In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges wrote “The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it.”
I wrote a response to a Chris Hedges post a short while ago, saying that as a Canadian, it doesn't matter to me who wins the American election........since both parties support Israel and the military industrial complex. It precipitated a long interchange with the person I sent my original response to...turned out he was also Canadian but missed I wasn't talking to him specifically, but to him as a representative American.
Rather amusing in the end...but it taught me something I think we all need to consider. In polarized times, its easy to see an enemy and hard to identify a friend. In a similar way, reading this interview its easy to be forced to see how bad everything is, and has been at least since the Iraq war, in America.
Gaza may be the point of no return....the canary in the coal mine about to explode. I understand why so many progressive people don't want to talk about it.........the real evil, in which there is no lesser, is on full view. You have to shut down, or be a political illiterate, not to see that America is on the wrong side........has probably been on the wrong side for decades. Tying that repeated error to capitalism is harder, but not that much harder when Chris tells us how much the billionaires pull in....and donate.
And then all those other wars, all those other virtuous forays into other peoples countries, all those destroyed or devestated families, all those little maimed corpses........rain down through the lost years upon all our westernized, sanitized, self satisfied heads. OMG, WE ARE THE EVIL EMPIRE!!!
Who knew? Well quite a few of us in point of fact...many of us marched against the Iraq war, the powerful didn't care. But now blackness has seeped over the entire history....turns out we in the west have been funding, supporting and dying in these wars since Korea. But the thing is....
Isn't knowing, even if very late, still a good thing??? And don't a lot of us know now....as Gaza gets bombed daily, to the very beaches, and the West Bank braces for its cleansing???
The question is, now that we know, what do we do?
For starters, I'd like us to stop name calling the people. Stop imagining the masses are too dumb to care....it might be true, but we don't know that. And even if, blaming the people isn't an action...its part of the blame game being played out everywhere now.
Chris says his prison students know where we are. So do many in the third world. So do the people who write in here. So do I.
But what do we do....singly, since many of us are alone in our knowledge.....but also publicly? We need actions, lots of them, and some of them actions that don't get us fired. I know it may seem cowardly, but I don't believe all journalists are careerists. Many of them are, but others are just trying to make a living in their chosen field. Many wish they'd been told the real story on the gig, before they invested in so many student loans.
Somehow, I want us to be kinder to each other....more humane. I also want a raft of ideas about what to do. We've marched, written letters, sent money to Palestinian aid organizations....but it still seems too little and without momentum.
It feels to me like we've done enough analysis. Any chance we could brainstorm a raft of actions, little, medium and big.......together. The thought of this world dying without a fight is what fills me with despair, not for myself, but for the little people I love.
“ funding, supporting and dying in these wars since Korea.” You might give a look at the Philippines, Mexico, and Cuba, to see that foreign intervention goes much farther back than Korea.
Thanks for the reminder........its hard to keep up with the 'good works' of the Americans...but you are right...I'm trying to forget shooting Philippinos trapped in that hollow or crater, like shooting ducks in a barrel.
If real history was taught in your schools, things might change. As it is, you really have to dig to get the whole story, which isn't much worse than what the Israeli's are doing in Palestine just now....but not much better either.
Ingamarie, I'm a curious person and I would like to know how history is taught in Canada, what about treatment of the natives, what about its participation and support of our unjustified wars in the world.
Short answer, I don't know. I've been retired for almost a quarter of a century, but when I taught there was some good social teachers....and since I've left, there has been a lot of work on teaching reconciliation, the truth about residential schools etc.
I don't think most Canadians know the degree to which we've followed the American lead on foreign policy...but in a quiet way. We didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq, but after that war got underway, we were more supportive than most of us realized. We'd like to be superior to you folks, but I've recently read a Canadian exploration called CANADA'S LONG WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY....by Ives Engler. It's well documented...short and to the point, going back to the ousting of Mossedegh in Iran in the 50's and sad to say...
We aren't the peace keepers we imagine. One good side bar of the genocide in Gaza: more Canadians are learning we don't stand with the oppressed. Not really...we do what our corporations want. Whenever a right wing coup happens...our extractivists move in.
I love the pairing of Hedges and Dore. It even sounds like it could be a comedy team. They complement each other perfectly, because each carries in him a dose of the other, and both have so much to offer.
I’m also happy that Chris Hedges doesn’t hold Dore’s recent tirades about Cornel West against him. Dore’s “take no prisoners” personality can be unproductive, but I always feel he’s honest and respectful. Imagine if yesterday’s debate had included West!
The “left”, can’t bear any more feuds at this time, or it’ll end up like the Colloseum scene in Life of Brian: “Judean Peoples Front?!? Bah! We’re the People’s Front Of Judea!!”
I don’t think can I be as forgiving as you are to Jimmy Dore. Even outside of his whole Cornel West debacle. His attacks on other progressives leaders, most notably Noam Chomsky, always struct me as an act to get more money and attention by attacking everyone and anything depending on what is hot at the moment. I enjoyed this interview, but rolled my eyes a few times at the hypocrisy of such a statement as “they’ll never let us come together. And the politics of division is very powerful…”. It might be reckless to call him a charlatan given I agreed to much of what was said here but he does behave differently from what I’ve seen from his own show.
Agreed. Jesters were in the business of telling some truths occasionally, but they don't entertain me. After listening to some of his shows I quit listening to him.
I appreciated the intelligent dialog between Chris Hedges and Jimmy Dore. But it is also a commentary on these disturbing times that a clearly intelligent person feels he must choose between a corporate stooge and a convicted sociopath (and also a stooge) (and among many other things, 26+ women have accused him of sexual harassment, abuse to rape - is that no small thing?) and who is so out of control he blunders into speaking the Empire's truths now and again. And that gives "hope?" It's scary! We live in a nuclear age on edge! And then there's Gaza undergoing a horrific genocide in the name of both parties as well as "drill baby drill" (by both parties) in an environment in serious climate crisis! This current politically insane climate (and the DNC convention and the "debate") make me feel like I've entered a psychotic ward. Is this what the Decline of a "Civilization" sounds and feels like?
I don’t think the silly phrase “anti-vax is appropriate here. Like me, RFK, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Jimmy Dore, no one can be “anti-vax” because there’s no “Vax” to begin with. The medical product currently called a vaccine doesn’t work. It doesn’t prevent illness. It doesn’t prevent transmission. There’s credible evidence that the main function of the vaccine is social control through mandates. If you can explain the justification for mandatory “vaccination” using a product which does not prevent transmission of the virus, which was never even tested for transmission, I’m interested in your explanation. (The argument that it decreases the severity of infection is specious, because no clinical tests have ever been devised which could prove that.)
In a world where the people are lied to in every conceivable way about every subject, skepticism is a duty. The President promised that the vaccine worked. He also claimed that he saw photos of beheaded babies on October 7th. Harris claimed that there were “mass rapes” as well, and she called the riot on January 6th an “armed insurrection”, maybe because the rioters each had two arms.
As William Burroughs said “If you aren’t paranoid, you aren’t paying attention.”
Has your doctor recommended you to be vaccinated? What is your explanation that the strength of the epidemics has decrease and now when the majority of the population is vaccinated, we don't have any more millions of deaths in America?
I don’t have a doctor. I haven’t been treated by a doctor since 1977. But I have a recommendation. Study immunology, and I mean that in a friendly way. Why dod the black plague kill a third of Europe and then die out? That’s what they do. But neither Jimmy Dore, RFK, nor I have ever told anyone not to get vaccinated. Your body, your choice. My body, my choice. And when the “vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission there can be no rational argument against being ”anti-vax”. Like Dore, I’m a private citizen. I don’t see what makes it anyone else’s business.
Good policy that I also follow: your business is your business and my business is mine. I don't need to study immunology, just to read the opinion of credited immunologist and specially follow my doctor's advice, who I'm sure he doesn't want to lose a client to covid, is enough. If you have not had a doctor for so long, you must be immune to everything. Good for you! Pandemics just don't die out, we have to protect ourselves with vaccines, isolation from infected people or whatever the experts advise, or they will continue and mutate causing greater damage. My opinion, of course.
Jimmy Dore is (or used to be, hadn't seen anything about him in a while) anti-vaxx as in "vaccines cause autism" . Heard him saying that when I tried to watch his show back when Bernie ran the first time. So yes, anti-vaxx, Robert Kennedy type. Not only about COVID
We have to protect ourselves and the world against COVID and other pandemics because they don't die fast, and we don't want they to persist as the black death pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
Major outbreaks or Yersinia pestis (Wikipedia)
Years Place Death estimates Article/citation
1347–51 Europe, Asia, Middle East 75,000,000–200,000,000 Black Death[71]
1360–63 England 700–800,000 Black Death in England
1464–66 Paris 40,000
1471 England 300–400,000 [72]
1479–80 England 400–500,000 [72]
1563–64 England 20,136+ 1563 London plague
1576–77 Venice 50,000 [73]
1582–83 Tenerife 5,000–9,000 [70]
1592–93 England 19,900+ 1592–1593 London plague
1596–99 Castile 500,000 [54]
1603–11 London 43,000 [74]
1620–21 Algiers 30–50,000 [36]
1628–31 France 1,000,000 [62]
1629–31 Italy 1,000,000 Italian plague of 1629–31[75]
1633–44 China (Ming dynasty) 200,000+ Great Plague in the late Ming dynasty[76][77]
1647–52 Southern Spain 500,000 Great Plague of Seville
1654–55 Russia 700,000 [50][51]
1656–58 Kingdom of Naples 1,250,000 Naples Plague[78]
1665–66 London 70–100,000 Great Plague of London
1675–76 Malta 11,300 1675–76 Malta plague epidemic
1679–80 Austria 76,000 Great Plague of Vienna
1681 Prague 83,000
1689–90 Baghdad 150,000 [38]
1704–10 Poland 75,000 Great Northern War plague outbreak
1709–13 Baltic 300–400,000 Great Northern War plague outbreak
1720s Marseille 100,000 Great Plague of Marseille
1738–40 Hungary & Croatia 50,000 Great Plague of 1738
1770s Moscow 75,000 Russian plague of 1770–72
1772–1773 Persian Empire 2,000,000 1772–1773 Persian Plague[79]
Disappointed. Jimmy Dore is a little more than just a bit narcissistic. Having said that, everything he said about the dems is true. The problem is that he is completely trapped in the duopoly discourse: in order to show how terrible one party is, he feels like he needs to draw an imaginary silver line about the other party. The republicans are not even a party anymore, they are a cult. Trump is only concerned about himself, he will have a bunch of terrible people running the country while he gives incoherent speeches and praises himself.
Dore seems to ignore that yes, Trump is a racist, Tucker Carlson is a racist. He doesn't have to praise those just because the democrats are so bad. I didn't hear him defend the free speech of students for exemple.
Hope for Trump is laughable. Republican think tanks, and the party itself are not hiding their goal of deregulating everything. This has real consequences for everyday life everywhere. According to them, the first day will be for firing most of the federal employees. Then there will be nobody to do the things that are important to millions. People need the government to work for them.
Project 2025 will simply finish what is left of education. Disabled people will be segregated again, the "parents' rights" people will turn education into bible studies, the Texan version of Moses as a founding father.
Tired of "dems are bad, the GOP is bad too but they say the right things". Pathetic. Republicans lie and Trump already showed us how much he lies. What is the logic for believing him this time? There are people who don't want neither party and are tired of the comparisons to measure the metaphorical dicks.
Jimmy Dore is also a millionaire, let's not forget.
Things need to change in this country and it will be ugly and it will hurt but it is not by playing the duopoly game that we can find a sliver of hope. It is by rejecting it. Jimmy Dore is just another pawn who likes to rant about some people depending on how he wakes up that day
I am voting Green because there is nothing worse than genocide and my vote never belonged to democrats. But I don't have any illusions that a Trump presidency will not be so bad. It will be devastating. But I guess the bridges in this country need to be burnt and some revolution needs to happen.
I live in the UK and knew nothing about Jimmy Dore. I watched the interview, didn't read it and initially I quite enjoyed Dore's almost hypnotic sweep of words, the facility that goes with being, that is if he is, a stand-up comedian. I did watch to the end but I began to tire of the easy generalisations, the evidence-free assertions and I longed for Chris Hedges to intervene much more than he did.
I wont go into detail, others here have done some of that and I don't have the time (or inclination) but what especially jarred with me were the gliding across vaccinations, Russell Brand, Donald Trump. Much that he said about e.g. the Democrat party was uncontroversial to anyone even a little bit leftleaning.
I really wasn't sure at the end -- would he really prefer President Trump to President Harris?
Mr Dore is a comedian and as aware as Mr Hedges that this DUOPOLY will change NOTHING - so what to do? As Mr Hedges said many times: General Strikes (otherwise it will just be 'the can kicked down the road') would be a method, as voting for 3rd party will achieve (almost surely) nothing (also in Europa you cannot get rid of the old party structures, so what could we do??)
The truth is that voters are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and the only thing we can do is vote third party, which only has the power to voice disapproval and _maybe_ let the morally bankrupt parties know we want more substantial politics than we are are getting BUT as money soaked as our political system is, WITH a press that no longer advances marginalized voices, even that is hard. But I'm just not going to vote for Harris. Period. In my deep red state, I will write in Jill Stein. But I believe there is worth in finding solidarity with people across the political spectrum that acknowledges the brokenness of our politics. It is the way forward.
While I don't agree with everything Chris has to say, I happily pay $5 per month to support his fearless independent journalism. This particular post is surprising, disheartening, and sadly not reported. The crude use of unchecked innuendo and exaggeration - and not just by Gore - is kind of shocking. I sure hope Chris is not fiddling with unfunny comedians while Rome burns.....
If you see the "left" parties in Europe and the US as the class consciousness of the PMC made manifest, everything makes sense. The masses are too cloddish, backward, unsophisitcated and unfashionable to be entrusted with any real power, while We The Better Sort of People, the educated professionals who would never do something so oafish as misgender someone, we will use that power much more wisely.
At the same time, contemporary left discourse does not require the rulers to give up any part of The Goodies.
The PMC can have it both ways. Demand more more power because of their self-evidently superior virtue, but at the same time, the existing distribution of wealth in their favor is obviously just and proper.
"Feral Finister inside a leather trunk.....can't come out to speak to us because he is defunct. Young women listen to him because he has SOME smart ideas but eventually see him for what he is.. A man without morals/educated in the USA.
I don't care what you think and I don't write with you in mind. How you reached your conclusion when I wrote not a word about America or Europe says volumes about you and your delusions of persecution.
Sorry, seems like you're jumping the shark here. Jimmy Dore, an anti-vaxxer, he's just restating what you've said in the past, nothing new to this content.
Mr Dore was noted as commenting from an article about vaccination rates and high rates of covid in Singapore. He totally misrepresented the report skipping over everything that had anything good to say about Singapore's vaccination program and even changed some of the text to fit his own needs. This isn't what we need in this time of trying to figure out creative ways to keep our government from destroying life as we know it.
I deal in solutions to problems and I'm kind of tired of this pontification.
Well Dore is certainly not the typical caliber for guest for a Chris Hedges interview but, I think he has genuinely been marginalized--as has Hedges, Taibbi, Robert Scheer, Glenn Greenwald and others--and there is something about that surreal experience, when perhaps you had been quite popular at one point that can make people a little hyper-alert and suspicious of everything. Some of his comments are kind of reminiscent of reading Catch-22. (Look, I don't like our current COVID vaccines but people really died and are still dying from the disease... They are the tools we have for this wily virus.) It is a surreal world when (as I sometimes say) you know lies are being told, but a good lie always contains a bit of truth and it's hard to parse that exact point when the lie starts or ends.
But maybe even more important is the practice of talking with people who don't strictly reside in the exact same silo that you reside in; so you hear different and sometimes discordant viewpoints. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. We need to do it when we can
I was calm when I started reading “The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore).” Having now finished reading the introduction, transcript, and comments, I can hardly breathe.
This experience is not different in kind from what it has been like since 2016 to read the news and political and social commentary. But this particular experience seems to be much worse in degree than usual. Why?
After a bit of intuitive introspection, I am guessing that the reason is the immediate political situation in which we are all living.
The first element in this situation is that for years we have been desperately hoping that Donald Trump will not be re-elected in November 2024. If he is, he will transform America into a fascist state, and (in Sarah Kendzior’s terrible phrase) it will take “generations of martyrs” to restore democracy to America. It is true that America in 2024 is seriously failing as a democracy, but we are not yet living in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, or Putin’s Russia. We do not want to see “Trump’s America” added to this list. We need to keep what we have, unsatisfactory as it is, in order to be able to work our way upward from here. While some individuals have done heroic things under impossible circumstances, you cannot restore democracy when you are confined in a concentration camp or gulag.
The second element in our immediate political situation is that since October 7, we have been facing an impossible choice: between the fascist Republican Party and the genocidal Democratic Party. And it is certain that one of these monstrous evils will prevail. It is true that life continually compels us to renounce our higher aspirations in favor of achievable goals—of “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” But our choice in 2024 is not such a choice. It is a Sophie’s Choice.
One choiceless renunciation we all must make occurs in bereavement. As many or most of us know from personal experience, it is hard to imagine a greater pain than that of losing a loved one. We never “recover,” we just eventually return, forever changed in ways not outwardly observable, to the world. But within us there remain, latent or active, an unbearable pain and sense of loss of our sense of comfort and belonging in this world. Nevertheless, while we continue to mourn within, we must adjust to the realistic limitations of life about which we have no choice.
Sophie’s Choice is a loss of a different order. How could anyone ever possibly adjust to, or resolve, having chosen to send her daughter to be brutally murdered in order to save her son? How could it be possible to remain sane in a world that has demanded such a choiceless choice? Hence the conclusion of the story: Sophie commits suicide. Living in such a world, and the knowledge that one has made such a choice, are intolerable. The death instinct, always so irresistibly seductive to humankind, has triumphed. The choice we face in 2024 is a choiceless choice of this kind, begetting despair.
There is an adage in physical health care: in an emergency, the first thing you have to do is check your own pulse. We are all now faced with managing our own mental health care in a society that has largely lost its mind. One of the essential requirements of sanity is perspective. Americans are now often speaking and writing as if we were the first people in the history of the world to be faced with the kind of mass psychosis that now prevails here. That is because, as Americans, we have had the privilege of living under the illusion that we live “outside history.” Since 2016 we have discovered we do not, and never did.
In an effort to maintain their sanity in the face of our disillusionment and despair at discovering that we live in history after all, many try to understand the historical origins of our political dysfunctionality by resorting to the pseudo-historical approach of “golden age” nostalgia. The various choices of “when things went wrong” include October 7, 2003, 9-11, the Clinton administration, the election of Reagan, the Powell Memo, the War in Vietnam, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the Enlightenment. Reflecting the state of denial we are all in, the most obviously apposite historical precedent is hardly ever mentioned: America was founded in exactly the same way as Israel, through settle-colonialism, land theft, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, pogroms, torture, rape, child abuse, apartheid, and genocide, together with bottomless self-righteousness, self-admiration, self-promotion, self-deception, shameless propaganda, and gaslighting. “This land is your land, this land is my land, / From California to the New York Island, / This land was made for you and me.” These pseudo-historical efforts to explain “when things went wrong” are all really pale, unconscious versions of theodicy: the attempt to explain how a good god could have created an evil world—that is, of the attempt to explain the existence of evil.
Actually, the ancient Greeks and Israelites got the historical explanation right millennia ago. The time “when things went wrong” was from the beginning. As soon as Prometheus stole fire for man, Zeus created Pandora, and she opened her accursed box. As soon as God created man, the orchard thieves stole their accursed apple, and humankind was banished forever from the Garden of Eden. Thus from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end, God tells man (or has his prophets tell man): “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” Why does God have to keep telling man to choose life? Precisely because man is always choosing death. Finally in the New Testament, God presents man with the literal choice between life and death, in the person of Jesus, the God-Man. Man of course chooses death once again, torturing and crucifying the god that man could become if man ever chose life. In reality there was no time or place “when things went wrong.” The only place where things “go wrong” is in our minds. The only time when things “go wrong” is when we despair of our mental quest to realize our highest human aspirations.
In trying to remain sane and to understand the world in these bewildering days, CH has been indispensable. Like the rest of us, I have learned, and continue to learn, a very great deal from him, not least from what he does and is as opposed to what he says. But I am puzzled by his interview with Jimmy Dore. I had been entirely unfamiliar with Dore. It is evident from this interview that he is well-informed, thoughtful, and insightful, refreshingly irreverent, determined to escape the hallucinatory world of lies that the dominant society constructs all around us, and willing to struggle and suffer for his convictions. It is also evident that he is intellectually quite undisciplined, and is more than a bit of a crackpot. As long as he functions in the role of being a comedian, not a serious social critic and journalist like CH, there is nothing wrong with his being an intellectually undisciplined crackpot. But especially in this digital age, we all have a problem with holding this kind of distinction in mind. Previously, the physical context of a particular discourse made us aware of whether we were listening to a journalist, a university professor, a government official, or a comedian. The differences among these categories is not determinative, but they are essential to our perspective and judgment. Now, anyone and everyone is promiscuously mingled together on the internet, in a dizzying merry-go-round of discourse that turns discourse into a hall of mirrors where perspective and judgment are impossible to establish or maintain. If we understand Dore to be a comedian, then we maintain a reasonable perspective. Thus we may gain insights from political skits on “Saturday Night Live,” but we do not expect to use those skits as a serious political guide. But if we understand Dore to be a serious journalist and social critic like CH, then he becomes a charlatan.
What puzzles me about by CH’s interview with Dore is not Dore’s intellectual limitations. Dore can speak for himself, readers are adults who can judge for themselves, and it is not CH’s responsibility to interview only people with whom he entirely agrees, which in any case is impossible. It was of course correct for CH to be gracious to his guest, regardless of what CH might think of the views his guest expressed. What puzzles me is that at times it seemed as if CH understood Dore to be a fully serious political and social critic like himself. When I read the comments on the interview, though some were illuminating, I found them to be largely dispiriting. This began with the noxious and childish exchange between Feral Finster and JennyStokes. But their exchange seemed to be of a piece with the sense of disillusionment and bewilderment endemic in the comments, which seem to reflect the disillusionment and bewilderment expressed by CH and Dore in the interview.
No doubt these are bewildering times. And maintaining one’s sanity is hard work in the best of times. One’s psychological equilibrium is continually being challenged, and everyone not infrequently finds oneself in a psychologically regressive state from which one must struggle to emerge. Two-thirds or half the people in America are aware that since 2016 the other third or half has been infected with mass psychosis. People in the former group, however, are generally unaware of the fact that they themselves probably suffer from a secondary case of that psychosis, since mass psychosis is inherently contagious. Hence the irrational “joy” so many people have felt since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. For the sake of celebrating their hoped-for deliverance by their new strongwoman savior, they are ignoring the fact that Harris’s replacement of Biden, supposedly with the intention of “saving democracy,” had been effected in secret and without any pretense of following democratic procedures.
To paraphrase William Blake, the greatest miracle is the willingness of people of conscience to struggle and suffer throughout their lives for their convictions. Thus CH and Dore have, so to speak, been sentenced to internal exile. It is a disgrace that a man of CH’s talents and accomplishments has been marginalized as he has been. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to bear mentally, even though CH must recall the passage in “Moby Dick” where the narrator points out that when Jonah learned that God wanted him to be his prophet, Jonah booked passage for the ends of the earth, because he knew what happens to prophets.
Being puzzled by this interview and the comments, redolent of disillusionment, bewilderment, and even despair, I was reminded of a finding by the great mid-twentieth century psychoanalyst, W.R. Bion. He found that when a group felt itself in need of a leader to take care of their needs, and he as their leader refused to assume this role, which each of them should have assumed for themselves, the group tended to make the psychologically most ill member of the group its leader. One form of this kind of behavior is exhibited by adolescents who grow up in dysfunctional circumstances, in which the adults fail to meet the basic needs of the adolescents. The adolescents inevitably regress psychologically, and in their confusion and despair not infrequently turn to others who have a psychopathology reflecting or complementing their own. Similarly, CH lives in a society that has deliberately and maliciously deprived him of the basic conditions of social existence appropriate for a man like him. How does one deal with this kind of situation? I wonder what thoughts CH might have on this subject.
For if Trump is elected, many of us will sooner or later find ourselves in a similar situation. It is necessary for us not to succumb to disillusionment or despair, but instead to continue our quest to achieve understanding, and to do so with intellectual discipline. Others have made it through this kind of situation successfully before us, and we can do so too. However bleak our choiceless choices may be, we must not abandon the struggle in despair as Sophie did.
Thank you for the discussion with Jimmy Dore. I think he may be missing (many may be missing?)
one point: I listened inadvertently (on Forbes) to Trump's first candidacy speech for this go 'round. His first comment was about building a a huge defense dome over the US. This would be music to the military industrial complex's ears. And it was the very first thing Trump brought up. It struck me then that he might've "caved". Perhaps out of fear. Perhaps for other reasons. And, after all...the assassination was only an attempt, not a success. I don't give one whit for any of them, but I'm wondering if Trump is really the "outsider" anymore that he purports to be, and that his supporters wish him to be.
I wrote a response to a Chris Hedges post a short while ago, saying that as a Canadian, it doesn't matter to me who wins the American election........since both parties support Israel and the military industrial complex. It precipitated a long interchange with the person I sent my original response to...turned out he was also Canadian but missed I wasn't talking to him specifically, but to him as a representative American.
Rather amusing in the end...but it taught me something I think we all need to consider. In polarized times, its easy to see an enemy and hard to identify a friend. In a similar way, reading this interview its easy to be forced to see how bad everything is, and has been at least since the Iraq war, in America.
Gaza may be the point of no return....the canary in the coal mine about to explode. I understand why so many progressive people don't want to talk about it.........the real evil, in which there is no lesser, is on full view. You have to shut down, or be a political illiterate, not to see that America is on the wrong side........has probably been on the wrong side for decades. Tying that repeated error to capitalism is harder, but not that much harder when Chris tells us how much the billionaires pull in....and donate.
And then all those other wars, all those other virtuous forays into other peoples countries, all those destroyed or devestated families, all those little maimed corpses........rain down through the lost years upon all our westernized, sanitized, self satisfied heads. OMG, WE ARE THE EVIL EMPIRE!!!
Who knew? Well quite a few of us in point of fact...many of us marched against the Iraq war, the powerful didn't care. But now blackness has seeped over the entire history....turns out we in the west have been funding, supporting and dying in these wars since Korea. But the thing is....
Isn't knowing, even if very late, still a good thing??? And don't a lot of us know now....as Gaza gets bombed daily, to the very beaches, and the West Bank braces for its cleansing???
The question is, now that we know, what do we do?
For starters, I'd like us to stop name calling the people. Stop imagining the masses are too dumb to care....it might be true, but we don't know that. And even if, blaming the people isn't an action...its part of the blame game being played out everywhere now.
Chris says his prison students know where we are. So do many in the third world. So do the people who write in here. So do I.
But what do we do....singly, since many of us are alone in our knowledge.....but also publicly? We need actions, lots of them, and some of them actions that don't get us fired. I know it may seem cowardly, but I don't believe all journalists are careerists. Many of them are, but others are just trying to make a living in their chosen field. Many wish they'd been told the real story on the gig, before they invested in so many student loans.
Somehow, I want us to be kinder to each other....more humane. I also want a raft of ideas about what to do. We've marched, written letters, sent money to Palestinian aid organizations....but it still seems too little and without momentum.
It feels to me like we've done enough analysis. Any chance we could brainstorm a raft of actions, little, medium and big.......together. The thought of this world dying without a fight is what fills me with despair, not for myself, but for the little people I love.
“ funding, supporting and dying in these wars since Korea.” You might give a look at the Philippines, Mexico, and Cuba, to see that foreign intervention goes much farther back than Korea.
Thanks for the reminder........its hard to keep up with the 'good works' of the Americans...but you are right...I'm trying to forget shooting Philippinos trapped in that hollow or crater, like shooting ducks in a barrel.
If real history was taught in your schools, things might change. As it is, you really have to dig to get the whole story, which isn't much worse than what the Israeli's are doing in Palestine just now....but not much better either.
Ingamarie, I'm a curious person and I would like to know how history is taught in Canada, what about treatment of the natives, what about its participation and support of our unjustified wars in the world.
Short answer, I don't know. I've been retired for almost a quarter of a century, but when I taught there was some good social teachers....and since I've left, there has been a lot of work on teaching reconciliation, the truth about residential schools etc.
I don't think most Canadians know the degree to which we've followed the American lead on foreign policy...but in a quiet way. We didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq, but after that war got underway, we were more supportive than most of us realized. We'd like to be superior to you folks, but I've recently read a Canadian exploration called CANADA'S LONG WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY....by Ives Engler. It's well documented...short and to the point, going back to the ousting of Mossedegh in Iran in the 50's and sad to say...
We aren't the peace keepers we imagine. One good side bar of the genocide in Gaza: more Canadians are learning we don't stand with the oppressed. Not really...we do what our corporations want. Whenever a right wing coup happens...our extractivists move in.
Invite Whitney Webb to your conversations
I love the pairing of Hedges and Dore. It even sounds like it could be a comedy team. They complement each other perfectly, because each carries in him a dose of the other, and both have so much to offer.
I’m also happy that Chris Hedges doesn’t hold Dore’s recent tirades about Cornel West against him. Dore’s “take no prisoners” personality can be unproductive, but I always feel he’s honest and respectful. Imagine if yesterday’s debate had included West!
The “left”, can’t bear any more feuds at this time, or it’ll end up like the Colloseum scene in Life of Brian: “Judean Peoples Front?!? Bah! We’re the People’s Front Of Judea!!”
I don’t think can I be as forgiving as you are to Jimmy Dore. Even outside of his whole Cornel West debacle. His attacks on other progressives leaders, most notably Noam Chomsky, always struct me as an act to get more money and attention by attacking everyone and anything depending on what is hot at the moment. I enjoyed this interview, but rolled my eyes a few times at the hypocrisy of such a statement as “they’ll never let us come together. And the politics of division is very powerful…”. It might be reckless to call him a charlatan given I agreed to much of what was said here but he does behave differently from what I’ve seen from his own show.
Agreed. Jesters were in the business of telling some truths occasionally, but they don't entertain me. After listening to some of his shows I quit listening to him.
https://youtu.be/KcIJIPu0Ok4?si=8sYupoe0IICQEZ8k
Why would you promote Jimmy Dore? Do you not care about sexual harassment ?
I appreciated the intelligent dialog between Chris Hedges and Jimmy Dore. But it is also a commentary on these disturbing times that a clearly intelligent person feels he must choose between a corporate stooge and a convicted sociopath (and also a stooge) (and among many other things, 26+ women have accused him of sexual harassment, abuse to rape - is that no small thing?) and who is so out of control he blunders into speaking the Empire's truths now and again. And that gives "hope?" It's scary! We live in a nuclear age on edge! And then there's Gaza undergoing a horrific genocide in the name of both parties as well as "drill baby drill" (by both parties) in an environment in serious climate crisis! This current politically insane climate (and the DNC convention and the "debate") make me feel like I've entered a psychotic ward. Is this what the Decline of a "Civilization" sounds and feels like?
Also Jimmy Dore seems to hold a top down hope. While whatever hope I have is a bottom up hope.
I don't get it, Chris. Why would you contribute to promoting Dore's anti-vax, etc. views?
This IS FREE SPEECH & democracy! If this is Mr Dore's opinion so be it (I am vaccinated but don't want others to be forced)
I don’t think the silly phrase “anti-vax is appropriate here. Like me, RFK, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Jimmy Dore, no one can be “anti-vax” because there’s no “Vax” to begin with. The medical product currently called a vaccine doesn’t work. It doesn’t prevent illness. It doesn’t prevent transmission. There’s credible evidence that the main function of the vaccine is social control through mandates. If you can explain the justification for mandatory “vaccination” using a product which does not prevent transmission of the virus, which was never even tested for transmission, I’m interested in your explanation. (The argument that it decreases the severity of infection is specious, because no clinical tests have ever been devised which could prove that.)
In a world where the people are lied to in every conceivable way about every subject, skepticism is a duty. The President promised that the vaccine worked. He also claimed that he saw photos of beheaded babies on October 7th. Harris claimed that there were “mass rapes” as well, and she called the riot on January 6th an “armed insurrection”, maybe because the rioters each had two arms.
As William Burroughs said “If you aren’t paranoid, you aren’t paying attention.”
Has your doctor recommended you to be vaccinated? What is your explanation that the strength of the epidemics has decrease and now when the majority of the population is vaccinated, we don't have any more millions of deaths in America?
I don’t have a doctor. I haven’t been treated by a doctor since 1977. But I have a recommendation. Study immunology, and I mean that in a friendly way. Why dod the black plague kill a third of Europe and then die out? That’s what they do. But neither Jimmy Dore, RFK, nor I have ever told anyone not to get vaccinated. Your body, your choice. My body, my choice. And when the “vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission there can be no rational argument against being ”anti-vax”. Like Dore, I’m a private citizen. I don’t see what makes it anyone else’s business.
Good policy that I also follow: your business is your business and my business is mine. I don't need to study immunology, just to read the opinion of credited immunologist and specially follow my doctor's advice, who I'm sure he doesn't want to lose a client to covid, is enough. If you have not had a doctor for so long, you must be immune to everything. Good for you! Pandemics just don't die out, we have to protect ourselves with vaccines, isolation from infected people or whatever the experts advise, or they will continue and mutate causing greater damage. My opinion, of course.
Jimmy Dore is (or used to be, hadn't seen anything about him in a while) anti-vaxx as in "vaccines cause autism" . Heard him saying that when I tried to watch his show back when Bernie ran the first time. So yes, anti-vaxx, Robert Kennedy type. Not only about COVID
We have to protect ourselves and the world against COVID and other pandemics because they don't die fast, and we don't want they to persist as the black death pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
Major outbreaks or Yersinia pestis (Wikipedia)
Years Place Death estimates Article/citation
1347–51 Europe, Asia, Middle East 75,000,000–200,000,000 Black Death[71]
1360–63 England 700–800,000 Black Death in England
1464–66 Paris 40,000
1471 England 300–400,000 [72]
1479–80 England 400–500,000 [72]
1563–64 England 20,136+ 1563 London plague
1576–77 Venice 50,000 [73]
1582–83 Tenerife 5,000–9,000 [70]
1592–93 England 19,900+ 1592–1593 London plague
1596–99 Castile 500,000 [54]
1603–11 London 43,000 [74]
1620–21 Algiers 30–50,000 [36]
1628–31 France 1,000,000 [62]
1629–31 Italy 1,000,000 Italian plague of 1629–31[75]
1633–44 China (Ming dynasty) 200,000+ Great Plague in the late Ming dynasty[76][77]
1647–52 Southern Spain 500,000 Great Plague of Seville
1654–55 Russia 700,000 [50][51]
1656–58 Kingdom of Naples 1,250,000 Naples Plague[78]
1665–66 London 70–100,000 Great Plague of London
1675–76 Malta 11,300 1675–76 Malta plague epidemic
1679–80 Austria 76,000 Great Plague of Vienna
1681 Prague 83,000
1689–90 Baghdad 150,000 [38]
1704–10 Poland 75,000 Great Northern War plague outbreak
1709–13 Baltic 300–400,000 Great Northern War plague outbreak
1720s Marseille 100,000 Great Plague of Marseille
1738–40 Hungary & Croatia 50,000 Great Plague of 1738
1770s Moscow 75,000 Russian plague of 1770–72
1772–1773 Persian Empire 2,000,000 1772–1773 Persian Plague[79]
1791 Egypt 300,000 [80]
1812–19 Ottoman Empire 300,000[81] 1812–1819 Ottoman plague epidemic
1813–14 Malta 4,500 1813–14 Malta plague epidemic
1813–14 Romania 60,000[82] Caragea's plague
1829–35 Baghdad 12,000 [83]
Disappointed. Jimmy Dore is a little more than just a bit narcissistic. Having said that, everything he said about the dems is true. The problem is that he is completely trapped in the duopoly discourse: in order to show how terrible one party is, he feels like he needs to draw an imaginary silver line about the other party. The republicans are not even a party anymore, they are a cult. Trump is only concerned about himself, he will have a bunch of terrible people running the country while he gives incoherent speeches and praises himself.
Dore seems to ignore that yes, Trump is a racist, Tucker Carlson is a racist. He doesn't have to praise those just because the democrats are so bad. I didn't hear him defend the free speech of students for exemple.
Hope for Trump is laughable. Republican think tanks, and the party itself are not hiding their goal of deregulating everything. This has real consequences for everyday life everywhere. According to them, the first day will be for firing most of the federal employees. Then there will be nobody to do the things that are important to millions. People need the government to work for them.
Project 2025 will simply finish what is left of education. Disabled people will be segregated again, the "parents' rights" people will turn education into bible studies, the Texan version of Moses as a founding father.
Tired of "dems are bad, the GOP is bad too but they say the right things". Pathetic. Republicans lie and Trump already showed us how much he lies. What is the logic for believing him this time? There are people who don't want neither party and are tired of the comparisons to measure the metaphorical dicks.
Jimmy Dore is also a millionaire, let's not forget.
Things need to change in this country and it will be ugly and it will hurt but it is not by playing the duopoly game that we can find a sliver of hope. It is by rejecting it. Jimmy Dore is just another pawn who likes to rant about some people depending on how he wakes up that day
I am voting Green because there is nothing worse than genocide and my vote never belonged to democrats. But I don't have any illusions that a Trump presidency will not be so bad. It will be devastating. But I guess the bridges in this country need to be burnt and some revolution needs to happen.
Great discussion! Thanks
I live in the UK and knew nothing about Jimmy Dore. I watched the interview, didn't read it and initially I quite enjoyed Dore's almost hypnotic sweep of words, the facility that goes with being, that is if he is, a stand-up comedian. I did watch to the end but I began to tire of the easy generalisations, the evidence-free assertions and I longed for Chris Hedges to intervene much more than he did.
I wont go into detail, others here have done some of that and I don't have the time (or inclination) but what especially jarred with me were the gliding across vaccinations, Russell Brand, Donald Trump. Much that he said about e.g. the Democrat party was uncontroversial to anyone even a little bit leftleaning.
I really wasn't sure at the end -- would he really prefer President Trump to President Harris?
Mr Dore is a comedian and as aware as Mr Hedges that this DUOPOLY will change NOTHING - so what to do? As Mr Hedges said many times: General Strikes (otherwise it will just be 'the can kicked down the road') would be a method, as voting for 3rd party will achieve (almost surely) nothing (also in Europa you cannot get rid of the old party structures, so what could we do??)
The truth is that voters are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and the only thing we can do is vote third party, which only has the power to voice disapproval and _maybe_ let the morally bankrupt parties know we want more substantial politics than we are are getting BUT as money soaked as our political system is, WITH a press that no longer advances marginalized voices, even that is hard. But I'm just not going to vote for Harris. Period. In my deep red state, I will write in Jill Stein. But I believe there is worth in finding solidarity with people across the political spectrum that acknowledges the brokenness of our politics. It is the way forward.
While I don't agree with everything Chris has to say, I happily pay $5 per month to support his fearless independent journalism. This particular post is surprising, disheartening, and sadly not reported. The crude use of unchecked innuendo and exaggeration - and not just by Gore - is kind of shocking. I sure hope Chris is not fiddling with unfunny comedians while Rome burns.....
Something I wrote elsewhere:
If you see the "left" parties in Europe and the US as the class consciousness of the PMC made manifest, everything makes sense. The masses are too cloddish, backward, unsophisitcated and unfashionable to be entrusted with any real power, while We The Better Sort of People, the educated professionals who would never do something so oafish as misgender someone, we will use that power much more wisely.
At the same time, contemporary left discourse does not require the rulers to give up any part of The Goodies.
The PMC can have it both ways. Demand more more power because of their self-evidently superior virtue, but at the same time, the existing distribution of wealth in their favor is obviously just and proper.
I really don't understand this diatribe Feral.
Did you watch the French being interviewed by the Media during the protests?
Way more intelligent than the usual 'baffoon' so called intelligencia of the USA!
MOST people in the USA do not know what is going on!
At an early age in France we learn POLITICS which is why we are on the streets.
And nothing came of it. The PMC are still firmly in control, in France and elsewhere.
That said, I wrote nothing specifically about Europe or France or any other country, for that matter. It's not ever always only all about you.
You are a complete US moron Feral.
IF you had watched the people on the streets being interviewed YOU would know that the French people know their politics. Unlike USA
All you can do is sorry ad hominem.
"Feral Finister inside a leather trunk.....can't come out to speak to us because he is defunct. Young women listen to him because he has SOME smart ideas but eventually see him for what he is.. A man without morals/educated in the USA.
Stand in my shoes Feral!'
I don't care what you think and I don't write with you in mind. How you reached your conclusion when I wrote not a word about America or Europe says volumes about you and your delusions of persecution.
I think a left group such as DiEM25 has much more to offer than that.
Sorry, seems like you're jumping the shark here. Jimmy Dore, an anti-vaxxer, he's just restating what you've said in the past, nothing new to this content.
Mr Dore was noted as commenting from an article about vaccination rates and high rates of covid in Singapore. He totally misrepresented the report skipping over everything that had anything good to say about Singapore's vaccination program and even changed some of the text to fit his own needs. This isn't what we need in this time of trying to figure out creative ways to keep our government from destroying life as we know it.
I deal in solutions to problems and I'm kind of tired of this pontification.
Thanks for all that you used to do.
🌵
Well Dore is certainly not the typical caliber for guest for a Chris Hedges interview but, I think he has genuinely been marginalized--as has Hedges, Taibbi, Robert Scheer, Glenn Greenwald and others--and there is something about that surreal experience, when perhaps you had been quite popular at one point that can make people a little hyper-alert and suspicious of everything. Some of his comments are kind of reminiscent of reading Catch-22. (Look, I don't like our current COVID vaccines but people really died and are still dying from the disease... They are the tools we have for this wily virus.) It is a surreal world when (as I sometimes say) you know lies are being told, but a good lie always contains a bit of truth and it's hard to parse that exact point when the lie starts or ends.
But maybe even more important is the practice of talking with people who don't strictly reside in the exact same silo that you reside in; so you hear different and sometimes discordant viewpoints. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. We need to do it when we can
Part 1
I was calm when I started reading “The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore).” Having now finished reading the introduction, transcript, and comments, I can hardly breathe.
This experience is not different in kind from what it has been like since 2016 to read the news and political and social commentary. But this particular experience seems to be much worse in degree than usual. Why?
After a bit of intuitive introspection, I am guessing that the reason is the immediate political situation in which we are all living.
The first element in this situation is that for years we have been desperately hoping that Donald Trump will not be re-elected in November 2024. If he is, he will transform America into a fascist state, and (in Sarah Kendzior’s terrible phrase) it will take “generations of martyrs” to restore democracy to America. It is true that America in 2024 is seriously failing as a democracy, but we are not yet living in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, or Putin’s Russia. We do not want to see “Trump’s America” added to this list. We need to keep what we have, unsatisfactory as it is, in order to be able to work our way upward from here. While some individuals have done heroic things under impossible circumstances, you cannot restore democracy when you are confined in a concentration camp or gulag.
The second element in our immediate political situation is that since October 7, we have been facing an impossible choice: between the fascist Republican Party and the genocidal Democratic Party. And it is certain that one of these monstrous evils will prevail. It is true that life continually compels us to renounce our higher aspirations in favor of achievable goals—of “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” But our choice in 2024 is not such a choice. It is a Sophie’s Choice.
One choiceless renunciation we all must make occurs in bereavement. As many or most of us know from personal experience, it is hard to imagine a greater pain than that of losing a loved one. We never “recover,” we just eventually return, forever changed in ways not outwardly observable, to the world. But within us there remain, latent or active, an unbearable pain and sense of loss of our sense of comfort and belonging in this world. Nevertheless, while we continue to mourn within, we must adjust to the realistic limitations of life about which we have no choice.
Sophie’s Choice is a loss of a different order. How could anyone ever possibly adjust to, or resolve, having chosen to send her daughter to be brutally murdered in order to save her son? How could it be possible to remain sane in a world that has demanded such a choiceless choice? Hence the conclusion of the story: Sophie commits suicide. Living in such a world, and the knowledge that one has made such a choice, are intolerable. The death instinct, always so irresistibly seductive to humankind, has triumphed. The choice we face in 2024 is a choiceless choice of this kind, begetting despair.
There is an adage in physical health care: in an emergency, the first thing you have to do is check your own pulse. We are all now faced with managing our own mental health care in a society that has largely lost its mind. One of the essential requirements of sanity is perspective. Americans are now often speaking and writing as if we were the first people in the history of the world to be faced with the kind of mass psychosis that now prevails here. That is because, as Americans, we have had the privilege of living under the illusion that we live “outside history.” Since 2016 we have discovered we do not, and never did.
In an effort to maintain their sanity in the face of our disillusionment and despair at discovering that we live in history after all, many try to understand the historical origins of our political dysfunctionality by resorting to the pseudo-historical approach of “golden age” nostalgia. The various choices of “when things went wrong” include October 7, 2003, 9-11, the Clinton administration, the election of Reagan, the Powell Memo, the War in Vietnam, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the Enlightenment. Reflecting the state of denial we are all in, the most obviously apposite historical precedent is hardly ever mentioned: America was founded in exactly the same way as Israel, through settle-colonialism, land theft, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, pogroms, torture, rape, child abuse, apartheid, and genocide, together with bottomless self-righteousness, self-admiration, self-promotion, self-deception, shameless propaganda, and gaslighting. “This land is your land, this land is my land, / From California to the New York Island, / This land was made for you and me.” These pseudo-historical efforts to explain “when things went wrong” are all really pale, unconscious versions of theodicy: the attempt to explain how a good god could have created an evil world—that is, of the attempt to explain the existence of evil.
Actually, the ancient Greeks and Israelites got the historical explanation right millennia ago. The time “when things went wrong” was from the beginning. As soon as Prometheus stole fire for man, Zeus created Pandora, and she opened her accursed box. As soon as God created man, the orchard thieves stole their accursed apple, and humankind was banished forever from the Garden of Eden. Thus from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end, God tells man (or has his prophets tell man): “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” Why does God have to keep telling man to choose life? Precisely because man is always choosing death. Finally in the New Testament, God presents man with the literal choice between life and death, in the person of Jesus, the God-Man. Man of course chooses death once again, torturing and crucifying the god that man could become if man ever chose life. In reality there was no time or place “when things went wrong.” The only place where things “go wrong” is in our minds. The only time when things “go wrong” is when we despair of our mental quest to realize our highest human aspirations.
Part 2
In trying to remain sane and to understand the world in these bewildering days, CH has been indispensable. Like the rest of us, I have learned, and continue to learn, a very great deal from him, not least from what he does and is as opposed to what he says. But I am puzzled by his interview with Jimmy Dore. I had been entirely unfamiliar with Dore. It is evident from this interview that he is well-informed, thoughtful, and insightful, refreshingly irreverent, determined to escape the hallucinatory world of lies that the dominant society constructs all around us, and willing to struggle and suffer for his convictions. It is also evident that he is intellectually quite undisciplined, and is more than a bit of a crackpot. As long as he functions in the role of being a comedian, not a serious social critic and journalist like CH, there is nothing wrong with his being an intellectually undisciplined crackpot. But especially in this digital age, we all have a problem with holding this kind of distinction in mind. Previously, the physical context of a particular discourse made us aware of whether we were listening to a journalist, a university professor, a government official, or a comedian. The differences among these categories is not determinative, but they are essential to our perspective and judgment. Now, anyone and everyone is promiscuously mingled together on the internet, in a dizzying merry-go-round of discourse that turns discourse into a hall of mirrors where perspective and judgment are impossible to establish or maintain. If we understand Dore to be a comedian, then we maintain a reasonable perspective. Thus we may gain insights from political skits on “Saturday Night Live,” but we do not expect to use those skits as a serious political guide. But if we understand Dore to be a serious journalist and social critic like CH, then he becomes a charlatan.
What puzzles me about by CH’s interview with Dore is not Dore’s intellectual limitations. Dore can speak for himself, readers are adults who can judge for themselves, and it is not CH’s responsibility to interview only people with whom he entirely agrees, which in any case is impossible. It was of course correct for CH to be gracious to his guest, regardless of what CH might think of the views his guest expressed. What puzzles me is that at times it seemed as if CH understood Dore to be a fully serious political and social critic like himself. When I read the comments on the interview, though some were illuminating, I found them to be largely dispiriting. This began with the noxious and childish exchange between Feral Finster and JennyStokes. But their exchange seemed to be of a piece with the sense of disillusionment and bewilderment endemic in the comments, which seem to reflect the disillusionment and bewilderment expressed by CH and Dore in the interview.
No doubt these are bewildering times. And maintaining one’s sanity is hard work in the best of times. One’s psychological equilibrium is continually being challenged, and everyone not infrequently finds oneself in a psychologically regressive state from which one must struggle to emerge. Two-thirds or half the people in America are aware that since 2016 the other third or half has been infected with mass psychosis. People in the former group, however, are generally unaware of the fact that they themselves probably suffer from a secondary case of that psychosis, since mass psychosis is inherently contagious. Hence the irrational “joy” so many people have felt since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. For the sake of celebrating their hoped-for deliverance by their new strongwoman savior, they are ignoring the fact that Harris’s replacement of Biden, supposedly with the intention of “saving democracy,” had been effected in secret and without any pretense of following democratic procedures.
To paraphrase William Blake, the greatest miracle is the willingness of people of conscience to struggle and suffer throughout their lives for their convictions. Thus CH and Dore have, so to speak, been sentenced to internal exile. It is a disgrace that a man of CH’s talents and accomplishments has been marginalized as he has been. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to bear mentally, even though CH must recall the passage in “Moby Dick” where the narrator points out that when Jonah learned that God wanted him to be his prophet, Jonah booked passage for the ends of the earth, because he knew what happens to prophets.
Being puzzled by this interview and the comments, redolent of disillusionment, bewilderment, and even despair, I was reminded of a finding by the great mid-twentieth century psychoanalyst, W.R. Bion. He found that when a group felt itself in need of a leader to take care of their needs, and he as their leader refused to assume this role, which each of them should have assumed for themselves, the group tended to make the psychologically most ill member of the group its leader. One form of this kind of behavior is exhibited by adolescents who grow up in dysfunctional circumstances, in which the adults fail to meet the basic needs of the adolescents. The adolescents inevitably regress psychologically, and in their confusion and despair not infrequently turn to others who have a psychopathology reflecting or complementing their own. Similarly, CH lives in a society that has deliberately and maliciously deprived him of the basic conditions of social existence appropriate for a man like him. How does one deal with this kind of situation? I wonder what thoughts CH might have on this subject.
For if Trump is elected, many of us will sooner or later find ourselves in a similar situation. It is necessary for us not to succumb to disillusionment or despair, but instead to continue our quest to achieve understanding, and to do so with intellectual discipline. Others have made it through this kind of situation successfully before us, and we can do so too. However bleak our choiceless choices may be, we must not abandon the struggle in despair as Sophie did.
Thank you for the discussion with Jimmy Dore. I think he may be missing (many may be missing?)
one point: I listened inadvertently (on Forbes) to Trump's first candidacy speech for this go 'round. His first comment was about building a a huge defense dome over the US. This would be music to the military industrial complex's ears. And it was the very first thing Trump brought up. It struck me then that he might've "caved". Perhaps out of fear. Perhaps for other reasons. And, after all...the assassination was only an attempt, not a success. I don't give one whit for any of them, but I'm wondering if Trump is really the "outsider" anymore that he purports to be, and that his supporters wish him to be.
Yes I watched this: But please invite Lindsay Graham to your interviews.
I am sick and tired of hearing these so called Liberal people/be brave.
Invite members of Congress?
Am a bit confused - are you joking? Neither Graham or a member of Congress would accept to come and face the truth?!
Everything is worth a try!