Pulitzer-Prize Winning Writer Chris Hedges Blasts Corporate America, Celebrity Culture
February 2, 2010
Former New York Times writer Chris Hedges spoke at Vermont Law School on January 28,2010.
Chris Hedges wants a revolution.
"I'm a dissident," he said. "I'm for all forms of resistance."
In a Jan. 28 speech at Vermont Law School, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer criticized America's celebrity culture and major corporations, saying a "perverted" profit demand has wreaked moral, political, economic and environmental havoc on the United States.
He called for a wholesale makeover of American society, including a regulatory crackdown on corporations, empowerment of the working class and a resurrection of traditional values, including honesty, modesty and self-sacrifice.
"There are powerful corporate entities arrayed against us," Hedges told a crowd of about 150 people at the Chase Community Center. "These anti-democratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross."
Hedges said a diseased form of unregulated capitalism and celebrity worship has infected American society, replacing old-fashioned decency with a ruinous belief in moral nihilism.
"We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire," he said. "Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant."
Hedges called for Americans to engage in "moral resistance" against corporate "hedonists of power."
"If we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury and our bizarre state socialism for corporations ... our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state," he said. "Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty, a state of neo-feudalism. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them."
A former war correspondent for The New York Times, Hedges came to VLS to discuss his latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
"The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid for by corporate titans," he said. "It is being paid for on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing towns and in depressed rural enclaves."
Hedges opened his remarks by saying his old friend Ralph Nader had urged him to use his VLS speech to explore the Bush Administration's failure to defend the rule of law, the poor, working class and the environment.
"A self-regulating market inevitably turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural world," he said. "We must opt out of the mainstream. We must articulate and stand firmly and unequivocally, even if this turns us at first into outcasts, on the side of working men and women. We must no longer be content with the crumbs tossed to us by the power elite in the vain hope that accommodation will work. We must become as militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain passive we will soon be engulfed by a ruthless totalitarian capitalism. If we remain passive, as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history, we will become serfs. If we fight back, we have a chance."
Hedges held up Michael Jackson as an example of commercial exploitation.
"He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated," he said. "He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that is at the core of our corporate culture. He was a reflection of us in the extreme."
Hedges said Americans are committing collective suicide in their worship of celebrity culture.
"The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture," he said. "This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths; superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the incapacity for remorse or guilt."
President Obama has been no better in resisting corporate money than his recent predecessors in the White House, and Democrats and Republicans alike have failed on the Iraq war, the federal deficit, health care, trade and other issues, he said.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hedges said. "It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an ‘empire of production' to an ‘empire of consumption.'"
The United States is devolving into a Third World nation in which corporate forces will never permit real reform. he said.
Hedges said American voters have rejected Nader because he offers no easy solutions.
"He's a pariah who speaks with moral authority," he said. "He shows the ugly reality and people would rather be fooled than make the commitment needed to fix this nation's problems. He's reviled by the society he's trying to save."
Hedges talked poignantly about the moral choices he has witnessed, including a Muslim farmer who gave his cow's milk to a dying Serbian baby during the Bosnian War. He also cited his father, Thomas, a Presbyterian minister and activist during the Vietnam War and civil rights and gay rights movements.
At the end of his speech, the Vermont native recalled his 2003 resignation from The New York Times, where he was reprimanded for his public comments against the Iraq War, which his editors said could jeopardize public trust in the paper's impartiality.
Hedges choked up briefly when said he chose to quit rather than to be silent and compromise his ethics. He received a standing ovation when he stepped from the podium.
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