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Vol. LXII, No. 44
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 44
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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“I didn’t get into Princeton, but I’m here now,” exulted author Naomi Wolf at the beginning of the recent Labyrinth Books talk and reception marking the publication of her book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. Former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges joined Ms. Wolf for the event, posing questions and adding his own take on the practice of democracy (or lack thereof) in America today.
Describing it as a follow-up to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, her 2007 book that warned about the “fascist shift” occurring in America under the Bush administration, Ms. Wolf described her latest work as a “Cassandra thing,” urging citizens to “wake up” to the “fake democracy” we are living in and “push back.” She was galvanized, she said, by reading the words of the nation’s founders, whose definition of happiness had to do with “using one’s capacities in the context of freedom to achieve the highest good,” rather than to be “side-by-side consumers shopping at Talbot’s and Victoria’s Secret.” In her introductory remarks, Labyrinth owner Dorothea von Moltke had described Ms. Wolf’s book as a “how-to manual,” and indeed, it concludes with 55 “action steps” for taking back the nation from what Ms. Wolf described in her talk as “vested interests and criminal thugs.”
Mr. Hedges, whose books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was perhaps even more emphatic in his description of the “corporate state that has rendered us impotent.” He cited the Clinton administration’s embrace of NAFTA and the WTO as a “betrayal of the working class,” and suggested that it is misguided to put one’s faith in the Democratic party. His statement that he would be voting for Independent Party candidate Ralph Nader in the Presidential election drew hisses from the audience. Noting that “politics is a game of pressure,” he refrained from getting “into a Nader debate,” but described his belief that people should “punish the Democratic Party by walking away from it.”
Responding to Mr. Hedges’ description of the nation’s founders’ “lust for genocide” toward native Americans, Ms. Wolf declared that she was not “an apologist” for the founding fathers, but rather “a cultural critic” who had “identified strains of thinking.” Rather than “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” she suggested that informed citizens should salvage what was good about the country’s earliest ideals. While corporations have “49 percent of the voice” in influencing public policy, she noted, people “still have 51 percent.”
Although he agreed that “it’s not all over,” Mr. Hedges sounded a less certain note about the prospects for democracy in America. “The Bush administration has obliterated the rule of law,” he observed, and the current “meltdown” is a reflection of a lot more than just economic distress. He noted that the intellectual activist Noam Chomsky is quoted in France but not in the U.S., where “six corporations control everything.”
“The great patriots were always holding a mirror up to Americans when they departed from ideals,” said Ms. Wolfe, describing her own belief in one’s duty to rebel against injustice.