Listen to This Article: "Let's Stop Pretending America is a Functioning Democracy"
chrishedges.substack.com
Listen now (11 min) | A functioning democracy could easily dispatch Donald Trump and his doppelgängers. A failed democracy and bankrupt liberalism assures their ascendancy.
If we could compare the number of people reading Chris's post with the number of people who tuned into MSN and Fox News today we could have the answer to what is wrong with this country. The corporate lying media have turned the vast majority of Americans into Stepford people who have no idea what's really going on.; they blame Trump or Biden but it's actually corporate tyranny (as Crhis wisely points out) that is destroying us.
I am ready to put my head in the oven after reading this. It is an electric oven so that would only f. up my hair. I read this, and it all makes sense to me except, once again - I am left with feeling hopeless and helpless; which is not going to help me or anyone around me. I am wanting Mr. Hedges to talk about the reality of dealing with this reality, personally, without becoming self-destructive. I feel talked at but not talked to. We may be in a failing democracy, but it could also be called a democracy trying to find itself, to bring itself to full maturity. Finding ourselves is messy and there is always the possibility that we will stay forever lost. One thing that immature people, or in this case, democracies do is they fail to look in the mirror and acknowledge their own short comings, their own darker side. I think in one of Mr. Hedges more hopeful earlier pieces he suggests that; for all of us to do that - that these times are calling us to come back to ourselves personally and collectively. In some ways the people in this hopeful, self-absorbed, ignorant at times, brutal at times, generous at times, narcissistic at times (all adolecent traits) country are naive to their own selves and certainly, politicians and the populace, are naive about the vacuousness and danger of a man like Trump. And yes, I agree - he moved in to a situation ripe for his taking. But that does not negate the need to speak up to him; skillfully. Not giving him more ammunition.
I don't know what the corrective is, (thank God I know that) but I will keep on trucking on. I am an artist and poet. I refuse to give in to hopelessness, or at least I refuse to stay there for a long time. It's not good for my health and commitment to moderate my drinking. I have a cockeyed belief maybe that it is up to each and everyone of us to make changes, however small.. And while I don't agree with all of what Joseph Campbell has to say, this quote always struck me as a truth "And so everyone of us share the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." Not sure what the "bright moments" would translate into, but what I take from this is - it is up to each of us; our tribe, the government is not going to do it for us. So do what you can. Bridge the gap with the"other side." Speak up to your own tribe when they are self-righteous. Plant a wildflower lawn. Volunteer at a food bank. Listen to others, beyond their opinion; but also don't allow viciousness to come at you either. Grownups have boundaries. Look at your own darkness before you point it out in others. All of these things are important personally and nationally. And the nation is made up of the personal.
I want to hear from Mr. Hedges how he deals with his own despair, personally.
We the people must turn our backs on the very system that has failed us and has supported the rich for over 200 years. That is long enough to be taken to the cleaners with nothing to show for it except the false Federal Debt. Eliminate the FED and out the window goes the debt. ELIMINATE THE SYSTEM AND THE CRONIES, AND WE GET WHAT WE MAKE....HOPEFULLY A PEACEFUL, CONSIDERATE, COMPASSIONATE SOCIETY. Nothing short of this will amount to much.
What’s the difference in Americans watching “Top Gun Maverick” and the Soviet father letting his kids play on the tank?
As Neil Postman wrote in “Amusing ourselves to death” and as FCC Chairman, Newton Minow, said of the entertainment propaganda of this "Wasteland of TV" --- keeping the people distracted from vast wars, economic inequality, and the reality of "the disease of Rupublics being Empire" are an element of the "Tropic of Cancer" --- which are so easily covered over by this dual-party duopoly of EMPIRE.
Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal Child-Killing & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] — which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy.
BTW, and I'll research this to be sure, but I'll bet that since the end of the Second World War of Empires, that the American cheer, "We're #1", "We're #1", "We're #1" --- is equally true in terms of the millions of people killed in wars, along with America, when the final figures are in, that America will also be #1 in GINI Coefficient of Wealth INEQUALITY and overtaking Russia.
You may be the disdainer-in-chief. You are perceptive, eloquent, and definitive. So now what?
I've put out my plea that you open that question for us, but I want to say something else here, which is how disaster contains the seed of renewal. The Hegelian dialectic describes a cyclical pattern where, when the current situation, the thesis, has so much going on that's contrary to its elemental nature (non-fitting elements are the antithesis), the center cannot hold and the system reconfigures into a synthesis (that becomes the new thesis) that accounts for all those contradictions.
It's a widely accepted dictum that change happens when the going gets bad enough, like what global warming could do. Get half the population under water and we won't cling to business as usual. This isn't pie in the sky; it's how systems work. But omg, even the pandemic didn't do it for us, where we would have gotten a gift from that curse. We are insane, knowing we are headed for a cliff we keep on running. Chris, what will stop us? How about you?
By the by, Thom Hartmann tweeted this: "In this speech by President Biden, I’m hearing the echoes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It was absolutely brilliant!." I'd like to hear you thrash that out with him. In fact, you could convene fellow gadflies, like Chomsky and Reich and Moore and Hartmann. None of them are offering ideas, either, and that meeting, where you'd get coherent on positions and become a responsible journalist force, would be good for all of us,.
Again... attempting to swim in the deep water of the pool while hanging onto the shallow end unwilling to let go.
I see progress though. I see the internal conflicts boiling and leading to the epiphanies of needed understanding to break out of the previous ideological identity programming that stands in the way.
The situation we are in is both complex and simple to understand. On the simple side it is the failure of globalism... that we have allowed The Elect to gut middle-class work opportunity for the benefit of the profit and earnings of the 1%. We saw similar problems during the Gilded Age but the 1% was focused mostly on domestic economic consolidation. The Great Depression and the wars, combined with labor and anti-trust acts, returned a share of the economic benefits back to the middle-class. And because of that the middle-class rocketed forward and put the economy on hyper-drive.
We are in a new gilded age, but this time we are more screwed. We are more screwed because the 1% were allowed to consolidate and grow their wealth by exporting our earned industrial knowhow to China and other countries... lifting their middle class at the expense of ours. At the same time The Elect kept the borders open and millions of new poor and uneducated people came to compete with the shrinking supply of career paths available. We have also spent ourselves into massive debt and deficits and there is no more room for FDR-type "solutions".
So what do we do to start to fix this mess?
We elect new leaders with the ideas of DJT. Understanding this is the letting go of the shallow end and effectively swimming in the deep water.
That was very good. I'm glad that someone with a voice is saying this.
On thing that would help the situation drastically is that if people would stop believing the mass media. It is pure PSYOP and has people living in total delusion. The opinion management skills of the PR industry and government agencies have grown tremendously over the last century, since the day of Edward Bernays (The Father of Spin).
Few people have any concept of just how completely inaccurate and deceptive the information being fed to us is, or how psychologically sophisticated it is.
I love your work Chris, hearing the truth and to where we are headed, but what do we do? What do you tell your kids? Do we just watch the republic be destroyed completely?
Watching Biden's speech, the first image that popped into my mind's eye were the documentaries that Leni Riefenstahl, the German auteur and political propagandist, directed for the Third Reich if they were colorized and updated for an American audience. The blood-red, ominous back lighting against the brick wall, the robotic cadence of the honor guard of the two Marines in dressed blues who halted on either side of stage, that large American flag draped vertically behind the entrance to the stage exactly as the Nazi flag was presented for rallies of the Third Reich, and the darkened silhouettes of Biden and the First Lady walking on stage when the front lighting was cued as the First Lady gave Biden a kiss. I love propaganda. It's a guilty pleasure watching war porn as a Vietnam veteran. I almost jumped up from my chair, kicked my heels, gave the Nazi salute and screamed, "Sieg Heil, Mein Fuhrer! I vish to die for vez Fatherland!" and break into a chorus of the "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" scene from Bob Fosse's classic movie, "Cabaret," of the crumbling Weimar Republic. But seriously, volk. Ironic that Biden dodged the draft as did the other war criminals of our forever wars like Cheney and Clinton or hid out joining the National Guard like Bush Junior and Bolton. I read "Democracy, Inc." by Sheldon Wolin because I've been following Chris Hedges since his old days at Truthdig. I could say all these war criminals should be lined up in front of that Black Wall on the Mall and shot by a firing squad at dawn as a public service to humanity. But I did that once at The American Conservative. I got banned from making comments. So I offer up this proposal merely as a thought experiment. It's just too late to reverse the engine of the war machine. We are barreling down the tracks in a rendezvous with history like a slow motion video of a train wreck just around the bend as surely as Oedipus Rex did when he met his father, who had abandoned him, bound his ankles and cast him in the wilderness as our political fathers did to us during the draft, on his journey of self discovery on that fork in the mountain trail to Athens. George Marshall, Secretary of State, attended the ceremonial signing of The National Security Act of 1947 at the White House. After the signing of the bill, Marshall walked up to President Harry Truman and warned, "Mister President, I fear we have militarized the decision-making process." As Gore Vidal said in one of his essays, "It's been all downhill from there." Vidal also warned toward the end of his career in interviews when asked how he was doing replied, about as good as he could since the country has entered the Weimar Republic phase of its decline. When it was noted Fed Chairman Paul Volker already whipped inflation during the Reagan administration, he again replied, just wait. He seems to have been prescient given the dark economic clouds on the horizon like Michael Barry of "The Big Short' fame . So I'm a fatalist. What's happened to this country during my life is worthy of a Greek tragedy. I empathize with the rage of the far right in this country on January 6th. I felt the same rage for many years after Vietnam. But then having been a medic corpsman, I recalled the horrific things I saw. And finally calmed. I haven't the heart for violence. But defeat and betray are a potent witch's brew to the soul. Revenge is a grave you dig for yourself is an old Serbian adage. War poisons everybody, as Howard Zinn used to say. So I sit back and watch the freak show. "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" by Robert Frost is one of my favorite poems. Why do people go to the shore and look at the sea when the real human drama of life is behind them? "They cannot look out far/They cannot look out in deep./ But when was that ever a bar/ To the watch they keep?" So I sit back and watch. Like my country, I'm neither out far nor in deep.
Phew. I am weighing in again. Was glad to see other comments that echoed my own feelings of - "okay - I hear you , a brilliant assessment, but what do we do now? " It might be good to open this up to a discussion . I live alone and find it dangerous to read these dire things without folks to process it, take it to the next step... Thank you all.
That was very good. I'm glad that someone with a voice is saying this.
On thing that would help the situation drastically is that if people would stop believing the mass media. It is pure PSYOP and has people living in total delusion. The opinion management skills of the PR industry and government agencies have grown tremendously over the last century, since the day of Edward Bernays (The Father of Spin).
Few people have any concept of just how completely inaccurate and deceptive the information being fed to us is, or how psychologically sophisticated it is.
So, I totally agree with your incredibly intelligent analysis. What I want to know is what should we do as a result? I have four grandchildren. I worry that there will be no planet for them to live on. In addition, there is currently no way, as you have pointed out, to influence the current system. Voting third party is my choice, but it means nothing. Mass movements that face a
If we could compare the number of people reading Chris's post with the number of people who tuned into MSN and Fox News today we could have the answer to what is wrong with this country. The corporate lying media have turned the vast majority of Americans into Stepford people who have no idea what's really going on.; they blame Trump or Biden but it's actually corporate tyranny (as Crhis wisely points out) that is destroying us.
I am ready to put my head in the oven after reading this. It is an electric oven so that would only f. up my hair. I read this, and it all makes sense to me except, once again - I am left with feeling hopeless and helpless; which is not going to help me or anyone around me. I am wanting Mr. Hedges to talk about the reality of dealing with this reality, personally, without becoming self-destructive. I feel talked at but not talked to. We may be in a failing democracy, but it could also be called a democracy trying to find itself, to bring itself to full maturity. Finding ourselves is messy and there is always the possibility that we will stay forever lost. One thing that immature people, or in this case, democracies do is they fail to look in the mirror and acknowledge their own short comings, their own darker side. I think in one of Mr. Hedges more hopeful earlier pieces he suggests that; for all of us to do that - that these times are calling us to come back to ourselves personally and collectively. In some ways the people in this hopeful, self-absorbed, ignorant at times, brutal at times, generous at times, narcissistic at times (all adolecent traits) country are naive to their own selves and certainly, politicians and the populace, are naive about the vacuousness and danger of a man like Trump. And yes, I agree - he moved in to a situation ripe for his taking. But that does not negate the need to speak up to him; skillfully. Not giving him more ammunition.
I don't know what the corrective is, (thank God I know that) but I will keep on trucking on. I am an artist and poet. I refuse to give in to hopelessness, or at least I refuse to stay there for a long time. It's not good for my health and commitment to moderate my drinking. I have a cockeyed belief maybe that it is up to each and everyone of us to make changes, however small.. And while I don't agree with all of what Joseph Campbell has to say, this quote always struck me as a truth "And so everyone of us share the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." Not sure what the "bright moments" would translate into, but what I take from this is - it is up to each of us; our tribe, the government is not going to do it for us. So do what you can. Bridge the gap with the"other side." Speak up to your own tribe when they are self-righteous. Plant a wildflower lawn. Volunteer at a food bank. Listen to others, beyond their opinion; but also don't allow viciousness to come at you either. Grownups have boundaries. Look at your own darkness before you point it out in others. All of these things are important personally and nationally. And the nation is made up of the personal.
I want to hear from Mr. Hedges how he deals with his own despair, personally.
We the people must turn our backs on the very system that has failed us and has supported the rich for over 200 years. That is long enough to be taken to the cleaners with nothing to show for it except the false Federal Debt. Eliminate the FED and out the window goes the debt. ELIMINATE THE SYSTEM AND THE CRONIES, AND WE GET WHAT WE MAKE....HOPEFULLY A PEACEFUL, CONSIDERATE, COMPASSIONATE SOCIETY. Nothing short of this will amount to much.
What’s the difference in Americans watching “Top Gun Maverick” and the Soviet father letting his kids play on the tank?
As Neil Postman wrote in “Amusing ourselves to death” and as FCC Chairman, Newton Minow, said of the entertainment propaganda of this "Wasteland of TV" --- keeping the people distracted from vast wars, economic inequality, and the reality of "the disease of Rupublics being Empire" are an element of the "Tropic of Cancer" --- which are so easily covered over by this dual-party duopoly of EMPIRE.
Disguised Global Crony Capitalist Racist Propagandist Criminal Ecocidal Child-Killing & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] — which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy.
BTW, and I'll research this to be sure, but I'll bet that since the end of the Second World War of Empires, that the American cheer, "We're #1", "We're #1", "We're #1" --- is equally true in terms of the millions of people killed in wars, along with America, when the final figures are in, that America will also be #1 in GINI Coefficient of Wealth INEQUALITY and overtaking Russia.
You may be the disdainer-in-chief. You are perceptive, eloquent, and definitive. So now what?
I've put out my plea that you open that question for us, but I want to say something else here, which is how disaster contains the seed of renewal. The Hegelian dialectic describes a cyclical pattern where, when the current situation, the thesis, has so much going on that's contrary to its elemental nature (non-fitting elements are the antithesis), the center cannot hold and the system reconfigures into a synthesis (that becomes the new thesis) that accounts for all those contradictions.
It's a widely accepted dictum that change happens when the going gets bad enough, like what global warming could do. Get half the population under water and we won't cling to business as usual. This isn't pie in the sky; it's how systems work. But omg, even the pandemic didn't do it for us, where we would have gotten a gift from that curse. We are insane, knowing we are headed for a cliff we keep on running. Chris, what will stop us? How about you?
By the by, Thom Hartmann tweeted this: "In this speech by President Biden, I’m hearing the echoes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It was absolutely brilliant!." I'd like to hear you thrash that out with him. In fact, you could convene fellow gadflies, like Chomsky and Reich and Moore and Hartmann. None of them are offering ideas, either, and that meeting, where you'd get coherent on positions and become a responsible journalist force, would be good for all of us,.
Again... attempting to swim in the deep water of the pool while hanging onto the shallow end unwilling to let go.
I see progress though. I see the internal conflicts boiling and leading to the epiphanies of needed understanding to break out of the previous ideological identity programming that stands in the way.
The situation we are in is both complex and simple to understand. On the simple side it is the failure of globalism... that we have allowed The Elect to gut middle-class work opportunity for the benefit of the profit and earnings of the 1%. We saw similar problems during the Gilded Age but the 1% was focused mostly on domestic economic consolidation. The Great Depression and the wars, combined with labor and anti-trust acts, returned a share of the economic benefits back to the middle-class. And because of that the middle-class rocketed forward and put the economy on hyper-drive.
We are in a new gilded age, but this time we are more screwed. We are more screwed because the 1% were allowed to consolidate and grow their wealth by exporting our earned industrial knowhow to China and other countries... lifting their middle class at the expense of ours. At the same time The Elect kept the borders open and millions of new poor and uneducated people came to compete with the shrinking supply of career paths available. We have also spent ourselves into massive debt and deficits and there is no more room for FDR-type "solutions".
So what do we do to start to fix this mess?
We elect new leaders with the ideas of DJT. Understanding this is the letting go of the shallow end and effectively swimming in the deep water.
That was very good. I'm glad that someone with a voice is saying this.
On thing that would help the situation drastically is that if people would stop believing the mass media. It is pure PSYOP and has people living in total delusion. The opinion management skills of the PR industry and government agencies have grown tremendously over the last century, since the day of Edward Bernays (The Father of Spin).
Few people have any concept of just how completely inaccurate and deceptive the information being fed to us is, or how psychologically sophisticated it is.
Drake
Drake Chamberlin
Media & Communication Action Project
https://m-cap.org/
I love your work Chris, hearing the truth and to where we are headed, but what do we do? What do you tell your kids? Do we just watch the republic be destroyed completely?
Watching Biden's speech, the first image that popped into my mind's eye were the documentaries that Leni Riefenstahl, the German auteur and political propagandist, directed for the Third Reich if they were colorized and updated for an American audience. The blood-red, ominous back lighting against the brick wall, the robotic cadence of the honor guard of the two Marines in dressed blues who halted on either side of stage, that large American flag draped vertically behind the entrance to the stage exactly as the Nazi flag was presented for rallies of the Third Reich, and the darkened silhouettes of Biden and the First Lady walking on stage when the front lighting was cued as the First Lady gave Biden a kiss. I love propaganda. It's a guilty pleasure watching war porn as a Vietnam veteran. I almost jumped up from my chair, kicked my heels, gave the Nazi salute and screamed, "Sieg Heil, Mein Fuhrer! I vish to die for vez Fatherland!" and break into a chorus of the "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" scene from Bob Fosse's classic movie, "Cabaret," of the crumbling Weimar Republic. But seriously, volk. Ironic that Biden dodged the draft as did the other war criminals of our forever wars like Cheney and Clinton or hid out joining the National Guard like Bush Junior and Bolton. I read "Democracy, Inc." by Sheldon Wolin because I've been following Chris Hedges since his old days at Truthdig. I could say all these war criminals should be lined up in front of that Black Wall on the Mall and shot by a firing squad at dawn as a public service to humanity. But I did that once at The American Conservative. I got banned from making comments. So I offer up this proposal merely as a thought experiment. It's just too late to reverse the engine of the war machine. We are barreling down the tracks in a rendezvous with history like a slow motion video of a train wreck just around the bend as surely as Oedipus Rex did when he met his father, who had abandoned him, bound his ankles and cast him in the wilderness as our political fathers did to us during the draft, on his journey of self discovery on that fork in the mountain trail to Athens. George Marshall, Secretary of State, attended the ceremonial signing of The National Security Act of 1947 at the White House. After the signing of the bill, Marshall walked up to President Harry Truman and warned, "Mister President, I fear we have militarized the decision-making process." As Gore Vidal said in one of his essays, "It's been all downhill from there." Vidal also warned toward the end of his career in interviews when asked how he was doing replied, about as good as he could since the country has entered the Weimar Republic phase of its decline. When it was noted Fed Chairman Paul Volker already whipped inflation during the Reagan administration, he again replied, just wait. He seems to have been prescient given the dark economic clouds on the horizon like Michael Barry of "The Big Short' fame . So I'm a fatalist. What's happened to this country during my life is worthy of a Greek tragedy. I empathize with the rage of the far right in this country on January 6th. I felt the same rage for many years after Vietnam. But then having been a medic corpsman, I recalled the horrific things I saw. And finally calmed. I haven't the heart for violence. But defeat and betray are a potent witch's brew to the soul. Revenge is a grave you dig for yourself is an old Serbian adage. War poisons everybody, as Howard Zinn used to say. So I sit back and watch the freak show. "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" by Robert Frost is one of my favorite poems. Why do people go to the shore and look at the sea when the real human drama of life is behind them? "They cannot look out far/They cannot look out in deep./ But when was that ever a bar/ To the watch they keep?" So I sit back and watch. Like my country, I'm neither out far nor in deep.
Phew. I am weighing in again. Was glad to see other comments that echoed my own feelings of - "okay - I hear you , a brilliant assessment, but what do we do now? " It might be good to open this up to a discussion . I live alone and find it dangerous to read these dire things without folks to process it, take it to the next step... Thank you all.
uplifting;)
I never know what to say. I am 74 and simple minded, I lack formal education and I am just learning to write.
My father told me 70 years ago America was an oligarchy and nothing has changed but the names of the witches. My father was a wandering Aramean.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. It was about the founding of Harvard.
That was very good. I'm glad that someone with a voice is saying this.
On thing that would help the situation drastically is that if people would stop believing the mass media. It is pure PSYOP and has people living in total delusion. The opinion management skills of the PR industry and government agencies have grown tremendously over the last century, since the day of Edward Bernays (The Father of Spin).
Few people have any concept of just how completely inaccurate and deceptive the information being fed to us is, or how psychologically sophisticated it is.
Drake
Drake Chamberlin
Media & Communication Action Project
https://m-cap.org/
So, I totally agree with your incredibly intelligent analysis. What I want to know is what should we do as a result? I have four grandchildren. I worry that there will be no planet for them to live on. In addition, there is currently no way, as you have pointed out, to influence the current system. Voting third party is my choice, but it means nothing. Mass movements that face a
militarized police force are suicidal. Help!!!