Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
Aldous Huxley
I have long found Chris Hedges to be a beacon of morality in the belly of the beast that is post 9/11 fascist America. His book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a superbly written, uncompromising look at the horrors of war seen through the eyes of a man who has been there, Hedges served as a war correspondent in some of the most vicious and senseless slaughtering sprees of the late Twentieth Century. His sheer courage in coming out in the early days of the Bushreich and denouncing war during a commencement address at Rockford College when the phony War on Terror was just ramping up during which he was jeered by the audience, his microphone cut off and he was run like a rabid dog from the campus, later his employer, the so-called liberal New York Times stabbed him in the back. Hedges went on to write what I consider to be a definitive expose of the authoritarian Christian Right entitled American Fascists and contributes weekly columns to the fine website Truthdig. As a fan, it was only natural that I would pick up his latest scathing condemnation of the dumb, foul rottenness that is America in terminal decline and while uneven it delivers like a baseball bat to the head. We truly are living in the existential Hell that is the Empire of Illusion.