Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”

“Ow,” Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

At 3:16 p.m., a deafening sigh was heard across the country as the nation grappled with the daunting cascade of syllables, whose unfamiliar letter-upon-letter structure stretched on for an endless 500 words. Children wailed for the attention of their bewildered parents, businesses were shuttered, and local governments ground to a halt as Americans scanned the text in vain for a web link to click on.

Sources also reported a 450 percent rise in temple rubbing and under-the-breath cursing around this time.

“It demands so much of my time and concentration,” said Chicago resident Dale Huza, who was confronted by the confusing mound of words early Monday afternoon. “This large block of text, it expects me to figure everything out on my own, and I hate it.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mark Shelton, a high school teacher from St. Paul, MN who stared blankly at the page in front of him for several minutes before finally holding it up to his ear. “What does it want from us?”

As the public grows more desperate, scholars are working to randomly italicize different sections of the text, hoping the italics will land on the important parts and allow everyone to go on with their day. For now, though, millions of panicked and exhausted Americans continue to repetitively search the single column of print from top to bottom and right to left, looking for even the slightest semblance of meaning or perhaps a blurb.

Some have speculated that the never-ending flood of sentences may be a news article, medical study, urgent product recall notice, letter, user agreement, or even a binding contract of some kind. But until the news does a segment in which they take sections of the text and read them aloud in a slow, calm voice while highlighting those same words on the screen, no one can say for sure.

There are some, however, who remain unfazed by the virtual hailstorm of alternating consonants and vowels, and are determined to ignore it.

“I’m sure if it’s important enough, they’ll let us know some other way,” Detroit local Janet Landsman said. “After all, it can’t be that serious. If there were anything worthwhile buried deep in that block of impenetrable English, it would at least have an accompanying photo of a celebrity or a large humorous title containing a pop culture reference.”

Added Landsman, “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have a point.”

March 17, 2010, Anonymous Internet (aka The Onion)

Letter from Berlin: Secret Germany

It’s the dead of winter in Berlin. Temperatures steadily in the minus-4 to minus-14 degree range ever since Christmas. Plenty of snow, icy sidewalks, frozen mud and slush, the very weather that the Winter Olympic Games organizers in Vancouver are presumably longing for, instead of the Gothic fog, rain, and premature spring that they’ve got. Here, public discourse has been reduced to earnest debates about the relation of black ice to civic and individual responsibility, and frequent reports of hospitalized people with broken arms and legs who have slipped on the aforementioned ice. And, oh yes, there’s a collapsing Eurozone economy, especially at the edges of the European Union, in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative-neoliberal coalition government is firmly resisting bailout talk.

It’s the sort of winter that leads Germans to turn up the central heating and contemplate the state of the German soul. Rumination about the German Geist has been an Olympic-class intellectual sport here for better than two centuries. Sometimes those ponderings produce a Faust; a Beethoven string quartet; a  Brecht, Thomas Mann, or Gunter Grass; even a Fassbinder film series of Alfred Doblin’s Weimar-era novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. At other times, that thinking about the authentic German soul or spirit gives us a Herder, Neitzsche, Heidegger, or much darker phenomena — and not just in the form of thoughts.

I think it’s fair to say that Germany is very far removed — more than a half century in time, but the distance is much more than temporal — from its fascist past. Yes, one finds in the press the occasional and almost inevitably exaggerated neo-Nazi story from Germany, but in reality I suspect it’s easier to turn up contemporary fascists in Britain, Italy, France, Austria or Belgium than it is to find them in the former Third Reich of Hitler. Of course, there are neo-Nazis in the country, but the other day when they attempted to march in Dresden to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II firebombing of the city, some 10,000 counter-protesters showed up in the snow and turned the right-wingers away at the train station. March cancelled. Germany may be one of the few modern nations to have actually learned something from history.

Fascism is gone, but the ghost of fascism remains, at least for a generation old enough to still have some living memory, however faint, of it. For such people, now in their fifties or older, the enigma of how it was possible for Nazism to occur, particularly in Germany, is a permanent question. It’s been a thematic of postwar German writing from Nobel laureate Gunter Grass’s now classic Tin Drum (the 50th anniversary of its publication was marked last year) to such recent works as Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

In the winter of German discontent with icy sidewalks, I’ve stumbled upon a lengthy biography of an early-20th century, now mostly-forgotten, German poet and cult leader that tells us more about the troubled stirrings of national souls than most volumes of conventional political analysis and history. The book is Robert Norton’s Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Cornell, 2002), a work that’s received only limited attention, largely in academic precincts, but that deserves, for a variety of reasons, a wider readership.

Norton’s bio is a first-rate piece of scholarship and an engrossing read, especially on long winter nights, German or otherwise. It’s among the best literary biographies of the past decade. Second, this first full-length account of Stefan George (1868-1933; the surname is pronounced “gay-org-uh”) fills in important gaps in the history of 20th century poetry, as well as in German cultural history. Most important, it examines once widespread notions about “secret Germany,” a dangerously Romantic idea that energized all sorts of phenomena in early 20th century, from nudist and nature movements, to cultlike homoerotic and mystical circles, to national longings for a strong Leader (or Fuhrer). In addition to appreciating the general virtues of Norton’s book, I have an accidental personal interest in it.

When I was a young writer in San Francisco in the 1960s, I frequently heard stories from my teachers Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan about one of their professors at the University of California Berkeley, when they were all students there just after the end of World War II. Their most memorable teacher, Blaser told me, was the medieval historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, author of Frederick II and The King’s Two Bodies, books to which we younger writers were soon introduced.

Kantorowicz, of Jewish descent, had spoken out against the Nazis and fled Germany in the late 1930s. Once in the U.S., he taught at Berkeley, where he resisted the McCarthyite “loyalty oaths” of the 1950s, and later at Princeton. In his youth, however, he’d been a rightwing German nationalist and a member of the fabled George circle. Kantorowicz’s 1928 study of the 13th century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick was one of the books produced by academic members of the George group that celebrated powerful German leaders.

Another San Francisco writer I knew, Lew Ellingham, who was knowledgeable about German culture and the George group, later partially applied the notion to his and Kevin Killian’s biography of Jack Spicer, Poet, Be Like God (1998). Norton’s biography of George provides a sharply focused portrait of what I’d only known, up to then, as a blurry myth of a distant Germanic brew of poetry and perversity.

As Norton recounts it, “George began his career in the early 1890s as a lyric poet in the French Symbolist mode and he was soon regarded as one of the best poets of his time.” Mallarme accepted the young George into his salon as “one of us.” But George’s ambitions would eventually extend beyond the merely literary.

“Over the next four decades,” Norton says, “George attracted a following, first among the small number of his associates and then among ever larger segments of the populace, that sought to put his ideas into practice in the world. For George had devised not just a way of writing poetry but also, as time went on, a way of living. He considered the group of friends he gathered around him, who habitually addressed him as ‘Master,’ to be the embodiment and defenders of the ‘true’ but ‘secret’ Germany, as opposed to the ‘false’ and all too manifest reality of contemporary bourgeois society.”

The group was “initially an informal coterie of like-minded poets who congregated to discuss and recite their works.” However, “George and his circle gradually assumed an enormously influential position in the culture at large. During the last 15 years of his life George was the closest thing Germany had to a prophet: a poetic visionary who, through his very remoteness, seemed to personify the vague longings of his countrymen for some form of redemption.”

To give some idea of George’s fame, Norton cites a 1929 newspaper photograph gallery, with the caption, “contemporary figures who have become legends”: the gallery included Woodrow Wilson, France’s Clemenceau, Gandhi, Lenin, and Stefan George. “Just before he died in 1933,” Norton reports, “after the new government had taken over in Germany — a regime many thought he had foreseen and whose coming he had, inadvertently or not, helped to prepare — several of its otherwise cocksure henchmen prostrated themselves before him in the attempt to win his blessing and cooperation…” And, in turn, George wasn’t averse to being regarded as the prophet of The New Reich (the title of his final volume of poems).

It’s hard to tell from Norton’s renditions of George’s poetry if it’s any good or not, though many readers and critics of his era claimed George’s poems to be masterpieces of German writing. Norton doesn’t assume any literary pretensions and simply offers workmanlike translations, to give readers an idea of what George was writing about. Unlike his younger contemporary, Rilke, whose work in English translation is remarkably accessible (if nonetheless difficult in terms of content), George’s verse remains opaque, though the titles of his books, Year of the Soul, The Seventh Ring and The Star of the Covenant among others, give some hint of the secret handshake contents.

What’s clearer is the personality (and persona) of the poet, an austere mixture of purities and autocratic power that could be alternately attractive and terrifying. It was just the sort of combination that gives rise to cult leaders. Still, George had a good eye for both talented writers and beautiful boys. When the 20-something George met and began a demonic pursuit of a talented and attractive 17-year-old Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a Vienna café in 1891, the object of the infatuation found it all pretty terrifying. Neither the friendship nor the literary relationship were consummated, though a turn-of-the-century version of telephone tag went on for years.

George was more successful with others. His primary disciple, the photogenic Friedrich Gundolf, turned up as an 18-year-old, and remained devoted to George to his death. Gundolf became a precocious professor at the University of Heidelberg, and published a celebrated study of leadership, The Mantle of Caesar, as well as books about Goethe, Shakespeare and the history of German poetry.  However, when he married, George excommunicated him permanently from the magical circle.

Other prominent followers had similarly stormy emotional and erotic relations with their master. In addition to Gundolf and Kantorowicz, members of George’s circle included such once well-known figures as historian Friedrich Wolter, cultural critic Max Kommerell, and later, the aristocratic brothers Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg, now remembered for their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler and their summary execution.

Norton is particularly good on tracing George’s  restless parapatetic wanderings between Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg and eventually rural Switzerland. He makes excellent and unprecedented use of the available correspondence and other documents to detail the tangled and obsequious relations that various followers had with the Master. His scene setting brings to life George’s growing influence, beginning with the poet’s first breakthrough salon reading  at the apartment of painter Sabine Lepsius in Berlin in 1897 (the young Rainer Rilke was in the audience; so was the sociologist Georg Simmel, another admirer).

In the pre-World War I decades, a publishing apparatus developed around George. There was a magazine, Pages for Art, a Yearbook of the Spiritual Movement, and a loyal publisher in Berlin who brought out George’s volumes of poetry and the scholarly works of his disciples, a series of so-called Geist-books uniformly marked by the circle’s insignia, a stylized swastika, the symbol that would later become notorious in Nazi hands. The group’s activities ranged from ritualized readings and dress-up parties (George, as many people noted, bore a resemblance to images of Dante, and he occasionally played that role at costumed gatherings) to the debates of fairly nutty sub-groups, such as Munich’s Cosmic Circle, which was a stew of apocalyptic prophecy, anti-semitism, and blood-and-soil mysticism.

George’s biographer is sensibly unsqueamish about the poet’s erotic pursuit of teenage boys, one of whom, Max Kronberger, who died at 16, a scant two years after George first met him, was posthumously elevated to the position of a god, the object of devotion for George’s sect. Although the organizational propaganda of the circle tended to later suggest that all the boy-chasing was “Platonic,” Norton is fairly convincing that the homoerotic aspects of George’s group amounted to more than simply high-minded pederastic conversation.

The core of the book, finally, is the cultural and political ideology of a once shadowy, but eventually quite prominent movement. It was, as Norton says, “elitist, hierarchically minded, antidemocratic, and deeply suspicious of all forms of rationalism.” In sum, George and company embodied “the beliefs and values shared by anti-modern intellectuals,” disturbingly striated with violent, apocalpytic calls for absolute destruction of the impure, debased present. It was a view that displayed nothing but contempt for the bumbling but social democratic Weimar experiment of 1920s Germany.

George’s “Secret Germany,” Norton says, “provided a surrogate ideology that looked back to a heroic European past for political and cultural models,” a past that was largely the product of romantic imagination. Norton underscores the point that this “’Secret Germany’ was not Nazi Germany,” adding, “but the two cannot be separated either.” He provides sufficient evidence that the elderly poet didn’t at all mind being thought of as the prophet of the fascist regime.

I think the real point of understanding George and his times is to understand what was so attractive about fascism. That is, although there’s a temptation to caricature its goose-stepping protocols, there had to be something about the promise of Nazism to explain how enticing it was. Norton’s study of the times also suggests how many of the movements and tendencies of the era were double-edged, both potentially progressive and deeply reactionary.

The images of order and heroics, knights in shining armour, were appealing in the circumstances of turbulent capitalism and political instability that marked post-World War I Germany. The youth, nature and nudity movements of the early 20th century bespoke an interest in environmental preservation against the destruction of technology and the market; the devotion to the body counterposed itself to unfeeling machines. Even the elements of homoerotic romance (and there’s a surprising amount of it attached to fascism) suggested a kind of bonding that rejected the instrumental relationships of bourgeois society. The modes of poetry and mysticism seemed a more authentic route to sublime truth that mere rationality. Finally, there’s the temptation of gnosticism or secret knowledge. That all of this has some pertinence to a post-modern present hardly needs to be spelled out.

Norton’s Secret Germany emphasizes the darker consequences of the phenomena it investigates. Those consequences explain why contemporary, pragmatic Germany is less inclined to seek its mystical soul. Norton gives the last word to the  German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about Stefan George in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascension to power and the poet’s death, that “if ever God has punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George.” Norton adds, “Only time would tell how right Benjamin had been.”

Berlin, February 18, 2010.

Decline and Distraction

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Knopf Canada, 232 pages, 2009)

 

One recent end-of-the-semester morning, while taking attendance in the “philosophy and literature” course I teach at Capilano University, I checked off the name of a student who had missed the previous class. “Where were you last week?” I asked. Since attendance-taking is a desultory ritual, I try to liven it up with some low-level banter. But this time, instead of the equally desultory dog-ate-my-homework excuse, there was something new.

“Modern warfare was released at midnight,” he said.

It took me a nano-second of mental double-take to realize that he wasn’t announcing an apocalyptic event that had been forecast by Nostradamus or the biblical Book of Revelations. In that same micro-instant I saw that I needed to make an orthographic tweak to his sentence to understand what he was saying. I had to italicize the subject of the remark: it wasn’t “modern warfare,” but instead “Modern Warfare.” Actually, Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty 6, accompanied by its ubiquitous “TM” trademark logo.

But he didn’t have to say all that because it was common knowledge. As I could tell from the collective chuckle, almost everyone in class got the picture immediately or, like me, an imperceptible nano-second later. Modern Warfare is a popular series of videogames and a new version of it had been recently released. Like Harry Potter novels, vampire movies, or certain musical/video releases, part of the marketing strategy is to begin selling them at midnight, giving early customers a more vivid prestige-enhancing sense of being the first one on their block to own one.

So, my student had dutifully lined up outside the mall emporium, purchased a copy of the game ($59.95 a pop, according to Amazon.ca) in the middle of the night, went home and blasted away until the wee hours, and was of course fast asleep by the time morning classtime rolled around. He wasn’t the only one. In the initial marketing surge (or should that be, these days, “surge”?), 4 million-plus copies were sold, according to the Modern Warfare 2 website, and the company has to date raked in about a half billion dollars in sales. So, this is not merely an anecdote about the latest cute excuse for missing class.

Naturally, I took the opportunity of the occasion to deliver a medium-level rant about the vacuity, shallowness, and dopey nature of the pop culture foisted on young people today, although I soften the blow by pointing out that their consumption of such junk isn’t entirely their fault. Since attendance-taking is generally agreed to be a desultory chore, the students are prepared to put up with these diverting rants as long as I don’t go on too long and turn it into nagging.

Anyway, fulminating about the state of the culture is a legitimate sub-theme of the philosophy and literature class, and such jeremiads can be counted as a form of classroom entertainment. Soon, we were back to our discussion of Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of, and Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, the four books that make up “Endings,” the last thematic of this semester’s course. But in the back of my mind, I was aware that Calvino et al.’s ideas about death were hardly a patch on the colourful blow’m-up-good version offered by Modern Warfare.

I offer this little story of cultural catastrophe in support of Chris Hedges’ critique of American culture, politics and economics, Empire of Illusion. However, I have to admit that I view such scenes with a bit more wry amusement than Mr. Hedges, who tends to be rather grim-lipped about the whole thing. Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times who subsequently turned into a political radical, and is currently a senior fellow of the leftist Nation Institute, a columnist for Truthdig.com, and the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). He begins his account of the “triumph of spectacle” with a protracted description of “entertainment” wrestling (as contrasted to the sport found in schools and Olympic contests).

It’s a ghoulishly fascinating 15-page portrait of the larger-than-life superheroes and lower-than-snakes villains of WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment tour, one of the spectacles of U.S. cultural life. I’m not one of the 7.7 million monthly visitors to WWE’s website, so I found Hedges’ saga of the soap-opera-like fake wrestling world a bit confusing. Instead of old-fashioned half-nelsons and body slams, WWE is apparently more about bizarre storylines involving provocative taunting, cuckolding, and derogatory genealogies (as in, “Y tu mama tambien”). But Hedges’ main point is that the popular culture in which the masses, as they used to be known, are immersed, willingly or otherwise, is trivial, salacious, distracting, intellectually mind-numbing and, above all, a terrible illusion that signals the decline and fall of the Empire.

Subsequent vignettes in the opening chapter about celebrity culture include a visit to a “celebrity cemetery,” beauty makeover shows, “reality” TV fare like American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother, and “humiliation” programs of the Jerry Springer type, where sub-proletarians duke it out over paternity DNA and who slept with whom. All of it serves to drive home Hedges’ message about the mindlessness of “mass-cult.”

Eventually, Hedges moves from the ring to Plato’s cave and spells it out. “We are chained,” he says, “to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism and pop psychology.” This is not exactly news, as Hedges readily admits. Not news then, but apparently more distortions of reality than ever, and perhaps some usefulness in pointing them out. Though shudder-inducing in places, Hedges’ book is strangely unsatisfying, and it’s not immediately clear why. Maybe it’s the tone of what my students would identify as “nagging.” But no, it’s more than tone.

In an opening chapter called “The Illusion of Literacy,” (and in a book partly sub-titled “The End of Literacy”), Hedges has surprisingly little to say about the subject, almost as if he’s not particularly interested in the possibility of literacy as a remedy for cultural mindlessness. There’s a scant couple of paragraphs citing an approximately 40 per cent functional illiteracy rate in North America, but nothing about the decline of book reading, especially among young people, nor anything about other “knowledge deficits” in history, geography, science and civics, and really not much about how the Internet is actually used by its consumers (9 out of 10 of young people’s most visited sites are devoted to “social networking”). For that sort of information you have to go to books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason or Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur.

The paucity of literacy discussion in a book that advertises itself as being about that topic is only part of a larger problem. The “illusion of literacy” chapter is followed by others that explore the “illusions” of love, wisdom, happiness, and America itself. There’s a lot about porn, the pretensions of higher education, pop psychology, and the dismaying condition of a pseudo-democracy. Most of what Hedges says is factually true, yet I found myself periodically surfacing from the account of cultural and political sludge to mumble, “Yes, yes, but this isn’t what all of life is about or how I experience it.” At least in some monastic corners of the world, the kid who’s playing Modern Warfare is also reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. That Hedges thinks bleak catastrophe is indeed the whole of contemporary life appears to be Hedges’ own illusion.

It’s never quite clear who Hedges is writing for nor what he wants his readers to do. Certainly, his unrelieved polemical essay is not aimed at the benighted masses watching Ultimate Fighting Challenge and poker on TV, clicking onto YouTube or YouPorn, “friending” strangers on Facebook, or blowing up imaginary worlds on Grand Theft Auto and Modern Warfare videogames. It’s not for them, since they’re not reading at all.

So, it’s a book about rather than for the unwashed but shampooed masses whose minds are inundated by junk culture. Hedges must be writing for the rest of us, the — let’s be generous — 10 or 20 per cent of us who read books, participate in politics and civic culture, and who keep a worried eye on the CO2 counts in the atmosphere. But most progressive middle-class intellectuals already know most of this stuff, and some of them have even read theoreticians like Guy Debord on “situationism” and Jean Baudrillard on “simulacra” (neither of whom is mentioned by Hedges), both of whom early on spotted “the triumph of spectacle.” Moreover, Hedges’ intended intellectual audience, while dimly aware of most of the phenomena Hedges excoriates, live lives that only peripherally partake of mass popular culture. Given that his readers likely pay only corner-of-their-eye attention to the details, maybe Hedges’ intention is to present mass culture to us as a form of at-home exotica.

The chapter on the “illusion of love,” which is entirely devoted to a journalistic visit to a pornmakers convention in Las Vegas, is characteristic of Hedges’ perspective. Beginning with an epigraph that offers a lurid passage from the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Hedges hews to her particular version of feminism, presenting an Inferno-esque, “graphic” account of heterosexual commercial porn that emphasizes its increasing violence and degradation of women. Interviews with porn performers, peddlars, and recovering porn actors reiterate the sadistic nature of this particular illusion, and in case we’re unfamiliar with its contents, Hedges provides extended vile snatches of porn video dialogue and detailed descriptions of how tab A is slotted into inserts B, C, etc., in such productions. After a few pages of this, you realize Hedges isn’t planning to go beyond the confines of the commercial sex industry, and you idly wonder why the chapter isn’t billed “the illusion of sex,” since it doesn’t seem to have much to do with love or any similar affectional state.

This cinema verite presentation builds to the climactic message that “porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Mr. Hedges goes on (and on). Porn is soon linked to the plight of  the mentally ill and the unfairly imprisoned, as well as the dangers of gun ownership, obnoxious nationalism and “rapacious corporate capitalism.” Predictably enough, porn is eventually equated to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and we’re assured that “torture and pornography inevitably converge.”

I’m puzzled by the rhetorical overkill, both here and throughout Hedges’ tract. While it’s reasonable to sharply criticize both the content of hetero porn and the conditions under which it’s made, it’s not immediately clear what the purpose is of a hyperbole that insistently ties porn to all of the world’s assorted ills. It’s as if, in the name of some form of radicalism, Hedges’ intent is to crush all possible discourse about the subject. In this leftist vision of liberation, one can sense the mirthless commissars just over the horizon.

In any case, Hedges’ edicts about the meaning of porn seem designed to render any further discussion of sexual representation either trivial or irresponsible, or both. A question like, “Momentarily leaving aside the egregious conditions and content of contemporary pornography, is there a moral objection to the representation of sex between people and the viewing of such representations by other people?”, becomes irrelevant or even blasphemously incorrect. Why would one want to ask such a question?

Well, for one thing, the question challenges some North American attitudes about sex. While porn may represent commercial views about sex, a dominant religious attitude among Christian fundamentalists (and perhaps the view is held more broadly than merely as a religious tenet) is that sex ought to be strictly regulated — preferably, within heterosexual marriage and utilized primarily for procreational purposes. The debate about attitudes toward, and practices of, sex had a lot to do with both feminist and homosexual political struggles in the last half century. None of that will be found in Hedges’ Empire. Nor, when it comes to cruelty and wanton killing, will readers find anything about porn-deprived jihadis, who manage a good deal of slaughter and torture without the aid of salacious imagery.

Maybe Hedges just isn’t a very good sociological writer. In service to agitprop, Hedges excises anything that complicates his “correct line.” In my experience of gay porn, while it’s true you can find niches for everything from S&M to foot fetishism, mainstream homo porn is overwhelmingly focused on the vanilla sex of “twinks” (18-21-year-old, more or less clean-cut, late-teen beauties). While one can probably criticize the conditions these boys endure while making porn, and can cite the ways in which porn sex distorts ordinary real sex, the behaviour of the boys is generally friendly and non-violent, there’s lots of kissing and gestures of affection, they use condoms in the name of “safer sex,” and the sex, apart from being hot (if you’re inclined to find such sex hot) is pretty inoffensive unless you find the whole thing offensive. I’m not offering a brief intended to mitigate the sexist horrors of heterosexual porn, I’m just suggesting that the world is more various and complicated than Hedges, in the grip of an ideology, allows.

Subsequent chapters on higher education and positive psychology are similarly uneven. Hedges opens his chapter on the “illusion of wisdom” by saying, “The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding  of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,  Cambridge, the University of Toronto and the Paris Institute of Political Studies… do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead… on creating hordes of competent systems managers… The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry… They organize learning around specialized disciplines… [they] have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.” Naturally, Hedges doesn’t want to lay at the door of those elite universities such things as the end of slavery, free speech, civil rights, notions of ethnic and gender equality, sexual orientation, or even the attempt to reform health care in the U.S.

But if elite universities are that bad, it makes me almost glad to be teaching in a non-elite, marginal, backwater university where we’re still allowed to read Italo Calvino and modestly rant about the mindless culture foisted on the young by the capitalist Axis of Evil that manufactures those Modern Warfare videogames. Since I’m likely to be accused of frivolity anyway, I might as well confess upfront that at the end-of-the-semester “Goodbye Class” in ethics, where one of the students, Veronika, provided us all with cupcakes that she’d stayed up baking the previous night, we spent a rollicking hour discussing the morality of David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots (2007), a review of which was the subject of Veronika’s final essay of the semester. Having debated the ethics of everything from abortion to vampires, it was fun to imagine “sexbots” at the end. The class and I found the discussion pretty hilarious, even educational. Mr. Hedges would perhaps think otherwise.

If Hedges can offer sweeping, half-true, generalizations about elite education, he’s also capable of astutely pointing out that in our “deteriorated educational landscape,” it’s the case that “there has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 per cent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid-to-late ’60s… Only 8 per cent of college graduates, about 110,000, now receive degrees in the humanities.” There have been precipitous declines in all fields, from English to mathematics to social sciences. “Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-71 have risen from 13.6 per cent of the graduating population to 21.7 per cent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 per cent to 8.2 per cent, as the most popular major.” All true, too true, but this isn’t the place for a full-scale dissertation on the plight of the shaping of the educated mind.

Hedges is much better when he gets to the “illusion of happiness.” That’s where he skewers self-help gurus peddling “positive thinking” and punctures the intellectual pretensions of various psychology departments to put “Positive Psychology” on a scientific footing. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009) does a more extensive and thorough job on the topic, but Hedges’ acerbic view of the matter ought to be enough to get you to stash your “Smiley” buttons and shelve your copy of Rhona Byrne’s The Secret.

The worst is saved for last. It’s Hedges’ chapter on the “illusion of America,” and clearly the one he was most itching to write. As is his wont, the screed is unrelieved, but tinged with bitter affection for a land that once was. “The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic, and historical language to describe itself… but only the shell remains,” Hedges laments. “The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father and his father’s father… is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return.”

In place of the recognizable America, “our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of the moneyed interests… During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting just around the corner.”

Hedges makes it clear that Barack Obama and the “bankrupt Democratic Party” are not the “hope” he “can believe in.” About the only closing-line relief Hedges can offer is “love,” whose power is greater than the power of death. “Love will endure,” Hedges asserts, “even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.” Hmm, bleak stuff.

Somewhere in the  course of Hedges’ final sermon (he was trained, he remarks in passing, as a seminarian), I think I figured out who he’s writing for. The intended readership, I suspect, is left liberals and social democrats, and Hedges’ polemic is designed to persuade moderate progressives that they don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. In failing to understand the situation, the moderate leftists become, in Hedges’ view, the real enemy, more culpable than the right wing conservatives, because they prop up the shell of the system, even when they should know better. If that’s what’s going on here, it echoes the 1920s Communist Party’s verbal and physical assault on social democrats as “social fascists,” and at least some of us remember where that revolutionary strategy led.

Hedges’ Empire of Illusion is a difficult book to deal with because much of it contains more than a grain of truth. Even if he could persuade left liberals and social democrats to repent and see the light, I’m not sure what he wants them to do. Become cadres in the true Revolutionary Party and set off to free the masses from their illusions? I don’t recall that working the last time it was tried.

It might be more helpful to see the situation as one of a divided polity, a divided culture in the midst of “culture wars,” in which there are left-of-centre Democrats and social democrats, Obama included, and right-wing Republicans and angry anti-government libertarians and self-proclaimed “independents.” That perspective at least makes possible an answer to the question, “What is to be done?” What we should do is continue to teach people to read books and to criticize the gadgets and content of capitalist pop culture. We should continue to try to reform health care, regulate and restrain capitalism, and attempt to save the planet. We should do the little things in our neighbourhoods, and we should join political parties and other organizations and try, as we used to say, to change the world.

This modest program is admittedly less spectacular than Hedges’ despairing vision of spectacle and decline. But what’s the alternative? I saw an ad on TV the other day advertising the latest apocalyptic movies and games, the screen filled edge to edge in high definition exploding objects. The voice-over punchline said, “The end of the world never looked so good.”

 

Vancouver, Dec. 19, 2009.