Written by John Turner   

Chris Hedges is, for me, one of the more interesting figures in public life now. He has moved from being a respected New York Times foreign correspondent to one of the most complete radicals America has to offer. In the process, he has doubtless lost some of his support. But he doesn’t care; he is driven. It’s the forces driving him that most attract my attention.

I suspect that most people are like me in that they grew up considering themselves normal, or regular, or balanced, or sensible and, therefore definitely separated from those on the fringes of political belief, who could be written off as kooks and consequently ignored. Most, I guess, hold to that position throughout their lives. Others come to feel they have to take a second look.

I’m not ready to go all the way with people like Hedges. Perhaps I never will be. But I cannot ignore him. He is too forceful, too articulate, too appealing.

I spent almost an hour this morning listening to an interview Rob Kall of Op/Ed News conducted with Hedges about his latest book, The Death of the Liberal Class. It was a sobering experience.

Hedges has concluded that the institutions many of us have most trusted to protect decency of life for the majority of people in America have become so corrupted by money and corporate influence they no longer offer anything of value. He is speaking of the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the White House under Barack Obama, National Public Radio and so on. The points he makes about them are striking and not easy to refute.

I suppose his principal position is that we are headed toward the death of anything we can reasonably call civilization if we don’t halt the destruction of the ecosystem. Liberals and their institutions make nice noises about the problem, but they are too weak, too timid, too caught up in respectability and civil discourse, to do anything about it. What we can say about our wishy-washiness with respect to environmental problems we can also say about war, rising inequality of income, destruction of governmental safety nets, the arts, and scientific research. We don’t have institutions now that can effectively move us towards solutions in any of those areas. The forces of greed, wealth and power are running roughshod over what might be called our better instincts. There is not only no balance between oligarchic power and genuine democracy, there is little hope for restoring any balance.

In the past oligarchies destroyed the life and hopes of distinct groups of people. Now they are threatening to destroy the hope of everyone on eath other than themselves.

Hedges points to the distinction between Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Both were elected in dire times by masses of voters who trusted that something could be done to makes conditions better. Roosevelt fulfilled that trust. Obama has betrayed it, says Hedges. Obama has worked to disassemble the very values he publicly espoused. He has given himself to Wall Street.

Is that too harsh a judgment of Obama? Maybe. I continue to hope that it is. But I can’t simply dismiss Hedges’s assessment. He has too much evidence on his side.

The liberal class has become a useless and despised appendage of the corporate system, a set of people so weak they can’t defend either themselves or the values they profess to uphold. The America they, and we, celebrate -- the America we saw portrayed in the president’s state of the union message -- doesn’t exist. Instead we are moving steadily towards a gigantic Camden, New Jersey, spread all across the nation, where unemployable people subsist on doughnuts and fried chicken because they are so educationally degraded they can’t imagine what to eat. The elite liberal classes that support and produce the New York Times have made vast segments of the population invisible.

Journalism has become so completely a vassalage of the corporate system that anyone who tells the truth will be fired. The media, rather than spreading truth, draw a veil over reality.

It’s a bleak picture Hedges draws. His answer is rebellion rather than revolution. Without perpetual antagonism towards wealth and power by major elements of the population we will march towards a collective suicide. He doesn’t assure us that rebellion will turn the tide. But he calls us to it because it is the right thing to do.

As I say, this is the sort of message most of us don’t want to hear. It’s not really respectable, is it? You can’t say this kind of stuff and be welcomed at the Rotary. You can’t be an elder in most churches, or synagogues -- I don’t really know about mosques -- if you offer such analysis.

I’m not sure Chris Hedges is comprehensively correct. In other words, I’m not sure things are as bad as he says they are. But I am sure he is shining light on conditions that are being shaded and ignored by the proper elements of our society. I want him to be heard, not followed as a prophet, but heard. I want his arguments to receive full public attention, because if they can be can be squashed the conditions he projects probably will come about. His is a valuable voice in our time.