Chris Hedges: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

CHRIS HEDGES
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Chris Hedges, a senior fellow with the Nation Institute and a hugely influential columnist for the progressive news site Truthdig, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning author and journalist whose books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, and Empire of Illusion. He has spent nearly twenty years as a foreign correspondent in the most troubled areas of Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported on our imperial wars in the Middle East, the problems of peace in Israel and Palestine, and the abject failure of American liberalism in the face of the corporate takeover of the American government. Hedges is now a strikingly compelling spokesperson for the progressive movement in the U.S.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and graphic artist Joe Sacco has traveled to the most depressed pockets of the United States to combine narrative nonfiction with graphic art in DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, DAYS OF REVOLT. They report from the devastated coal fields of West Virginia, the Lakota reservation of Pine Ridge in South Dakota, the streets of Camden, N.J. (the poorest per capita city in the nation), and among undocumented agricultural workers in Immokalee, Florida, to bring readers a true portrait of the vast and growing zones of sacrifice imposed across the country by the marauding, unchecked corporate state.

DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, DAYS OF REVOLT illustrates what happens when a society loses all sense of the sacred, when nothing has intrinsic worth beyond monetary values. Hedges and Sacco reflect back to America in searing portraits of its poorest, most exploited citizens, to show what we are doing to ourselves as a nation. Their collaboration considers what tens of millions of Americans will endure if this country continues to configure itself in an oligarchic system of only masters and serfs.

Hedges has sharply critiqued the Occupy Movement’s acceptance of individuals concealing their faces and practicing violence. He insists that unless we begin to stand fast around moral imperatives… we will be complicit in our self-annihilation. “As the centers of American power were seized and hijacked by corporations, the media continued to pay deference to systems of power that could no longer be considered honest or democratic. The media treat criminals on Wall Street as responsible members of the ruling class. They treat the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon as statesmen.”

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