THE EMPIRE OF ILLUSION & WHITE TRASH

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Below is an excerpt from an interview

with Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Chris Hedges, who has a Masters of Divinity

degree from Harvard, and has spent almost

twenty years in global "hotspots" as a

foreign correspondent, fifteen of

them with The New York Times.

His most recent book came out last year:

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy

and the Triumph of Spectacle.

The interview is from the August 2010

issue of the Catholic Agitator.

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There has been a huge assault against

the capacity for moral autonomy,

especially within the church, so that

those figures who speak with any kind

of moral autonomy are immediately labeled

"political" and banished. We have a

corporate-controlled media that determines

almost everything that we watch, hear, or read.

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What they have done on the airways in

the news industry is to turn it into entertainment.

It is all about spectacle and debauchery.

Given what is happening in our country today,

the fact that the national news revolves

around John Edwards' mistress or Tiger Woods

replicates the kind of folly that embraces the

twilight days of civilizations. People are so

disconnected from reality that they do not

know how to read what is happening -

they cannot grasp that the walls are tumbling

down - and so they retreat into absurdities.

Cicero wrote about it at the end of the

Roman republic; Joseph Roth wrote about it

at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;

and I saw it in Yugoslovia. This is the disease

gripping American society today, giving a

kind of absurd quality to political and

civil discourse.

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The undercurrent of a world like ours,

where people are reduced to objects and

where there are no higher values,

where national myths collapse,

triggers a similar longing for annihilation

and a moral decline into hedonism and

giddy communal madness.

This is precisely what we are doing.

Everything that we are doing does ensure

our own annihilation, and yet there is a

kind of intoxicating quality... There is

something very seductive about disconnecting

yourself from the real and entertaining

yourself through the basest forms of

hedonism and selfishness.

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That is what reality programs on TV

are about. It is about promoting values that,

if you ticked them off in any psychology

textbook, belong to psychopaths:

self-aggrandizement; a capacity for

deception; a lack of remorse; an inability

to form friendships; betrayal.

These are all psychopathic qualities and

yet these are the very qualities that seem to

run Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

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The actual qualities that maintain

communities: sharing; honesty; the

capacity for self-sacrifice; loyalty; these

are the qualities that are ridiculed

in the culture, both at the top

and at the bottom.

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Chris Hedges has a column on Truthdig.com -

check it here:
http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges
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Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative.
 It is as momentary as anything in popular culture.
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Morley Safer
CBS
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Mostly, it's a medium created BY white trash,
FOR white trash.  "White trash" has a new meaning.
  It's no longer people in west-Texas trailer courts who wear grimy clothes,
 drink cheap beer, smell strange, and have bad teeth.
These are the unfortunates who have been around since
the time of Christ, and much earlier actually, ever since
the rich and poor got divied' up.  No, it's not them.
It's the people who are horrible examples of their race -
shallow, idiotic cretins with bad values, NO class, and really
 ought to be sterilized....and reality TV is their new medium.
Human waste.  Donald Trump comes to mind.
As for the handful of Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics
who are caught up in it....well, sterilize them too.
 Society needs to get a handle on this, or
 it'll just get worse, and worse, and....
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Jeff Mulcahey
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