Joe Bageant thinks out loud "from the Cheap Beer Zone"

This guy does some provoking. I find him a welcome antidote to much that tends to float out from the mainstream media:

Extracts from Contemplations from the Cheap Beer Zone
By Joe Bageant

You could say my friend Virgil Jenkins is an erudite and insightful student of American culture. You could say he has honed his understanding of America through decades of serious reading and contemplation. But it would be a damned lie. Mostly, Virgil does just what I do, drink and talk and watch television. Still, the dirt-eating truth of the situation is this: He's got more common sense and insight than 99 percent of the people who run this country. We seem to have gotten different results from the same regimen.

A few more quotes to get you warmed up:

. . . liberal TV watchers see Jon Stewart of The Daily Show as being political or about politics in some way. Of course it is about entertainment. Period. It's a comedic entertainment, created for profit by a global corporation and designed to fit the tastes and self-images of people who identify themselves as politically progressive. Stewart is a hip identity symbol for white middle class liberals. Which comes down to being, as Virgil terms it, "a smartass." Yet Stewart is a fundamental political input for millions, even though his show has about as much to do with an informative, actionable reality as Sponge Bob or ABC News . . .

We listen to and read movie criticism, then talk about movies as if they were important or necessary. They change nothing, be they Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, a major bullshit media ruckus to stir the money pot, or Al Gore's Inconvenient Truths, which will win a pile of the industry's self-congratulating awards, then melt like candy cotton in American consciousness by next year. And this is a movie delivering the most important piece of information on the planet, albeit more watered down than a 50-cent shot in a skid row bar.

. . . when it comes to halting the American suckdown of the planet's paltry remaining resources, only global revolution or an environmental collapse can get American faces out of the Cheetos bag, much less rock the ExxonMobil Wal-Mart Starbucks Microsoft Citigroup McDonald's Time Inc. Monsanto bastards out of the saddle they own and occupy regardless of who is in the White House.

We have all assembled our identities from the prepackaged and highly processed consumer media spectacle that now constitutes the American experience, mixed and matched personality ensembles from synthetic experiences and products, all of it purchased at the same globally franchised company store, all of it within the context of our own particular tribe of consumer cultism and commodity fetishes.

OK, that's enough for you to decide if you want to read the other 80%.

More from Joe:

• Where young US liberals get their news
• Television has no effect?
• Joe's blog