Bageant, Ivins sorely missed in bringing us the truth

I miss Joe Bageant.

Along with Molly Ivins, he was one of the great voices saying with it was more honorable to be liberal than to be conservative, and why to keep America healthy we needed to keep the rich from looting the entire federal treasury.

Most everybody knows who Ivins was. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for various newspapers and magazines in Texas. She was the one who tagged George W. Bush with the nickname "Shrub" to show his lack of stature next to his father.

We lost her to cancer in 2007, and no one has come close to replacing her.

Joe Bageant was much less well-known for much of his life, although he exploded on the scene in 2007 with his book "Deer Hunting With Jesus," an amazing explanation of why Democrats no longer win the votes of the white working class.


A second book, "Rainbow Pie," was published primarily in Australia, and he wrote dozens of pieces that were published on the Internet. He was a Scots-Irish Virginian from Winchester, a self-styled "socialist redneck," and he too died of cancer in 2011.

Bageant aimed at bigger targets than Ivins, which probably made him less effective, a broken-down knight  aiming at some hellishly large windmills. If that made him less of an optimist, so be it.

One of the pieces he wrote for the Web in 2005 was about the increasing distance between left and right in America as illustrated by the success of the "Left Behind" series of books.

In fact, he used the books as one of the primary reasons we have reached a point where there may never be a reconciliation between the two sides. It used to be that the two parties worked well together and managed to compromise to get things done.

Democrats were more the party of labor and Republicans of management, but with the postwar prosperity of the '40s and '50s, the pie was big enough to share.

But things started changing in the '60s, when the issues became about so much more than money. Civil rights, Vietnam, Women's Liberation, abortion rights, gay rights. Add to that the explosion of evangelical, fundamentalist religion and all of a sudden, the two parties weren't just adversaries. They were rapidly becoming enemies.

Especially with the two hottest of the buttons -- abortion rights and gay rights. To the most radical opponents of abortion, it was a life and death issue and they were willing to kill abortion providers to stop them. As for gays and lesbians, what they were doing was an abomination against God's law to the fundies.

To women seeking liberation, it was as if they were being forced into the traditional role stated so well by the Germans -- children, kitchen and church.

As for gays and lesbians, they had to stop looking for love in all the wrong places, such as they were.

So what you had was each side playing Horatius at the bridge, willing to do whatever it took to keep the other side from crossing over. No compromise was really possible.

And as Bageant wrote in 2005, not only did something like 60 percent of conservative Christians believe in End Times theology, two-thirds of those -- 40 percent of conservative Christians -- believe the End Times would come during their lifetime.

It's like President Reagan's beleaguered Interior Secretary, James Watt, said in the 1980s. We don't have to take care of the environment because Jesus will return in our lifetime and fix everything.

Watt is still alive. He'll be 80 in January.

Truly, only the good die young.