Dems could literally run the GOP out of town.

THey would lose a lot of the urban white middle and upper middle class and upper class, but who cares? THe numbers would be there. And that is what the frigging Dems were supposed to be about, ANYWAY!

Once the dems get the house, the prez, and the Senate, and appoint a lot of judges, tHen the Dems could legalize a lot of Hispanics, bring in more, and cement a electoral majority. The USA needs a lot of reforms. A lot. The GOP is just gonna rape this country.

[hatrack]

6. After reading about the 9/11 resolution today, the Dems deserve it

It's over in GD/Campaign.

Apparently some resolution commemorating 9/11 came up in Congress today, and it pretty explictly linked Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and the attacks. Exactly 14 (I think that's the correct number) of Dems had the guts to vote against it. Everyone else just shuffled along like good little sheep.

[dumpster_baby]

5. here is an updated link for the Bageant article above

The one up on top no longer works. THis is the new one:
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant09092004.html

[eridani]

7. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, is going to offer ---

--nationalized health care. Wrong. Kucinich did, and also stood against oursourcing. "We are already paying for universal health care--we just aren't getting it!"

Actually, I can think of one politician who stands up for people like Dot and programs like nationalized health care. But he is busy right now being president of Venezuela. Show me a political party willing to put the people on the streets door to door, which is what it will take to mobilize the votes of the working poor, and I will show you one that can begin to kick a hole in that wall between Capitol Hill and the people it is supposed to be serving.

The people that Dean and Kucinich (and to some extent Clark) brought into the party are in fact trying to do that door to door thing.