Moon Lecture Series: Chris Hedges

for the rest of us he tells the truth when nobody else wants to be hearing the truth now there are some people here tonight i'm going i can guarantee you either one or two you're going to go home and say why did we go and heal that guy because he will push you he will push the edges of what you believe and for those of us coming from a faith background he came from a faith background went to seminary and then found that the the religious community wasn't keeping faith with the truth about justice the truth about poverty the truth about the oppression of races and peoples in various ways and he had to tell the truth and my experience in the church and in the faith community that people such as chris hedges are in short supply and we need them because he is a prophet of our time even though he's operating outside the church he's a prophet that the church and the people of faith need to hear so you don't need to hear me going on and on about what a wonderful guy is any longer let's hear from chris hedges thank you thank you very much uh i do as alan said indeed come out of the church my father was a parish minister for 40 years my mother was a seminary graduate who became a college professor i got my mdiv at harvard um and just before i begin since i'm in a church setting everything that i do in my life was set down by the example of my dad he was involved in the civil rights movement this was we lived in a small farm town in upstate new york where in rural white enclaves such as that martin luther king was one of the most hated men in america he himself a veteran of world war ii he'd been a sergeant in north africa i was very involved in the anti-war movement and took me and my sister to annie ward demonstrations as kids and finally to his credit and this was the 1960s and 70s he was an outspoken supporter of gay rights um which made him a pariah within the presbyterian church his youngest brother my uncle was gay and lived with his partner in greenwich village and had been disowned by the family except for my dad who embraced both jamie and arthur and incorporated them into our family and when i went to college at colgate university my father had a church in syracuse new york and when he found that there was no gay and lesbian organization at colgate he brought the gay speakers to my campus and i who was probably one of the most committed heterosexuals at colgate would be sitting around with groups of students and gay activists and my father kept pushing the students to come out of the closet and openly form an organization which they were frightened to do a problem that my dad solved by driving down one day taking me to lunch and telling me i had to found it so i did i founded the gay and lesbian alliance at colgate university [Applause] and when i would go into the dining hall for breakfast lunch or dinner the checker would take my card check off the appropriate box and hand it back and go now i end this story on a kind of poignant note because the church was very unforgiving of this position especially then and even now within the presbyterian church same-sex marriage is not permitted and they wanted my father to be quiet and he responded instead and you can see where i get all my my sort of distaste for authority from instead he organized a public easter service for the gblt community of the city of syracuse and he drove down and got me and he said you know this is probably one of the last times you'll ever hear me preach and he was right and i walked into that church i was telling allen and others the story tonight and it i was maybe 19 years old or something and people were crying even before my father got up to the pulpit holding hands and my father said marriage is not a reward for being a heterosexual marriage is a sacrament and any church that refuses to honor the sacrament of marriage does not deserve to call itself christian and they threw him out and years later when i denounced the war in iraq or the calls to invade iraq i'd been the middle east bureau chief for the new york times seven years in the middle east many months in iraq and was called in i was given i was booed off of a commencement stage in rockford college which was on youtube and then the trash talk right wing cable news got a hold of that clip and lynched me which is what they do hour after hour and my employer the new york times called me in and issued me a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of the new york times and that is the process under guild rules after you issue the employee that reprimand you then if they continue to violate those rules that employee can be fired and i am not going to pretend it was an easy day i'd been 15 years at the paper but i sat in that office and realized that um i could muzzle myself and pay fealty to my career but to do so would be to betray my dad and i quit the paper and when i walked out the door for the first time i articulated what it was my father had truly given me and that was freedom i didn't need the new york times or any institution to tell me who i was and i often think that it's my voice you hear but in so many ways these are his words and i think in the christian church we call that resurrection perhaps the most pressing portrait of the american character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in hermann melville's moby dick melville in his novel makes our murderous obsessions blinding hubris violent impulses moral cowardice and lust for self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a doomed whaling voyage he is our foremost oracle what william shakespeare was to elizabethan england or fidor dostowski to czarist russia in moby dick our country is given shape in the form of a ship the pequod named after the pequot indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the puritans and their native american allies the ship's 30-man crew there were 30 states in the union when melville wrote the novel is a mixture of races and creeds the object of the hunt is a massive white whale moby dick which in a previous encounter maimed the ship's captain ahab by dismembering one of his legs the maniacal quest much like that of a civilization dependent on fossil fuel and the profits of global speculators assures the pequod's destruction and those on the ship on some level know they are doomed just as many of us know that our civilization and our ecosystem cannot stand the continued assault by corporate capitalism but when when a man suspects any wrong it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself ishmael says in moby dick and much this way it was with me i said nothing and tried to think nothing how much longer can a financial system that depends on the federal reserve to purchase 85 billion dollars in u.s treasury bonds much of it worthless subprime mortgages each month survive how much more money we are now at 15 to 20 trillion dollars can be looted from the us treasury by big banks and wall street before the financial system again implodes how much longer can wages be driven down and suppressed and i speak of course on a day when 47 million americans have seen five percent cuts in their food stamps while interest rates which can soar of 30 percent us with debt peonage the ecosystem is at the same time swiftly disintegrating scientists from the international program on the state of the ocean issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life the excess co2 and heat from the atmosphere is rapidly warming and acidifying the oceans this is compounded the report noted by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change the scientists in this report called these effects a deadly trio that when combined are creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet's history and this is their language not mine the scientists wrote that each of the earth's five known mass extinctions were preceded by at least one of these deadly trios acidification warming and deoxygenation they warned that the next mass extinction of sea life is already underway the first such mass extinction in 55 million years the university of hawaii also released a new report saying that the effects of climate change are now inevitable they cannot be stopped at best the rate of devastation can be slowed the report predicted that over the next 50 years temperature levels will rise at such a rate that human life in many parts of the planet will become unsustainable millions upon millions of people will flee as refugees millions of species will face extinction coastal cities such as new york and even inland cities such as london will become unlivable microbes seem set to inherit the earth yet we like ahab and his crew do not change course we do not trust our eyes or our intelligence we trust in the myth of human progress the absurd belief that human technology and ingenuity will save us that somehow although no one spells out how we will all be able to adapt this myth is abetted by the corporate assault on culture journalism education the arts and critical thinking those who speak truth are marginalized and ignored dismissed as pessimists in a culture that prides itself on a child-like optimism at the expense of reality we have a mania for hope which our corporate masters lavishly provide across the political and cultural spectrum to keep us passive frederick nietzsche in beyond good and evil wrote that only a few people have the fortitude to look into what he calls the molten pit of human reality a handful of artists and philosophers for nietzsche are consumed by an insatiable curiosity a quest for truth a desire for meaning and this sends them down into the bowels of the pit they get as close as they can before the flames and the heat drive them back this understanding nietzsche wrote comes at a high cost those singed by the fire become burnt children eternal orphans and empires of illusion dying civilizations make war an independent intellectual inquiry art and culture on their burnt children the masters of the corporate state do not want us to peer into the pit or heed the cries of those who have seen what awaits us the corporate state rather feeds the thirst for illusion happiness and hope it peddles the fantasy of endless material progress it insists and this is the argument of globalization that our voyage is unalterable and decreed by natural law it is part of the march of human progress and those who challenge this myth are heretics clive hamilton in his book requiem for a species why we resist the truth about climate change describes a kind of dark relief that comes from accepting that catastrophic climate change is virtually certain this obliteration of false hopes he says requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge the first is attainable the second because it means that those we love including our children will face insecurity misery and suffering within a few decades if not a few years is much harder to acquire to emotionally accept impending disaster to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to collapse is as difficult to accept is our own mortality the most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth intellectually and emotionally and yet rise up to resist the corporate forces that are destroying us the human species led by white europeans and euro-americans has been on a 500-year long planet-wide rampage of conquering plundering looting exploiting and polluting the earth as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way but the game is up the technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small global elite are the forces that now doom us the capitalist quest for ceaseless economic expansion has become a curse a death sentence but even as our economic and environmental systems unravel after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago we lack the vision and the courage to shut down the engines of global capitalism complex civilizations as many anthropologists have observed have a habit of ultimately destroying themselves joseph tainter in the collapse of complex societies charles redmond in human impact on ancient environments and ronald wright in a short history of progress have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown the difference is that when we go down this time the whole planet will go with us there will with this final collapse be no new lands left to exploit no new civilizations to conquer no new peoples to subjugate and no new resources to plunder collapse occurs in complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest power and prosperity one of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun reinhold niebuhr wrote the ancient mayan the sumerians of what is now southern iraq ancient egypt greece rome even easter island were destroyed by the mechanisms that once made them prosper the novel ways these civilizations found to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation systems eventually created disastrous unforeseen complications wright in a short history of progress calls this the progress trap the industrial revolution created technological civilizations of such complexity and such dependence on ceaseless exploitation write notes that we do not know how to make do with less or reduce our demands on nature we know only how to service and maintain a system that is killing us this is the evolutionary history of the human race as the collapse becomes increasingly palpable if human history is any guide we like past societies in distress we'll see many retreat into what anthropologists call crisis cults the powerlessness felt in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions a belief for example that god or gods will come back to earth and save us the christian right embodies the escapism of crisis cults these cults will prefer perform absurd rituals in our case probably christian to make it all go away believers will be entranced by magical thinking our bankers corporate boards politicians television personalities and generals continue to hold up seductive images of unrivaled wealth and power like ahab and his crew these images spur us towards self-annihilation all my means are sane ahab says my motive and my object mad melville who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers was aware that the wealth of industrialized societies was violently seized from the wretched of the earth all the authority figures on the ship are white men ahab starbuck flask and stub the hard dirty work from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales at the task of the poor mostly men of color melville saw how european plundering of indigenous cultures from the 16th to the 19th centuries coupled with the use of african slaves as a workforce to replace the natives enriched europe and the united states the spanish conquest of the america set in motion five centuries of reckless economic and environmental plunder karl marx and adam smith attributed the huge influx of wealth from the americas as having made possible the industrial revolution and modern capitalism the industrial revolution equipped technologically advanced states with refined weapons systems turning us into the most efficient killers on the planet ahab when he first appears on the quarter deck after being in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage holds up a doubloon an extravagant gold coin and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale he knows that the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man is sortedness and he plays to this sortedness the whale becomes like everything in the capitalist world a commodity a source of personal profit a murderous greed one that starbuck denounces as blasphemous immediately grips the crew ahab's obsession obsession infects the ship ahab conducts a dark mass a eucharist of blood and violence on the deck he orders the crew to circle around him he makes them dream from a flag on that is passed from man to man filled with droughts hot as satan's hoof ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him the captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ship's harpooners queequeg tashtego and dagu his three pagan kinsmen he orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons and fill the sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter drink ye harpooners drink and swear ye men that man the deathful whaleboats bow death to moby dick god hun us all if we do not hunt moby dick to his death and with a crew bonded to him in his eternal quest he knows that starbuck is helpless amid the general hurricane starbuck now is mine ahab says cannot oppose me now without rebellion the honest eye of starbuck melville wrote fell downward the ship described by melville as a hearse was painted black it was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales it was melville writes a cannibal of a craft tricking herself forth in the chaste bones of her enemies the fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the pequod into a red hell and we live now on our own hearse our own raging fires leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance across the middle east but speak our own lust for blood and profit and in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of those who impede our hunt just as ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son who has fallen overboard ahab is not solely reliant on a heated rhetoric of persuasion he oversees a terrifying internal security force on the ship the five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air ahab's secret private whale boat crew his private mercenaries keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission the art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion and fear are the familiar tools of tyranny and our lives are as circumscribed as the lives of the crew on melville ship the novel in essence is the chronicle of the last days of a civilization and yet ahab is no simple tyrant melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between ahab's maniacal hubris and his humanity ahab ii has a yearning for love he harbors regrets over his deformed life the black cabin boy pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain ahab is aware of this tenderness and he fears its power pip functions as the fool did in shakespeare's king lear ahab warns pip of ahab lad lad says ahab i tell thee thou must not follow ahab now the hour is coming when ahab would not scarce thee from him yet would not have thee by him a few pages later untottering ahab stood forth in the clearness of the mourn lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven from beneath his slouched hat ahab dropped a tear into the sea nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one weed drop starbuck approaches him ahab for the only time in the novel is vulnerable he speaks to starbuck of his 40 years on the pitiless sea the desolation of solitude it has been why this strife of the chase why weary and palsy the arm at the oar and the iron and the lamps how the richer or better is ahab now he thinks of his young wife i widowed that poor girl when i married her starbuck and of his little boy about this time yes it is noon nap now the boy vivaciously wakes sits up in bed and his mother tells him of me of cannibal old me how i am abroad upon the deep but will yet come back to dance with him again ahab's thirst for dominance vengeance and destruction however overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion hatred wins what is it ahab finally asks what nameless inscrutable unearthly thing is it what causing hidden lord and master and cruel remorseless emperor commands me that against all natural lovings and longings i so keep pushing and crowding and jamming myself on all the time melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct one can be brave on a whaling ship or battlefield yet a coward before human evil starbuck elucidates this division the first maid is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as ahab's impious end starbuck while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas or winds or whales or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world yet cannot withstand those more terrific because spiritual terrors which sometimes menace you from the con concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man mutiny was the only salvation for the pequod's crew and it is our only salvation but moral cowardice turns us into hostages i am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change these debates were not academic they were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising a professional disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and like marx in the inevitable emergence of the worker state prudent insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order something we are likely to witness in our lifetime and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos krapotkin like prudent believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society emma goldman along with kropotkin came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses the mass goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life clings to its masters loves the whip and is the first to cry crucify the revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers the building blocks of revolt they believed relied on the tool of the general strike the ability of workers to the mechanisms of production strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties strike funds and union halls workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state but now with the decimation of the u.s manufacturing base along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion we will have to develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers most manufacturing jobs have disappeared and of those that remain few are unionized our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses monsanto and its faustian counterparts on wall street rule they are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless the corporate leviathan which is global is freed from the constraints of a single nation state or government corporations are beyond regulation or control and politicians are too anemic or more often too corrupt to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction this makes our struggle different from the revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized slavic republics russia spain and china and uprisings led by disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through africa and latin america the dispossessed working poor along with unemployed college graduates and students unemployed journalists lawyers and teachers along with impoverished artists will form our movement and this is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the declining middle class bakunin unlike marx considered these day class say intellectuals essential for successful revolt it is not the poor who make revolutions it is those who conclude that they will not be able as they once expected to rise economically and socially service workers and fast food workers know they are trapped as does the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt these two groups once united will be our primary engines of revolt much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws especially drug laws that have permitted courts probation officers parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color especially african-american men without just cause and locked them in cages for years in many of our most impoverished urban centers are internal colonies as malcolm x called them mobilization will be difficult the urban poor are in chains these chains are being readied for the rest of us erika chenoweth and maria stefan examined a hundred years of violent and non-violent resistant movements in their book why civil resistance works they concluded that non-violent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings violent movements work primarily in civil wars or an ending foreign occupations they found non-violent movements appeal to those within the power structure especially the police and civil servants who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing in the end to abandon them and we need only one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system history has shown to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures rebellion works on two tracks building alternative structures such as public banks to free ourselves from control and finding mechanisms to halt the machine the most important impediment facing us is not ideological it is now logistical the security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt the state knows the tinder is there it knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable it knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least half of the u.s population to perpetual poverty and as unemployment benefits are scaled backs as schools continue to close as the middle class withers away as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet the future will increasingly be one of open conflict the battle against the corporate state right now is a primarily about building an infrastructure sustain resistance the state and its internal projections has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine but the state to protect itself uses its mechanisms of propaganda to assure us that we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth profligate consumption and a dependence on fossil fuel the mania for hope is fed to us at the expense of the truth the corporate state meanwhile is internally preparing for the world it knows is actually coming it is cementing into place a pervasive police state one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry those with the moral courage to expose this security and surveillance state chelsea manning julian assange edward snowden jeremy hammond are criminalized and persecuted we will be sustained in this revolt which will require us to confront all systems of power by the transcendent chants work songs spirituals the blues poetry dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain the imagination of african americans they were the forces that as ralph ellison wrote we had in place of freedom the oppressed would be the first for they often know their fate to admit that on a rational level such a notion is absurd but they also know that is only through the imagination that they survive jewish inmates in auschwitz reportedly put god on trial for the holocaust and then condemned god to death this is a rational response to the horror of the holocaust a rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the inmates in evening prayers and this is the absurdity we must capture african americans and native americans for centuries had little control over their destinies forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by whites suffering for the oppressed was tangible death was a constant companion and it was only their imagination as william faulkner noted at the end of the sound and the fury that permitted them unlike the nivel the novel's white thompson family to endure the theologian james cone captures this in his book the cross and the lynching tree cone says that for oppressed blacks the cross on which jesus was crucified was a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world's value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat that suffering and death do not have the last word that the last shall be first and the first last cohn continues that god could make a way out of no way in jesus's cross was truly absurd to the intellect yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross christ crucified manifested god's loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life that transcendent presence in the lives of black christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately in god's eschatological future they would not be defeated by the troubles of this world no matter how great and painful they're suffering believing this paradox this absurd claim of faith was not only possible was only possible in humility and repentance there was no place for the proud and the mighty for people who think that god called them to rule over others the cross was god's critique of power white power with powerless love snatching victory out of defeat reinhold niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression even in the face of near certain defeat a sublime madness in the soul niebuhr wrote that nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places this sublime madness as niebuhr understood it is vital without it truth is obscured and niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity liberalism niebuhr said lacks the spirit of enthusiasm not to say fanaticism which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks it is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history the prophets in the hebrew bible spoke out of this sublime madness the words of the hebrew prophets as abraham asher wrote were a scream in the night while the world is at ease and asleep the prophet feels the blast from heaven the prophet because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality was heschel said compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his or her heart expected rebellion is a moral imperative it is to be carried out regardless of the possibilities of success it is not for the practical or the timid it is an act that is performed in the end because in times of despair and suffering it affirms life primo levy in his memoir survival in auschwitz tells of teaching italian to another inmate gene samuel in exchange for lessons in french levy recites to samuel from memory canto 26 of dante's inferno it is the story of ulysses final voyage we cheered but soon that cheering turned to woe for then a whirlwind born from the strange land battered our little vessel on the prowl three times the boat and all the sea were whirled and at the fourth to please another's will the aft tipped in the air the prowl went down until the ocean closed above our bones he has received the message levy wrote of his friend and what they shared in dante he has felt that it has to do with him that it has to do with all who toil and with us in particular levy went on it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen that he understand before it is too late tomorrow he or i might be dead or we might never see each other again it is those who find the courage to peer into the molten pit who can minister to the suffering of those around them they will be infected with this sublime madness as hannah erin wrote in the origins of totalitarianism the only morally reliable people are not those who say this is wrong or this should not be done but those who say i can't they know that as immanuel kant wrote if justice perishes human life on earth has lost its meaning and this means that like socrates we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong no matter what happens around us we can surmount despair not by ignoring reality but by responding radically to it and this includes acts of civil disobedience including jail time and in these acts we become fully human one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt camus wrote it is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity it is not aspiration for it is devoid of hope that revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it those we must follow now will be as ornery and mad as all prophets they will call us to lives of steadfast defiance they will be burnt children the people noticed that crazy horse was queerer than ever black elk said remembering the final days in the wars of western expansion he went on to say of the great sioux warrior he hardly ever stayed in the camp people would find him out alone in the cold and they would ask him to come home with them he would not come but sometimes he would tell the people what to do people wondered if he ate anything at all once my father found him out alone like that and he said to my father uncle you have noticed me the way i act but do not worry there are caves and holes for me to live in and out here the spirits may help me i am making plans for the good of my people homer dante beethoven melville dostoevsky proof joyce auden emily dickinson james baldwin along with artists such as the sculptor david smith the photographer diane arbus or the blues musician charlie patton all had this sublime madness it is the sublime madness that lets one sing as bluesman ishman bracey did in hinds county mississippi i've been down so long lord down don't worry me and yet in the midst of the imagination also lies the absurdity and certainty of divine justice i feel my hell horizon horizon every day i feel my horizon arise in every day someday it'll burst this levy and wash the whole world away shakespeare's greatest heroes and heroines prospero anthony juliet vila rosalind hamlet cordelia have this sublime madness king lear once he was stripped of power and forced to live with the persecuted and the poor had it it was only then that he could see it was only then that he understood that unbridled human lust and hubris led to the suicide of the species it will come albany says in the play humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep the poems of federico garcia lorca sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in spain music dance drama art song painting with a fire and drive of resistance movements the rebel units in el salvador when i covered the war always traveled with musicians and theater groups art as emma goldman pointed out has the power to make ideas felt goldman noted that when andrew undershaft a character in george bernard shaw's play major barbara said poverty is the worst of crimes and all the other crimes or virtues beside it his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than shaw's socialist tracks the degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state the destruction of the arts and journalism the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors severs the population from understanding self-actualization and finally transcendence in aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty truth and imagination and this is the war waged by all totalitarian systems the role of the artist then precisely is to illuminate that darkness blaze roads through the vast forest james baldwin wrote so that we will not in all our doing lose sight of its purpose which is after all to make the world a more humane dwelling place ultimately the artist and the revolutionary function as they function and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it wrote baldwin otherwise they could never endure much less embrace the lives they are compelled to lead i do not know if we can build a better society i do not even know if we will survive as a species but i know these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat i do not fight fascists because i will win i fight fascists because they are fascists and this is a fight which in the face of the overwhelming forces arrayed against us requires us to embrace this sublime madness defined in acts of rebellion the embers of life an intrinsic meaning that lies outside the certainty of success we must at once grasp our reality and then refuse to allow reality to paralyze us we must make this absurd leap of faith we must believe despite the empirical evidence around us that the good always draws to it the good we do not know where acts of goodness go the buddhists call it karma but in these acts we make visible a better world it is time for our own mutiny for the overthrow of our own ahabs for the redirecting of our ship away from certain death back towards life no matter how bleak things get we always have a choice in life we can choose to be rebels or slaves and that choice is one the corporate state is powerless to take from us and to rebel even if we fail is to succeed we must become a threat to the security and surveillance state and its corporate overlords and we cannot become a threat if we do not engage in actions that actively obstruct power the turkish poet nazim hickman who spent most of his adult life in prison or in exile knew something of despair but he knew something too of resistance of that rebellious spirit which must define us in times of oppression if we are to remain fully human any act of resistance large or small he wrote from inside his prison cell is its own eternal triumph any act of resistance lights up the night sky to remind us why we were created hickman captured this in his poem on living living is no laughing matter you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel for example i mean without looking for something beyond and above living i mean living must be your whole occupation living is no laughing matter you must take it seriously so much so and to such a degree that for example your hands tied behind your back your back to the wall or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses you can die for people even for people whose faces you've never seen even though you know living is the most real the most beautiful thing i mean you must take living so seriously that even at 70 for example you'll plant olive trees and not for your children either but because although you fear death you don't believe it because living i mean weighs heavier let's say we're seriously ill need surgery which is to say we might not get up from the white table even though it's impossible not to feel sad about going a little too soon we'll still laugh at the jokes being told we'll look out the window to see if it's raining or wait anxiously for the latest newscast let's say we're at the front for something worth fighting for say there in the first offensive on that very day we might fall on our face dead we'll know this with a curious anger but we'll still worry ourselves to death about the outcome of the war which could last years let's say we're in prison and close to 50 and we have 18 more years say before the iron doors will open we'll still live with the outside with its people and animals struggle and wind i mean with the outside beyond the walls i mean however and wherever we are we must live as if we will never die this earth will grow cold a star among stars and one of the smallest a gilded moat on blue velvet i mean this our great earth this earth will grow cold one day not like a block of ice or a dead cloud even but like an empty walnut it will roll along in pitch black space you must grieve for this right now you have to feel this sorrow now for the world must be loved this much if you're going to say i lived thank you [Applause] okay if you'll be seated let's take some questions anybody have a question a brief question please so we can get several questions in what do we have i was just wondering um when i listen to your talk i it borders on the um the depressive okay um and i know that even though it does border on the depressive you've actually said that you have optimism about the future um i'm a member of move to amend here in sacramento we're trying to get a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of their political power get them out um to me it's like a race are we gonna are we gonna conquer corporations are they gonna conquer us and i think climate change is there you know is the way they're gonna do it so what i'm saying is how do you reconcile these i'm assuming that you have the same i i don't you know i was a war correspondent for 20 years and we didn't use words like optimism and pessimism um i was in sarajevo when it was being hit with 2000 shells a day constant sniper fire four to five dead a day two dozen wounded a day and you had to make a very cold calculated assessment of the weapons systems arrayed against you and respond and i think what kept us going three and a half years the serbs shelled the city what were the kind of pyrrhic victories that we carried out as journalists so that if the serbs went into a village and massacred everyone in the village and blocked all the roads we would put our satellite phones in our backpacks and walk in and report it and get out and oftentimes when we're in those villages the serb snipers would fire at us because they didn't want the story out it didn't mean that we wouldn't wake up to the next day and there wouldn't be another massacre but it was our kind of battle to prevent the serbian forces or at least documenting what they did and prevent them from hiding what they did and i think that when you get involved in acts of resistance those acts themselves sustain you in a kind of penultimate way where you know what happens in the final end doesn't matter and i can give an example um i was with uh and veterans for peace in front of the white house a couple years ago for the anniverse marking the anniversary of the war in afghanistan up until bill mckibben's 350. was the largest mass arrest since the 60s 133 of us were arrested and it was snowing it was december or november this november and watermelon slim himself a blues musician and vietnam vet played taps on his harmonica and the veterans folded the flag of a kid who'd just been killed in afghanistan a couple weeks before his family had brought it from his coffin uh and then everybody went silent and someone slowly beat a drum and we lined up and a lot of us were crying and we marched to the fence of the white house and we were arrested and what was fascinating at that moment was that it turns out most of the dc police were in the national guard and had been to iraq and afghanistan and when they would cuff us behind our backs they would whisper keep doing what you're doing because these wars stank and so that moment was so deeply empowering it didn't stop the war in afghanistan but i think that when and i think martin luther king writes about this in the end of strength to love when they fire obama's house and he's sort of sitting at the kitchen table and he's fallen into despair i think that's where true spirituality comes from is carrying out acts of resistance against radical evil and at that point you know i do become religious i think that when you stand up to acts of radical evil whatever spiritual force is out there whatever you want to name it it's real and and it empowers you to go forward and it is a kind of sublime madness and james cohn is right it is a kind of absurdity or as kierkegaard said a leap of faith but i think that engaging standing up to radical evil um in a kind of real way and and and putting your body on the line i mean i don't as wendell berry says going to jail is more time than i care to donate to the us government um but i don't think we have another option and yet i find you know that's almost my church i find that that those moments of resistance and uh to be to to give me the kind of strength and power to go on and it and it is not you know it's not irrational but it's not at the same time probably rational yes um my question is a little bit about journalism and what its role is going to be um we live in a world where we can hear thousands of tweets and read people's facebook pages and have 91 000 documents put online as a result of um of hacking and so when i'm confronted with those kinds of things i don't know anything about the motivation of the tweeter or the writer of something i don't know anything about um the integrity of the individuals who do that and so it seems that wikileaks and places like that release and core dump all of these things on top of this but what is the role of journalism and without the corporate influence i suppose before all of journalism and in sorting that out for us i mean my anger at the obama administration is that the assault on civil liberties under this administration is far worse than it was under george w bush [Applause] and and part of that assault has been an assault against journalists if there are no manning snowden's assanges there is no free press um i as an investigative reporter for the new york times published and let's remember everything chelsea manning released to wikileaks was secret it wasn't top secret i published top secret material in the times and what's happened now is that with the wholesale surveillance what it means is that no no source can contact a journalist and expose the corruption misuse or even crimes of the power elite because they know that they will be that all their communications are captured and they will be found out which is why snowden fled the country and not only fled the country but rapidly admitted that he'd done it because he knew that the nsa had all of glenn greenwald's electronic communications the use of the espionage act seven times by obama and i think ellsberg spoke here uh has made it impossible for us to as investigative reporters challenge the official narrative and that means really the death of journalism so you're right to raise the issue of credibility but in fact the issue is one that is far more serious and that is that the most sophisticated security and surveillance state in human history which has now been delivered to us has essentially made not only journalism but any kind of activism impossible because they know everything we're doing before we do it and that's extremely frightening so um i mean i think the issue of the web and what has credibility and that's a good issue but the far more crucial issue is whether we're going to have any kind of a free press left or not and and this administration has gone a long way to snuffing out the power of the press to hold power accountable thank you mr hedges um i believe you and i've read our invisible revolution which you wrote i'd like to ask anyway if you will sign after considering one of the piecemeal and incremental reforms of our democracy such as it is the california disclose act senate bill 52 here in california we hope it goes across the country then because disclosure of the truth transparency are one of those transformative ideas worthy of revolution so i'd like to just give you the well i'll do anything to annoy power um i sued barack obama in federal court over section 1021 of the national defense authorization act in the southern district court of new york that section overturns 150 years of domestic law to empower the military to seize u.s citizens who substantially support that's not a legal term it's not material support substantially support al-qaeda the taliban or something called associated forces another kind of nebulous term hold them in military facilities strip them with due process and keep them there indefinitely and i'm sure to the surprise of the administration i won and judge catherine forrest declared the law unconstitutional now the reaction of the obama administration for me was quite chilling first of all suddenly instead of the federal attorneys that we we got the pentagon attorneys who started talking about national security issues who on the day of the ruling walked into judge forrest chamber and demanded that she issue a temporary injunction i.e she put the law back into effect until the appeal was heard she refused to accredit that was a friday afternoon monday morning at 9 00 a.m they went to the second circuit the appellate court right below the supreme court and made the same request and unfortunately appellate court ceded to that and and put the law back on the books until they heard the appeal now we knew they'd appeal but why were they so aggressive and i think the only response that i and the lawyers could make was that because they're already using the law probably against u.s iraqi u.s pakistani dual nationals in black sites like bagram because if it was found out that u.s citizens were being held under this law without access to due process and that injunction was allowed to stand they would be in contempt of court unfortunately the appellate court ruled in july against us overturned judge forrest decision and they overturned it saying that i and the other plaintiffs who joined me including noam chomsky and ellsberg didn't have standing um now what was fascinating is that they they as president cited the amnesty international versus clapper case before the supreme court i was also a plaintiff in that case and said the government lied the government got up in the supreme court and we only know they lied because of the snowden revelations and said none of these journalists have any standing because if in fact they were being monitored under law we would have to tell them they're being monitored and we now know that we were they were not telling us and we have filed a cert and we are trying to go to the supreme court but i think that so i certainly am all for not taking anything lying down and yet i no longer place my faith in the traditional systems of government but in mass movements which i believe we have to rebuild which is why i was so closely allied with the occupy movement i wanted to thank you for speaking to vocational schools and also speaking to artists i started as an artist and then i shipped it to um investigative reporting and journalism and i did that pro bono for many years um you detect an accent i do not vote in united states i'm a polish citizen and i went on the hillary clinton for uh president campaign and prior to that i i teamed up with the obama for president campaign and shifted i've noticed um in united states a shift that when i speak to it shakes my chest to the very core and and when i grew up in poland there was martial law and i remember that i shifted with the immigration my mom and my sister to new york city when i was 11 and i hoped for dynasty and you know the american dream and i've noticed that in united states the lack of civil liberties and the lack of the increased form of fascism i guess i could related that as best to that america is dying it's everything that i always believed america to be why i came here is dying and so i wanted just to thank you for speaking to artists in general because that really resonated with me because now i'm pursuing art and and i think that's going to wake people up thank you well you know the first public works project that the right wing killed of roosevelt's new deal was the theater project because under the public theater project millions of americans were suddenly not seeing disney fied garbage but stuff that spoke to their real condition like the creator of rock indeed baldwin when he was 11 went to harleman's horse and wells uh black macbeth in which orson welles being insane decided that all of the three weird sisters had to be witch doctors but he wasn't satisfied with having people playing witch doctors he went to haiti and found witch doctors but baldwin talks about that as his awakening and um and i think what's happened to the arts the fact that the corporations have sucked the life out of the arts is is what always happens i mean totalitarian societies are very good at spectacle uh but spectacle it's mindless cicero wrote about it with the arena the the emotional and intellectual life of as the roman republic was dying was absorbed by the arena what happened to cicero he was captured beheaded his hands were severed from his body and his severed hands and head were brought to the arena and um and they told cheering crowds he would never write or speak again that you know civilizations go down in the same fashion and you go back in dostoevsky's own very prescient understanding of the collapse of liberalism that's what demons is about that's what notes from underground is about and what he calls the rise of an age of moral nihilism and you read raskolnikov's dream and crime and punishment it just presages the bloodletting that would grip russia within a few years and and artists who have this kind of sublime madness capture this and seek to transmit it to the wider culture but we live in a culture where art or authentic culture has been ruthlessly marginalized or destroyed and we don't teach it in our schools it's frightening i've been watching the public television series the african-americans hosted by henry lewis gates i was struck that in the first episode he commented that slavery was the ultimate expertise slavery was the ultimate expression of capitalism it seems that our present economic trends and the assaults in the middle class and everything else you mentioned are pushing us towards a new slavery of capitalism well what happens as empires die is that the mechanisms of control and exploitation that are familiar to the victims of empire finally consume the residence of empire thucydides noted this with athens expanding empire which he said led athens to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home having spent 20 years on the outer reaches of empire and having seen the cruelty and violence of empire and then coming back and watching our police forces become militarized so that if there's a night raid for a warrant in oakland you have black uniformed kevlar-plated militarized police carrying long-barreled weapons with helicopters kicking down a door throwing in stun grenades there's no difference between a night raid in oakland and a night raid in fallujah it's the same you have 160 law enforcement agencies that have applied for drone permits you have torture taking place in our maximum security prisons i mean all in the end all of the the disease of empire migrates back and so what we did to native americans what we did to african americans what we did to those we subjugated in the philippines cuba vietnam iraq afghanistan the dominican republic there's a long list we're finally consuming ourself and this is the logical consequence of unfettered unregulated capitalism which is karl marx understood is a revolutionary force because it number one has no self-imposed limits and number two it commodifies everything human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse and in that collapse has built its own self-annihilation but it's incapable of any kind of control carl polyani in his book the great transformation although he was an economist writes that you know in what happens and it's a book about the nature of unfettered capitalism and he says when societies lose the capacity for the sacred they die and that's sort of what's happened we've lost the capacity for the sacred we don't unders everything has a cash or a monetary value nothing including human life anymore has an intrinsic value at least to the people in charge so 15 of the population in the united states in the eyes of corporate capitalism is superfluous labor so they throw them in cages and we're now seeing uh what were visited upon african americans and urban centers being visited on poor whites all in the name of drugs i mean half of the people in our prison population never committed a violent crime uh we're and we're seeing against activists the whole reason i fought the ndaa is because this has nothing to do with terrorism it has to do with the ability to use the military to break the back of dissent and why the military because ultimately they don't trust the police to protect them and you saw in chicago with the teachers strike where the teachers would be marching through the streets and they would go in the precinct houses and the police would applaud to use the bathroom they'd applaud them that terrifies the state and um and that's why they want but we kept saying congress wrote the laws a bipartisan bill sponsored by mccain 11. we said all you have to do is put into section 1021 that u.s citizens are exempt and will drop our lawsuit they didn't put it in because they know damn well why they wrote it hi chris thank you for your presence i think your father would be very proud of you right now chris should i vote uh well as emma goldman said if voting was that effective it'd be illegal um i vote i voted for nader i wrote nader's speeches forum in 2008. i voted the last election the green party is a kind of just as a protest vote um but if you i mean i i would hope that by now people are not going to be fooled by another barack obama um he has betrayed every single campaign promise he made and he has lied to us um i mean just take the 2001 authorization used military force act which he has interpreted as giving the executive branch the right to assassinate american citizens i mean this is just really frightening and really radical stuff um the way that he has persecuted whistleblowers like you know chelsea manning exposes war crimes through a video where uh helicopter pilots are not only firing on unarmed civilians and children but firing on people unarmed civilians who attempt to rescue the wounded and nothing happens to them and chelsea manny is sitting in fort leavenworth for 35 years i mean if that doesn't show the sickness the moral inversion of a society and we i won't even get into obamacare um except to say that it's the equivalent of the bank bailout pill for the pharmaceutical insurance industry 447 billion dollars in subsidies they can drop any of us who get sick i mean it's and we're all legally mandated to buy this corporate product the first thing the white house did was grant exemptions to these companies that did not want to ensure chronically ill children which means in moral terms that we live in a country where it's illegally permissible for corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons and daughters that's the world that's been created for us so i vote i just i don't vote for democrats or republicans and and i think nader was right that if we can begin to build 5 10 15 million people that are willing to step outside the system we have a chance thank you for being here i'm also with move to amend sacramento what i've noticed over the years is that the combination of state cap state capitalist state corporate capitalism has had most of our ordinary citizens running around like crazy from job to job three jobs and then having to deal with the groceries and the children and etc and i think this is probably by design because they want to keep us so busy that we don't have time to revolt i am very much what you said about revolting because it feels good because it it makes me feel good because i'm so damn angry but i have this question of americans are not very fast to rouse themselves out into the street and i have a vision of tens of thousands of people in sacramento and millions in cities um whole towns coming out onto the street do you have any suggestions for how we can get people angry enough to people people themselves people are pretty angry um you know the secret the secret is just to keep doing and go back and read vasslov havel's great 1978 essay the power of the powerless so he starts charter 77 in 1977. the velvet revolution doesn't happen until 1989 i covered the velvet revolution i was in the magic lantern theater every night with covel and klaus and dinsbury and everyone else i covered the east german overthrow of the stasi state there again you had a small group mostly lutheran pastors and small groups of congregants who were holding candlelit vigils in leipzig night after night people didn't join them and then suddenly 70 000 people showed up there's always something some spark and it's always the ruling elite that determines the configuration of rebellion so what was their response to the occupy encampments they eradicated them physically they did not respond to any of the grievances that push people into those encampments if the state and here we talk about a dying civilization but if the state could have responded rationally then there would have been a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions public option or universal health for all forgiveness of student debt and a massive jobs program especially targeted at people under the age of 25. that would be a rational response but because not only did they not respond rationally but things are getting worse and we speak on a day where i mean we live in a country now where millions of children go to bed every night hungry i think the figure is like 10 or 20 million and we're cutting their food stamp benefits we're cutting the unemployment benefits we're slashing head start closing so that gets to the point of because there's no control no regulation no self-imposed limits these people will push and push and push until there's blowback so blowback is inevitable the problem is not that there won't be blow back the problem is what that blowback will look like because we have powerful proto-fascist movements in this country that prey on the despair and rage a legitimate rage and despair but channel it the way fascist movements do by sacralizing the nation fusing the iconography and language of the christian religion with the nation state nazis did this and then targeting the vulnerable blaming undocumented workers muslims homosexuals liberals feminists they have a long list of people they despise and those forces are financed by the most retrograde elements of american capitalism from the koch brothers on death so we and they talk in the language of violence and they celebrate the gun culture and i was just in alabama and it's like a confederate theme park um i hate to be like a white liberal but it did confirm everything i every stereotype i had about white alabamians i was walking through montgomery with a great lawyer brian stevenson who spent his entire life defending black people on death row and it was just this confederate they had just done a reenactment of jefferson davis's inaugural because it used to be this it was the first southern white house so about 200 white guys dressed up in confederate uniforms and somebody dressed up like jefferson davis in a carriage and they marched through the center of montgomery with big confederate flags now half of montgomery is black and and and it reminded me of yukoslavia when i covered the war in yugoslavia when yugoslavia went down the economic crisis created the war not ancient ethnic hatreds you had the same thing a self-identified but impotent liberal elite that couldn't respond rationally to the crisis and so you vomited up these very frightening figures slobodan milosevic radovan heritage and and what happens when societies go down is that when they turn and anger on that impotent liberal elite they um not only throw out the elite but they turn on traditional liberal values as well because they see that it has failed them and i worry very much that that scenario is there that this neo-confederacy which we see in the south is a response to the joblessness the despair the same thing i saw in yugoslavia and it's all come up in the last 10 15 years these these memorials are all new you drive into montgomery and it is the biggest confederate flag i've ever seen you know like they fly over those used car dealerships it's like that put there by the sons of the confederacy um and i think that we have violence in american society and hofstetter wrote this is traditionally vigilante violence it's the clan it's cuban exiles blowing people up in miami um it's black water i mean all of that's there and um so i think that you know there's no guarantee that when that backlash comes it's going to look good i'm afraid this is going to have to be our last question thank you i really enjoyed your talk um one thing that's always struck me when i hear people talking about climate change and how it's going to affect us is i don't understand why the people in power and the people that are orchestrating this whole thing think that they're going to be immune from the effects of climate change and why that doesn't wake anybody up because they don't live in the real world they they live in an artificial world and in dying societies elites retreat into enclosed protected enclaves whether it's a versailles or the forbidden city remember none of these people even fly commercial airlines they have no idea what's going on in this country that's number one and number two and i speak is somebody who went to school with a lot of them is they're sort of stupid um they i mean you know larry summers is the kind of classic example the youngest tenured economics professor at harvard and yet um you know he he buys into this deregulated market you know the only kind of poetic justice is that he not only trashed the american economy in the global economy but he lost about a third of the harvard endowment because he bought all this toxic garbage and there's you know they're sort of smart in a kind of analytical way and yet on another level they're completely clueless and i think part of it is because they're clueless about human nature and how it works uh and i think also they're blinded by their own greed um in the short term it's very profitable for them they live in these bubbles um and you're right i mean they will they'll you know will go down first probably but they'll go down next but i think you they have no clue i think the problem is that um you know they are so myopic so blinded by that lust for profit i mean look forty percent of the summer arctic sea ice melts and the reaction of shell oil company is that the death throes of the planet are very good for business and we're going to go up there and drop one half billion dollar drill bit after another i mean it's insane and yet you go back and look and tainter does a good job of this and redmond but look at the collapse of all civilizations and that's what happened you end up with a kind of idiot elite and corrupt i mean these people have no moral center at all many of these people on wall street know we're going down they are as cynical they're just cynical and they're just stealing as much as fast as they can on the way out the door and they think that their wealth will buy them protection thank you [Music] you

Channel: St. Mark's UMC Sacramento

Views: 41,640

Rating: 4.8799 out of 5

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Id: r9XmyYYaZ18

Length: 95min 21sec (5721 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/orcgore]

Yeah man, Hedges has been in this for a while. America the Farewell tour is grim..

[u/sharklikebull]

Brother Hedges was calling this in the Bush years in my memory.

[u/HuevosSplash]

He's a war correspondent, or rather used to be, saw the collapse of many countries while covering war and has a good take on the early signs and late signs of a decaying collapsing society. It's quite evident that the American brand of terrorism that we brought abroad is now coming back home to it's own people, all the cruelty and the callousness of the ruling elite spread open for the world to see.

[u/fuzzyshorts]

Chis hedges scares me. In this just posted video form 2013, Hedges paints a picture of this moment in america and the possibilities of what is to come.

[u/moppelh]

Is there a transcript of this somewhere?

[u/antihexe]

Chris Hedges is one of the most important and relevant journalists living now. I can't think of another quite as present and honest and frank.

[u/[deleted]]

The Jeremiah of our time.

[u/SpiritualInkedAddict]

One of my favorite writers, sadly, I feel he is correct.

[u/[deleted]]

Knee-chuh.