He is one of those “deathless souls” E.M. Forster described: “sensitive, considerate and plucky.” It’s that play of forces–yes, senstivity and consideration are forces–that makes his writing irresitable.

There’s invariably a sad wisdom in his work, so this modern classic on the “audacity of depression” is in tune with much that I’ve read by him (including other modern classics–sufficient to make other writers St. Paddy’s beer-green with envy). Sensitivity, consideration and pluckiness would make for a good drinking or smoking companion, but Bageant also offers the sine qua non of important writers/artists: an ability to place his thumb squarely on the Zeitgeist’s wrist and take its pulse. And then he looks us in the eye and tells us things are grim. As in Grim-Reaper grim. As in never-getting-better-in-your-lifetime grim. As in, forget the false hopes, the “Change” mantra. We’re living in a technological matrix-nightmare that has produced two world wars, and now an endless “War on Terror.” Slavery isn’t dead in the world, it has just taken a different form. Most of us are numb and dumb.

There isn’t hope–but there is endurance. Periwinkles grow above the graves of African slaves. There is the courage to endure and struggle for those Forsterian virtues.

Let’s fess up to the depression, but not bury ourselves in it. That’s Bageant’s message. In a time of collapse and darkness, there’s still Galileo and Copernicus. Euripides rejects Socratic hemlock, escapes cascading-downward Athens, and lives to write again. What to do as the Great Collapse begins (now) and during it? Communes in the hills? Expatriate like Berman, Bageant and many aware and independent spirits before them?

As a side-light: I lived in Japan for 5 years and my wife is Japanese. I can personally attest to the absurditites of that modern, hyper, materialist, technological society. I can also attest to some perdurable qualities that have survived the atomic holocausts and the onslaught of Western culture since the Meiji era and, especially, since World War II. Today, the Japanese struggle to keep their ancient culture alive. It is shredded, but elements of it persist. They struggle to learn and re-learn, even as we struggle to capture grains of truth from our long history.

As we sensitive, plucky global people struggle with the hydra-headed complexities of modern life, as we try to think, feel and intuit our way through the mazes, we hold fast to the yarn of the brave ones who have preceded us, and to yarn-makers like Bageant who keep lighting matches.

http://stonefruit.blogspot.com/2008/04/trouble.html

I’m starting to see more and more of these 100th monkey-type moments lately. It’s about the only thing that gives me a shred of hope.

I am old not ancient just old and that wine and cigarette in Mexico sounds good but would not work out well for me. There is still time and there must be away. How do you get a few million people to start in front of the Capital? There must be away.

How did you know Fred’s roof is the greatest sitting (and drinking) spot in Ajijic, Mexico?

joe bageant

“Eventually the system will reach a point… where the social cue is ‘integration’–where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society.” Theodor Adorno
For nearly two thousand years Japan created a society whose political organizations, culture, arts, and specially language perfected Adorno’s
concept—-until the invasion of America by Admiral Perry in the mid nioneteenth century. Japan’s trauma and assimilation of Western technology over the past one hundred and fifty years or so is in the greater sense of its history an adjustment and reformation of its previous, central identity: a highly refined, stratified and merciless totalerian society.

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I like this. Keep it up.