The Triumph of the Spectacle

The United States of America prides itself on being the “leader of the free world”. In reality it is a deeply sick society whose only freedom is that of abuse (in all the senses of that word) and the multiplicity of perverse ways it chooses to keep itself entertained.

Of course, it has its decent side – but independent voices are increasingly difficult to find. You can find Chomsky on Youtube and in bookshops – but rarely quoted in the media. 

Chris Hedges is a rare voice of sanity whose articles I have been following this year on the brave Scheerpost site. His background is fascinating – a war correspondent who started out with the intention of being a churchman like his father and whose rebellious spirit saw him sacked from The New York Times for his vocal opposition to the Iraq War. He has become a fairly prolific writer – turning out since 2002 almost a book a year. His Wikipedia entry was clearly written by a corporate lobbyist! 

Somewhat belatedly I have been reading his Empire of illusion – the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle (it was published in 2010!) – which is a savage indictment of the depths to which the country has fallen in my lifetime,  

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in the Second World War. It could be cruel and unjust if you were poor, gay, a woman, or an immigrant, but there was hope it could be better. It was a country I loved and honored.

It paid its workers wages envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good, public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs, from Head Start to welfare to Social Security, to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly, and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, worked to protect the interests of most of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a press that was diverse and independent and gave a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to reveal ourselves to ourselves. 

I am not blind to the imperfections of this old America, or the failures to meet these ideals consistently at home and abroad. I spent more than two years living in Roxbury, the inner city in Boston, across the street from a public housing project where I ran a small church as a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. I saw institutional racism at work. I saw how banks, courts, dysfunctional schools, probation officers, broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and employers all conspired to make sure the poor remained poor. I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I saw there the crimes and injustices committed in our name and often with our support, whether during the contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. We had much to atone for, but still there was also much that was good, decent, and honorable in our country. 

The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. 

The words "consent of the governed" have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner. The government, stripped of any real sovereignty, provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good. America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions.It represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not possess. 

Hardly surprisingly, the book was largely ignored by the corporate media – with one of the few (Canadian) reviewers lamenting that it didn’t really tell him anything he didn’t already know. But what I did appreciate – in the book’s final chapter – was the tribute to “those who saw it all coming! 

There were some who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul, and Andrew Bacevich, writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten, and Naomi Klein, and activists such as Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and Ralph Nader warned us about our march of folly. In the immediate years after the Second World War, a previous generation of social critics recognized the destructive potential of the rising corporate state. Books such as David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd”, C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite”, William H. White’s “The Organization Man”, Seymour Mellman’s “The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline”, Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History” have proved to be prophetic. This generation of writers remembered what had been lost. They saw the intrinsic values that were being dismantled. The culture they sought to protect has largely been obliterated. During the descent, our media and universities, extensions of corporate and mass culture, proved intellectually and morally useless. They did not thwart the decay. We failed to heed the wisdom of these critics, embracing instead the idea that all change was a form of progress.

Other interesting titles of his which caught my eye were -

Wages of Rebellion – the moral imperative of revolt (2015); and 

Unspeakable (2016) a collection of interviews