Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

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That's what our guest tonight argues in his latest book, by travelling to, and documenting life and the ...

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

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Staff Pick

Chris Hedges's writing and reportage is consistently trenchant and unequivocal, notable for its discerning examinations and penetrating insights. Joe Sacco's award-winning work as a cartoonist is as distinctive as it is compassionate. Combining the immense talents of these two men can only result in a devastating, powerful book of timely importance. So it is with Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

The decline of America is a story of gross injustices, declining standards of living, stagnant or falling wages, long-term unemployment and underemployment, and the curtailment of basic liberties, especially as we militarize our police. It is a story of the weakest forever being crushed by the strong. It is the story of unchecked and unfettered corporate power, which has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our manufacturing base, bankrupted the nation, and plundered and contaminated our natural resources.

Two years ago, Hedges and Sacco set out to visit areas of the United States that have long been the victims of varying forms of exploitation, neglect, and degradation. The common thread shared by these forlorn locales is that each, in its own way, has served as the sacrificial setting (with individuals, families, once-enduring ways of life, and the environment as the sacrificed) to the insatiable appetites of corporate profit and greed. Their book recounts the time they spent in these places, ably portraying the stories of not only the locations themselves and their sorrowful declines, but also the inhabitants and citizens that have long borne witness and suffered (and continue to suffer) the abuses they are all but powerless to combat.

The four "sacrifice zones" that Hedges and Sacco immersed themselves within are the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (with the lowest life expectancy for males [48] anywhere in the Western world, save for Haiti); Camden, New Jersey (a once-flourishing industrial center that is now home to the highest poverty rate per capita in the United States); southern West Virginia, where coal companies, via the abhorrent practice of mountaintop removal, have laid waste to the landscape and befouled air, soil, and water, further endangering the lives of an already-impoverished class of once-proud rural miners; and finally Immokalee, Florida, where migrant agricultural workers (many undocumented) are forced to work in dangerous, deplorable conditions that "replicate slavery." While each of these four settings is beset by their own unique array of circumstances and challenges, they share a commonality in that they have all been preyed upon by the forces of an unrestrained capitalism whose only goals are ever-greater profits and the relentless conversion of resources (be they fossil fuels or people) into aggregated wealth. The individuals with whom Hedges and Sacco met, while each marginalized, neglected, and exploited in their own way, represent far more than the destitute and bereft — they are vassals in the neofeudalistic system that enrich the corporate elite at the expense of everyone and everything else.

As societies become more complex they inevitably become more precarious and vulnerable. As they begin to break down, the terrified and confused population withdraws from reality, unable to acknowledge their fragility and impending collapse. The elites retreat into isolated compounds, whether at Versailles, the Forbidden City, or modern palatial estates. They indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of wealth, and extravagant consumption. The suffering masses are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, "...extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity." This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and collapse.

As Hedges and Sacco were nearing completion of their book, a group consisting of a few hundred activists in a lower Manhattan park "unwittingly triggered a global movement of resistance that would reverberate across the country and the capitals of Europe." Occupy Wall Street took aim at corporate greed, corruption, cronyism, and the undue influence corporations have over democracy. As an antipode to the impotence found in the desolated regions they visited earlier, Zuccotti Park represented a vitality and intensity that offered a differing account to the one proffered by the monolithic corporate media. As they had done elsewhere, Hedges and Sacco listened, interviewed, and reported upon the burgeoning movement as it grew from its infancy. Whereas hope had been but an abstraction in Camden, Pine Ridge, Immokalee, and West Virginia, in New York City they witnessed collective aspirations amounting to a clarion call for restorative justice.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is an often unsettling, upsetting book. The clarity and empathy with which Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco crafted this book is colored by its unyielding potency. Their work serves as a steadfast documentary on the calamitous effects of allowing plutocratic rule to proliferate. As we observe the increasing criminalization of dissent, growing disparity of wealth, and rapidly advancing debasement of the ecosystems upon which we depend for survival, a new narrative is taking form. With their book, Hedges and Sacco have made a laudable effort in so eloquently contrasting these opposing forces. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a blistering indictment of unfettered capitalism, a lament for the inhumane and callous treatment of those it deems expendable, and, perhaps most importantly, a rousing portrait of what our future may look like if it is permitted to endure.

The devastation of Pine Ridge, in Camden, in southern West Virginia, and in the Florida produce fields has worked its way upward. The corporate leviathan has migrated with the steady and ominous thud of destruction from the outer sacrifice zones to devour what remains. The vaunted American Dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American Dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse — the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters — has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment. This virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, of the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in biblical terms our 'neighbor,' haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices in our own demise. Revolt is all we have left. It is the only hope.

Recommended by Jeremy, Powell's City of Books

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city's real unemployment — hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations — is probably 30 to 40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state's proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt. There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, and MS-13. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax.

Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation's largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to Campbell's Soup. It was a destination for immigrants and upwardly mobile lower middle class families. Camden now resembles a penal colony.

In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and American Book Award winning cartoonist Joe Sacco show how places like Camden, a poster child of postindustrial decay, stand as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States will turn into if we cement in place a permanent underclass. In addition to Camden, Hedges and Sacco report from the coal fields of West Virginia, Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and undocumented farm worker colonies in California. With unemployment and underemployment combined at far over ten percent, as Congress proposes to slash Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and other social services, Hedges and Sacco warn of a bleak near future — where cities and states fall easily into bankruptcy, neofeudalism reigns, and the nations working and middle classes are decimated. A shocking report from the frontlines of poverty in America, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a clarion call for reform.

Review:

"An unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed....A call for a new American revolution, passionately proclaimed." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Synopsis:

In the vein of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Chris Hedges and American Book Award winning cartoonist Joe Sacco bring us a searing on-the-ground report on the crisis gripping underclass America and crime.

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About the Author

Chris Hedges, a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, with fifteen years at the New York Times. He is the author of the bestsellers War is Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class. He currently writes for numerous publications, including Harpers, the New York Review of Books, Granta, and Mother Jones. A columnist for Truthdig, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Joe Sacco is a Maltese citizen currently residing in Portland, OR where he makes his living as a cartoonist and journalist. Sacco was a recipient of the prestigious American Book Award in 1996 for Palestine. His first post-Palestine work, the short story "Christmas with Karadzic," appeared in Zero Zero (#15), the leading alternative comics anthology. The story was the subject of a major feature on Sacco in The New York Times in June of 1999, and set the stage for the success of his next major opus, Safe Area Gorazde. (It has since been collected in the book War's End.)

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http://www.powells.com/biblio/1568586434?p_isbn

US Capitalism: Marginalizing the Masses

by Dylan Murphy / August 19th, 2013

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, 2012) is a searing, angry indictment of capitalism in the United States. Pulitzer prize winning journalist and avowed socialist Chris Hedges has teemed up with cartoonist Joe Sacco to catalogue America’s “internal colonies” where the most downtrodden sections of US society survive against the odds. Hedges and Sacco rail against the destruction of working class communities and the obliteration of the environment by big business in its aggressive pursuit of super profits.

The book is divided into five sections. The first four sections describe in intimate detail the “third world” type of poverty and the atomisation of working class communities in Pine Ridge among the Indigenous communities, it goes on to catalogue the destruction of working class community in post industrial Camden city and West Virginia and the emergence of modern slavery on the vegetable farms of Immowakalee, Florida. Chris Hedges’ powerful commentary is accompanied in each chapter by the moving cartoons of Joe Sacco which tell the story of various people caught up in America’s internal colonies.

In chapter one, “Days of Theft,” they tell the story of the attempted genocide of the Indigenous peoples. Following General Custer’s defeat by the Lakota Sioux the American government launched a genocidal war against the Indigenous nations of the plains that nearly wiped them out. The remnants of the various tribes were forced on to internal colonies called reservations where the tribal culture was almost extinguished. Indigenous culture, language, and religion were banned. Many were kidnapped and removed from their families only to be raised in racist Christian boarding schools.

Hedges and Sacco focus upon the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where those stuck on the reservation have been left to rot in a sea of poverty and hopelessness. Sixty per cent of dwellings lack electricity or running water. The tragic result of this has been the atomisation of a once proud people whose communities are devastated by rampant alcoholism, family break up, drug abuse, and violence.

However, there is some hope in the emergence of the American Indian Movement which has stood up to racist oppression and resurrected Native American religion and culture such as the once banned sun dance. A growing number of people have begun to learn their own culture and resisted the attempt at cultural genocide.

In chapter 2, Hedges and Sacco move their focus to Camden City which once had a thriving industrial base. Sadly, the de-industrialisation of America over the last few decades coupled with the riots of the late sixties has led to the mass pauperisation of the city’s inhabitants. As in Pine Ridge the people of Camden City live in an internal colony blighted by terrible poverty, mass unemployment, a high murder rate and a rampant drugs trade. Lone individuals stand out as having tried to keep communities together and provide a safety net for a people who have been abandoned by the state. Father Michael Doyle has founded a medical clinic, organised to keep the local school open along with a food bank and the renovation of one hundred and seventy derelict houses.

In Chapter 3, “Days of Destruction,” the story moves to the mining communities of West Virginia where open top coal mining involves the destruction of entire mountains. So far an area the size of Delaware, over 1 and half million acres, has been destroyed by the mining companies whose ruthless pursuit of profit has involved the poisoning of huge areas. Over five hundred mountain tops have gone along with an estimated one thousand miles of streams, creating an ecological disaster zone in this once beautiful area. Millions of tonnes of toxic coal slurry is kept in various dams that threaten villages and towns with destruction if they burst.

The decimation of the deep coal mining industry left once proud communities atomised and demoralised. Here again, the drugs trade is one of the few growth industries. Corporate politicians allow the mining companies to poison the ground water and air through the massive quantities of coal dust given off by their operations. Hedges and Sacco give the example of the town of Sylvester where people can no longer stay outside as everything is covered in a toxic coal dust which has led to huge increase in lung disease and cancers. As in Pine Ridge, small numbers of people are fighting back and campaigning to to force the mining companies to take measures to deal with the toxic coal dust which poisons the air.

In chapter 4, Hedges and Sacco take up the re-emergence of modern slavery on the tomato and vegetable farms of South Eastern America. They focus upon the farms in the Immokalee region of Florida where the super exploited workers are illegal aliens from the South and Central America.

Here, the workers are trapped in hellish conditions where they toil for ten hours a day in the sweltering fields where temperatures soar to 90 degrees and above. Workers wait at 3:30 am each morning to see if they will be picked for work in the fields. The US Department of Labor estimates that the agriculture industry has a death rate seven times higher than the average rate of most industries. The workers put up with such conditions in an effort to send money back to their impoverished families back home.

Workers are trapped in these modern-day slave plantations. Many are in permanent debt to the gangs who charge $1,000 for bringing them to the United States. They work six days days for slave labour wages and have to pay large amounts of their wages for shared accommodation, often ten people to a room, while they buy overpriced food from the labour contractors, known as crew leaders. The tomato and cucumber pickers are exposed to dangerously high levels of poison as the crops have been heavily sprayed with toxic pesticides. Over the last decade over 1,000 workers have been freed from these slave plantations by police raids.

Workers have begun to fight back and organise against their super exploitation. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers was set up in the mid-90s. Its inspiring campaigns have forced several of the fast food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King to sign the Fair Food Agreement that demands more humane working conditions and a wage increase of a penny or more for each pound of tomatoes harvested. The campaign continues to force all of the big food companies and super market chains signed up to this code.

In the concluding chapter, they deal with the Occupy Wall Street movement which is regarded as a turning point in the American political scene and is seen as the beginning of a new revolt from below against the bankster occupation of American politics and society. Hedges concludes with a call to arms and says the American people have no option but to revolt against a capitalist system that is totally bankrupt. For example over 50 million Americans live off food stamps while the 0.1 per cent of the population become richer and richer guarded by a totally corrupted political and legal establishment that denies even a modicum of justice to the general population while creating a monstrous surveillance state that Stalin and Hitler could only have dreamed of.

Hedges writes:

The American Dream … is a lie. The virus of corporate abuse-the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters-has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment. This virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on a reservation. … Revolt is all we have left. It is our only hope.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a powerful indictment of capitalism in present day America and an inspiring account of how people can fight back even under the most difficult of conditions.

Dylan Murphy is a historian and trade union activist. Read other articles by Dylan.

This article was posted on Monday, August 19th, 2013 at 8:00am and is filed under Agriculture, Anti-slavery, Book Review, Capitalism, Environment, Labor, Mining, Occupy movement, Original Peoples, Pesticides, Pollution, Poverty.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/08/us-capitalism-marginalizing-the-masses/

The Other America

‘Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt’

By PHILIPP MEYER

Published: August 17, 2012

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This book is a collaboration between Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, showing us daily life in four centers of 21st-century American poverty. Hedges’ contribution — a combination of reportage and commentary — is in a long tradition of literary journalism. Sacco’s is the sort of graphic art popularized by Art Spiegelman in “Maus.” Both writers have decades of experience as correspondents in war zones, but in “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” they turn their attention to the bombed-out and collapsed areas of their own country.

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From “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”

DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, DAYS OF REVOLT

By Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

Illustrated. 302 pp. Nation Books. $28.

Sacco’s sections are uniformly brilliant. The tone is controlled, the writing smart, the narration neutral; we are allowed to draw our own conclusions. Hedges sees this book as a call to revolution, and as with most works in which the author’s philosophical and political beliefs are aired in an unfiltered manner, a lot of what you appreciate about Hedges’ writing will depend on how closely you identify with his politics.

From my point of view — and perhaps I could be accused of not being political enough — this is unfortunate. This is an important book. But it is at its best when simply presenting the facts.

Anyone who grew up near a postindustrial area — who has seen a middle-class town become a pocket of destitution — will not find any one chapter in this book too shocking. What is shocking is the degree to which this depth of poverty is found everywhere, from rural Indian reservations to near-slave conditions in Florida tomato fields. These are not pleasant stories. They are the very sort of thing we all prefer to forget so that we can focus on our daily lives, and this makes it all the more important that they are recorded.

The first chapter opens with a sketch of life on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota. As it follows the lives of various people on the reservation, weaving between history and personal narration, we see the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM), its eventual collapse and how people today have learned to live with the ­consequences.

Hedges’ rage here is palpable, as is his sympathy with his subjects, and occasionally the tone gets a little strident. But as the book continues, the polemics fade. The second chapter brings us into Camden, N.J., telling the story of its decline and abandonment by the powers that be; the third chapter does the same for West Virginia, focusing on coal mining’s economic, social and environmental effects. The fourth chapter, which covers human slavery in the Florida tomato fields, is the most shocking.

The book’s final chapter takes place in New York City, at the center of the Occupy Wall Street movement. ­Hedges believes this was a turning point in American history, and there is an insider feel, something almost Woodstockian in the tone. Hedges’ take is that the seeds of a revolution were sown in Zuccotti Park, but those who saw the events from the outside might be more reminded of the protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

By the end of this book, I found myself preferring Sacco. Maybe even more so than in his other work, he allows characters and situations to speak for themselves. If you are a close reader, his point of view is clear, but it is controlled in such a way that you are allowed to disagree with him.

Hedges is a serious writer and thinker, and as in his seminal work, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” he is brilliant at depicting human life at the extremes of existence — from war to grinding poverty — and explaining the effects on the human psyche. But if in that book he was more like a teacher, in this one he is high priest. We’re given little room to form our own opinions. “There are no excuses left,” he says in the final chapter. “Either you join the revolt or you stand on the wrong side of history.”

How you react to being ordered to join the revolt will determine a lot of what you think about this book. If you’re a believer, it will all be fuel for the fire, but the people who would learn the most from these stories will very likely have trouble getting past the first pages. I couldn’t help wondering about conservative friends of mine, their children and other folks who might have read this book if the tone had been less strident. But maybe that is the problem with all calls to revolution: You hear them only if you want to.

Philipp Meyer is the author of the novel “American Rust.” His second novel, “The Son,” will be published next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/books/review/days-of-destruction-days-of-revolt.html?_r=0