Chris Hedges – Today’s Jeremiah for the USA

Since the 1980s Chris Hedges has written for The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, NPR and more from over 50 countries. After falling out with the Times in 2004, he has worked mainly for Truthdig, a gritty leftish, non-partisan, all-opportunity offender, writing gutsy books at one-a-year pace.

A 1983 M.Div. graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Hedges was ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA in 2014. For years he has made a career of writing about the deterioration of U.S. democracy. America: The Farewell Tour is his latest and longest against corporations and rightist Christian power-brokers that have stripped freedoms and opportunities from more and more non-white Americans. 

Earlier books, such as Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America and War, the Force That Gives Us Meaning, dissected the steadily impoverishing, materialistic and greedy soul of U.S. business and imperialist expansion. Farewell does that in spades, though without the faintest glimmer of irony, hope or redemption that once seeped through tiny cracks. 

To call Farewell a jeremiad is fitting; Hedges reminds me more of Jeremiah than the weeping prophet himself. Since Hedges’ lifelong education is steeped in biblical study and church activism, that comes as no surprise. What is astonishing, though, is how thoroughly and prophetically Hedges links the corruption and corporatization of American political parties to financial and military institutions that monopolize the economy, always further oppressing America’s growing visible minorities. 

No recent American leaders escape Hedges’ laser aim. Predictably, he lambastes Donald Trump’s early glitzing up of Atlantic City, New Jersey as a cynical ploy 20 years later to sack the town, leaving behind rotting casinos, unpaid contractors, poverty and homelessness. As well he plausibly accuses the Bush presidencies and Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations as continuing examples of surrender to corporate America, all leaving the agonizing needs of more and more Americans in their toxic dust.

I didn’t like most of Farewell. But Chris Hedges is necessary reading to witness a powerful, though ever more marginal voice in U.S. political commentary with its strikingly biblical tone. Hedges is far from popular; but then, neither was Jeremiah.