Chris Hedges

"America's best days are still ahead." That's what politicians and business leaders are supposed to say. This book gives a very different view.

A chapter looks at one family's journey through the nightmare of opioid addiction. Another chapter gives a Very Detailed look inside the porn business. The Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City may still be officially open. The gaming tables are empty, and large numbers of the hotel rooms are unusable. Maintenance in the rooms that are used is a show more thing of the past, so a guest may have to deal with, for instance, leaky toilets or cockroaches.

Antifa and the alt-right are two different manifestations of the same phenomenon; people who are frustrated and feel left behind by global capitalism. The factory which provided a decent living for residents of a small Midwest town has closed, and moved to Mexico, leaving them with no alternatives, and no hope. The average minority resident of New York City is more than tired of being repeatedly stopped and frisked, or given a ticket for something like jaywalking, simply because a white cop feels like it.

People who are in prison will get paid a few cents for working, usually for some large corporation, if they get paid at all. Especially in private prisons, they will get financially gouged for everything else, including phone calls to their loved ones.

Donald Trump may have ridden this frustration to the White House, but that does not mean that he can do anything about it, until corporate control of America is eliminated. This is certainly not an optimistic book, but it is a very eye-opening book. It is highly recommended for all Americans. show less

It’s been a while since I read such a frustrating book all the way through. It’s an extended, unremitting, and therefore badly organized rant about how much America sucks, loosely grouped at least early on into chapters (our celebrity culture sucks, our pornography sucks, our education system sucks). It’s not even that I disagree with most of what Hedges argues, including that a culture of spectacle diverts people from large structural economic and political problems and hides the fact show more that we have engaged in a massive wealth transfer to the richest and more-or-less permanent impoverishment of the poorest among us.

But since we (Americans) just make Hedges sick, he is not interested in convincing or in offering solutions, just in spewing his polemic. This leads to a couple of systematic issues, aside from the frustrating lack of structure. First, Hedges thinks that he’s the only one who sees through popular culture, that the audience eats it up unquestioningly, seduced by WWE wrestling and Jerry Springer into thinking that image is everything.

Second, though he sometimes recognizes that the people we see on reality shows are often there to provoke “there but for the grace of God” reactions, he’s so disgusted that he has what is actually, I suspect, exactly the reaction the producers intended. He tells a somewhat misleading story about a Jerry Springer show featuring a man who has a fantasy that his wife will dress up in a cheerleader outfit and do a cheer/striptease just for him. I find this a rather sweet fantasy, to be honest. The show (which is only available on pay/DVD, not regular TV) then apparently has a woman in a cheerleader outfit demonstrate, including stripping off everything and giving the guy a lap dance, after which the wife is offered the opportunity to do the same thing in front of the studio audience and then does. Okay, I’m not really comfortable with that, but everyone seems to be consenting. The problem is: the man and his wife are fat (while the cheerleader, apparently, is so thin that she lacks much in the way of breasts, which Hedges also finds offensive). And this disgusts Hedges so much that he can’t stop harping on it. How dare fat people have sexual fantasies? How dare they show their naked bodies in public? Fat’s just another indicator of the moral decay of American society, to Hedges, but he doesn’t recognize how his own reaction is far from oppositional.

Because Hedges hates everyone, no accusation is too contradictory. So, today’s students “put in punishing hours, come to office hours to make sure they grasp what their professors want, and challenge all grades under 4.0 in an effort to maintain a high average. They learn to placate and please authority, never to challenge it” (emphasis mine). Now, there’s a way to reconcile these two statements, I think, but it would have something to do with resistance and subversion and negotiation, as well as with the place of educators in a university hierarchy (Hedges even mentions professors’ loss of authority, though given that he says they’re all corrupt servants of oligarchy, obfuscating in the service of their corporate masters, it remains unclear why he thinks that’s a bad thing) which are all too complicated for Hedges’ blanket condemnations. If you like unfair generalizations, you might like this book! show less

Chris Hedges wrote War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning after the events of September 2001, but before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars of the 21st century that make it all the more painful to read today. About two thirds of the text is memoir, but in the form of anecdotes pressed into service for a war correspondent's reflections about the perennial nature of war and what it does to societies and individuals. Many of these stories are grueling to read, and Hedges very consciously straddles a show more line on which he hopes to make patent the attractions of war without himself glamorizing it.

There are many literary references in this book, especially to the classics of antiquity which Hedges studied at Harvard during a hiatus in his work as a journalist. He gives these their due as evidence of the enduring attributes of war, but he avoids elevating them into sanction for it. He also returns at various points to his own need for literary sustenance in the midst of war (e.g. 90, 169).

In his introduction, Hedges disclaims a pacifist agenda. He writes that his aim is "a call for repentance" in the face of growing US military hubris. The book is concerned with the ways in which war is fostered by the dehumanizing falsehoods of nationalism, destroying culture and erecting an abstract "cause" to which life must be subordinated. Hedges proposes memory and love as the antidotes to the martial impulse, where these are rooted in lived contact with others, particularly across ethnic and religious divides. Unfortunately, this book is as timely now as when it was first published, and there is no real likelihood that it will become irrelevant in the foreseeable human future. show less

This is a rant against the scientistic fundamentalism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc. Hedges mounts a perfectly valid attack against this shallow and deluded propaganda. This materialistic bigotry wearing the clothes of science and critical thinking deserves the dressing down dealt by Hedges and really much more.

Hedges founds his criticism in Christianity which is doubtless a fine foundation for the majority of his audience. I though am a Buddhist so for me the show more book doesn't quite work. This book presents several challenges for Buddhists.

What would a Buddhist criticism of belligerent scientism look like? Hedges is constantly referring to the original sin or the essential imperfectability of humans when he criticizes fundamentalism. But in some sense the perfectability of humans is at the core of Buddhism, i.e. the third Noble Truth of the Buddha, the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. Indeed, shallow interpretations of Freedom and the Path to Freedom can get Buddhists stuck in various forms of fundamentalism. Indeed, various modern forms of Buddhism even seems to ally themselves with scientism and thereby flirt, at the very least, with fundamentalism and similar forms of conceptual grasping that thereby stray from liberation.

This book presents more of a question than an answer for Buddhists. This book as a critical itch, as the start of a significant project, is probably how it will appear to most readers with a reflective bent. Hedges opens the door to a deep subject. He motivates further thought in a very effective way. He brings up an urgent and central issue of our time. This is an important book, not so much because of its arguments, but because of the questions they open up. show less