Objectify This

Christopher Hedges extemporized about his new book,  The End of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle, when he stopped in Berkeley, CA on his  tour last summer. But his take on the spectacular is not without some convoluted ironies.

First, I feel that I should disclose that I have not read his book. In that light, my attendence of his lecture and subsequent criticism could be construed as just the sort of illiteracy and subsequent enjoyment of the spectacular that he decries so often.

Like Hedges, I am appalled that real, informed, balanced, fact-checked, in-depth journalism and publishing— real inquiry, real literacy— is on the way out. Numerous small and large presses have made significant staffing cuts, Condé Nast cut four magazines, and even the New York Times, a venerable giant of fact-checking, announced the firing of 100 newsroom staffers today.

But I think that Hedges is doing something potentially philosophically untenable. After Hedges spent most of his lecture blaming Wall Street’s ascription to a “spectacular” and illiterate worldview for the recession and the bailout (an argument that seems tenable only in a figurative sense, to the best of my knowledge), I waited in line to ask him a question: Was he proposing that we let the banks fail? Would that have been, in his eyes, less of a spectacle?

I had been afraid to ask the question during the actual Q-and-A period, noting that the audience (mostly aging hippie-intellectuals from U.C. Berkeley) had been nodding with the fervor of a nascent cult. I wasn’t sure what those peaceniks would have said to me, but I was, as a nascent hippie-intellectual myself, afraid of their spite.

To my surprise, Hedges was forthright about his answer: he did support the bailout. In other words, he, himself, had just spent at least half an hour on a soapbox, shaking his fist in righteous anger about a solution he himself would have chosen — and this was  his example in an argument about empty soapboxing.

It makes me wonder if real literacy is already gone when we fight for it by failing to reflect on what we ourselves are doing or saying. Of course, total enlightenment may elude most of us, but reflection is sorely missing from my life, most of the time.

That’s why, for a short time only, on your local internets, ObjectifyThis will offer a reflection series, in which I consider some gray areas, or at least broach some less polarized subjects. In honor of my prematurely waning eyesight, Hedges’ idea of the spectacle, and the fact that soon I’ll be telling people about the good old days when the New York Times had fact-checkers to check their other fact-checkers’ work, I’ll be calling it Where Are My Spectacles, because presumably this will evoke a creaky granny who has a right to be nostalgic.