October 30th, 2011 Filed under: Bankruptcy Service — Bankruptcy Author
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Drawing on two decades of experience as a war correspondent and based on his numerous columns for Truthdig, Chris Hedges presents
The World As It Is, a panorama of the American empire at home and abroad, from the coarsening effect of America’s War on Terror to the front lines in the Middle East and South Asia and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Underlying his reportage is a constant struggle with the nature of war and its impact on human civilization. “War is always about betrayal,” Hedges notes. “It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked.”
Review:
I have not the slightest idea why people would bother to purchase this book when just going to truthdig.com would afford them the opportunity to read all of what Hedge’s wrote. It’s like why even bother to publish a collection of essays (and lay to waste more trees!), other than the obvious reason that Hedges needs to find some means of paying his son’s Colgate tuition bill (which I’m sure is upwards of $40K/year)…? All that Hedges has to rant and rail about can be heard on Democracy Now or in the music of David Rovics (free of charge, however) so his readership consists mostly of people who something of a schadenfreude, i.e. they actually enjoy reading about how messed up the world is and need/want to be told that it’s only going to get worse. I used to have immense respect for Hedges; over the past decade he has degenerated from a courageous war reporter to something of a misanthropic Naderite on homeopathic steroids picking a bone with anyone who does not see eye to eye with him and grinding his axe in self-righteous and self-serving futility.
Every year, he publishes some form of screed that proclaims pretty much the same thing(s):the earth is going to hell in a handbasket (and the more dire situation is, the more people become indifferent to it); the rich are getting richer and richer; corporations have ever more power, and we are incapable of any form of moral evolution (we are, however, according to Hedges, somehow magically capable of evolving into a Marxist society devoid of any and all of the miasmas of modernity – this despite every historical precedent suggesting otherwise). For all Hedges’ insight (that I once admired), his analyses are as predictable as they are obnoxiously self-ingratiating and ultimately, shallow. It wouldn’t take much brainpower to predict what Hedges would say in his 2012 book. It will be salted with (mostly out-of context) Hannah Arendt quotations, ‘little Eichmann’ references and some invocation of Nietzsche about how “we have become the evil we so deplore.” (Exactly who this ‘we’ is Hedges never endeavours to explain – just about everyone who bothers to read and take his essays seriously at this point presumably agrees with him fully already, so it is unclear how he can think he is doing anything besides preaching to the proverbial choir.) Hedges will go to point out (correctly) that progressives who (still) support Obama are either oxymorons are just plain morons. In the end it will just clamour about how we have lost our capacity for (insert any one of the following) empathy/love/forgiveness/patience/ability to see interconnectedness, etc. etc.
This type of analysis is not just a waste of intellectual energy and natural resources, it is an exercise in outright futility. Just what is Hedges hoping to accomplish in his writing? “We are breeding ourselves to death.” Is this a joke? If so, it’s on you, Chris – people who have four children (two of whom were born after you turned 50!) do not have the right to say that they are concerned with overpopulation. Of course, the converse of that claim (to stop breeding altogether (a solution I myself advocate and actually practice) leads to the same result – the extinction of the human race (which, you cannot seriously think would be a bad thing). “Man is a cruel animal.” Well, true enough. But so are hippos (who have been known to kill their own young); so are most cat species, who will kill any animal smaller than them that moves; so are the insect species in which the female consumes the male after copulation; so are our relatives, the chimps, whom Jane Goodall was shocked to learn engage in what only be described as animalistic warfare. Additionally, not to put to fine a point on it, but this claim makes the case against breeding a fortiori. Finally, isn’t this (neo)Hobbesian insight what corporate world has been arguing for years – that because of our inclinations to savagery we cannot be expected to exhibit empathy and compassion? Does Hedges really think that he will bring about a more just, compassionate and caring world through writing all that he’s written?
I, for one, am not fooled (much less enticed) by the anti-brand, anti-elitist stance of someone who is the product of Loomis-Chaffee, Colgate, and Harvard Divinity. Hedges is just as much of a fence-sitting coward as the liberal fops he so deplores. For all his radical posturing and superficially Marxist leanings, he is nothing more than an uptight, whiny, bourgeois idealist who still believes that love, peace, and egalitarianism will reign in the new world once modern industrial society collapses (which, inevitably, it will). Until then, he’s not willing to do anything about it except write books, travel around the country, crank out more children and lecture/denounce us sots for not being willing and able to dedicate and/or lay down our lives in the name of some higher cause. I think it would have been better for him to remain a war reporter.
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