Cambridge Forum; WGBH Forum Network; Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

The moderator for tonight's program is the Reverend John Berens. John is Unitarian Universalist minister at the first parish in Needham. He's also the former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and a member of the board of Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. John is the author of several books including one that's forthcoming. The house where hope the promise of progressive religion for America. Thank you Pat. And John Buren says Pat said I have been involved with progressive religion and civic issues for many years. It's a great honor to be here tonight and to introduce Chris Hedges a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School where I had the honor of being the president of the alumni for a number of years and where I currently teach reading Kris's brilliant analysis of our cultural political situation I found myself asking the question that my mentor and your late friend William Sloane Coffin would often pose. If you find yourself feeling disillusioned Have you asked yourself lately why you had illusions to begin with.

Christmas book it seems to me is the most powerful analysis of where our illusions come from that I have read in many years. It's no longer a question of what's wrong with Kansas but why do so many Americans vote against their own long term economic self-interest. What does sports radio have to do with the election of a senator from Massachusetts. Why do so many bread and circuses in America distract us as it would have put it from distraction to distraction. The obsession with the sexual cavorting of celebrity demagogues and the ambition to become them ourselves has

become part of the warp and woof of American culture. An Empire of Illusion indeed where differences between fantasy and reality are deliberately blurred. Not only by our media but by our government and by corporations having a profound impact on our democracy and our sense of community and our quest for the common good. How on earth do we reclaim reality from the current celebration of pro-wrestling pornography and Ponzi schemes. Chris is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. As many of you know from his previous books he worked for many years as a foreign correspondent in Central America the Middle East Africa the Balkans was part of a team of

reporters that at the New York Times won the 2000 and two Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the rise of global terrorism. His bestsellers war is a force that gives its meaning and American Fascists. And Chris one of my favorites Moses on the freeway. The Ten Commandments as they are celebrated and ignored in our culture. All of these have been prohibited to what I think is some of Chris's finest work. Welcome to the Cambridge forum Chris Hedges. Jim thank you John. Jim. In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated

by the corporate forces that render Jackson insane. Jackson robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses. I was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into a Caucasian death mask. He hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity a product one to be sold used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral Neil ism and personal disintegration that is at the core of our corporate culture and his fantasies of eternal youth delusions of majesty and desperate disfiguring

quest for physical transformation or an expression of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme. His memorial service of a riot is show with a coffin at an average of thirty one point one million television viewers. It was the final episode in the long running Michael Jackson series and the stories that in thrall us are real life stories. Early fame wild success and then a long bizarre and emotional train wreck O.J. Simpson offered a tamer version of the same plot. So does Tiger Woods and Britney Spears Jackson by the end was heavily in debt and whether to 22 million dollar out of court settlement to Jordy Chandler as well as seven counts of child

sexual abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony. Jackson reflected our own physical and psychological disintegration especially with many Americans struggling with overwhelming debt loss of status and deep personal confusion. The lurid drama of Jackson's personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoing dramas on television in movies and the news. News reports on television are mini dramas. They come complete with a star a villain a supporting cast a good looking host and a dramatic if often unexpected ending in Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury's novel about a future dystopia people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions

life. Bradbury understood once it was packaged scripted given a narrative and filmed became the most compelling form of entertainment. And Jackson was a great show. He deserved a great finale. Those who created Jackson's public persona and turned him into a piece of property. First as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15000 golden casket are the agents publicists marketing departments plastic surgeons script writers advertisers video technicians and television personalities who orchestrate the vast stage of celebrity for profit and yet we measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them.

We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fattest see of their stardom. We too long to attract audiences for our grand ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us mindful of how we hold ourselves. How we dress what we say we invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars we wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught us almost unconsciously to generate interior personal screenplays and we have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure of the way we relate to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler who has written widely about this argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of

consumer culture and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture celebrity culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation pain weakness and betrayal. Education building community honesty transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you ridiculed and voted off. Any reality show fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to disappear the unwanted. And celebrities that can no longer generate publicity good or bad vanish in life the show's teach is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention and our self

permits the humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail those who are deemed ugly ignorant or poor are belittled and mocked. Human beings are used betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture which is pretty much the story of Jackson's life. The cult of the self which Jackson embodied dominates our culture. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths superficial charm grandiosity and self-importance a need for constant stimulation a penchant for lying deception and manipulation and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Jackson from his phony marriages to the portraits of

himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys. Had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement mistaken for individual ism are the same as democratic equality. It is the celebration of image over substance. We have a right in the cult of the self to get whatever we desire. We can do anything even belittle and destroy those around us including our friends. To make money to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved they become their own justification their

own morality and how one gets there is irrelevant. And it is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the global economy stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college and the heads of these corporations like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed. Walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. But the tattle izing illusions offered by our consumer culture are vanishing as we head towards collapse. The jobs we are shedding

are not coming back. As Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a jobless recovery the travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class especially as unemployment insurance runs out and class warfare once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to at her an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism is returning with a vengeance. In his book Democracy Incorporated Sheldon Wallen who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and later at Princeton uses the phrase inverted to an ism to describe our political system inverted totalitarianism. Unlike classical totalitarianism does not revolve around a demagogue or a charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state it purports to cherish democracy

patriotism and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and whart the democratic process. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists a corporate media controls nearly everything we read watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion in classical totalitarian regimes such as nazi fascism or Soviet communism. Economics was subordinate to politics under inverted totalitarianism. The reverse is true will and rights economics dominates politics. And with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness. The Obama brand offers us an image that appears

radically individualistic And new this image and Nakia lates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We feel we are entertained. We feel hopeful but like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest. A few weeks before Obama won the presidential elections. Obama beat Nike Apple Corps and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers top annual award marketer of the year. What for all our faith and hope. As the Obama brand given us

his administration has spent lent or guaranteed twelve point eight trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy brand Obama has allocated nearly one trillion dollars in defense related spending and a continuation of our doomed imperial project in Iraq where military planners estimate that between 50 to 70000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years and brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan including the use of drones sent on cross border bombing runs into Pakistan that have left over 700 civilians dead since Obama took office. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and because of pressure from the for profit health care industry refuses to consider a single

payer not for profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes including the use of torture and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy or restore habeas corpus corporations which control our politics no longer produce products that are different but brands that are different and brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than to brand George W. Bush. The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq it began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted in the words of the Harvard historian Charles Mayer from an empire of production to an empire of consumption.

By the end of the Vietnam War when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady inexorable decline we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire. We could no longer afford. We began to use force especially in the Middle East to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. And the bill is now due. America's most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free market capitalism and globalization they have dynamited the very foundations of our society in the 17th century. These

speculators would have been hung today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party could ditch labor unions no longer a source of votes or power as a political ally. Workers he insisted would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better Clinton argued to take corporate money and do corporate bidding. By the 1990s the Democratic Party under Clinton's leadership had virtual fund raising parity with the Republicans. And today the Democrats get more legislation demanded by corporations including the North American Free Trade Agreement thrust a knife into the back of the American working class. Now after was peddled by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise incomes and

prosperity of the citizens of the United States Canada and Mexico we were told it would staunch Mexican immigration. But now after which took effect in 1994 reversed every one of Clinton's predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans grown by Mexican farmers those farmers had to compete with the huge agribusinesses in the United States. And many were swiftly bankrupt. At least two million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994 and guess where many of them went. This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large scale factory closures along the border. As manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for China. Now after was great if you were a corporation it was a

disaster if you were a worker and we are now getting a taste of Clinton's draconian welfare reform bill signed in 1906 as tens of millions of people face the prospect of losing their unemployment benefits and attempting to survive on one hundred forty three dollars a month you receive from welfare. It was the Clinton administration led by summers which ripped down the fire walls that had been established by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing. Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It's set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the financial system with Glass-Steagall demolished and the passage of naphtha. The

Democrats tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators and many of the architects of this deregulation. Economists such as summers have come back to serve corporate interests in the Obama White House. The cost of our Empire of Illusion is not being paid for by corporate titans. It is being paid for on the streets of our inner cities in former manufacturing towns and in depressed rural enclaves. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. Their misery is not morally excusable because of the demands of the market. They grieve and suffer and feel despair. They lose their dignity with their jobs their sense of self worth. Human beings not corporations raise children and maintain communities.

And the growing class divide is not understood by complicated sets of statistics or the utopian faith an unregulated globalization. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope. The assault on the way the American working class and assault that has devastated members of my own family in the former mill towns in the state of Maine shows no sign of abatement in the past three years nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off among workers laid off from full time work. Roughly one fourth were earning $40000 a year. There's been a viral Mars ation of the American working class and the assault on the middle class is underway.

Washington has become our Versailles. The media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats like the Republicans or courtiers or pundit academic experts and financial analysts at least those with prominent public platforms are courtiers and we are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. Being a courtier requires agility and eloquence and the most talented of them should be credited as persuasive actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They are the smiley faces of a corporate state. But when the corporations make their iron demands these courtiers drop to their knees they

placate the telecommunications companies that want to be protected from lawsuits. They permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place vast subsidies of corporate welfare. They allow our for profit driven health care system to leave the uninsured and underinsured to suffer and die and for over 40 thousand Americans died last year because they could not get proper medical care. The for profit health care industry like the defense industry makes money from death and suffering. It is legally permitted in this country to hold a sick child hostage while their families frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters. Any discussion of health care should acknowledge the fact that our for profit health care system is the problem and must be

destroyed. Only then can we have an honest debate about what comes next. But this will never happen. It will never happen because the industries money and lobbyists drive the discussion as well as the shape of the so-called health care reform bill. America is devolving into a third world nation and if we do not immediately halt our elites rapacious looting of the public treasury and our bizarre state socialism for corporations we will be left with trillions in debts which can never be repaid and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Tens of millions of people brutally controlled will live in perpetual poverty a state of neo feudalism.

This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. In his book The Great Transformation written in 1044 Karl Paul Jani laid out the devastating consequences the depressions wars and inevitable totalitarianism that grow out of a so-called self regulated free market. Jani grasp that fascism like socialism was rooted in a market society that refused to function. He warned that a financial system always devolved without heavy government control into a mafia capitalism and a mafia political system. A self regulated market inevitably turns human beings as well as the natural environment into commodities. A situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the

natural world the free markets assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension and intrinsic value beyond monetary value commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. We have been borrowing at a rate of more than two billion dollars a day over the last 10 years and at some point it has to end. By through 2010 because of the bailouts stimulus packages giveaways and short term debt we will have to finance 5 trillion dollars in

debt. That is about ninety six billion dollars in debt auctioned off every week. If China and the oil rich states do not buy this debt the buyer of last resort will be the Federal Reserve and this will have the effect of essentially printing endless amounts of money. Our currency at this point will become junk. A Farias and sustained backlash which we can already see leaping up around the fringes of American society. Will sustain be sustained by a betrayed an angry populace. One unprepared intellectually emotionally and psychologically for collapse. This populist revolt will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic.

It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler and it was the breakdown in Czarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks a cobble of proto fascist misfits from Christian demagogues to loud mouth talk show hosts who we naively dismiss as buffoons will find a following with promises of revenge moral renewal and new glory. How we cope with our decline. Will we cling to the absurd dreams of an imperial superpower and the fantasies of a glorious tomorrow. Or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations. Will we heed those who are sober and rational. Those who speak of a new simplicity and humility in an age of imperial as well as material decline. Or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up in moments of crisis and panic.

Will we radically transform our society to one that protects the ordinary citizen and for the common good that defies the corporate state that dismantles empire. Or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush dissent and drive us into a new dark age. Social and political reform never comes from accommodating the power structure. It comes from frightening it. The Liberty Party which fought slavery the suffragists who battled for women's rights the labor movement and the civil rights movements knew that the question was call papa wrote was not how do we get good people to rule. Most of those attracted to power are at best mediocrities and often venal. But how do we limit the

damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements are the real engines for social reform. The correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens they never achieved formal political power but they are a reminder that as Studs Terkel used to say Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up. We must opt out of the mainstream. We must articulate and stand firmly in an equivocal even if this turns us said first into outcasts on the side of working men and women. We must no longer be content with the crumbs tossed to us by the power elite in the vain hope that accommodation will work. We must become as militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain passive We will soon be engulfed by a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.

If we remain passive as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history we will become serfs. If we fight back we have a chance. Saturation coverage of Jackson's death was yet another example of our collective flight into illusion. It deflected the moral questions arising from mounting injustice growing inequalities costly imperial wars economic collapse and political corruption as we sink into an economic and political morass as we barrel towards a crisis that will create more misery than the Great Depression. We remain controlled manipulated and distracted by the cellular shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave the fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to

entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally confuse us about our identity blame ourselves for our predicament condition us to chase illusions of unachievable fame and happiness and keep us from fighting back. And in the end that is all the Jackson coverage was really about. Another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying culture from the bane Wolf at the gate. Thank you. Chris I suspect that in the seventeenth century that you alluded to the end of a classic American jeremiad it was sometimes hard for the congregants to know where the preacher was suggesting that hope might be

placed not in Princes not in delusions not in the industry of happiness psychology that you so trenchantly analyze in your book. I think they probably had to listen between the lines and to the end. The way I did when I read your book I found one of the most poignant moments actually in the end notes where you express your gratitude to your one time teacher and mentor at Colgate Coleman BROWN The Rev. Coleman Brown. And you say that he always directed you beyond your own despair to look.

Deeply enough to see in humankind the potential the hope for some further good. Tell us a little more about where to look. I think the failure of the American left is due to two crucial mistakes. The first is that it's not our job to achieve formal political power. It's our job to stand fast with a moral imperative in the way that all the great reformers in society did and most of them began as very isolated marginal and often ridiculed figures. And I think the second mistake is to. Succumb to a kind of.

Practicality whereby we judge the efforts that we make in the fight for justice by what we see around us. And this is the strength of the religious left. Figures like Dorothy Day Martin Luther King. Is that we have to. I think finally I find within us the strength of the faith. To believe that what we are doing. While it may not transform society or the world in our life time. Never the last has a kind of a power that often we don't recognize in the moment. I spent almost two decades as a war correspondent and I watched figures stand up in El Salvador Oscar Romero being one or in the Balkans.

And. The ability even for a sole individual to express another way of being to nurture a community in the wars in Yugoslavia when they began the first people killed were not the opposing warlord or leader of the other ethnic group but that within your own community who still had Muslim friends or had friends or Serb friends who defied that narrative of hate and. The situation that we face is very bleak. We lack the tools to disrupt the rape of the nation by the corporate state labor unions are a spent force. Our political system has become I think as Sheldon Wolin correctly points out a system of inverted totalitarianism our press

certainly are responsible print press is dying. Resistance in many ways will be local. And I think that we'll have to find sustenance. In a belief that no matter how bleak it gets. That active resistance that ability to retain our integrity is in and of itself a victory for. I during the war in the Balkans where there were horrific acts of genocide I and other journalists at some risk would walk into towns where the Serbs would carry out massacres whether in Kosovo whether in Bosnia they would cut the roads we would have to go in the back way with our satellite phones and report on what had happened and file those stories. Certainly it didn't stop them from carrying out a massacre. The next day but each act like that. Each act that

broke from the abstract sort of despair that comes with viewing the genocide at large was one that I think empowered us to go from one day to a next. And no act of resistances is futile. It's when you give in to cynicism or when you give in to despair that that you die you die morally you die spiritually. I think the great writers of spiritual ism are not those of the sort of self-help gurus and the narcissism of HOW IS IT WITH US of A people like King or Bahnhof or who knew that true spirituality came with that eternal battle for justice. Thank you has the ability to retain our own integrity and integrity is in and of itself a victory I'm reminded of being introduced to a website called Americans who tell the truth. Put up by a main artist who in the mendacity leading up to the Iraq war

looked around for people doing precisely that. Mr Hedges I thank you so much for telling the truth about so much of the evil and sickness of the current American society. I agree with everything you said except one word talking. At some point about American policy and budget. You used the word defense. Granted that we've called our military budget the defense budget that's a lie. We have a military budget. President Dwight David Eisenhower as he left office warned us of the military industrial complex. You also did not mention that more than six decades after the end of World War Two more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union your government and mine and all of our government the federal government which takes

most of our resources and spends and is spending over one half of our budget every year on imperialism and you did mention the word empire a number of times. When are we the American people and how can you help us. Going to cut that military budget stay inable. I mean the fact is we're borrowing we're borrowing to maintain empire just as we are borrowing to maintain a level of consumption in real wages in this country have dropped for 90 percent of Americans since the early 1970s. So either we confront. Reality I mean the thing about a dream is that as King understood a dream is something you strive towards or an illusion is something you live within and illusions are very dangerous. You you see it see these allusions fed to the American consumer across the

political and spectrum I mean whether it's Oprah or the Christian right or corporatism or Hollywood it's that false belief that if we just dig deep enough within ourselves if we focus on happiness if we grasp that we are truly exceptional we can have everything that we want. And that has not kind of it has fostered a kind of infant Teil ism a state of perpetual childish ness. And and that's very dangerous because as the gap opens up between the illusion and the reality that is confronting us confronting tens of millions of people in this country whose homes are being foreclosed who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills who are finally beginning to realize that the jobs they've lost are not coming back and that not only is there not hope for them but there is not hope for their children. Then they react as children and they search for a savior somebody who will come in and save them. So. Whether it's the environmental crisis whether it's the permanent war economy whether it's the

destruction of our manufacturing base these illusions run all the way across the cultural spectrum. And and I think replicate if you look at dying empires whether it's the Austro-Hungarian or the Roman replicate those twilight periods when people become utterly unmoored from a reality based universe. But with both the current vice president and president starting to speak very well of the surge and using the word and supporting it does that ultimately give more because it rewrite the history especially over time that this was affective is a good use of the military and that kind of criticism we have is it is valid over time. And does that affect the budget and how does that affect you know the Iraqi surge the Iraqi surge correct. One of the most horrifying things for me about the Bush administration or about the Obama administration is that what it is done is codified. The egregious assault on civil liberties and the destruction of the rule of law

that was put in place by the Bush administration not only domestically but internationally. Preemptive war under post Nuremberg Laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression. It's illegal. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of the occupation. And as someone who has covered these kinds of conflicts it's utterly unsustainable over the long term. It these are long wars of attrition. And you know I used to go into the airport in Algiers and it would say welcome to Algeria land of a million martyrs. And Iraqis and Afghanis will bleed in a way that we want to expel foreign occupiers from their country. So yes that you you know without getting into the tactics of the surge and the buying off of the Sunni militias and yet they have you're very correct in pointing out that they have embraced not only the policies but the rhetoric but of course you know they've

kept the same. Secretary of Defense. I mean I think that makes the defense system stronger in the long run but in that case. OK. Thank you. Questioner. I'm going to find the need to point out one thing. If we were a conservative group you use the word elite which I find amusing. You would be the elite because you read but enough of that. I had a specific question about how do you address young people how do you get parents to address young people with the toys I mean I think it starts so young you know when I'm seeing a 10 year old with a BlackBerry at Disneyland where her father has spent $500 to bring the entire family for the day and she's doing this and this and it starts so young and everybody has to have a 50 inch television set in surround sound it you know if we can't pull people away from the toys how do we get them.

Well you raise an exaggerated history so you know you raise a very important point that people retreat into virtual ghettos. Yeah. And the danger of these virtual ghettos is that they sever you from your community. Television did it pretty effectively. We've become you know even more sophisticated in cutting people off from everyone around them and. You know refer you to a book. You know the spoke you are not a gadget. Buy a lanyard. Who writes about. And I think correctly about how dangerous the Internet can become for all of the reasons that you point out that essentially you retreat into these anonymous crowds and it with anonymity. And so when you read the kinds of comments that are put up even on liberal blogs they're absolutely hate filled. I mean every time I write an article you know I

graduated from Harvard Divinity School which is probably without doubt produced more atheists than any other divinity school in the country. And not believing. And and when the London Review of Books interviewed my book on atheism they called me a nonbeliever but every time I write something there's you know that the one of the acceptable bigotry is on the left is to attack people who. Find value and worth in religious thought. And yeah I'm with you I'm. I mean why I don't own a television. And one of the values in actually having citizens human beings come together on evenings like this speak directly to one another ask questions dialogue with someone who has applied a great deal of literate thought to the issues of the time rather than simply throwing up the images. Next question. Mr. Hedges I just thought it might be relevant but I need to

give you the CDM I saw I'm a decorated veteran of Vietnam and a member of Veterans for Peace and you're one of the authors of a very short list that I read all the time in. And yours is the most brilliant description of what's going on today that I that I find out there. We in the left and I'm a recovering ultra left this. I was very active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I described the problem very well. But right now my assessment is that the left is paralyzed and completely out of it. And so I've been toying with that with with the with the idea of and I know you have written a book about the American right. Why is it not. Because And I've read some of the stuff that they've been writing and I read Joe Stack's manifesto which could be written by a leftist by the way. I read it. There was an article in Mother Jones this month about the Oath Keepers. Right. And they actually have taken an oath not

to carry out Martial Law Orders right. What do you think about the possibility of the left and the right trying to come to some mutual understanding and a united front effort. Well you raise a very good point. I think the American left is bankrupt. Both in terms of its institutions and its moral core. We should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1904 with naphtha and we didn't. We continued to speak in a language by which we stand simply defended the rights of working men and women while we supported a party that utterly destroyed the working class in this country. And again I think that our failure was based on the idea that it wasn't practical. It you know that fighting at least worst candidate but what it's done. Since the Reagan administration if not before is make us

appear absolutely hollow. We speak in the bloodless language of issues and policy and we have allowed the right to express and articulate a very legitimate rage which is rising up within our society. And I think we have to. We have to be willing to stand alone. We have to be willing to risk a certain amount of ridicule for stepping outside the mainstream. Because if we don't that bankruptcy of liberalism will empower. Further empower these proto fascist movements. That I think are extremely dangerous and can snuff out what's left of our very anemic democracy Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground is the perfect example of the defeated dreamer the mouse man the person who had high ideals and voted for Obama and he didn't deliver so now he doesn't want to do anything anymore. That's just what the right wants.

I I voted for Nader in the last election and I voted for Nader for many reasons. One of them one of the big ones being that I spent so much of my life in war that I will not and I have so many friends in the Middle East who have suffered egregiously without being melodramatic some of whom have died and I have to go back there and tell them that I did everything no matter how futile it was to stand up against this war machine. And hopefully have earned him the right to ask for their forgiveness. I think we have lost our moral core and we have to refine that moral core. And when people take moral stances in society it's painful it's lonely it's difficult to read. You know the biography of King alone when he began it alone when he finished. Defections even within his own movement because he wouldn't embrace black power

got up a month or two before he died and said I take nonviolence to be my lawfully wedded wife. In sickness and in health till death do us part. And these are our leaders these are Martin Luther King you know was OUR was our greatest president the most powerful man in the 1960s. And you know the biography bearing the cross he carried the cross until of course he he finally knew that. And of course Hoover and Johnson after he denounced the war withdrew the FBI protection he knew you knew knew. And I think if we don't recover that moral core we have no weapon with which to fight back. And we are going to be engulfed by a terrifying movement like Oath Keepers who have as you point out a correct

analysis of the Prague problem understand the rape that is being carried out by corporate entities. But what they propose is terrifying and and we have nothing yet on the left to stand up and counter it was the night that Dr. King was killed Chris that I came into this church this very church. Recognizing that there was a need to keep alive the prophetic questions and to keep alive those questions you need communities that agreed to live in the spirit of the questions even without having all of the answers. Our next question. I'm David Fellingham I'm also a member of the Smedley D about the brigade of Veterans for Peace here in Cambridge and not to belabor you know the issues but I'm concerned about unmasking neo liberalism especially Clinton with his new plan

for Haiti. Could you talk a little bit about the lure of the neo liberalism and how as a movement we can deal with it. It's become what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference where and if you turn on any television show that's all it is fundamental. The engine of the permanent war economy of American imperialism of the Wall Street that aft of taxpayer funds and rise of a criminal class of speculators remains on question. By either the left or the right. And as the working class in this country I mean the working class it's sort of a misnomer. The there you know there there there are. 40 million Americans who live in real poverty.

The disenfranchisement of the working class is the rage that it feels I think and the anger that it feels towards these courtiers in political power and courtiers in the media. It is it is one that is. Driven by the utter disconnect from what they hear and what they are experiencing. So. Yeah I mean neo liberalism essentially has bought into the utopian fiction of unfettered markets and globalization. And so that the there really is just a bland uniformity of opinion that's imposed by a powerfully driven corporate media entities and real debate I mean health care being the perfect example. Real honest debate never seeps into the national discourse. I think the failure on the part of those of us who care about the working class to care about social reform who care

about any galah Tarion society is to have signed on to this neoliberal project. And Clinton I think is the poster child for it. I hate Bill Clinton because I was in Bosnia when Bill Clinton was president. I got a taste of it. You know I saw the corpses caused by his cowardice and he knew better because of the dedication of the Holocaust Museum. I got up and spoke about Bosnia because we understood the lesson of the Holocaust which is when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not. You are culpable. Listening to the Cambridge forum with Chris Hedges the author of his latest book Empire of Illusion where in dialogue between Mr Hedges and members of the audience gathered here at the first Persian Cambridge. Thanks Chris for the opportunity to ask for some of your insight that you could possibly connect to one of three things either a people who

believe they are above the national system the Davis man or B the efforts in an empire that is slipped away. Great Britain for example Gordon Brown has what he's trying to do or see people who were really well and truly are outside the system the Native Americans and Native Hawaiians who are trying to bring back the idea of a sustainable society. Is there anything in any of those areas I mentioned that you would offer as something where we could draw a lesson or potentially some hope. I think all resistance. But to the extent that we can begin to resist will be local. Food is going to be huge. Our food system is not sustainable. I live in New Jersey my tomatoes come from California. It's absurd what happens. We you know fossil fuel is a terminal resource.

The these food deserts I just did a story out of Camden New Jersey which will be out in the May issue of Harper's Magazine which is the per capita the poorest city in the country there is no supermarket and Gambon. There's no hotel there's no movie theater. And these are apocalyptic centers of post-industrial America and the problems that they engender are going to begin to see that words across the American line already are beginning. I mean I did a book on the Christian right and was all over the country for it and there are whole sections of America where for many people the end of the world is no longer an obstruction and the only way to break this pro fascist movement is not by arguing with them because these people have slipped into a non-reality based belief system. It is by Rian franchising them economically into the

system. And if it that is not done we're finished. Thanks. There's another word. The word surge is an interesting word. It struck me that that word was deployed by the Bush administration precisely at the moment when the storm surge across the Gulf Coast had splintered whatever was might have been left of the Bush Bush administration's credibility and all of a sudden there was this other surge that was going to be deemed a success. I would like to ask King I think it may have been the title of his last collection or published work was chaos or community. And I would like to ask you to push a little further into the realm of community as an important piece of what you're talking about the absence of community the fracturing of community the disintegration of community and community as the basis potentially for resistance and whatever

effective political action you might think I think might be possible. And what are the you know because I think there are tremendous obstacles to community and without that it's hard to imagine how we might other than ince you know sort of the retreat into private decency as Bill counsellor once called it you know hiding in little groups and surviving. Well community is is key because. It's a long term act of resistance is not sustainable without community. The tragedy is that so many of the institutions and I thought I would you know put the liberal church high on the list have failed us. They in the name of tolerance have not denounced these Christian radicals who are. Heretics. They're not Christians. They have acculturated the worst of American capitalism and the worst of

American poor imperialism into the Christian religion. And where has the church been silent. Where has the Academy been. What what is the the head of a university the president of a university is installed for what. To raise money. The Dept. of the. The Dept. on the Harvard Board of Overseers is the deputy chair is Robert Ruben. The corporation I mean. Yeah. You know we've utterly lost you know the capacity within institutional structures. To sustain or foment a community that promotes justice both within the academy and within the church the press the serious press is dying. The print press we're making that transformation from a society from a print based society one.

And I worked in a newspaper for a long time. I'm not here to defend commercial media. I understand the lies that they tell which are but there are the lies of omission it's what they don't tell you. Chomsky got that right. But what they did tell you was based on verifiable fact. It was reported researched and checked. But with the destruction of print then you have a national discourse or national dialogue that is no longer based on verifiable fact facts and opinion are interchangeable. Lies are true death panels are real. So. I think we have to turn and look local. And I think you're you're you're right. We have to. We can't do it alone. We'll be destroyed if we try and do it alone. We have to try and build units of like minded people and we have to. Don't build it as I think it was doing who understood Irving how don't do it around movements do it around campaigns.

You know food for instance is is a good example. The to the extent that we can divorce ourself from the consumer economy and the corporate state that every step that we take to do that is a small victory. For more in dialogue with Chris Hedges author of Empire of Illusion. Hi Chris. I knew you a long time ago if you remember. I have a comment and ask you a question out of it. There was a a woman a religious sister that I think you knew Sister Marie Augusta Neal who wrote a book called The socio theology of letting go which meant that it which in which she stated when the poor reach out to take what is rightfully that is the rich should let go in in the many years since she wrote

that and in the many years that I've been working that's been the premise on which I basically have functioned and have done the resistance because in most of my time in the peace movement and the justice movement it has been that it has been finding people with which you can resists the structures that we have and the structure question is always the question that's not mentioned anywhere today. Emory used to talk about we are all part of one system today. There aren't many systems. It's one world. And my thinking it what you wrote has brought together a lot of the thinking in the writing that I've done in the recent weeks and months I have been thinking but looking at what's happening in this country looking at the politics the economics of it. I've come to the conclusion that this is going to sound terrible to people but I'm not going to apologize for it. It's where I'm coming from at this point looking at what

I'm seeing that maybe it's not a bad thing for the rest of the world that the United States and its people go into decline and become like a third world country which we do have pockets of. There is a movement among the people of the world as I'm sure you know where they are not affected by the media in the same way we are. You know some people still don't have TVs and stuff like that and they are talking about another world being possible another world being necessary. The theologians among them also talk about another god being necessary. Why would it not be a good thing. What's happening in this country now. Let them. You raise a very good point I had dinner with Daniel Berrigan a few months ago who said the tragedy is not that the American empire is declining the tragedy is that we're bringing so many

people down with us. I don't think that learning to live with a new simplicity or learning to speak to the rest of the world with a new humility instead of in the language of violence is going to impoverish us spiritually. It will impoverish us materially but not spiritually. And what I fear is that we have the possibility of a deformed all of dark IT system which creates a neo feudalistic state whereby. At least two thirds of Americans are kept through Draco nian control in a state of perpetual poverty. And that's what. I mean these corporations are not going to go

away unless they're made to go away. ExxonMobil is not going to allow energy independence. It would devastate their profits. Halliburton. Raytheon Northrop Grumman tens of billions of dollars they take from taxpayers in weapons contracts. They're not going to ever give this up on their own. And I. But I think that the destruction of consumer culture and the destruction of American Empire. Is not in moral terms. A negative for us and perhaps can allow us to recover. Some of our own humanity. You just mentioned the word violence and you had certainly alluded earlier to violent revolution in seventeen eighty nine and one thousand

seventeen. I wish you would talk a little bit more about violence. There's a lot of violence in America already there's individual violence and there's violence that is pushed by by the very system that you're you're decrying. There's also a lot of official violence and there's violence that's disguised in violence that's not talked about the violence of the right wing white terrorists who's you know if he's not Muslim we don't hear about him. So I wonder if you could talk about the ambiguity of violence and the difficulty of negotiating violence. How do you remain nonviolent and resist in a violent culture. I'm not Finally a pacifist for this reason. I lived in Sarajevo when it was being hit with 2000 shells a

day by Serbs who ring the city. Constant sniper fire four to five dead a day two dozen wounded a day. We were literally protected by a trench system. We knew from the dream Valley Boockvar other areas that the Bosnian Serbs had overrun that should the city be captured. About a third of the residents would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven into displacement and refugee camps. But once people are pushed to violence they embrace a poison. Violence is always tragic. I don't believe in just war theory. Those who orchestrated the defenses of Sarajevo at the beginning came from the criminal class. They were people who had a penchant for violence and an access to weapons. So I understand

that when you are faced with the real possibility of your own annihilation as those who lived in Sarajevo did face for three and a half years. That recourse to violence is a normal human reaction. However I also understand that once you reach that point you are. Contaminated by violence and that's the tragedy. We should build the systems by which populations or groups of people don't have to resort to violence because once that happens it is. A vast enterprise of necrophilia. War and I've been in many yes since of war's death. It is about the destruction of all systems of life familial ecological social political.

And that's one of the things that terrifies me about what we're doing because there is no check on. The corporate state. They will push and push and push in till the dispossessed begin to carry out. They're already beginning to carry out acts of violence and I understand it. But I also know that once that happens then. You need the moral order is always turned upside down. I'm reminded of the right old neighbor of whom our president claims to be an interpreter. Writing in the middle of World War 2 in the irony of American history that once America took up arms against totalitarianism against the Nazis against genocide its great danger would be to fall into the illusion of its own righteousness.

And that it seems to me has played itself out over the last 50 60 years in ways that the bulk of the American people have not been able to see through. And now we're paying for it. Yes. One last question this evening before we conclude our dialogue with Chris Hedges the author of Empire of Illusion. I would like to say this in respect. I am a recovering I was Catholic and I and a longtime veteran for peace. I was a naval officer for 25 years. I just got done radiation and I've grown a little bit into solitude and I read most yes I can. As I said I came from South Boston and it was in the habit that we had in our soul and in it it relates to what the Pharisees said I said to it when they talked about quite so I said what kind of good comes from Nazareth. Forgive me if I can't if I

somewhat in my cynicism wonder what good comes from Harvard. None that I know of. But I notice that everybody here would agree that single payer is the answer in all of these meetings and I don't know much about peace I know about war but I never hear a vigorous or forceful. Thing. To do. The antidote for that for the military industrial called Why don't we pay taxes. I never hear that embrace by any speak very much and I believe that with respect to violence. You know your vivid portrayal of our society was summed up in the 30s by Bill Wilson who said you know it's so full one riot. I thought it was going to show Jackson the person and the society as a whole.

But I do believe that this violence has to come. We must do violence from ourselves. I think there is will legitimate violence I don't know how to do that but I do have a question in that I've been betrayed by everyone just no less than Jesus Christ you know he's up there he says. This shit is not working. What keeps you with all your knowledge I've begun to have some empathy for politicians what they know what keeps you. And I sometimes wrestle with from blowing your brains over it. Augustine said that hope has two beautiful daughters. Anger and courage anger at the way things are. And that and the courage to make sure they don't remain the way they are. I think my father was a minister.

He was driven from one church to the next because of his first his support of the civil rights movement. I grew up in an all white rural enclave where Martin Luther King was probably one of the most hated men in America. He had been in North Africa was an Army sergeant World War Two and told me when I was about 12 that if the war was still being fought and I was drafted he would go to prison with me. And I still have this image of sitting in a jail cell with my dad and finally he was a vocal supporter of the gay rights movement in the 1990s. His youngest brother my uncle was gay and lived with his partner in Greenwich Village and my father had a. Particular understanding of the pain of being a gay man in America in the 1000 50s in the 1960s so that when I was at college at Colgate.

He had a church in Syracuse. And when he found that there was no gay and lesbian organization he brought the gay speakers to my campus and I would have to join my dad and gay activists and groups of students I was certainly one of the most committed heterosexuals at Colgate talking about respect and dignity and other ways of being and believing. And this after several of these meetings led to students confiding in my father that they were too uncomfortable to publicly form a Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Colgate. A problem he solved by arriving one day and taking me to lunch telling me that I had found it. So I founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance. I never attended but I had my name on it every week. And when I would go into the dining hall for breakfast lunch or dinner the checker would take my card check it

off and hand it back and go faggot. So I made it my undergraduate mission to seduce his girlfriend and I. Many years later 20 years later. I had been in the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times months of my life in Iraq. I knew the folly of the invasion. I gave a commencement address in Rockford college in 2003 two weeks after George Bush landed on the aircraft carrier. And was booed off the stage you can watch it on YouTube tonight and it was heavy. The right wing media picked it up and trashed me day in and day out so that finally I was called into the office of the New York Times and given a formal written reprimand and told that I must no longer speak about the war in

Iraq. And as I sat in that office you asked what gives me hope. Yes I sat in that office. I realized that I had a choice. I could pay fealty to my career and muzzle myself but to do so would be to betray my dad and I couldn't do that. And I quit. And when I walked out the door I realized that what my father had given me was freedom. Thank you. The M.