Interviews with Chris Hedges

Comment

Comment by Cromag on September 21, 2009 at 8:43pm

Transcript: Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion”, 21 July 2009
Thom Hartmann interviews Chris Hedges about his book “Empire of Illusion”, 21 July 2009

Thom: Is the world dying? Is our culture dying? Is this mess one that we have created ourselves? Is this something that is unique to the United States? Is it planet wide? What’s going on here? Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winner, his new book, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.” And for our listeners in Portland, listening on AM 620 KPOJ, Chris is going to be at Powell’s tonight on Burnside, the legendary bookstore, at 7:30 tonight, and it should be a lot of fun. But he’s in the studio with us live here today. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Hedges: Thank you, Thom.

Thom: So great to have you here. In synopsis you paint a rather dire portrait of a bread and circus America.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. It’s the story of an America that has transferred its allegiance to spectacle, to pseudo-events, that no longer can determine what is real and what is illusion, that confuses how they’re made to feel with knowledge, that confuses propaganda with ideology, and that’s exceedingly dangerous. All totalitarian societies are image-based societies, and that’s what our society has become.

Thom: Already. We’re past the point of saying we’re at a threshold. You’re saying we have passed the threshold.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. I think that you can easily, there’s enough indicators within the culture, to illustrate that print-based culture, those people who deal in nuance and ambiguity and ideas are a minority.

Thom: But can’t there be a nuanced and thoughtful electronic, I mean I read you all the time on the Internet. You’ve got a piece up today on Commondreams.org. As do I, by the way.

Chris Hedges: Sure, but the fact is shows like yours, in the cultural mainstream, are marginal.

Thom: We’re anomalies. We’re the exception that proves the rule.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. You’re not interrupting me, you’re not insulting me, you’re not shouting. It’s not carnival barking. You use the airwaves to actually try and discuss ideas and allow your guests to flesh out opinions, opinions that you may not even agree with. That’s very different from almost everything we see. And look, newspapers are dying, the publishing industry is dying, you have 42 million Americans who are illiterate. You have another 50 million Americans who are semi literate, meaning they read at a 4th of 5th grade level. And then you have people who are functionally literate, but they don’t read. There are tremendous consequences for that, because as you well know, having worked in the advertising industry, these images are not benign. They are skillfully orchestrated and manipulated by for-profit corporations to get us to do a lot of things that are not in our interests. And of course, this all ties into the rise of celebrity culture, well on display with our 3 week coverage of the death of Michael Jackson.

Thom: Right, yeah, the whole circus around him. So how do we fix this? How do we recover some sense, I mean you read DeTocqueville, you know, DeTocqueville’s story, Democracy in America is the title, 1838. And he only spent 6 months here, he was in his late 30s, French nobleman, came over, looked around, blew his mind. The average farmer was as literate as the average scholar.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s the tragedy, isn’t it?

Continue reading the rest of the interview HERE

Comment by Cromag on September 21, 2009 at 11:14am

American Fascists, Chris Hedges on The Hour (CBC)


Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize winning writer and author of "American Fascists." In his latest release, the former New York Times correspondent compares the U.S. Christian right to 20th Century fascism.

As a son of a preacher, Hedges has a deep knowledge of the Bible which he uses to openly blast the role of Christianity in politics.

Hedges believes the far right Christian believers have been manipulated by the high power, allowing for bigotry and intolerance.
(AND HE IS RIGHT!!!!)

Unlike Chris, I grew up in a strict separatists fundamentalist baptist household. Much of details I have read were already known to me. I like his book because it is bringing to light the Fascist nature of American Religion. It has been my struggle, unlike most Christians and Non-Christians, to see this Christianity as anything but fascist in nature.

For more info, go to www.cbc.ca/thehour/

Comment by Cromag on September 21, 2009 at 11:08am

Review: ‘Empire of Illusion’ by Chris Hedges
"Remarkable, bracing and highly moral”
by Brian Bethune on Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Like Christopher Hitchens, in so many ways his opposite number, Chris Hedges occupies an isolated and occasionally lonely spot on the ideological spectrum, angering progressives as much as conservatives. He may be a socialist and the author of American Fascists (2007), the title of which pretty much sums up what he thinks of the Christian right in his country. But he’s also a religion-friendly guy—the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the possessor of both a master’s degree in theology and a firm belief that spiritual seeking is hard-wired in humans—a stance that provokes many on the militant atheist left. In fact, Hedges is as much a throwback as a revolutionary: an old-fashioned, passionate, moralist America-Firster. And none of that is meant as criticism.

Hedges is not likely to win a lot of new friends with his latest work, Empire of Illusion (Knopf). The “illusion” part of the title is made clear in Hedges’ savage assault on celebrity/pop culture that focuses on two soft, but richly deserving targets, pro wrestling and the porn industry. Wrestling he uses to symbolize the vacuity of celebrity culture, how Americans (and, increasingly, the rest of the world) are “bombarded with cant and spectacle” that robs them of “the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth.” Celebrity culture is one of images and sound bites, he writes, one that both drives and is enabled by, functional illiteracy. (He cites studies estimating the illiterate and semi-literate proportion of the U.S. and Canadian populations to be about 42 per cent.) If the Lincoln and Douglas debates of 1858 were carried on at a high-school graduate level, George W. Bush was down to Grade 6 vocabulary in 2000, and Al Gore, his supposedly pointy-headed intellectual opponent, debated at a seventh-grade level. And, like porn—which Hedges convincingly shows to be a far more vicious, victim-rich industry than liberal thought likes to imagine—celebrity culture provides new gods to distract us. (Remember Hedges’ conviction about our intrinsic natures.)

But distract us from what? Ranting against pop culture is generally the territory of the political right, but Hedges does not deliver his polemic in order to call Americans back to a faux Rockwell-esque world of unquestioning faith and jingoism, as many Christian conservative commentators do. For him, high-flying televangelists are part of celebrity culture, not an antidote to it. No, the “illusion” serves the other half of his title, the “empire,” the corporate and military forces that he believes profit from the impoverishment, moral and financial, of his countrymen. It prevents Americans from seeing what is done in their name or even what is done to them. What seems to truly drive Hedges’ rage is his conviction that no republic has ever survived the acquisition of empire, and that his own will be no exception. The U.S. is in a death spiral, he believes, inextricably trapped in other nation’s lives and in “a culture of illusion that is, at its core, a culture of death—it will die and leave little of value behind.” Remarkable, bracing and highly moral, Empire of Illusion is Hedges’ lament for his nation.