Joe Bageant was my brother. Not in a literal sense, of course: we came from different countries, although with similar rural backgrounds, he from Virginia, I from Lincolnshire in England.
Nor do I have any need for a surrogate brother, having five real ones, including a twin. Joe was my intellectual brother: we cared about the same things, shared the same, socialist, dreams and loved to articulate the thoughts that most men keep to themselves. The rhetoric did, occasionally, drift into the fanciful, such as the time he confided his plans for the future to my wife Jools and I over a well-liquored dinner at his home in Winchester, Virginia. At the time Joe was splitting his life between there and Belize, but the latter haven was becoming too small for him. “I’m off to India,” he said, “to talk to the wise and holy men in the mountains and on the plains. And, in a few years, when I die, I’m going to be cremated in a blazing barge on the Ganges.” Me? I’d be happy for my remains to be packed in a refuse bag and dumped on a wooded slope back home in England, I replied.
Joe was immensely conscious of his mortality. Had been since the day we first communicated seven years ago this month, when ColdType published "Covert Kingdom", one of his first essays. “I have to do this stuff now,” he told me during the first of what became regular hours-long Skype conversations, “because I won’t be alive in two years.” A lifetime of smoking, boozing and ingesting exotic substances had left their marks on his lungs and the daily trip to his magazine job in Washington, DC was compounding his woes.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2011/04/my-brother-joe.html
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