THE KINGDOM OF SURVIVAL : Joe Bageant/Chomsky

Run time: 03:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYaqEgyrh1M   Posted on YouTube: July 26, 2010 By YouTube Member: SLOWBOATFILMS777 Views on YouTube: 686   Posted on DU: July 31, 2010 By DU Member: roxiejules Views on DU: 1237

 
Joe Bageant talking about poor whites - are you your brother's keeper?

Author of Deer Hunting with Jesus and soon to be released Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/07/bageant-chomsky-featured-in-film.html

Joe Bageant is featured in a documentary film now in production, titled "The Kingdom of Survival", scheduled for release in November. Others in the film are Noam Chomsky, Mark Mirabello, Ramsey Kanaan, Sasha Lilley, Mike Oehler, Bob Meisenbach, and Will "The Bull" Taylor.

Writer and filmmaker M. A. Littler describes his film as a search for visions that challenge the status quo. "This is an interdisciplanary documentary combining speculative travelogue and investigative journalism in order to trace possible links between survivalism, spirituality, art, radical politics, outlaw culture, alternative media and fringe philosophy," he said.

What planet of middle class have you been hanging around?

I never knew anybody from a worse background than my father. His mother was a Native american teenager and to this day we aren't sure who his father was. He was raised in a church home in Oklahoma and ran away to California when he was 16. In spite of all that he was able to finish high school, enlist in the Navy, get discharged, get married, have two kids, re-enlist in the Marines and serve in WWII, have another kid, get a college degree via the GI Bill, and have a successful middle class life as an independent businessman and later as a CPA. He died in 2003.

You might be uneducated but you don't have to be dumb.

On the other hand, the America my dad grew up in is a far cry from the America we're living in today. Joe's "people" have a lot in common with urban African Americans if they'd let themselves realize it. Only when they do, will either group make advances in their standards of living.

I think Bageant is correct when he says the middle class has been more involved in their own narcissistic consumerism than breaking class barriers and actually helping. As he once wrote, they 'have been forced to eat shit and ask for seconds'. The middle class is just now getting a taste of that.

Any difference of opinion on this site is often met with the response of "those-redneck-racist-Christian" blankety blanks or other vulgarities. I think it is counter productive to the liberal cause to continue to demean our brothers and sisters. We have more in common with them than you might think. Where is the compassion? The Republicans understand how to reach out to the poor whites, even if they are lying they still understand.

Many middle class started out poor and haven't forgotten that. To compare Liberals to be less understanding of poor than far right Republicans does not hold water-IMHO.

I think they TALK like they are.


"The political left once supported these workers, stood on the lines taking its beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now, comfortably ensconced in the middle class, the American left sees the same working whites as warmongering bigots, happy pawns of the empire. That is writing working folks off too cheaply, and it begs the question of how they came to be that way -- if they truly are. To cast them as a source of our deep national political problems is ridiculous. They are a symptom of the problems, and they may be making it worse because they are easily manipulated, or because they cannot tell an original idea from a beer fart. But they are not the root cause by any means. The left should take its cues from Malcolm X, who understood the need to educate and inform the entire African-American society before tackling the goal of unity. Same goes for white crackers. Nobody said it would be easy." - Joe Bageant

It is a two way street. The middle class urban liberals have reached out many times, only to get it slapped by people who would rather let Rush do their thinking so they can say "ditto". The library is just as open to poor people as it is to middle class people. But which subcultures have education as a value and which don't value education? Anyone who voted for Sen. 897th-in-his-class must think that the road to success is by connection and marrying well, not by learning.

I'm not sure one is happy to be "dumb". I think they are in survival mode.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

Those that can't learn and adapt will be replaced by those who can.

because liberals think of them as too "dumb".