JOE BAGEANT- "No Free Tortillas in the Workhouse Republic: The Iron Cheer of Empire"

No Free Tortillas in the Workhouse Republic
The Iron Cheer of Empire

By JOE BAGEANT

Ajijic, Mexico

...

Tourists seldom venture over to this working class neighborhood on Calle Zaragoza, and the neighborhood merchants' customers are their neighbors. Their goods are the common fare of daily family life in Mexico. Today, at a table less than two blocks away, I purchased a dozen brown eggs, with the idea of making huevos rancheros. The purchase took three quarters of an hour, and included stumbling but cheerful half English/half Spanish conversations with the six vendors between my casita and the table of Gabriel, the old egg and cheese vendor with an artificial leg and wizened smile who assures me that rooster fertilized eggs make a man go all night. "I am too old to care about that," I half say, mostly in that gesturing rudimentary sign language understood everywhere.

...

These vendors are not poor people or peasants. They own homes, drive cars, watch cable television, send their children to college and do most of the things North Americans do. But their jobs are their livelihoods, not their lives, and every transaction is permeated with the ebb and flow of daily neighborhood and family life. "Is Maria going to graduate after all? Si! But by just by the hair in her nose! Who is going to sell fireworks for the Feast of Saint Andrew?" (Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Ajijic.)

Behind the plastered brick walls along the street mechanics fix cars, dentists pull teeth and teachers cheer preschoolers on in a chirping Spanish rendition of Eensy Weensy Spider. The entire street is busily, but not hectically, engaged in making a living, with most of the people doing so within 50 feet of where they will sleep tonight. But before they sleep they will sit out on the street, or perhaps the tiny neighborhood plaza, gossiping with the same folks who've been their customers all day. The same families into which their children will marry and whose sick elders they will burn candles for in the ancient stone church, founded as a Spanish colonial mission to civilize the Huichol Indians, who've since retreated up into the mountains to honor their "god of the opening clouds" in peyote rituals.

...

It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything.

...

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/10/the-iron-cheer-of-empire.html

From this vantage point it sounds like a fantasy land despite knowing that there really are places in the world where people can and do live like that.

Thanks for posting:toast:

though clearly far more agrarian. I belong to the Grange with all its corny rituals and funny mixture of old and young. The other night I went to a church supper where the conversations were about our children and who needs help this winter with such things as shoveling snow. The OP is a nice essay but community is to a large degree, what we MAKE it.

Thanks

is exactly what we are. And we'll get the bare minimum to sustain us from our owners and we better like it. The few lucky enough to be in a situation that is more conducive to community will do their job for the owners by pointing fingers at the workers for their plight, completing the circle by letting the owners off blame free.

I don't know which is worse the abusive owners or their toadies that haul water for them in exchange for a bit more freedom.

"But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness."

I love Joe Beagent. I just read Deer Hunting with Jesus... a great read...

Now Let's Roll.. Let's go kick some Muslim ass..

... which consists of working, consuming and 'appearing to be,' but never purely being."

just a small observation...i'm fascinated by the longevity of 70s-era rock -- that it has endured so long suggests that it says something that modern (pop, mainstream) rock doesn't. could it be that modern (pop, mainstream) rock doesn't exist anymore b/c real rock necessarily communicates these "fuck you" sentiments about mainstream culture, that the corporate machine of music-making can't/won't endorse?

it's fascinating to me b/c 70s rock hasn't gone away, and i don't think it ever will. we'll always hear it blaring from motorcycles and beach bars and lakeside marinas -- where people are going on vacation to get away from their fucked-up "careers."

I was watching some of the footage of woodstock recently and one thing hit me. No advertising. No obnoxious billboards, no banners on every inch of temporary fence, no huge ads framing the stage, the field wasn't renamed after one or two corporations, people weren't walking around with piles of cheap plastic woodstock souvenirs.

I was too young for woodstock but luckily I got out of high school before the advent of designer jeans and labeled clothing. Awful.

I don't think people realized just how bombarded they are by advertising just about everywhere the eye tries to rest.

Music is corporate these days. Generic. The money is not there to nurture an artist for years like the labels used to. The value of the music was as much in the process and development of the artist as in the final product. Now it's just the product, the process is too costly to the bottom line to spend time on.
Of course there are exceptions but they are not and can not be part of the corporate assembly line of performers.

while corporate was taking over rock there was an impressive emergence of the indie scene. it's harder now, but there's still a decent underground thing going on. and that's just it -- real life, like real music is being pushed underground.

The top 400 people are worth more than the bottom 50-percent of the population combined?

PDF Version: http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/Wealth_in_America.pdf

Going by how the War Party runs the show, the greedhead slavemasters of the South really won the Civil War.