So what if big business makes a lot of money and gets away with murder? For decades, Americans have looked the other way, as corporations have hacked into the natural world and human life with a machete a mile long. We seemed to think it was the “American way,” all OK, as long as we had ours.
Until we didn’t.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt brings to light a series of lives in four severely impoverished American places, the direct casualties of capitalism unchecked. In a sequence of incisive personal interviews and graphic illustration, we begin to understand exactly what happens when everyday life is eviscerated by corporate greed. These vividly described accounts neatly slice through our tendency to convince ourselves that negative circumstances aren’t such a big deal unless they’re happening to us.
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| Chris Hedges |
This hard-hitting book is a generous act: the product of two men who devoted years of their lives to diving into the heaviness and darkness that stop most of us in our tracks. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who logged two decades as a NY Times foreign correspondent in some of the world’s worst war zones, and illustrator Joe Sacco, the renowned creator of war-reportage comics including Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, here graphically delineate the inner and outer landscapes of those most burned by raging greed.
These war zones are close to home. Take southern West Virginia, where coal-mining giant Massey Energy has completely gutted the local landscape; contaminated air, soil, and drinking water; and flatly refused to comply with any legislation locals can pass through a corrupt legal system. It’s a striking example of how megacorps have plundered local resources to expand their own coffers while leaving community residents with Third World problems. “Disease in the coalfields is rampant,” Hedges states. “The coal ash deposits have heavy concentrations of hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen. Cancer, like black lung disease, is an epidemic. Kidney stones are so common that in some communities nearly all the residents have had their gallbladders removed. More than a half a million acres, or 800 square miles, of the Appalachians have been destroyed. More than 500 mountain peaks are gone, along with an estimated 1,000 miles of streams, which provide most of the headstreams for the eastern United States.”
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| Jenkinjones, WV. Joe Sacco. |
“Mountaintop removal” is a euphemism. These corporate predators have actually completely removed 500 mountains in West Virginia alone. The entire Appalachian landscape has been radically and permanently altered—and rendered almost unlivable. Local residents, who recall their childhoods in a virtual Garden of Eden, have now given Last Rites to the natural world they've loved. As resident Larry Gibson states, “Do you know what it’s like to hear a mountain get blowed up? A mountain is a live vessel, man; it’s life itself. You walk through the woods here and you’re gonna hear the critters moving, scampering around, that’s what a mountain is. Try to imagine what it would be like for a mountain when it’s getting blowed up, 15 times a day, blowed up, every day, what that mountain must feel like as far as pain, as life.”
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| Joe Sacco |
The rape of nature--and humanity--is also a constant in Immokalee, FL, where scores of migrant laborers are captured into slavery and interned in shockingly cruel circumstances. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders once described this area as “the bottom in the race to the bottom.” Captive workers are routinely forced to work countless hours in 90-degree heat for sub-minimum wages that are often withheld from them or applied against an enormous fictitious “debt” they’re required to pay. Gouged by everyone from landlords charging $2,000+/month for overcrowded, ramshackle trailers, to company stores, to viciously abusive crew leaders, these people live lives that are in some ways more desperate than the original Southern slaves’. Ill from constant pesticide exposure, they lack any form of job protection or security, medical coverage, Social Security, food stamps, or legal protection. And when employers are done with them, they’re left with no income, food, or housing. Much of the workers’ suffering is directly caused by the unreasonable stipulations of large chain grocers and restaurants, such as Walmart, Burger King, and even Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Their demands on suppliers to keep prices at rock-bottom have meant that migrant workers now receive even less than their previously minuscule wages. Some hope does exist here, however. The workers’ efforts at organizing, via the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have begun to reap real results in ameliorating the situation.
Chris Hedges’ careful descriptions read like verbatim records of hell. If your heart is still intact, this is an emotionally draining book to ingest. And terribly infuriating, as these stories chronicle suffering that could easily be prevented if corporations considered their impact on human beings. However, the authors know that corporate compassion is unlikely. Despite Mitt Romney’s assertions to the contrary, corporations are not human. They thrive on being “no one,” and thus not having to concern themselves with matters of conscience or justice. As Hedges notes, “Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice.” Employees of Goldman-Sachs can look out the window and jeer at Occupy Wall Street protestors, while reassuring themselves of their own personal innocence as their employer jacks up commodities on the global food market, forcing thousands of people to go hungry and die of starvation each day. The technical jargon they’ve learned in business school masks the true nature of the proceedings, helping them conveniently ignore their own bloody hands.
Hedges and Sacco also take on the political landscape, which has played a huge role in the American death spiral. While politicians everywhere are known for their corruption, the authors help us understand how their bribe-taking leaves nothing to “trickle down.” A prime example is Camden, NJ, where not only has the city’s entire economy (except for drugs) been sent overseas, but the chance of a recovery is nil thanks to crooked politicians like George Norcross, who pocket relief funds doled out by the government. We see Camden's trajectory in the story of Joe Balzano, a 76-year-old former dockworker whose life spans much of city's rise and fall. Here, Sacco’s illustrations bring the man’s biography to life. But the hero of the chapter is Lolly Davis, a kind-hearted grandma who has mothered countless children discarded by their addict parents. She’s a stellar example of the power of acting on one’s principles with simple human kindness in the face of disaster all around us.
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| Camden Transition Area. Joe Sacco. |
Sprinkled throughout Days of Destruction are amazing philosophical quotes that lend moments of transcendence and even hope to an otherwise bleak account. As someone who wonders daily if I’m the only one who sees (or cares) what’s happening to the country, I feel better knowing that this state of affairs is being keenly observed by an extremely articulate thinker/writer like Chris Hedges. “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.”
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| Occupy Wall Street. Joe Sacco. |
Hope and possibility are front and center in the book’s concluding chapter, “Days of Revolt.” Hedges hunkered down with the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park (for which he was arrested), and here chronicles its history and principles. He attributes some of Occupy’s success to forging new systems that operate outside traditional lines, instead of attempting to work within a broken system. He asserts, “The only route left is to disconnect as thoroughly as possible from the consumer society and engage in acts of civil disobedience and obstruction.” The authors make the fine point that nonaction is equivalent to complicity, that standing on the sidelines and declaring one’s innocence is tantamount to enacting radical evil. As Hedges notes, any act of rebellion, no matter how small or seemingly futile, is helpful in chipping away at corporate power and making the point to other potential activists that revolution is possible. “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
In the winter of 1989, Hedges was a New York Times reporter covering Prague’s Velvet Revolution. One night, after 20 years of exile, Marta Kubisova, Czecheslovakia’s most popular singer who had been silenced by the Communist Party, took the stage in Wenceslas Square. After two decades of being relegated to factory work, she once again began to sing. Her song was “Prayer for Marta,” the defiant anthem that had originally sparked her banishment. And the words that came forth were these: “The people will once again decide their own fate.” Hundreds of thousands of Czechs sang in thunderous unison. Less than two weeks later, the socialist government collapsed.
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| Pine Ridge Reservation, SD |
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a punch-packing, heart-breaking, and ultimately invigorating book, the one that those of us who have felt so disheartened in the last 5 years have been waiting for. It pulls no punches in demonstrating a truth that’s easy to understand and hard to ignore: for most, corporate greed has shredded what was once possible in America.
“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. The 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 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.”
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco. Nation Books, 2012.
Check it out! This review can also be read at the NY Journal of Books: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/days-destruction-days-revolt
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt website: http://perseuspromos.com/hedges/daysofdestructiondaysofrevolt/
