Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [72]
“Fear engenders cruelty,” I said. “Cruelty . . . fear, insanity, and then paralysis.”
There were more hoots and jeers.
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” someone cried out.
“In the center of Dante’s circle,” I said, “the damned remained motionless.”
Horn blasts were unleashed.
“We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand,” I continued:We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship, in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us, as well.
“God bless America!” a woman cried.
I continued: “The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus, the occupation of the oilfields.”
The microphone went dead. I stood looking out at the angry crowd, the wind whipping down the hillside. There were some people standing in the front. One woman was weeping. The crowd grew more agitated and several people rose to sing “God Bless America.”
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” a woman shouted.
I had to cut short my address and was removed by security before the awarding of the diplomas. The event dominated the broadcasts of the trash-talk right-wing commentators, from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News analysts. Clips of me being heckled and jeered, taken from home videos, were played repeatedly on the cable shows. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial denouncing me as an elitist and a pacifist and condemned my talk. The local paper, the Rockford Register Star, reported my address with the headline “SPEAKER DISRUPTS RC GRADUATION.”
War, and especially war in the Middle East, were not abstractions to me. I spoke out of a reality few Americans understood. But my editors at the New York Times were furious. I had crossed the line once too often. I had dared to feel, to make a judgment, and to think independently. I was called into the Times offices at 229 West 43rd Street by an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given a written reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.” The procedure meant that, under the rules established with the Newspaper Guild of New York, the next time I spoke out against the war I could be fired.
If I had repeated the mythic narrative of America—the narrative embraced by the power elite and the liberal institutions that serve them—the talk would not have attracted notice. If I had told the graduates that America was a great and noble country, that we were spreading democracy and virtue throughout the world, that globalism was empowering and enriching the world’s poor, and that American soldiers were sacrificing their lives for our freedom and security, none of it would have been deemed controversial or political. The public statements of support for the invasion of Iraq by fellow reporter John Burns did not see him ousted from the paper. The approved mythic narrative is “neutral” and “apolitical” because it serves the empowered classes. Those who honor these myths remain valued members of the liberal class. Those who do not are banished.
The media are as plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism, and careerism as the academy, the unions, the arts, the Democratic Party, and religious institutions. The media, like the academy, hold up the false ideals of impartiality and objectivity to mask their complicity with power. They posit the absurd idea that knowledge and understanding are attainable exclusively through vision, that we should all be mere spectators of life. This pernicious reduction of the public to the role of spectators denies