Posted by Benjamin on: 07.25.2007 /
I was so impressed, and disturbed, by the article “The Other War” by Chris Hedges that I ordered his Losing Moses on the Freeway, which I rather suspect I am going to immensely enjoy and rather be moved by. Thought I share an excerpt from the opening chapter with you. H/T Martin. The chapter is entitled:
Decalogue I “Mystery”
I stand across from the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Project in Roxbury on a muggy July night. Scattered streetlights cast out dim yellow arcs on Parker Street. The remaining slate-gray metal poles, with their lamps shattered by rocks, leave the strip of asphalt gap-toothed, with lonely outposts of pale spotlights and long stretches of darkness. The unlit stretches are uncharted oceans of fear. They are filled with dangers imagined and real. At night, in the ghetto, I cling to light.
Parker Street is rutted and potholed. It rises and falls with the scars of old frost heaves. Newspapers, broken beer bottles, pieces of cardboard and plastic bags line the gutters. The triple-decker houses, cut into overcrowded apartments, are inhabited mostly with families from the Dominican Republic. The noise of people crushed together in small spaces, the shouts, the crying of children, the smell of fried food spill out into the street. Music with a Caribbean beat plays through several of the open windows.The pale specter of television sets, the great Leviathan of modernity, the tool that teaches us to speak and think and cuts us off from our neighbors, sends out flickering images that reflect in the window panes. At night, striding up Mission Hill, it is often all I see, window after window, as if we are infected with a plague.
This has been my world for over two years. It will be my world no more. I am leaving, leaving not only Roxbury but seminary, leaving the church. I am turning on all that has formed me. I have buckled under its weight. No more will I preach the Sunday sermons, sitting up late Saturday night as I write my words on yellow legal sheets. No more will I help carry in the coffins of those I buried, lifting the thin strip of paper from the faces of the dead when I open the box for viewing. No more will I ride the subway to Cambridge to sit through seminars on theology or the psalms or the Bible. No more will I divide up passages in the Hebrew Bible with colored flares into the various sources identified by scholars, the academic evisceration of the word. All this is over.
I heave an empty bottle against the wooden doors of the Gloucester Memorial Presbyterian Church in Roxbury. The bottle splinters. I have watched children break bottle after bottle against walls and pavement. Destruction is the way these children affirm themselves, fight back against the forces above them. These are weak, symbolic protests born of rage and pain. They destroy. I sweep up. This is the pattern.
The long slow drip of oppression and abuse, which strips human beings of dignity, was unknown to me until I moved to the ghetto. I sympathize on this night with the rock throwers. I sympathize although I spend hours every week removing the signs of their pathetic protests. I know most will lose. I know the ghetto will win. I know most of those born poor stay poor. And I know I will protect myself if they turn on me. I can easily cross the barrier that hems them in like sheep. I can turn to the instruments of control and oppression—the police, the courts, the probation officers—for protection when I am afraid. I am not one of them. I will never be one of them. I am the enemy.
I look at the shards of broken glass. I look at the hulking, dimly lit red brick church. I look at the desolate holes of darkness in the street, which always fill me with dread. All my dreams of being an inner-city minister, all my illusions about myself, the one who comes to save and care for others, the one who will be blessed and loved and honored for goodness, lie in little pieces on the ground. I have seen, through their eyes, the image of myself. It is not an attractive sight. It is not who I thought I was. It is not who I want to be.
“Now,” I say softly, “I am on your side.”
It is an act of apostasy. It is meant to mark my switch from the side of those who attend my church to those whom my tiny, dysfunctional congregation, although mostly African-American, look at with open disdain, those whom they dismiss as “the animals.” It is meant to mark my break from institutions that overtly or subtly mete out oppression, including the various religious institutions that formed me. The breaking of the bottle is meant to be an ending, a final conclusion to a life spent in the powerful and claustrophobic embrace of the church. It is meant to be a break from God. But you trade one god for another. This is how life works. We all have gods.
Wow.
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Comment by: Martin Gugino
1 07/25/07 7:59 AM | Comment Link |Chris Hedges is something else.
Comment by: David H
2 07/25/07 10:43 AM | Comment Link |Just started reading “The Other War.” It horribly describes how new terrorists are made.
Comment by: Benjamin
3 07/25/07 12:19 PM | Comment Link |Martin, indeed–I think you were the one who put me onto him. Thankyou! I think I need to add a hat tip here somewhere.
Comment by: Benjamin
4 07/25/07 12:22 PM | Comment Link |David,
Hope you don’t find it as depressing as I did. In all honesty I only actually read about 2/3 of it, and skimmed the other third. found it too overwhelmin.
Comment by: David H
5 07/25/07 12:42 PM | Comment Link |Not all the way through, yet. I feel somewhat compelled to get through stuff like this. Part of my search for understanding of human nature. Bu I also have to look for people from the coverage area of my newspaper so I can try to compel people there to tackle similar stories. The Bush administration limits access to combat in Iraq and troops there don’t feel free to discuss things like this. But the really compelling aspect of this piece is the realization that we could “win” (i.e. leave Iraq on US terms having established a stable government, etc.) and that is unlikely to change the primary dynamic that is now being trotted out as raison d’etre for our presence — the war on terror.
When we leave the economy of Iraq will be in shambles and the people will have years of simmering hatred for the US. We will have created a significant hotbed for anti-US sentiment likely to haunt us as Iran now does. But maybe we will be able to hold our heads high and say: “We won.”
The similarities between Iraq and Vietnam keep mounting also. The cost in human lives broken or destroyed will be measured in generations.
Comment by: April Terry
6 07/25/07 3:47 PM | Comment Link |First of all, I want to say that the excerpt of the book that you posted was excellent. I think that has to be my next book to read.
Secondly, I was just sickened by the article and deeply angered. Between the racism, dehumanization, the lack of regard for human life, I can’t imagine there would be any way that we can exit from Iraq without years of damage having been done.
The numbers of people who must hate us due to what they have experienced has to astronomical.
All the while, I was thinking of WWII and how the Nazis were perceived during their occupation of other countries and I thought that we are the same, if not worse. I’m deeply ashamed.
Comment by: David H
7 07/25/07 6:26 PM | Comment Link |But the Nazi’s, God bless ‘em, weren’t pretending they had good intentions for the recipients of their wrath. They weren’t nice people and didn’t care who knew it in the occupied nations.
The US government still fails to grasp, it would seem, that the entire world has figured us out for the liars that we are. The only people who continue to believe that we have good intentions and that our leaders should be trusted live within the borders of this country. And much of their time seems to be spent complaining about why we are so misunderstood in the world.
Oddly, Talk of the Nation, on NPR, had a piece about a Pentagon commissioned $400,000 study about how marketing techniques could be used to train US personnel (i.e. soldiers) and help change the perception of people about who we are and what we are doing in their “theater of operation” (i.e. war zone).
Todd Helmus, a Rand employee and the author of the study, which is called “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, talked sincerely about branding, what activities are on-brand and which are off-brand, and other squishy Madison Avenue terms. A conclusion of the study: indiscriminate shooting and bombing are bad for US brand identity.
Eric Dezenhall, a damage control expert brought in to offer an alternate perspective, sounded almost amazed that the other guy thought he had some good ideas. He said: “My experience is you can only spin a public that wants to be spun…. My problem with the marketing model of communications is that it tends to assume a relatively neutral audience. I don’t think we have an audience that is receptive to communications [because] they are trying to figure out if they are going to survive the day.”
Only America, it seems, would have the hubris to believe that the problems of this war could be fixed with proper marketing. It isn’t about the lies we tell, our leaders insist, it is whether we can make them appear believable.
Comment by: Martin Gugino
8 07/26/07 7:54 PM | Comment Link |In 2003, around the time of the “mission accomplished” event off San Diego, Chris Hedges gave the commencement address at Rockford College. The talk is on Google Video. He speaks against the war in Iraq, and you can see the sense of the times in the reaction of the audience to his talk.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=chris+hedges+rockford
It is quite astonishing. You see the chancellor of the university, pleading with his new graduates, watching the naive and loud response of some to Chris’s quite accurate, educated, and sad analysis of the “war”.
Comment by: David H
9 07/26/07 8:55 PM | Comment Link |Martin, thanks for the link. I wonder what those graduates think now? I’m not sure that was a proper venue for that speech ’cause I didn’t get to hear it all. However, those kids are the ones who will be making the voting decisions. Maybe they will remember those words now and make different decisions.
I went to a Brethren in Christ college. The BICs are peace mongers. But I doubt the response to such a speech would have been much different if presented to those with whom I graduated.
Comment by: Benjamin
10 07/26/07 10:04 PM | Comment Link |Martin–thankyou for the link! Wow. His comparison of comradeship versus friendship, war vs. love, was very thought provoking.
Comment by: Rachel
11 07/27/07 8:04 AM | Comment Link |Well I’ll be damned! Why didn’t they just pay me the $400K and I could have told them that?!
Comment by: Benjamin
12 07/27/07 8:59 AM | Comment Link |hehe–I’d have done it for way less than that. 1K even =)
with regards to U.S. brand identity: here’s a funny story. Earlier this year, my daughters aged 3 and 5 were visiting their grandparents in Australia with my wife, and their grandparents took them to macdonalds for some food. When asked by their grandparents about their macdonalds experiences in the U.S., my daughters replied “Oh, I don’t think we have this restaraunt in America”
Yeehaw! That sort of made my day.
Comment by: David H
13 07/27/07 12:16 PM | Comment Link |The truly funny thing about the Rand study was that the author apparently believes that the brutality discussed by the service people in “The Other War” can be trained out of US service personnel if we simply make them aware of the brand they are representing and teach them on-brand and off-brand practices.
Brutality and war seem to go hand in hand under any circumstances. But the stress and frustration of the type of war ongoing in Iraq (which is very similar to what took place in Vietnam vis-a-vis insurgents) tend to enhance that brutality. It isn’t just the poor Iraquis who are unlikely to be an interested audience for the brand spin, it is also the US service men being put into impossible situations where they have no one to trust (including their own officers) and face the constant threat of surprise attack. When you are 13 months into a year-long tour that has consisted of daily mortar barrages, regular fruit-less raids, occasional IED attacks and the constant knowledge that anyone not wearing a US uniform could be an enemy, then your brand awareness could very well slip when the crap hits the fan.
As for McDonalds, that was among the first lessons I had in the power of parenthood. When my kids were very small we went to McDs because they had an indoor playground. But I would never eat the food. My kids would ask why and I would tell them about the poor quality and unhealthy aspects. Soon they began to refuse going there even with friends and I would hear their little voices telling others abut the poor and unhealthy food. I had not intended to indoctrinate.
Comment by: benjamin
14 07/27/07 2:58 PM | Comment Link |You think?
Comment by: David H
15 07/27/07 7:13 PM | Comment Link |Is there an emoticon for sarcasm? I couldn’t find a good one.
Comment by: Benjamin
16 07/28/07 11:42 AM | Comment Link |Can we even put emoticons in here?
Comment by: Benjamin
17 07/28/07 11:44 AM | Comment Link |Comment by: Benjamin
18 07/28/07 11:45 AM | Comment Link |guess so =). Kewl
Comment by: Benjamin
19 07/28/07 11:48 AM | Comment Link |Comment by: David H
20 07/28/07 2:54 PM | Comment Link |If you have to tout it on a placard, does it still qualify as sarcasm? Ah, the limits of the internet.