The book is on Bookshare. I'm reading it now. Hedges is a complicated
person. His background is certainly complicated as well.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 10:15 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges Fearlessly Tells His Own
'Forbidden' Stories
An interesting excerpt. I envy Hedges a bit. He had real guts to organize
the Gay and Lesbian club. On the other hand, I think I prefer the dad I was
dealt.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/6/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
the campus.
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > Chris Hedges
Fearlessly Tells His Own 'Forbidden' Stories
________________________________________
Chris Hedges Fearlessly Tells His Own 'Forbidden' Stories By Chris
Hedges [1] / Hot Books [2] November 3, 2016 The following is an
excerpt from the new book Unspeakable: Chris Hedges on the Most
Forbidden Topics in America [3], by Chris Hedges in conversation with
the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, David Talbot,
published here with permission from Hot Books, an imprint of Skyhorse
Publishing.
The Making of a Radical
What made you a radical?
It's a combination of factors-including my personality type. I grew up
in a literate household, in a farm town of 2,000 people in upstate New
York called Schoharie. My mother, when I was a kid, was a teacher and
ended up becoming an English professor. My father was a World War II
army veteran-he had been a cryptographer in the North Africa,
Palestine and Iran-and a Presbyterian minister. They were very
involved in the 1960s in the civil rights movement and the anti-war
movement. My dad took my younger sister and me to protests.
Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in rural white enclaves, was at the
time one of the most hated men in America. Standing up for racial
justice in a town where there were no people of color was unpopular.
My father, who left the army largely a pacifist, hated war and the
military. He told me that if the Vietnam War was still being waged
when I was eighteen and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me.
To this day I have images of sitting in a prison cell with my dad.
My father was, finally, a vocal and early supporter of the gay rights
movement. His youngest brother was gay. He understood the pain of
being a gay man in America in the 1950s and 1960s. The rest of my
father's family disowned my uncle. We were the only family my uncle
and his partner had. My father's outspokenness about gay rights defied
the official policy of the Presbyterian Church.
By the time I was in college at Colgate University, my father had a
church in Syracuse. When he found that Colgate, which was an hour from
Syracuse, had no gay and lesbian organization he brought gay speakers to
My father encouraged the gay and lesbian students to form a formalemotional price for defiance.
campus organization. They were too intimidated-not surprising given
Colgate's outsized football program and fraternity system-to do so.
This was a problem my dad solved by one day taking me to lunch and
telling me, although I was not gay, that I had to found the school's
gay and lesbian group-which I did.
I used to go into the dining hall and the checker would take my card
and had it back to me with saying "faggot."
I saw my father, who I admired immensely, attacked for taking what
were moral stances-stances that defied the institutional church where
he worked and the values of the community in which we lived. I
understood at a young age that you are not rewarded for virtue. Virtue
must be its own reward. I saw that when you do what is right it is not
easy or pleasant. You make enemies. Indeed, if you take a moral stance
and there is no cost, it is probably not that moral. This was a vital
lessen to learn as a boy. It prepared me for how the world works. I
saw that when you stood with the oppressed you were usually treated
like the oppressed. And this saved me from disillusionment. I saw my
father suffer-he was a very gentle and sensitive man-when he was
attacked. And here personality comes into play. I was born with an
innate dislike for authority-my mother says that part of the reason
she agreed to send me to boarding school was because I was "running
the house"-and thrived on conflict. My father did not. He paid a higher
Where were you sent to school?Loomis-Chaffee, John D.
I was given a scholarship to attend a boarding school, or pre-prep
school, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, called Eaglebrook when I was 10.
I went to Loomis-Chaffee, an exclusive boarding school-the
Rockefellers went there-after Eaglebrook. The year I graduated from
Rockefeller III was our commencement speaker.circle.
Boarding school made me acutely aware of class. There were about 180
boys at Eaglebrook, but only about ten percent were on scholarship.
Eaglebrook was a school for the sons of the uber-rich. I was keenly
aware of my "lower"
status as a scholarship student. I saw how obscene wealth and
privilege fostered a repugnant elitism, a lack of empathy for others
and a sense of entitlement.
C. Wright Mills understood how elites replicate themselves. The
children of the elites are, as Mills pointed out in The Power Elite,
shaped not so much by the curriculum of exclusive schools but by
intimate relationships with teachers, who often went to the same
schools and prep schools, and by each other. This acculturation takes
place through sports teams, school songs and rituals, shared
experiences, brands and religious observances, usually Episcopalian.
These experiences are often the same experiences of the boys'
fathers and grandfathers. It molds the rich into a vast extended
fraternity that, because of these unique experiences, are able to
communicate to each other in a subtle code. No one outside this caste
knows how to speak in this code. This is what Gatsby finds out. He can
never belong.
Who were some of the names you went to school with?
The Mellons, the Buckleys, the Scrantons, the Bissell family, the son
of the former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and others. A
friend of mine's father owned Cartier's jewelers, along with K-Mart
and other businesses. I was at the estate of Governor Bill Scranton,
who was the Republican governor of Pennsylvania and later a UN
ambassador, and watched him come home from work in a helicopter. I had
never seen an indoor swimming pool that big.
The rich have disdain for anyone who does not belong to their inner
They believe that their wealth and privilege is conferred upon themDisorder. He suffered alone.
because of their superior attributes. They define themselves not by
what they are in private-in private they are usually bastards-but by
the public persona created for them by publicity. They see their
possessions and power, which in most cases they inherited, as natural
and proper because they believe they are inherently better than
others. Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a great
crime. He got that right.
All these families-the Mellons, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the
Morgans-started out as gangsters. They hired gun thugs to murder union
organizers and strikers. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the
industrialized world. Hundreds of workers were killed. Tens of
thousands were blacklisted. These oligarchic families pillaged, looted
and ruthlessly shut down competitors. Their grandsons were sitting
next to me in class at Eaglebrook in their school blazers, which by
the way could only be purchased at Lord and Taylor.
The refinement of the rich is a veneer. They can afford good manners
because they use others-including the machinery of state-to carry out
their dirty work. They often know the names of the great authors and
artists, but they are culturally and intellectually bankrupt. They are
consumed by gossip, a pathological yearning for status and obsessed by
brands and possessions-mansions, yachts, cars, gourmet food, clothes,
jewelry or vacations at exclusive resorts. They epitomize the cult of
the self and the unchecked hedonism that defines a consumer society.
They talk mostly about money-the money they made, the money they are
making and the money they will make. They are philistines.
My mother's family was from Maine. I spent most of my summers with her
family, fishing and hunting. They were working class. My grandfather
worked in a post office. One of my uncles-who had fought in the South
Pacific in World War II-came back destroyed physically and
psychologically. We did not have an understanding of Post Traumatic Stress
He was an alcoholic and lived in a trailer. He worked in myfrom the school. But I felt it.
great-uncle's lumber mill. But this was only because he was family.
Once he was paid, he often disappeared to drink away his paycheck. He
reappeared when his money ran out. Another uncle, who was the soul of
decency, was a plumber. Many of my relatives, especially my
grandfather, were quite intelligent. But none of them had much of an
education. My grandfather had to drop out of high school to work his
sister's farm after her husband died.
Going back and forth between that world of an elite prep school and
this mill town in Maine-Mechanic Falls-I realized that in terms of
native intelligence and aptitude, there were people in my family who
were as gifted as anyone in my prep school. The difference was that
they, like most of the working poor, were never given a chance. And
that is what it means to be poor in America. You don't get a chance
while the rich get chance after chance after chance.
Look at George W. Bush, a man of limited intelligence and dubious morals.
He
was a drunk, a cocaine addict, went AWOL from his National Guard unit,
and never really held much of a job until he was 40. And he ends up as
president. Affirmative action is alive and well, at least for the rich.
They
know how to take care of their own. And it does not matter how
mediocre they are.
You obviously were closely observing your fellow students' in their
native habitats. When you speak of their "disdain" you mean the
attitude that these rich kids had toward their servants?
Yes, I watched how the elites and the children of the elites treated
those "beneath" them. I saw my classmates-boys of eleven or
twelve-order around adults who were their servants, cooks and
chauffeurs. It was appalling. The rich lack empathy for those who are
not also rich. Their selfishness makes friendship, even among
themselves, almost impossible. Friendship for them is defined as
"what's in it for me." They are conditioned from a young age to kneel
before the cult of the self. I do not trust the rich. To them everyone
is part of their elite club or, essentially, the help. It does not
matter how liberal or progressive they claim to be. I would go back to
Maine and it would break my heart. I knew what my classmates thought
of people like my relatives. I also knew where I came from. I knew
whose side I was on. And I have never forgotten. My family was a great
gift. They kept me grounded.
Did your rich friends ever visit you where you lived?
No.
Is that because you didn't want them to?
(Pauses) Probably. I've never thought about it. I didn't see my family
very much. My father worked on the weekends. I used to go to New York
with a friend of mine -this is the boy whose father owned Cartier's.
His father would send the Rolls Royce down on Friday with the
chauffeur so we could go to New York for the weekend. There wasn't
really the opportunity for me to have friends over. I lived several hours
When my father picked me up in his old Dodge Dart, classmates would betheater in college, especially Shakespeare.
getting into their limousines.
Were you embarrassed?
I don't know that I was embarrassed, but I was conscious of it. I
didn't like these people. I didn't want to have a limousine, but you
were once again called out as the scholarship kid. The world of the
rich is very hierarchical. It is built on gradations of wealth. Some
scholarship kids, maybe most, desperately wanted to join the
elites-that's the story of Gatsby. They were terrible conformists,
aping the manners and attitudes of rich classmates. I loathed the rich.
Why do you think your parents-who were from modest backgrounds and
were involved in social activism-sent you to privileged schools like this?
There were a few reasons. My father was at war with the local public
school authorities. We had in our community a group of very poor,
mixed-race people-probably a mix of white, Indian and black, known in
racist slang as sloughters. They lived in remote areas outside the
village. When the kids from these families got into trouble-and this
gets back to my point about how the poor at best get one chance - the
principal expelled them. The only person these families could turn to
was my father, the local minister. My father hated the principal, who
was destroying the lives of these children by denying them an
education. So my father was finally banned from entering the school- I
think they put a restraining order on him. He was not violent, but he
could get angry, especially when children were being hurt.
My mother was teaching in a neighboring village. My parents
transferred my sister to her school. I was sent to boarding school,
something I never considered for my own children. It was out of
Dickens. The youngest boys were bullied by older boys. I fought back,
which meant they usually left me alone. I was, however, in a few
fights. I still have chipped teeth and once ended up in the hospital
with internal bleeding. Boys that did not fight back were crushed. My
closest friend at Eaglebrook, a sensitive and sweet boy who should
have never been sent to boarding school, committed suicide as a
teenager. He may have been gay. The bullying was an accepted part of
the culture. Boys were supposed to be tough, not to whine or complain.
They were expected to stand up for themselves, to become "men."
I knew about a half dozen boys who were molested by teachers. These
schools, where boys and teachers interacted in the classroom, on the
athletic fields, in the dining halls and in the dormitories were a
paradise for pedophiles.
The response of the school was always the same-cover it up. When I was
about twelve, my room was next to the apartment of the teacher-we
called them masters-on our dorm floor. After lights out at 9:30, he
would usher a boy down the hall into his apartment. When we came back
from Christmas that year, he and the boy had disappeared. No one said
a word. These boarding schools are as culpable in hiding and
perpetuating sexual abuse as the Catholic Church.
My father had grown up with old money, although by the time he was an
adult the money was gone. He came from an established family-his
ancestors settled East Hampton, New York in 1650-so he knew the world
of prep schools. He always wore Brooks Brothers suits, although they
were an extravagant expense for a Presbyterian minister. He knew the
culture of the elites and had contacts among them. I was also gifted
academically. Education was important in our family. There was the
assumption that these schools would provide a superior education.
So after prep school, you continue your elite education at Colgate?
Yes, but when I went to Colgate, it was not what it is now. When I
went, because I was a resident of New York State, there was generous
state scholarship money for students like me. There was a New York
State program for lower income students called Tuition Assistance
Program. There were regent scholarships. I pretty much went to Colgate
for free. About 60 percent of the kids at Colgate were on scholarship.
Since then, it has become an elite outpost of places such as
Greenwich, Connecticut-but it wasn't like that when I was there. It
was a healthier place. I was quite happy there. I had been a very good
long distance runner in high school and expected to run in college. My
coach had gone to Colgate. It was the only school I applied to. My
career as a runner was cut short by injuries. I ended up doing a lot of
You graduate from Colgate in 1979 and go on to Harvard Divinityminister.
School-at that time did you think you would follow in your father's
footsteps and become a minister?
Yes, although by nature I was a writer. I dictated stories to my
mother and she typed them when I was four and five. I always loved
books. I wrote stories and poems until I was a teenager. I started an
underground newspaper that was eventually banned. When Loomis-Chaffee
launched a campaign to raise a few hundred thousand dollars to
renovate the chapel, I went up to the squalid living quarters of the
kitchen workers although students were forbidden. I took pictures and
wrote a story about the conditions endured by the kitchen staff. I
waited until the commencement issue to publish it for maximum
embarrassment. It worked. The living quarters were renovated. The
kitchen staff chipped in to put up a small plaque in my honor. It was
an early lesson about the social good that journalism could accomplish.
At Colgate, I had gotten a job the summer after my junior year as an
unpaid intern on the House Subcommittee for International Development.
I wrote a case study of the corporation Gulf & Western and how it was
breaking the unions that were organizing against their sweatshops in
the Dominican Republic. Union organizers were being routinely
assassinated. Gulf & Western eventually sent a couple guys in suits to
meet with the Congressman Michael Harrington, and I was fired from my
unpaid internship. I hastily collected $220 dollars from the other
interns and hitchhiked to Miami. I flew to the Dominican Republic. I
wrote up the story and it was set to appear in the Outlook section of
the Washington Post. But Gulf & Western, which owned Paramount
Pictures, threatened to pull advertising and the paper killed it.
I got it published in The Christian Science Monitor.
I loved reporting and writing. But I couldn't reconcile American
journalism's supposed objectivity and neutrality with the imperative
of social justice. At Colgate, I had been very influenced by my
religion professor, Coleman Brown, who had worked in East Harlem as a
minister. And there was my father. I decided I would be an inner city
I moved across the street from a housing project in the RoxburyPublishing.
section of Boston and ran a church for two-and-a-half years. I
commuted to Cambridge to go to divinity school. But I never stopped
writing. Writing, for me, is like breathing.
What were some of the issues you were dealing with in Roxbury?
Racism. Violence. Poverty. Homelessness. Rape. Prostitution. Domestic
and child abuse. Drug and alcohol addition. Police violence. Mass
incarceration.
Welfare. Probation. Failed schools.
I preached on Sunday and ran a youth group. I missed classes almost
every Friday because I was in juvenile court. I didn't understand
institutional racism until then, all the ways society keeps the poor
poor. And I had never experienced this level of human suffering,
especially the hell endured by people addicted to substances. Poverty,
as George Bernard Shaw wrote, is "the worst of crimes. All the other
crimes are virtues beside it." Roxbury put race at the center of my
understanding of America.
Roxbury is also where I developed my deep dislike for liberals. I was
a Presbyterian seminarian, but the church had abandoned the poor with
white flight. My classmates at Harvard Divinity School sat around
talking about empowering people they'd never met. They liked the poor,
but they didn't like the smell of the poor. They would pick coffee for
two weeks in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas and spend the rest of the
semester talking about it-but they wouldn't ride 20 minutes on the
Green Line to where people were being warehoused like animals. I grew
increasingly disenchanted with the liberal church and with liberal
institutions like Harvard Divinity School. I decided I'd be an inner
city cop. I took the police civil service exam.
Why a cop?
Because I saw that a good cop could make a difference. We had a few.
This is Adam Walinsky's line, who became an advisor to urban police
departments after working as a young Senate aide to Bobby Kennedy. He
spent years trying to get the police to function more as inner city
social workers.
Exactly. About 60 percent of all police calls are for domestic disputes.
There was this one cop, he was white and his wife was black. He
cared-most of them didn't. So I took the exam, there were 50 openings
in the department at the time. Kevin White was the mayor. It later
came out in his FBI indictment that he gave 48 of the jobs to the
children of his cronies in South Boston. It was nepotism. It was
rigged. I didn't get the job, even though I scored 98 percent.
This has been an adapted excerpt from Unspeakable: Chris Hedges on the
Most Forbidden Topics in America [3], by Chris Hedges in conversation
with the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, David Talbot,
published here with permission from Hot Books, an imprint of Skyhorse
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regularthe campus.
column for Truthdig [4] every Monday. Hedges' most recent book [5] is
"Wages of
Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > Chris Hedges
Fearlessly Tells His Own 'Forbidden' Stories
Chris Hedges Fearlessly Tells His Own 'Forbidden' Stories By Chris
Hedges [1] / Hot Books [2] November 3, 2016 AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Google+Share to MoreShare to
The following is an excerpt from the new book Unspeakable: Chris
Hedges on the Most Forbidden Topics in America [3], by Chris Hedges in
conversation with the founder and former editor in chief of Salon,
David Talbot, published here with permission from Hot Books, an
imprint of Skyhorse Publishing.
The Making of a Radical
What made you a radical?
It's a combination of factors-including my personality type. I grew up
in a literate household, in a farm town of 2,000 people in upstate New
York called Schoharie. My mother, when I was a kid, was a teacher and
ended up becoming an English professor. My father was a World War II
army veteran-he had been a cryptographer in the North Africa,
Palestine and Iran-and a Presbyterian minister. They were very
involved in the 1960s in the civil rights movement and the anti-war
movement. My dad took my younger sister and me to protests.
Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in rural white enclaves, was at the
time one of the most hated men in America. Standing up for racial
justice in a town where there were no people of color was unpopular.
My father, who left the army largely a pacifist, hated war and the
military. He told me that if the Vietnam War was still being waged
when I was eighteen and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me.
To this day I have images of sitting in a prison cell with my dad.
My father was, finally, a vocal and early supporter of the gay rights
movement. His youngest brother was gay. He understood the pain of
being a gay man in America in the 1950s and 1960s. The rest of my
father's family disowned my uncle. We were the only family my uncle
and his partner had. My father's outspokenness about gay rights defied
the official policy of the Presbyterian Church.
By the time I was in college at Colgate University, my father had a
church in Syracuse. When he found that Colgate, which was an hour from
Syracuse, had no gay and lesbian organization he brought gay speakers to
My father encouraged the gay and lesbian students to form a formalemotional price for defiance.
campus organization. They were too intimidated-not surprising given
Colgate's outsized football program and fraternity system-to do so.
This was a problem my dad solved by one day taking me to lunch and
telling me, although I was not gay, that I had to found the school's
gay and lesbian group-which I did.
I used to go into the dining hall and the checker would take my card
and had it back to me with saying "faggot."
I saw my father, who I admired immensely, attacked for taking what
were moral stances-stances that defied the institutional church where
he worked and the values of the community in which we lived. I
understood at a young age that you are not rewarded for virtue. Virtue
must be its own reward. I saw that when you do what is right it is not
easy or pleasant. You make enemies. Indeed, if you take a moral stance
and there is no cost, it is probably not that moral. This was a vital
lessen to learn as a boy. It prepared me for how the world works. I
saw that when you stood with the oppressed you were usually treated
like the oppressed. And this saved me from disillusionment. I saw my
father suffer-he was a very gentle and sensitive man-when he was
attacked. And here personality comes into play. I was born with an
innate dislike for authority-my mother says that part of the reason
she agreed to send me to boarding school was because I was "running
the house"-and thrived on conflict. My father did not. He paid a higher
Where were you sent to school?Loomis-Chaffee, John D.
I was given a scholarship to attend a boarding school, or pre-prep
school, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, called Eaglebrook when I was 10.
I went to Loomis-Chaffee, an exclusive boarding school-the
Rockefellers went there-after Eaglebrook. The year I graduated from
Rockefeller III was our commencement speaker.circle.
Boarding school made me acutely aware of class. There were about 180
boys at Eaglebrook, but only about ten percent were on scholarship.
Eaglebrook was a school for the sons of the uber-rich. I was keenly
aware of my "lower"
status as a scholarship student. I saw how obscene wealth and
privilege fostered a repugnant elitism, a lack of empathy for others
and a sense of entitlement.
C. Wright Mills understood how elites replicate themselves. The
children of the elites are, as Mills pointed out in The Power Elite,
shaped not so much by the curriculum of exclusive schools but by
intimate relationships with teachers, who often went to the same
schools and prep schools, and by each other. This acculturation takes
place through sports teams, school songs and rituals, shared
experiences, brands and religious observances, usually Episcopalian.
These experiences are often the same experiences of the boys'
fathers and grandfathers. It molds the rich into a vast extended
fraternity that, because of these unique experiences, are able to
communicate to each other in a subtle code. No one outside this caste
knows how to speak in this code. This is what Gatsby finds out. He can
never belong.
Who were some of the names you went to school with?
The Mellons, the Buckleys, the Scrantons, the Bissell family, the son
of the former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and others. A
friend of mine's father owned Cartier's jewelers, along with K-Mart
and other businesses. I was at the estate of Governor Bill Scranton,
who was the Republican governor of Pennsylvania and later a UN
ambassador, and watched him come home from work in a helicopter. I had
never seen an indoor swimming pool that big.
The rich have disdain for anyone who does not belong to their inner
They believe that their wealth and privilege is conferred upon themDisorder. He suffered alone.
because of their superior attributes. They define themselves not by
what they are in private-in private they are usually bastards-but by
the public persona created for them by publicity. They see their
possessions and power, which in most cases they inherited, as natural
and proper because they believe they are inherently better than
others. Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a great
crime. He got that right.
All these families-the Mellons, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the
Morgans-started out as gangsters. They hired gun thugs to murder union
organizers and strikers. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the
industrialized world. Hundreds of workers were killed. Tens of
thousands were blacklisted. These oligarchic families pillaged, looted
and ruthlessly shut down competitors. Their grandsons were sitting
next to me in class at Eaglebrook in their school blazers, which by
the way could only be purchased at Lord and Taylor.
The refinement of the rich is a veneer. They can afford good manners
because they use others-including the machinery of state-to carry out
their dirty work. They often know the names of the great authors and
artists, but they are culturally and intellectually bankrupt. They are
consumed by gossip, a pathological yearning for status and obsessed by
brands and possessions-mansions, yachts, cars, gourmet food, clothes,
jewelry or vacations at exclusive resorts. They epitomize the cult of
the self and the unchecked hedonism that defines a consumer society.
They talk mostly about money-the money they made, the money they are
making and the money they will make. They are philistines.
My mother's family was from Maine. I spent most of my summers with her
family, fishing and hunting. They were working class. My grandfather
worked in a post office. One of my uncles-who had fought in the South
Pacific in World War II-came back destroyed physically and
psychologically. We did not have an understanding of Post Traumatic Stress
He was an alcoholic and lived in a trailer. He worked in myfrom the school. But I felt it.
great-uncle's lumber mill. But this was only because he was family.
Once he was paid, he often disappeared to drink away his paycheck. He
reappeared when his money ran out. Another uncle, who was the soul of
decency, was a plumber. Many of my relatives, especially my
grandfather, were quite intelligent. But none of them had much of an
education. My grandfather had to drop out of high school to work his
sister's farm after her husband died.
Going back and forth between that world of an elite prep school and
this mill town in Maine-Mechanic Falls-I realized that in terms of
native intelligence and aptitude, there were people in my family who
were as gifted as anyone in my prep school. The difference was that
they, like most of the working poor, were never given a chance. And
that is what it means to be poor in America. You don't get a chance
while the rich get chance after chance after chance.
Look at George W. Bush, a man of limited intelligence and dubious morals.
He
was a drunk, a cocaine addict, went AWOL from his National Guard unit,
and never really held much of a job until he was 40. And he ends up as
president. Affirmative action is alive and well, at least for the rich.
They
know how to take care of their own. And it does not matter how
mediocre they are.
You obviously were closely observing your fellow students' in their
native habitats. When you speak of their "disdain" you mean the
attitude that these rich kids had toward their servants?
Yes, I watched how the elites and the children of the elites treated
those "beneath" them. I saw my classmates-boys of eleven or
twelve-order around adults who were their servants, cooks and
chauffeurs. It was appalling. The rich lack empathy for those who are
not also rich. Their selfishness makes friendship, even among
themselves, almost impossible. Friendship for them is defined as
"what's in it for me." They are conditioned from a young age to kneel
before the cult of the self. I do not trust the rich. To them everyone
is part of their elite club or, essentially, the help. It does not
matter how liberal or progressive they claim to be. I would go back to
Maine and it would break my heart. I knew what my classmates thought
of people like my relatives. I also knew where I came from. I knew
whose side I was on. And I have never forgotten. My family was a great
gift. They kept me grounded.
Did your rich friends ever visit you where you lived?
No.
Is that because you didn't want them to?
(Pauses) Probably. I've never thought about it. I didn't see my family
very much. My father worked on the weekends. I used to go to New York
with a friend of mine -this is the boy whose father owned Cartier's.
His father would send the Rolls Royce down on Friday with the
chauffeur so we could go to New York for the weekend. There wasn't
really the opportunity for me to have friends over. I lived several hours
When my father picked me up in his old Dodge Dart, classmates would betheater in college, especially Shakespeare.
getting into their limousines.
Were you embarrassed?
I don't know that I was embarrassed, but I was conscious of it. I
didn't like these people. I didn't want to have a limousine, but you
were once again called out as the scholarship kid. The world of the
rich is very hierarchical. It is built on gradations of wealth. Some
scholarship kids, maybe most, desperately wanted to join the
elites-that's the story of Gatsby. They were terrible conformists,
aping the manners and attitudes of rich classmates. I loathed the rich.
Why do you think your parents-who were from modest backgrounds and
were involved in social activism-sent you to privileged schools like this?
There were a few reasons. My father was at war with the local public
school authorities. We had in our community a group of very poor,
mixed-race people-probably a mix of white, Indian and black, known in
racist slang as sloughters. They lived in remote areas outside the
village. When the kids from these families got into trouble-and this
gets back to my point about how the poor at best get one chance - the
principal expelled them. The only person these families could turn to
was my father, the local minister. My father hated the principal, who
was destroying the lives of these children by denying them an
education. So my father was finally banned from entering the school- I
think they put a restraining order on him. He was not violent, but he
could get angry, especially when children were being hurt.
My mother was teaching in a neighboring village. My parents
transferred my sister to her school. I was sent to boarding school,
something I never considered for my own children. It was out of
Dickens. The youngest boys were bullied by older boys. I fought back,
which meant they usually left me alone. I was, however, in a few
fights. I still have chipped teeth and once ended up in the hospital
with internal bleeding. Boys that did not fight back were crushed. My
closest friend at Eaglebrook, a sensitive and sweet boy who should
have never been sent to boarding school, committed suicide as a
teenager. He may have been gay. The bullying was an accepted part of
the culture. Boys were supposed to be tough, not to whine or complain.
They were expected to stand up for themselves, to become "men."
I knew about a half dozen boys who were molested by teachers. These
schools, where boys and teachers interacted in the classroom, on the
athletic fields, in the dining halls and in the dormitories were a
paradise for pedophiles.
The response of the school was always the same-cover it up. When I was
about twelve, my room was next to the apartment of the teacher-we
called them masters-on our dorm floor. After lights out at 9:30, he
would usher a boy down the hall into his apartment. When we came back
from Christmas that year, he and the boy had disappeared. No one said
a word. These boarding schools are as culpable in hiding and
perpetuating sexual abuse as the Catholic Church.
My father had grown up with old money, although by the time he was an
adult the money was gone. He came from an established family-his
ancestors settled East Hampton, New York in 1650-so he knew the world
of prep schools. He always wore Brooks Brothers suits, although they
were an extravagant expense for a Presbyterian minister. He knew the
culture of the elites and had contacts among them. I was also gifted
academically. Education was important in our family. There was the
assumption that these schools would provide a superior education.
So after prep school, you continue your elite education at Colgate?
Yes, but when I went to Colgate, it was not what it is now. When I
went, because I was a resident of New York State, there was generous
state scholarship money for students like me. There was a New York
State program for lower income students called Tuition Assistance
Program. There were regent scholarships. I pretty much went to Colgate
for free. About 60 percent of the kids at Colgate were on scholarship.
Since then, it has become an elite outpost of places such as
Greenwich, Connecticut-but it wasn't like that when I was there. It
was a healthier place. I was quite happy there. I had been a very good
long distance runner in high school and expected to run in college. My
coach had gone to Colgate. It was the only school I applied to. My
career as a runner was cut short by injuries. I ended up doing a lot of
You graduate from Colgate in 1979 and go on to Harvard Divinityminister.
School-at that time did you think you would follow in your father's
footsteps and become a minister?
Yes, although by nature I was a writer. I dictated stories to my
mother and she typed them when I was four and five. I always loved
books. I wrote stories and poems until I was a teenager. I started an
underground newspaper that was eventually banned. When Loomis-Chaffee
launched a campaign to raise a few hundred thousand dollars to
renovate the chapel, I went up to the squalid living quarters of the
kitchen workers although students were forbidden. I took pictures and
wrote a story about the conditions endured by the kitchen staff. I
waited until the commencement issue to publish it for maximum
embarrassment. It worked. The living quarters were renovated. The
kitchen staff chipped in to put up a small plaque in my honor. It was
an early lesson about the social good that journalism could accomplish.
At Colgate, I had gotten a job the summer after my junior year as an
unpaid intern on the House Subcommittee for International Development.
I wrote a case study of the corporation Gulf & Western and how it was
breaking the unions that were organizing against their sweatshops in
the Dominican Republic. Union organizers were being routinely
assassinated. Gulf & Western eventually sent a couple guys in suits to
meet with the Congressman Michael Harrington, and I was fired from my
unpaid internship. I hastily collected $220 dollars from the other
interns and hitchhiked to Miami. I flew to the Dominican Republic. I
wrote up the story and it was set to appear in the Outlook section of
the Washington Post. But Gulf & Western, which owned Paramount
Pictures, threatened to pull advertising and the paper killed it.
I got it published in The Christian Science Monitor.
I loved reporting and writing. But I couldn't reconcile American
journalism's supposed objectivity and neutrality with the imperative
of social justice. At Colgate, I had been very influenced by my
religion professor, Coleman Brown, who had worked in East Harlem as a
minister. And there was my father. I decided I would be an inner city
I moved across the street from a housing project in the RoxburyPublishing.
section of Boston and ran a church for two-and-a-half years. I
commuted to Cambridge to go to divinity school. But I never stopped
writing. Writing, for me, is like breathing.
What were some of the issues you were dealing with in Roxbury?
Racism. Violence. Poverty. Homelessness. Rape. Prostitution. Domestic
and child abuse. Drug and alcohol addition. Police violence. Mass
incarceration.
Welfare. Probation. Failed schools.
I preached on Sunday and ran a youth group. I missed classes almost
every Friday because I was in juvenile court. I didn't understand
institutional racism until then, all the ways society keeps the poor
poor. And I had never experienced this level of human suffering,
especially the hell endured by people addicted to substances. Poverty,
as George Bernard Shaw wrote, is "the worst of crimes. All the other
crimes are virtues beside it." Roxbury put race at the center of my
understanding of America.
Roxbury is also where I developed my deep dislike for liberals. I was
a Presbyterian seminarian, but the church had abandoned the poor with
white flight. My classmates at Harvard Divinity School sat around
talking about empowering people they'd never met. They liked the poor,
but they didn't like the smell of the poor. They would pick coffee for
two weeks in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas and spend the rest of the
semester talking about it-but they wouldn't ride 20 minutes on the
Green Line to where people were being warehoused like animals. I grew
increasingly disenchanted with the liberal church and with liberal
institutions like Harvard Divinity School. I decided I'd be an inner
city cop. I took the police civil service exam.
Why a cop?
Because I saw that a good cop could make a difference. We had a few.
This is Adam Walinsky's line, who became an advisor to urban police
departments after working as a young Senate aide to Bobby Kennedy. He
spent years trying to get the police to function more as inner city
social workers.
Exactly. About 60 percent of all police calls are for domestic disputes.
There was this one cop, he was white and his wife was black. He
cared-most of them didn't. So I took the exam, there were 50 openings
in the department at the time. Kevin White was the mayor. It later
came out in his FBI indictment that he gave 48 of the jobs to the
children of his cronies in South Boston. It was nepotism. It was
rigged. I didn't get the job, even though I scored 98 percent.
This has been an adapted excerpt from Unspeakable: Chris Hedges on the
Most Forbidden Topics in America [3], by Chris Hedges in conversation
with the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, David Talbot,
published here with permission from Hot Books, an imprint of Skyhorse
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular
column for Truthdig [4] every Monday. Hedges' most recent book [5] is
"Wages of
Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [6] Error!
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[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/chris-hedges
[2] http://hotbookspress.com/
[3]
https://www.amazon.com/Unspeakable-Chris-Hedges/dp/1510712739/?tag=alt
ernorg
08-20
[4] http://www.truthdig.com/
[5] http://www.truthdig.com/bazaar/wages_of_rebellion
[6] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Chris Hedges ;
Fearlessly Tells His Own 'Forbidden' Stories [7]
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