A nation in tatters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/08/2018 (2886 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Next to anthrax, acid reflux, cold calls and waterboarding, U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t seem like such a bad guy.

After all, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges, he’s no worse than the motley nucleus he represents made up of “billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists and moral deviants” who are helping corporate America take over the country and run it into the ground for their own benefit and at everybody else’s expense.

In his 13th book, America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges flatly asserts that the nation named the United States of America is in its death throes. He’s not kidding. He means it. He says the republic could vanish in 20 years.

Hedges doesn’t blame Trump for all this. He just concludes the man got elected president thanks to the things that are destroying the country — moral decay, corporate bondage and tyranny, unrestrained capitalism, wholesale imprisonment, neutered organized labour, drugs, violence, hate and the universal disillusionment and despair that is now the theme of everyday life in the U.S.

The U.S., Hedges says, is unravelling, its ordinary people rudderless, their country falling apart and no longer leading the free world. Make no mistake, Hedges says, Trump is not the cause of the disintegration of the U.S., he is the result of it. He is speaking, of course, of the president of ridiculous god-like promises and wholesale chaos. Trump, he says, is just speeding up the collapse.

Hedges lives in New Jersey. He is married to Canadian actor Eunice Wong. For 15 years, he was with the New York Times, reporting from Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is a respected mind.

The corporate elites and their henchmen and fellow travellers now running the country will never come to realize they’re destroying it, Hedges says. He would doubtlessly agree these people are so full of themselves they’d feel most at home in a room full of mirrors.

But Hedges doesn’t just blame the right and Republicans for the mess in the U.S. — he blames the left and Democrats, too, because nobody is acknowledging the systemic problems destroying the country — including pornography, suicide, xenophobia, the opioid epidemic, poverty (half the country is impoverished) and global catastrophic climate change. Until these factors are addressed, and until the country goes back to serving its citizens rather than its corporations and billionaires, Hedges says, the downfall will continue into extinction. And Trump is helping it on its way as surrogate for the elites.

In America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges is trying to rally the troops to salvation. But his heart doesn’t seem in it. Rather, the mood of his writing conveys a hopelessness, an inevitability, a remorse, a despair much like the early pages of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant post-apocalyptic The Road.

The U.S. is no longer the world’s premier manufacturing engine, and its global influence over other nations has almost disappeared because it has lost the respect of its allies and therefore can no longer get them to do what it wants, Hedges writes.

Hedges says that unless there is “a sudden and widespread popular revolt,” the country’s loss of influence in the world will lead shortly to abandonment of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, “plunging the United States into a crippling depression.”

What Hedges calls the “death spiral” of the United States will be over before anyone knows it. One of the things that could replace it would be a totalitarian regime, he says.

Meanwhile, Hedges predicts China, already the leading manufacturing nation, may very well fill the “global vacuum” left by the death of the U.S. and become the world’s most powerful and influential country.

And what does all this mean to Canada? The United States is our neighbour, our biggest customer and our nearest ally. Hedges says we’d better start worrying.

In summary, the prophetic America: The Farewell Tour reads like an obituary: “The United States of America, born in 1776, dies after a long illness.”

If Hedges is right, a country once the pride of liberty is about to become the world’s largest gravesite. And where does that leave us?

 

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.