These Precious Illusions

Last Saturday, Chloe and I went to the SPL book sale which was a complete madhouse. Still, we survived, and I got some lovely items for $1 a pop. I got Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth in hardback and a paperback of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. All are in pretty good condition. The Corrections and Song of Solomon are on my tentative summer reading list. If the book section of the sale was crazy, that was nothing compared to the audiovisual component which was in a separate building. Anyway, I figured if the CDs were only one buck, I might as well just grab anything that looked interesting. I got Spoon's Gimme Fiction, the soundtrack to Juno, M. Ward's Post-War, Kate Bush's The Sensual World, and Elliott Smith's From a Basement on the Hill. I think I made out pretty well.

On Sunday I pretty much had a breakdown as major projects were due while I had majorly procrastinated. I've taken to saying that my SUU professors should have known better that I don't have the managerial skills to handle grad school when they wrote my letters of recommendation, but whatcha gonna do? This week has gotten better, for the moment anyway. During semesters, you get to sort of semi-languorously make your way through the fifteen weeks. As least that is my experience. During ten-week quarters, my preferred languid pace doesn't work so well. There is always something due.

So what I really want to write about is this fairly provocative, polemical book I just finished. It's entitled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. It's pretty strong stuff. He comes from a working-class family, earned a BA in English from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard. He has worked as a correspondent from the NYT and earned a Pulitzer for his coverage of global terrorism. He is a socialist and a Christian, which is rarely explicit in the book though never far removed. He has previously written several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning--writing "war is a drug" that became the epigraph for The Hurt Locker--and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (a mouthful right there) wherein he argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement is a threat to American democracy. (See the current history textbook controversy going on in Texas.) This might also go on my summer reading list.

Hedges follows in the tradition of other Cassandras including Noam Chomsky, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jared Diamond, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, and Neil Postman, whose book Amusing Ourselves to Death is also on my list. He often comes off as a Debbie Downer and seems to alienate any possible reader taking on the left and the right, critiquing not only pornography, corporations, and pop psychology, but also The New York Times NPR, and our education system, especially our universities. As a polemic it's often rage making, and he doesn't offer any easy answers (because there are none) except the enduring power of love, which seems pretty flimsy.

The book is comprised of five chapters, each tacking a different illusion. The first is the Illusion of Literacy. Hedges begins, naturally enough, with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and argues that our society is functionally illiterate since even if we may know how to read and write, we are mesmerized by the shadow plays, unable to distinguish reality from illusion. He makes the analogy to Fahrenheit 451 where books are burned, but nobody seems to mind since they are enchanted by the parlor walls, an obvious metaphor for television. Our world is less 1984 and more Brave New World (also on my list). We don't need to censor people if we can endlessly amuse them. In this chapter, Hedges explores our cultural illiteracy through WWE, reality TV, and our celebrity culture. Today celebrity is everything, even if it's only the 15 minutes found on reality TV shows most of which, if not all, are puerile, voyeuristic, and morally reprehensible. Over the summer my family watched I Survived a Japanese Game Show and Wipeout, and even then I thought, what is the merit of this show? There is none intellectually or artistically.

Now I love television, scripted please, since reality TV has nothing in common with reality. Episodic television, at its best, can address complex ethical and moral issues, dysfunctional families, and serve as biting satires of pop culture, etc. Sometimes it's a little over-simplistic, that's the medium, but it can at least get you thinking. Shows that come to mind include The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, and The Simpsons. At it's worst, TV shows can be glitzy, showy, and glamorous distractions or even puerile and mind-numbingly stupid, but at the very least some artistic merit went into the work from the writing and acting to the directing and production. In this chapter, and through the rest of the book, Hedges seems in search of lost time, his own illusion of the good old days, the illusion of Norman Rockwell's America. Yet he also notes that historically kings led their courts in elaborate intrigues to distract everyone from the dirty business of governing. This isn't new. As I read this chapter Lily Allen's "The Fear" came to mind. I'm not sure Hedges would approve of reducing his book's ideas to pop songs, but "The Fear" really captures everything Hedges is saying--cultural programming, massive consumption, and the inability to separate reality from fantasy. MGMT's "Time to Pretend" also seems to apply.

The second chapter is the Illusion of Love. Here he discusses pornography, often with an unsettling, graphic frankness. I don't think anyone confuses pornography with love, but Hedges says it's not even about sex. It's the auto-erotic, masturbatory fantasy of the subjection of women by men. He discusses at length how far porn has gone since the advent of the home video and especially the Internet, continually pushing boundaries, becoming more extreme, violent, and deplorable. He attends a porn convention in Las Vegas calling the city our cultural capital--the ultimate simulacrum where nothing is real. He talks to current and ex porn stars, illustrating how they are treated not as people but as commodities. The producers and directors are pimps. I've often wondered why it's illegal to pay someone for sex, but not illegal to pay 2 (or 50) people to have sex with each other and film it.

In The West Wing Amy Gardner tells Josh that prostitution is about the subjugation of women by men for profit and dire economic needs are a form of coercion. Not to mention that being a prostitute is bad for you. I think that applies to pornography as well. This chapter reminded me of Tori Amos's songs "Amber Waves" and "Don't Make Me Come to Vegas" both from Scarlet's Walk. Actually most of Amos's road-tripping, agit-pop record of America serves well as a companion piece to the book including "Wednesday," "Crazy," "Pancake," and "Scarlet's Walk." I just want to quote Neil Gaiman's description of the album: "The CD's about America -- it's a story that's also a journey, that begins in LA and crosses the country, slowly heading east. America's in there, and specific places and things, Native American history and pornography and a girl on a plane who'll never get to New York, and Oliver Stone and Andrew Jackson and madness and a lot more. Not to mention a girl called Scarlet who may be the land and may be a person and may be a trail of blood."

The middle chapter is the Illusion of Wisdom, wherein he takes on our contemporary institutions of "higher" learning. I think he would have a friend in Harold Bloom who has little patience for today's university--media circuses and undead professors. Hedges notes that most of our multiple failures can be laid at the doors that educate our elite. He says our universities are owned by corporations and that our public institutions are high-security national laboratories. If we remember in Dollhouse, Rossum uses college laboratories for its experiments. Hedges tells us that universities focus on analytic intelligence and condition students to value success above all else through standardized test scores and GPAs. They teach increasingly specialized subjects, riddled with academic jargon, divorced from other disciplines and often from context and reality. Many of our liberal arts colleges have folded, and the large universities are politically silenced. Hedges writes, "The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive." Today they embrace a moral nihilism.

This led me to a fascinating article written by Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning" which argues for a return to the trivium: grammar, logic (dialectic), and rhetoric. These are not subjects, they are the raw tools of learning across subjects. The tools we need to be truly literate. Sayers was a Christian humanist in the first half of the 20th century. This article was presented in 1947. And while she wants to teach theology again, I would not agree except that I would not be opposed to teaching some type of (secular) morality. I have no songs for this, only the authentic wisdom of Oscar Wilde's maxims. Borges tells us that the Great Aesthete was almost always right.

"All bad poetry is sincere."
"In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
"One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers."
"Public opinion only exists where there are no ideas."
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."

The fourth chapter is the illusion of happiness. Here he tackles the pop psychology of positive thinking. Perhaps because I've grown up with the myth of choosing to be happy, this one got under my skin. I don't believe in New Age philosophy or in "The Secret" though I do think that at some level if you visualize what you want that can help you set a goal and provide the motivation to achieve it. But focusing on riches isn't going to make you wealthy, which I think is Hedges point. Choosing to make the best of bad circumstances is one thing, but creating positive illusions creates a delusional society that is disconnected from reality. He spends most of the chapter discussing how widely this idea is promoted by the media conglomerates and especially how ruthlessly it is used by corporations to mold compliant "happy" workers. "[Positive psychologists] condemn all social critics and iconoclasts, the dissidents and individualists, for failing to surrender and seek fulfillment in the collective lowing of the corporate herd. They strangle creativity and moral autonomy. The seek to mold and shape individual human beings into a compliant collective."
I definitely think we need more iconoclasts and subversives, and from my favorite iconoclast, Tori Amos, we have "Almost Rosey" and "Sweet Dreams."

In the final chapter, we have the Illusion of America. He admits that this country was never perfect, but that is used to be something. Today a very few companies and people control almost everything that we see, read, and hear. Corporations have sucked dry the blood of the working class and control the political landscape. Thank goodness they are recognized as "people" now. He chastises the Democratic Party and Clinton for selling out the working class for corporations--for ditching labor unions, for signing NAFTA, for crippling welfare with reform, for demolishing the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the economic meltdown we are experiencing. Health care was/is still broken (dismantling the entire health care system is probably the only way to fix it), the environment is being destroyed, the press is controlled by media conglomerates, politics are controlled by corporations who are getting richer while people are getting poorer. He also notes that corporations exhibit six traits displayed by clinically defined psychopaths. If they're people now, can we do something about this? Listening to "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" by Tracy Chapman is appropriate here ("Fast Car" is also nice for showing the dark side of the American Dream). Hedges says none of this is sustainable. We are talking about a revolution. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Extreme stuff. So thank goodness, we have written him out of our history textbooks, the man only wrote the Declaration of Frickin' Independence.

Again, this is polemic, and I while I have argued in my head with him and quibbled with several points, in the end I agree with Hedges's thesis. It is definitely interesting, probably an important work, and I would recommend that you read it. You are free to argue with it, Chris Hedges would probably be disappointed if you didn't. I will leave you with one last quote:

This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debts into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth.