Page 4
News
Street Roots • Oct. 5-11,2018
Chris
Hedges
His new book, “America: The
Farewell Tour,” lays out in
unflinching term s the evidence
fo r our impending doom
BY JOANNE ZUHL
EXEC U TIVE ED ITO R
hat’s wrong with us?
As a nation, we are riddled with
depression and addiction.
- Hate groups march openly in our streets.
School shootings are a frequent occurrence.
We imprison people at shocking rates.
We wage unwinnable wars against unseen
enemies. We willfully poison Our land, air
and water. We don’t believe a thing we say
and it doesn’t seem to matter.
Who’s running this place, anyway?
Not us, says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-
Prize-winning journalist
whose new book,
“America: The Farewell
Tour,” provides a
scathing - and urgent -
critique of the dire
consequences of our
nation’s unfettered
capitalism. As the title
suggests, Hedges’ book
explores the final
throes of our corporate
empire, indicative of
famously failed empires
gone before, and the
pathologies it manifests.
This is the latest in a
series of books by
Hedges analyzing the
state of America,
Chris Hedges
among them “War Is a
Force That Gives Us "
Meaning,” “American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America”
and “Death of the Liberal Class.”
Hedges traveled the country researching
this book, but his view of America is refined
also by nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning
News and The New York Times:
Hedges currently writes a weekly column
for the website Truthdig, and hosts “On
Contact” on the Russian govemmnt-funded
network, RT America. And as if that weren’t
enough, he also teaches a class in prison
through Rutgers University in New Jersey
■
and is an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Hedges was in Portland earlier this week
to talk about his new book. Tonight, O ct 5,
he’s back in town and will be the featured
speaker for Democracy Reborn:
Communities Resisting. Communities
Rising, an event by Oregon Community
Rights Network.
Street Roots talked with him over
breakfast on Tuesday, and while he speaks
calmly and clinically about America’s crises,
Hedges states frankly that he is genuinely
scared - for himself, his family and the
planet And we should be too. Because the
problem is bigger than one or even both
political parties. This Cancer is rooted in our
hallowed political and economic systems.
And Charlottesville, Kavanaugh and Trump?
Those are just the symptoms.
Chris Hedges: What’s going on is that
the social bonds that make a healthy society
possible have been broken. And until those
bonds are repaired, things are only going to
get worse. And we see a myriad of
symptoms - chronic underemployment and
unemployment, homelessness, opioid
addictions, a retreat into gambling, suicide,
hate groups - we must remember that
people who seek to destroy others are
driven from a deep desire to ann ihilate
themselves and everything that makes an
open society.
It’s what the socialist Emile Durkheim
called “anomie.” The literal translation of
anomie is rulelessness. It means the rules
don’t work anymore, at least the rules as
they’re presented to society. What are those
rules? You work hard, you get a good
education, you obey the law, and you get a
chance to carve out a meaningful existence
with a living wage. That’s gone.
There are two sets of rules. There’s one
set of rules for us, where we have
criminalized poverty, created the most
monstrous system of mass incarceration in
the industrialized world, where wages have
remained stagnant American productivity
See HEDGES, page 5
Hedges was part
of a team of
reporters with the
New York Times
awarded a Pulitzer
Prize in 2002 for -
coverage of global
terrorism. That
same year he
received the
Amnesty
International
Global Award for
Human Rights
Journalism.