America

March 15, 2018

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedges spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and now serves as a columnist for the progressive website Truthdig and host of the TV program On Contact. Here he portrays a country riven with job uncertainty and rapid social change leading to despair, drug abuse, and rising anger at anything that looks other.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 4, 2018
Journalist Hedges’s latest critique of late-stage capitalist America is forceful and direct, reflecting a weary despair backed up by diligent reporting. He sees the ills of drugs, gambling, pornography, hate groups, mass incarceration, and an oppressive state as evidence of a “creeping corporate coup d’état,” decries the fiction of an economic recovery, and paints the election of Donald Trump and the ascendancy of “his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists and moral deviants” as embodying “the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.” He turns an unflinching eye on the opioid crisis, the evisceration of organized labor, and the resurgence of hate groups, and supports his contention that laborers are on a “global plantation built by the powerful” with harrowing descriptions of sex work in the pornography-industrial complex. In Hedges’s view, the few positive responses left to Americans are to band together for small-scale socialist enterprise and community, and engage in “a global fight for life against corporate tyranny” as exemplified by the protests against industry might and police power in Standing Rock, S.Dak., and Ferguson, Mo. Though this account is trenchant, even the staunchest adherents of Hedges’s unreconstructed socialist views may feel drained by the unrelenting bleakness of its worldview.

June 15, 2018
With a trademark blend of heavy-handed polemic and sharply observed detail, Hedges (Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, 2015, etc.) writes a requiem for the American dream."This moment in history marks the end of a long, sad tale of greed and murder by the white races," writes the author. "It is inevitable that for the final show we vomited up a figure like Trump." There's not much room for evenhanded debate in the face of such language, but that's beside the point: Hedges is ticked off, as ever, and here he is in full-tilt righteous indignation, making it clear that it's not just Christians who are awaiting the apocalypse. Hedges limns an America whose economy is presupposed on mindless consumption and permanent war, in which the rich are now busily honoring Karl Marx's prediction that in the end times, "the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it"--health care, education, infrastructure, and so forth. That much seems inarguable. Hedges doubles down on the apocalyptic prophecy as his argument builds: "Droughts, floods, famines, and disease will eventually see the collapse of social cohesion," he writes, "including U.S. coastal areas." Nobody said that climate change and its effects would be pretty, but the author lays it on thickly as he delivers a comprehensive, onrushing litany of the horrors that await us. Where he uses hard data--as when he calculates that despite at annual expenditure of $76 billion in the war on drugs, overdose deaths have increased by 400 percent since 1999--Hedges is nearly unassailable. Where he relies on mere rhetoric, as in a rather strange disquisition on sex work, sadism, and capitalism, he's less satisfying. His breadth of reference, however, is refreshing, drawing on the likes of Plato, Émile Durkheim, and Eric Voegelin--and lots of Marx--for reinforcement.While often an exercise in preaching to the choir, the book is also a fiery sermon that weighs the nation and finds it wanting.

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