By GREGORY N. HEIRES
Day of Destruction,
Days of Revolt
By Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Nation Books
New York, 2012
Decades of attacks on our standard of living have led to a category of non-fiction that you might describe as crisis literature.
The themes of these hard-hitting and analytically compelling works are familiar: globalization, skyrocketing inequality, the decline of the middle class, the erosion of pensions and other benefits, and the rise of a new Gilded Age. Yet too often these books miss the human element as they lack a visceral and passionate outrage over what’s going on, and include few personal stories of the impact of these trends.
Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and acclaimed graphic artist Jose Sacco’s “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” brings home the personal tragedies occurring throughout the country as the 1 percent amass obscene levels of wealth at the expense of the rest of us. The authors do this while they also successfully lay out the political and economic roots of the crisis our society confronts. By attaching faces to their analysis through illustrations and extensive interviews, Hedges and Sacco’s work demonstrates the effectiveness of personalizing analysis.
The book opens with a list of illuminating facts, which together constitute an indictment of a country whose power elite and millions of ordinary citizens claim is a beacon of democracy and entrepreneurial dynamism. No, Hedges and Sacco point to the ugly underbelly of our country, including:
• the lowest social mobility and average number of days for paid holidays, annual leave and maternity leave among industrial nations and
• an accompanying highest infant mortality rate, highest consumption of anti-depressants per capita, largest prison population per capita, highest obesity rate and second-highest high-school dropout rate.
Having succinctly laid out some of the most disturbing statistics about the U.S. decline, Hedges and Sacco go on to talk about the human stories behind that malaise. They do this while weaving in an analysis and stinging commentary on the tragic personal stories they describe in words and pictures.
The first chapter, “Days of Theft,” focuses on the Pines Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This is an account of the legacy of the U.S. government’s genocidal policies that produced abysmal conditions at the reservation, where the alcoholism rate is as high as 80 percent and residents get by on $2,600 to $3,500 a year.
Michael Red Cloud, a chief of the Oblala Teton Sioux, describes in the book’s graphics and text the gang- and gun-infested lives of Native Americans in Rapid City. We hear from Leonard Crow Dog from the Rosebud Indian Reservation next to Pine Ridge. He joined the American Indian Movement militants, who occupied Wounded Knee in 1973. He spent 27 months in prison after he became the victim of an FBI witch-hunt following the murder of two agents and the search for AIM leader Leonard Peltier. Today, Hedges says, “a “peculiar schizophrenia” characterizes the Native American experience in which military veterans, for example, express how proud they are to have served in Vietnam while also voicing criticism of the country’s colonization of their people.
“Days of Siege” describes life in Camden, N.J., a symbol of the decline of manufacturing and resulting impoverishment. “Everybody is a paycheck away from being here,” Lorenzo “Jamaica” Banks says in an illustration of a tent camp. Officials tolerate the illegal encampment because Camden has only 200 beds for its more than 7,000 homeless. The son of an Italian immigrant, Joe Balzano, 76, describes how the shipping industry once helped to produce a vibrant down town he likens to the good times depicted in film “American Graffiti.” Today what characterizes the downtown is “almost a bleakness,” Balzano says.
A political boss, George E. Norcross III, who doesn’t live in Camden and doesn’t hold elective office, Hedges writes, controls the city. The Democratic Party oversees what’ s in effect a poverty-business, controlling, for instance, $100 million out of the $170 million spent in a state bailout in the biggest municipal takeover in 2002.
Father Michael Doyle describes how young people seethe over their grim prospects. “You have an enemy, and that is greed and prejudice and injustices and all that type of thing, but you can’t get to it. There’s no head, there’s no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor, it’s just horrendous what people do.”
Environmental degradation is the focus of a chapter about the region surrounding Welch, W. Va., called “Days of Devastation.” Years of coal exploitation have produced a toxic wasteland.
The son of a coalminer, activist Larry Gibson returned to his home after a career as an autoworker. “The people within the coal fields are allowed to breathe the same air I’m breathin’ because the profit margin is higher than the price of a man’s life,” Gibson says. While coal companies have repeated profits, the local populace has become impoverished.
About half of the residents in McDowell County rely on government assistance. Many suffer from depression brought on by economic misery and uncertainty. “Prisons are supposed to be the new growth industry,” Hedges writes.
Public pressure over a heavy cloud of dust at a plant at Elk Run forced Massey Energy Coal Co., the third-largest coal company in the county, to erect a dome over the facility, creating a surreal atmosphere depicted in an illustration by Sacco. Over the past decade, Massey “leveled an area the size of Delaware—1.4 million acres—and left behind a poisoned and dead landscape,” Hedges writes. “Coal companies like Massey rack up appalling safety and environmental violations. Yet for such companies, it is less expensive to pay the fines than comply with the strictures of the Clean Water Act or mine safety standards.”
The chapter “Days of Slavery” tells the story of immigrant workers in Immokalee, Fla. Ana (a pseudonym) recounts in a graphic novelette her migration from rural Guatemala to Guatemala City as a 14-year-old girl and her subsequent journey as a mother to the United states forced to leave behind her daughter. Eventually she makes her way to Florida, only to find her dream of a better life shattered by her poor working conditions and poor pay.
Hedges and Sacco describe in great detail the harsh struggle of immigrant workers—loneliness, indignities, poverty wages—but the chapter does conclude on a positive note. “We discovered that we could not wait for someone from the outside to come and save us,” recalls Lucas Benitez. The workers organized, and their fight-back paid off with improved wages, an education program and better workplace regulations.
“Days of Revolt,” the final chapter, brings the book to hopeful conclusion. Hedges and Sacco discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement, from its birth in Liberty Square in New York City to its influence around the country and outside the United Sates. OWS embodies the outrage of progressives that has finally emerged in a big way after decades of the right-wing ruination of our society.
More than a year after OWS’s emergence, the course of the movement is far from clear. The movement did put inequality at the top of this year’s presidential debate. But will a lasting progressive mass movement emerge to put an end to years of conservative lunacy and the neo-liberal policies that today are shaping the “Grand Bargain” over entitlements and taxes under discussion in Washington?
Recalling the drive that led him to pick himself off the floor as a boxer thirty years ago in order to fight back against all odds, Hedges writes, “But I felt a twinge of euphoria again in my stomach, this utter certainty that the possible is possible, the realization that the mighty can fall.”
And the results of this year’s elections appear to suggest that a growing number of the 99 percent are finally seeing the connection between that fall and their well-being.
www.thenewcrossroad.com Posted November 27, 2012
