Author WARNS of pageantry's perils -
Chris Hedges, who wrote 'Empire of Illusion,' examines America's
identity crisis in an age of consumerism and spectacle.
By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Chris Hedges sees, in America, a nation that has lost its way. He sees
a country that places prosperity above principle, celebrity above
substance, spectacle above nuance and introspection. He sees a "timid,
cowed, confused" populace disconnected from language, governed by
consumerism, ambivalent toward the common good, enamored by an
American myth that has no basis in the American reality.
"We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the
linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate
illlusion from reality," Hedges writes in his new book, "Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." "We have
traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is
designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with
a sixth-grade reading level.
"Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this
level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of
Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of
no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys
— a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity."
Hedges paints a bleak picture in this book — all the more sobering
when one considers that this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has
spent decades covering violence and war around the globe, in Africa
and the Balkans, South America and the Middle East. He states,
plainly, that the age of American eminence is over. Our standard of
living is going to drop. Our consumptive tendencies are going to
change. Yet the biggest problem, as Hedges sees it, is American denial
— an eagerness to cling to the good-times, anything-we-want illusion,
"the the dark message of corporatism," at the expense of this perilous
end-of-empire reality.
For all his years in journalism, Hedges has never been hesitant to
step outside the lines and draw conclusions in a pointedly
"progressive" point of view. He lost his job at The New York Times, in
fact, for speaking out against the war in the months before the
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nationalism and myth were at the
heart of his breakout book, "War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning,"
which was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle award for
non-fiction in 2002.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges attended divinity school
before embarking on a career in journalism. An avowed socialist, he
claims to have voted for Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic
presidential primary of 2008 and Independent candidate Ralph Nader in
the election. He does not associate the word "hope" with the word
"Obama." He does not own a television. As a gesture of protest, he
once wrote he would not pay federal income taxes in the event of a
U.S. invasion of Iran.
Last month, three days after the Fort Hood tragedy, Hedges spoke at
St. Andrews Presbyterian church in a program moderated by University
of Texas journalism professor and peace activist Robert Jensen. Fort
Hood didn't come up in the conversation, or the question-and-answer
session that followed. But these topics, from "Empire of Illusion,"
did:
American Illusion
"You strive toward a dream; you live within an illusion. And societies
that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality die. If you look
at the twilight periods of all great empires – Roman, Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian — there is, in those final moments, not only a deep
moral degeneration but an inability to distinguish what is real from
fantasy."
"During the election between McCain and Obama, we were waging two
wars, pre-emptive wars that under post Nurmberg laws are defined as
criminal wars of aggression. We were running offshore penal colonies
where we openly tortured individuals stripped of all rights. We had
suspended habeas corpus. We had engaged in warrant-less wiretapping
and eavesdropping on tens of millions of Americans . ... And yet we
spoke of ourselves as the greatest democracy on Earth – and that as
the embodiment of the highest values, we had a right to deliver it to
others by force."
American Values
"We talk about (the importance of) American culture. (But in truth):
American culture was destroyed after World War I, with the rise of
Madison Avenue and the implanting of mass corporate culture which
sought to instill new values into the American consciousness. Instead
of the values of thrift, communitarianism, modesty (and)
self-sacrifice, we developed, courtesy of the advertising industry,
this cult of self — this deep narcissism and hedonism that
disconnected us from others and gave us mass corporate culture.
"So it's not American culture that we embrace for the moment. It's not
American culture we export. It's corporate culture. And I think that
altered situations will force us back into a moral system that defies
the dark ethic of corporatism. And hopefully reconnects us to those
values within our past that I think were brought us closer to
fostering the building of common good.
'Vocational America'
"Education in the United States has become vocational. ... Many of the
state universities, community colleges and online for-profit
universities — that are growing faster than any other university
sentiment — have no use for the Humanities, literature, history,
philosophy, classics, art. Why? Because the Humanities ask the kind of
broad questions of meaning that those systems that prize above all
else vocational workers do not want to ask.
"The problem with our vocational system is that it measures and
rewards a very narrow kind of intelligence, a kind of analytical
intelligence to create legions of systems managers — people who have a
drone-like ability to work for very long hours, and (have) a kind of
penchant or capacity for manipulation, but don't know how to question
assumptions or structures."
'The Liberal Church'
"I come out of a liberal church. The liberal church has failed us, and
they've failed us on two levels. (First), they have defined
spirituality as 'How is it with me,' which is a form of narcissism.
Martin Luther King preached a great sermon called, 'Jesus didn't come
to bring us peace of mind.' And secondly, they have failed us because
they did not stand up to the Christian right. The Christian right is a
mass movement, I think the most dangerous mass movement in American
history — and they are Christian heretics.
"They have acculturated the Christian Gospel with the worst aspects of
American imperialism and American Capitalism. Jesus did not come to
give us a Cadillac and to make us rich and to bless arm fragmentation
bombs being dropped all over the Middle East. It was an utter
perversion of the message of the Gospel. And because the liberal
church lacked the fortitude and the spine to renounce this movement —
leaving it to repugnant figures like Christopher Hitchens or Sam
Harris ... at a time when the culture so desperately needs a moral
voice, the church sadly to me has become in many ways morally
irrelevant.
Capitalism
"Capitalism is probably ingrained in human nature. But there are
different kinds of capitalism. The kind of penny capitalism that I saw
at the farmer's market in the town I grew up in is not a dangerous
form of capitalism ... but corporate capitalism is something else.
Corporate Capitalism is cannibalizing the nation.
"Karl Polanyi in 1944 wrote a brilliant work called 'The Great
Transformation' in which he talked about the inevitable
totalitarianism and wars and breakdown that was caused by a system
that permitted unregulated capitalists to flourish. When everything
becomes a commodity, including human labor, when the natural world
becomes a commodity that is valued only by its capacity to generate
profit, then you commit collective suicide, because you exhaust human
beings and human resources, you deplete them, until they die. And
that's precisely what's happening. Look at the oil and natural gas
industry, the coal industry, our permanent war economy. ..."
Capitalism and Celebrity
"The ethic of celebrity culture ... is the ethic of unfettered
capitalism. What are the values promoted on reality television
programs like "Survivor"? A capacity for manipulation. Building false
friendships (with) those you betray. A destruction of real community
and solidarity. Basically: the traits of psychopaths. And what do you
get in return? Fleeting fame and money.
"Well, that is the ethic of Wall Street. That is what allowed the
titans of large corporations to fleece their shareholders, people who
had put month by month small sums aside for their retirement, for
their college, destroy these institutions like Lehman Brothers, and
then like Richard Fuld did, walk away with a severance package of $45
million. The ethic of celebrity culture is the ethic of Wall Street.
And the crisis that faces the country at its core is not so much an
economic crisis or a political crisis as it is a moral crisis.
The Bankruptcy of Liberalism
"I fear more the bankruptcy of liberalism than I do the fanaticism of
the right. ... I think the book for our times is probably
Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground," (1864) in which he writes
about a defeated dreamer, who becomes a cynic at a time when
liberalism is bankrupt and who descends into a state of moral nihilism
... which understood precisely where his country was going."
The Failure of Democrats
"Those of us who care about the working class in this country – and
much of my own family comes from the working class — should have
walked out on the Democratic party in 1994 when they passed NAFTA.
That thrust a knife in the back of the working class in this country –
followed by Clinton's so-called welfare reform, followed by a
Democratic party that quite consciously did the bidding of
corporations to receive (campaign) money. That was the intent. So by
the 1990s, the Democratic party had parity with the Republicans in
terms of corporate donations — and of course now they get more.
"The bankruptcy of American liberalism is that it continued to speak
against war, continued to speak on behalf of the working class,
continued to support constitutional rights, and yet backed the party
(the Democratic party) that betrayed all of these values. This wasn't
lost on the working class. The anger of the working class toward
liberals in this country is not misplaced, because liberals continue
with that type of hypocrisy. They continue to espouse values and yet
support political parties that tear down those values. And that's very
dangerous. . . .
"The progressive movements in this country rely on the working class
to propel our democracy forward. (But) our working class has been
decimated. It doesn't exist any more, because there are no jobs, no
meaningful jobs. And so that rage and frustration which you're already
seeing leaping up around the fringes of society — and of course
America is a very violent nation, that undercurrent of violence runs
very deep — is presaging, I fear, a backwash. But a right wing
backwash. And that is largely because the liberal class in this
country became gutless."
Health Care
"Any discussion of health care in this country should begin with the
factual acknowledgment that the for-profit health care industry is a
problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that's not only
responsible last year for the deaths of 20,000 Americans who could not
get proper health care, medical coverage. But it (is) legally allowed
(to) hold sick children hostage while parents bankrupt themselves to
try to save their sons and daughters. This is a system, in theological
terms, of death.
"Our for-profit health care system makes money off of death, the same
way our arms merchants make money off of death. And the inability
within our country to face this reality, the inability in a
corporatized media to even have this discussion is, I think, evidence
of the power of the corporate state, which drives debate, which
permits institutions that are morally bankrupt to have a seat at the
table. And that is symptomatic of a society in deep decay."
Violence
"When you push a populace to violence, you unleash a poison that
infects everyone. I don't believe in the term "A Just War." ... And
the longer we continue to speak to those in the Middle East through
the language of violence, the more we empower those who are only
capable of speaking back to us in the language of violence. When you
look at 9/11: huge explosions and death above the city skyline,
nihilistic violence as a message. Where did they learn that from? From
(Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara of '65, when he justified the
bombing of North Vietnam, which left hundred of thousands of
Vietnamese dead, (in the name of) delivering a message to Hanoi.
The perpetrators of 9/11 simply learned to speak the language we taught
them. ... You cannot promote a virtue through force. ... You cannot
implant democracy through force. Because once you use force, you speak
in a language in which the very concept of human rights is an
absurdity."
Faith
"I'm a Christian Agnostic — which means, and I think that's probably
biblically accurate, that I know nothing, and I believe I can know
nothing, about God.
"God is a human concept. God has been given by various theological
systems – our own and others – numerous attributes, some of which are
morally repugnant. But the reality of the transcendent is something
that artists and religious thinkers — who of course in early history
were fused into one — have struggled to document.
"Marcel Proust wrote that the real news of our lives never appears in
a newspaper. The most powerful forces of human life are non-rational –
not irrational, but non-rational: Grief, love, beauty, search for
meaning, struggle with our own mortality. You can't empirically
measure these forces. The Buddhists say you can memorize as many
sutras as you want, it will never make you wise. If you're not in
touch with these forces – and Paul Woodruff wrote a great book about
this, 'Reverence' – you're not a complete human being."
