Surviving the Fourth of July

I survive the degradation that
has become America — a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom
and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights,
in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under
international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its
back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to
embrace totalitarian capitalism — because I read books. I have 5,000 of
them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.

I survive the gradual, and I now fear inevitable, disintegration of
our democracy because great literature and poetry, great philosophy and
theology, the great works of history, remind me that there were other
ages of collapse and despotism. They remind me that through it all men
and women of conscience endured and communicated, at least with each
other, and that it is possible to refuse to participate in the process
of self-annihilation, even if this means we are pushed to the margins
of society. They remind me, as the poet W.H. Auden wrote, that “ironic
points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages.”
And if you tire, as all who can think critically must, of the empty
cant and hypocrisy of John McCain and Barack Obama, of the simplistic
and intellectually deadening epistemology of television and the
consumer age, you can retreat to your library. Books were my salvation
during the wars and conflicts I covered for two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the
Balkans. They are my salvation now. The fundamental questions about the
meaning, or meaninglessness, of our existence are laid bare when we
sink to the lowest depths. And it is those depths that Homer,
Euripides, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Joseph
Conrad, Marcel Proust, Vasily Grossman, George Orwell, Albert Camus and
Flannery O’Connor understood.

“The practice of art isn’t to make a living,” Kurt Vonnegut said. “It’s to make your soul grow.”

The historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only 29
years in all of human history during which a war was not under way
somewhere. Rather than being aberrations, war and tyranny expose a side
of human nature that is masked by the often unacknowledged constraints
that glue society together. Our cultivated conventions and little lies
of civility lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves.
But look at our last two decades-2 million dead in the war in
Afghanistan, 1.5 million dead in the fighting in Sudan, some 800,000
butchered in the 90-day slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by
soldiers and militias directed by the Hutu government in Rwanda, a
half-million dead in Angola, a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia,
200,000 dead in Guatemala, 150,000 dead in Liberia, a quarter of a
million dead in Burundi, 75,000 dead in Algeria, at least 600,000 dead
in Iraq and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict
between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey,
Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo. Civil war, brutality,
ideological intolerance, conspiracy and murderous repression are the
daily fare for all but the privileged few in the industrialized world.

“The gallows,” the gravediggers in “Hamlet” aptly remind us, “is built stronger than the church.”

I have little connection, however, with academics. Most professors
of literature, who read the same books I read, who study the same
authors, are to literature what forensic medicine is to the human body.
These academics seem to spend more time sucking the life out of books
than absorbing the profound truths the authors struggle to communicate.
Perhaps it is because academics, sheltered in their gardens of
privilege, often have hyper-developed intellects and the emotional
maturity of 12-year-olds. Perhaps it is because they fear the awful
revelations in front of them, truths that, deeply understood, would
demand they fight back. It is easier to eviscerate the form, the style
and the structure with textual analysis and ignore the passionate call
for our common humanity.

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have
opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would
not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary,” Proust
wrote. “It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of
awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take
its place. …”

Although Shakespeare’s Jack Falstaff is a coward, a liar and a
cheat, although he embodies all the scourges of human frailty Henry V
rejects, I delight more in Falstaff’s address to himself in the Boar’s
Head Tavern, where he at least admits to serving to his own hedonism,
than I do in Henry’s heroic call to arms before Agincourt. Falstaff personifies a lust for life and the mockery
of heaven and hell, of the crown and all other instruments of
authority. He disdains history, honor and glory. Falstaff is a much
more accurate picture of the common soldier who wants to save his own
hide and finds little in the rhetoric of officers who urge him into
danger. Prince Hal is a hero and defeats Percy while Falstaff pretends
to be a corpse. But Falstaff embodies the basic desires we all have. He
is baser than most. He lacks the essential comradeship necessary among
soldiers, but he clings to life in a way a soldier under fire can
sympathize with. It is to the ale houses and the taverns, not the
court, that these soldiers return when the war is done. Jack Falstaff’s
selfish lust for pleasure hurts few, while Henry’s selfish lust for
power leaves corpses strewn across muddy battlefields. And while we
have been saturated with the rhetoric of Henry V this past July 4
holiday we would be better off listening to the truth spoken by
Falstaff.

There is a moment in “Henry IV, Part I,” when Falstaff leads his
motley band of followers to the place where the army has assembled.
Lined up behind him are cripples and beggars, all in rags, because
those with influence and money, like George W. Bush,
evade military service. Prince Hal looks askance at the pathetic
collection before him, but Falstaff says, “Tut, tut, good enough to
toss, food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as
better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.”

I have seen the pits in the torpid heat in El Salvador, the arid
valleys in northern Iraq and the forested slopes in Bosnia. Falstaff is
right. Despite the promises never to forget the sacrifices of the dead,
of those crippled and maimed by war, the loss and suffering eventually
become superfluous. The pain is relegated to the pages of dusty books,
the corridors of poorly funded VA hospitals,
and sustained by grieving families who still visit the headstone of a
man or woman who died too young. This will be the fate of our dead and
wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the fate of all those who go
to war. We honor them only in the abstract. The causes that drove the
nation to war, and for which they gave their lives, are soon forgotten,
replaced by new ones that are equally absurd.

Stratis Myrivilis in his novel “Life in the Tomb” makes this point:

“A few years from now, I told him,” Myrvilis wrote nearly a century
ago, “perhaps others would be killing each other for anti-nationalist
ideals. Then they would laugh at our own killings just as we had
laughed at those of the Byzantines. These others would indulge in
mutual slaughter with the same enthusiasm, though their ideals were
new. Warfare under the entirely fresh banners would be just as
disgraceful as always. They might even rip out each other’s guts then
with religious zeal, claiming that they were ‘fighting to end all
fighting.’ But they too would be followed by still others who would
laugh at them with the same gusto.”

Patriotic duty and the disease of nationalism lure us to deny our
common humanity. Yet to pursue, in the broadest sense, what is human,
what is moral, in the midst of conflict or under the heel of the
totalitarian state is often a form of self-destruction. And while
Shakespeare, Proust and Conrad meditate on success, they honor the
nobility of failure, knowing that there is more to how a life is lived
than what it achieves. Lear and Richard II gain knowledge only as they
are pushed down the ladder, as they are stripped of power and the
illusions which power makes possible.

Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I
picked up “Macbeth.” It was not a calculated decision. I had come that
day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the
death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their
throats slit.

I had read the play before as a student. Now it took on a new,
electric force. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no
longer an abstraction. It had become part of my own experience.

I came upon Lady Macduff’s speech, made when the murderers, sent by
Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children. “Whither should I
fly?” she asks.

I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

Those words seized me like Furies and cried out for the dead I had
seen lined up that day in a dusty market square, and the dead I would
see later: the 3,000 children killed in Sarajevo, the dead in unmarked
mass graves in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the
dead who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras and a vanquished
idealism into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually
folly, of course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course
force easily snuffs out gentleness, compassion and decency. In the end,
all we can cling to is each other.

Thucydides, knowing that Athens was doomed in the war with Sparta,
consoled himself with the belief that his city’s artistic and
intellectual achievements would in the coming centuries overshadow raw
Spartan militarism. Beauty and knowledge could, ultimately, triumph
over power. But we may not live to see such a triumph. And on this
weekend of collective exaltation I did not attend fireworks or hang a
flag outside my house. I did not participate in rituals designed to
hide from ourselves who we have become. I read the “Eclogues” by
Virgil. These poems were written during Rome’s brutal civil war. They
consoled me in their wisdom and despair. Virgil understood that the
words of a poet were no match for war. He understood that the chant of
the crowd urges nearly all to collective madness, and yet he wrote with
the hope that there were some among his readers who might continue,
even when faced with defeat, to sing his hymns of compassion.

… sed carmina tantum
nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia, quantum
Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas.

…but songs of ours
Avail among the War-God’s weapons, Lycidas,
As much as Chaonian doves, they say, when the
eagle comes.

* * *

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was
for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times,
is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.