Chris Hedges

In a rare moment of hyperbolic self-admiration, I will say out loud that Chris Hedges represents what I should aspire to be. He, dare I say it, is me, with a more rigorous education, a deeper schedule of reading, and a more serious approach to the dissemination of his writings. In lieu of an apology, I will just humbly admit that in this comparison, I, in every meaningful way, am left holding the short end of the stick.

I read everything by Mr. Hedges that I come across, and unsurprisingly I agree with just about all of it. There are many ideas, and a certain attitude, that his essays share with mine. We fall into a very similar range on the cynicism scale, which is to say that we are both rather close to the top of it. I tend to be even more negative, because that is my temperament. I'm sure that Mr. Hedges is a nicer man than me, deep down. I mean, I'm sure that we are both polite and somewhat charming on the outside, but my heart is almost certainly a much darker thing than his. Darker than yours as well, dear reader, and you may be thankful for that. If there were an Olympics for inner darkness and unrest, I would make the podium. In these miserable times, Mr. Hedges seems to retain a few ounces of hope in him. God bless him for that, because it makes him much more useful as an influential public intellectual.

That's another difference between us: I believe that Chris Hedges is a legitimate public intellectual. I would never say that about myself. I'm more of a low-budget Will Rogers style commentator. If public intellectuals could make a living playing the lounges in Vegas, I might be allowed to serve as a warm up act.

“It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience...” This sentence appeared in a piece by Mr. Hedges on Consortium News dot com this week. Here is a perfect example of our separation on the nihilism scale. One must have a great deal of hope for the future to believe that this kind of thing is conceivable in America. I more often fall back on my “new dark ages” prediction, which I stated just the other day as “a great tyranny, perhaps for thousands of years...” 

I have, in my more lucid moments, dreamed up something along the lines suggested by Mr. Hedges in the above quote. Just walking around in large groups carrying signs and subjecting yourself to police abuse and violence won't do it. That plays into the hands of the clampdown. It only gives the money power a chance to show off their brutal authority. That's a game that they will win; the state police have much more room to escalate than the demonstrators. But how about a general strike? What if something like that were organized in a way that would frighten the money power? Not just “Tuesday this week and then again when we feel like it.” What if it were Tuesday for two hours, everyone in America shows up two hours late on Tuesday? Every Tuesday. And what would happen if another hour were added after a couple of weeks? And so forth. That would be a very simple plan to understand, and easy for people to join in on. There would be retaliation, definitely, and people would suffer socially and financially. That would be terrible, but did anyone think that this would be easy? The only easy thing is to just throw up your hands and shout, “I love Big Brother!” No one wants the cage of rats dropped on their heads.

How angry and desperate would people need to be before the cage of rats became a “fuck it” moment? “Fuck you, I'm done, do your worst?” Could it ever happen that Americans would stay with such a crawling-general-strike until there were two entire days in every week when silence descended on every shop, factory, and office? Could one hundred million working Americans stick to that plan until it began to work? That would certainly get the money power's attention.

Oh, how I hate it when this happens. I get my hopes up, and it's all very exciting, however briefly. Then I realize that the reality of our situation is worse than it has been at any time in history. The money power today has much more money at its disposal, almost all of the existing money in fact, and exponentially more individuals who would do literally anything for a good deal of money and a chance at a piece of the pie. There are many tens of millions of Americans who would kill for the chance to be hired as highly paid strike breakers and mass-murderers. Look at these “police” who have been roughing up peaceful demonstrators over the last couple of months. What do they make now, six thousand dollars a month? Raise that by twenty or thirty percent, and add substantial bonuses for any particularly disagreeable dirty work. Can you imagine anything at all that they would not do?

I will continue to read whatever I find by Chris Hedges, and I will deeply appreciate any scraps of hope that he can manage to work into the general gloom. You should read him yourself. It's truth on the half-shell, and if there's too much hot sauce on it to suit you, just stop and take a breath after every paragraph. Put ice in your beer or something. I firmly believe that it is better to know what's coming, better to face the firing squad without a blindfold (although I will take that last cigarette, please). Better than remaining oblivious like most Americans, content to wake up one day, turn on the TV, and say, “wait, what happened?” And then continue watching to discover what their fascinating new lives will be like.