Joe Bageant, author of “Deer Hunting With Jesus” and newly released “Rainbow Pie” and pundit extraordinaire, died Saturday March 26 after a four month bout with cancer. I feel like my voice is gone.

All my life I’ve been an idealist, quick to spot the wrongs in our world and strive to set them right. In the 60’s the most blatant sin was the Vietnam War. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the throng of protesters, hoping our collective voices would put an end to the carnage.

Thirty years later, the spread of easily shared information via the world wide web including endless venues for online protest, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the many wrongs in our world today. There isn’t just one cause, there are dozens. Which one will I pick this week and how much difference will it make when we are all are railing about separate issues?

I once asked my idealistic cousin Tommy who is ten years older than I, “Where in the world do we (idealists) go to fit in?” His answer: “There is no place in the world for idealists.”

My father was an idealist. He lost his shot at tenure at Monmouth College in 1969 when he helped stage a protest in which his students pelted a General onstage with marshmallows. He was asked to turn in his resignation and soon found that no other college in either New Jersey or New York would hire him after what he’d done.

Dad ultimately moved my mother and us six kids to a place he described as the “Armpit of the Universe” and even though I suffered at the hands of my new school mates who didn’t understand my clothes and accent, I was beamingly proud of what he’d done.

My husband, Bob has always followed his heart on political matters, quitting a lucrative job after being admonished by his superior for joining a protest rally. He was working at Tecnetics, a company that made power supplies for cruise missiles, and had gotten his picture in the newspaper marching in protest of Gulf War I.

Bob is now an educator who isn’t afraid to bring the truth to light for his students and show them where to go to express their indignation. It’s been said that you marry either your mother or your father and I see that I married a man who isn’t afraid to stand up for his ideals.

Of late, social networking has brought to light a bizillion causes, all clamoring for my involvement. Pretty much everything is either corrupt or broken; from GMO’s to War, to Wall Street, to our justice system, to Corporate Rights, to Election Reform, to Food Bills, to Education and Health Care.

So many causes, so little time to protest. Confused and dis-empowered I look back on the Viet Nam protests with nostalgia.  I find myself missing the focus of that movement, mourning our collective lack of focus and pissed off that things have gotten much worse. That’s where pundits like Bageant stepped in and gave voice to my outrage.

Bob and I have read the copy of “Deer Hunting With Jesus” that lives at our local library and our copy of “Rainbow Pie” is on order. Meanwhile, I’ll be mining Bageant’s many splendid essays for great quotes like these.

Liberal activism is sort of like sending a rabbit to sell wolves on the benefits of veganism.

The slaves are free to elect their masters, and that is enough to satisfy most folks in the land of the free. That, along with 100-plus cable channels to keep us entertained inside the cage. We know we are powerless, but better the devil you know than evil socialism, where you are not allowed to take out a second mortgage on your cage.

Workers in industrialized nations are so busy begging for jobs and wages enough to keep them in meaningless commodities and gadgets (which only shift more money to corporations) they cannot see the forest for the trees.

In the corporately managed theater state, it’s not whether a thing is true that matters, but how it sounds and looks and what you call it. Call end of life counseling a “death panel,” and you’ve just turned mercy and choice into one more Great Satan.

Lies for the sake of generating emotion enough to destroy reason have been a mainstay of American politics from the beginning.

So why did American liberals believe Obama would bring home the healthcare bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It’s a big neighborhood, a very special place where “Your vote is important,” and “by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation.

Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life is monitored by an employer, a credit rating bureau or the media’s projection of the world, and mediated by the financialization of life’s every aspect.

A potato is just a potato until people sweating over belt lines and giant fryers turn it into Tater Tots.

Just as we started ballyhooing the triumph of America Consumer Capitalism over Communism, the world’s ecology started backing up like a redneck septic tank.Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don’t let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshiping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.

Unfortunately, Americans get laughed off the map for being overly human these days, dubbed emotional pussies, part of the Kumbaya crowd, unrealistic utopians — and if you are sincerely human enough, get your ass kicked by the system.

“Guantánamo” was the name I chose for the 250 square foot garden I created in front of our house at Oilseed Community where we spent the first two years after moving to North Carolina in 2007. There were three underlying reasons for the choice.

The first was due to my profound disappointment in my country’s choice to incarcerate and torture human beings without due process of law. I understood that some of the inmates at the prison in Cuba were criminals, but that does not demand a rescinding of legal and human rights – concepts previously supported by the United States of America.

The second reason was  due to the name my friend Lyle chose for his garden some years back. Lyle’s garden is named “Cuba”, a name chosen by the inspiration he gained by learning about how the island nation of Cuba responded to the abrupt ending of their petroleum addiction after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba reacted to the loss of its Soviet supply line by instituting land reform, and encouraging farmers and agronomists to retool Cuban agricultural production to methods that did not require petroleum inputs, for fuel, fertilizers, or pesticides. This amazing story can be learned though a documentary produced by The Community Solution  entitled “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”

In North Carolina, if you want to take more food off your garden than the deer do, you need to fence your garden in, giving it the look of a place more suited toward the incarceration of edibles than the nurturing of them. Lyle’s garden, surrounded by it’s eight-foot high fence, provided him and his family a space to produce their own food, without the need for fossil fuel inputs. My first exposure to gardens with tall fences was at Lyles’ when he provided Camille and me a room for a couple of nights on an exploratory visit we made to the area in April 2007. Needless to say, I was captivated by the concept.

The third reason for my name selection was due to the influence of a master kumu hula, Hokulani Holt-Padilla, who I had the pleasure of working with back in 2000- 2001 while working with the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission. One of the many pieces of wisdom I gained from Hoku was that place names are important. She helped me understand that place names are part of what defines the spirit of a place, and its people.

Guantánamo was the name originally bestowed upon the southeastern area of the island by its original human inhabitants, the Taino. Columbus landed at the bay in 1494, promptly changed the name to Puerto Grande, and started the systematic decimation of the indigenous population.

When I told one of my Oilseed neighbors that I was considering naming  the garden Guantánamo, their response was “Oh, don’t say that word!” For them, you see, that word represented the unjust incarceration and torture of human beings, and was something not very pleasant.

So there you have it. My little fortified garden was, from that point forward, known as Guantánamo. I wanted people (at least a few) to associate the name with a place of life, beauty, and sustenance rather than a collection of incarcerated and tortured humans. I was hopeful that our new president would stand by his campaign promise to close down the “detention camp” at Guantánamo Bay in his first few months in office. Since he didn’t, I did, with Lyle’s help. We moved the containers, with food growing in them to their new home next to my new garden, christened “The Sunken Gardens of Moncure”, since it is housed in an abandoned swimming pool.

That story will need to be told, in its own space in its own time, and will likely be titled “A Moveable Feast.”

Priorities. Our government has them, but they don’t resonate with many of our personal values. One good example is a bloated military budget (an amazing $515.4 Billion or 16.5% of our budget earmarked for 2009) when one out of every three Americans is left without adequate health care.

Another good example is the government’s obsession with terrorism. While the fat cats on Wall Street are robbing us blind, the FBI is kept busy wiretapping our phones and reading our emails.

F.B.I. Struggles to Handle Wave of Financial Fraud Cases

Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.
>snip<

Some critics question whether the shift indicates not just a lack of resources, but a lack of interest by the Bush administration.

Check out this story from US News: The Biggest Bailout

The Federal Reserve extended an $85 billion loan to American International Group to be paid back as AIG sells off some business in the biggest government takeover so far in the ongoing credit crisis.
And don’t miss her now legendary “Let’s Play Wallstreet Bail-Out” speech, given September 22, 2008 on the floor of the House of Representatives says it all. Click on More for the complete transcript.

Ms Katur has since gone on to initiate legislation to actually fix the United States’ financial system as opposed to just putting a pricy bandaid on it. See: October 1, 2008: Kaptur and DeFazio Propose the No BAILOUTS Act

“We want a good bill, not a fast bill. We want a bill that will really work,” said Kaptur, the senior-most woman in the House.

Bill O’Reilly comes to mind. He’s perfect, and I’m not the first person to say this. O’Reilly has a loyal following, many of whom would love to see him run for president. Bill Moyers called O’Reilly a “pugilist” which fits him to a tee. Yep, Bill O’Reilly fits the profile. And Sarah Palin – she totally fits the model with her tough, fast talking, god blessing style.

But seriously, I truly believe that the whole political fracas that’s got everyone glued to their TV News/Email Spam/Op-Ed Columns is really just a glitzy circus designed to distract us from the real issues at hand, namely the rise of the facist state, the gutting of the constitution and the plight of the working class. I truly believe that any candidate that makes it to the top has been bought and put in place by the money that runs our world. As Ralph Nader puts it:

The expense of political campaigns creates a clear advantage for the highest spender. Money dominates the dissemination of campaign messages, mainly waged on television in the form of sound bites. This economic stranglehold of campaigns makes politics a game for only the rich or the richly funded. This silences alternative viewpoints and turns off many voters who do not feel represented by privileged candidates.

Count me among those voters who don’t feel represented by either party.

So yeah, the Republicans look different from the Democrats in the same way Mr. Nasty looks different from Mr. Nice on the All Star Wrestling mat. The Republicans play the role of the big, bad bully while the Democrats get to be nice little pansies. Meanwhile, the politicians who speak to my heart are droned out by the roar of the crowd. Bread and circuses, bread and circuses!

For six years we have been driving and walking on the industrialized soil of the greatest country in the world. For six years we felt as if we had a small pebble in our shoe. Or perhaps they didn’t fit right.

We tried to ignore it. We tried to blame it on our feet. In the end, we decided to take off our shoes and walk away.

It breaks my heart to believe that roughly half the people I encounter each day believe that might makes right, that outright carnage will somehow lead to peace, and that the United States, after little more than 200 years experience has somehow achieved enough wisdom to rule the world.

There seem to be two kinds of people in America at this time; those who feel the ends justify the means and the idealists. Those who are pleased to see strength and resolve, and those who are horrified. Count me on the side of the idealists.

I am mystified by the motives of those who support such a brutal regime. I find myself obsessed with the need to understand. “What can they be thinking?” I keep asking myself.

My guess is that they are thinking we have a great life here – let’s keep it that way. That this is the greatest country in the world. That god loves us or he wouldn’t have given us all this wonderful stuff. That the TV wouldn’t lie, and that supporting the president makes us good patriots. America, love it or leave it.

My guess is that they really don’t want to think bad thoughts or make waves. That the easiest thing is to go along and believe the best of our leaders. How can liberating Iraq be a bad thing? What about those poor women there? Aren’t they better off now? Won’t they all be voting for democracy soon? Certainly, Mr. Bush has the best interests of everyone in mind.

My guess is they are thinking that we have no choice. That our national security depends on making a strong statement. That those 100,000 dead civilians are an unfortunate accident, or that many of those deaths are not our fault, or even, that the newspapers made this number up.

And that if we don’t get them, they are surely going to get us. God Bless America.

What is up with that, indeed! Is this the new alternative to “Have a nice day!” or did Safeway tell their cashiers to start saying this so we could feel safe because we bought our stuff at Safe way?

Now, I know what you must be thinking. You must be thinking, “Hello! I thought these two only shopped at the Pukalani Superette and Ah Fooks! What are they doing dropping dollars at one of the big food chains?”

Regardless of whether this is a national trend or merely the trendy marketing ploy of a national corporation, it does raise the third question, which is, “What is that supposed to mean?”

Does it mean I need to buy a newspaper on the way out and look up the color of today’s terror alert? Does it mean that we missed another whole terrible episode on network television? What are the chances, really, that a person with a ski mask and a silencer will catch up with us before we make it home? Or, that a wayward SUV will cream our little car before we get where we are going?

Our excuse, by the way, for being in the Safe Way to begin with was that we had gone to the liquor store for Kahlua and they were out. We have become dependant upon Kahlua ever since a friend of ours suggested we try squirting some into our after-work shot of frozen tequila. He called this a Brave Bull and it has proven to be exceedingly good.

In fact, we went online to research some other interesting Shooters and found a myriad of fun designs. Two that caught my eye were the Chocolate Monk (Kahlua, Bailey’s and Frangelico) and the Duck Fart (Kahlua, Bailey’s and Crown Royal).

We know this one thing for certain and that is Money and Liquor are right there at the base of All Evil. Add a driver’s license, some prescription drugs (one out of three Americans) and an average IQ of 100 and you are looking down a dark barrel indeed! When you take all that into consideration, it isn’t surprising that there are nearly 45,000 vehicular deaths a year in the US.

And in that respect, the words of the Safeway clerk become crystal clear. What she was probably saying was (after looking at the four bottles of on sale Kahlua we had just purchased) “Watch out.”