Empire Of Illusion is a tour of the fractured American Id, a study of social breakdown in the Decline and Fall model, and a barely muted howl.

That's a lot of freight to load on to one train. Sometimes it works, especially when Hedges in on areas he knows well, especially the corporatization and "dumbing up" of the university environment (where certain skill sets and bodies of knowledge are heavily emphasized and others are marginalized and neglected)....

At other times it is grotesque and morbidly depressing, as when he details, at length, how the adult entertainment industry really works and what it does to the minds, bodies, and souls of those who choose to work there or have no other options but to work there. Perhaps it could be metaphorically described as a slaughterhouse of the emotions. Industrial scale soul rape. It's pretty nauseating and if you would rather think about other things, you might want to pass up reading this book.

However, Hedges claims that the primary audience for the open porn sites are preadolescent to adolescent boys, roughly ages 11-17. It is hard to imagine constant and unfettered exposure to hard core pornography in this developmental window NOT having severe adverse long term effects on these young minds.

Hedges would have vastly improved his analysis if he had stepped back and drawn historical parallels which might help understand how societies are changed by destabilizing inputs such as these. For example, during the Vietnam war, Ho Chi Minh (does anyone under 50 even know who "Uncle Ho" was, or do they care ?) made a strategic decision to supply American troops with as much high quality dope as they could consume, particularly tropical strength cannabis, opium, and heroin, including the notorious Double Uoglobe 98% pure smack that was being shpped back to the USA in the body cavities of troop corpses by Air America. Ho Chi Minh fully undcerstood that a society could be brought to its knees by flooding it with substances that it didn't have the will or the resources to control.

One might see an ominous parallel with porn flooding in the twenty first century and dope flooding in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, Empire Of Illusion doesn't give us any illuminating historical cross referencing of that sort which might help contextualize current events in the light of historical events. Everything is seething and crumbling in the Big Now.

Professional Wrestling comes from a long tradition that includes Roman gladitorial spectacles, medieval morality plays, medicine shows, vaudeville acts, and cinematic weirdness like Three Stooges or hideous daytime effluvia like Queen For A Day...once rated in the Guiness Book Of World Records as the worst television program ever produced.

Again, we are provided a present moment snapshot of WWF style wrestling without a satisfying understanding of how it came about or how it, and related spectacles operate in and on the American psyche.

Somehow, this work may have been better served by the ironic detachment and sense of absurdity that one finds in Hunter Thompson or the sociology of Erving Goffman. Walter Kirn, in his _Lost In The Meritocracy_ gives a much better feel from the inside of the fine details of higher education
as a training in Upper Newspeak.

When economic subjects arise, we would have been better served if those economic claims were substantiated with charts, tables, and other evidentiary materials that would allow us to connect Hedges' reasonings and his affective responses in our own minds. If one is going to grandly proclaim the imminent collapse of the western economic scaffolding, I'd like to see some darn convincing analysis of why one ought to believe this, rather than possibly we're going through one of our periodic economic (and societal) troughs which tinctures our thinking with darkness and gloom.

Chris Hedges' newest book may be a screed, but it's an uncomfortably accurate one, delving into the addictive, corrupting hold of comforting & distracting illusion over too many Americans. From the even vaster wasteland of TV, brought to us by endless channels, to the drug of sensation at its lowest common denominator from the porn industry, to the "think happy thoughts" snake oil of both New Age & fundamentalist belief systems --

But you have to stop & catch your breath, or else be swept away by the torrent of mediocrity & cheerfully willful ignorance that passes for contemporary culture & thought. Once you're aware of how thoroughly blanderized & infantilized our culture has become, it's all too easy to succumb to despair or cynicism. And with good cause!

Hedges wisely selects just a few specific examples as indicators of something far more pervasive & widespread. Particularly disturbing is the chapter on the so-called "adult" entertainment industry, which is anything but adult. The graphic description of the ways in which women are used & discarded as commodities is sickening, yet we're clearly just getting the tip of a very slimy iceberg.

And Hedges connects this aspect of dehumanization to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, showing how sexuality & torture intertwine. Most disturbing of all is how accepted & mainstream this sort of "entertainment" has become -- we're not talking about erotica or old-fashioned porn, which at least portrayed sex as mutually enjoyable for men & women; what we see now is humiliation, suffering, pain, almost all of it inflicted on women for the pleasure of emotionally stunted men.

More than that, though, Hedges explores the ways in which reason & literacy -- the humanities -- are shunted to the margins in favor of a utilitarian mindset, one that boils down to, "What's in it for me, right now, and how can I get the most of it as quickly as possible?" And that "most" is wealth, status, power, and the illusion of importance -- a humanity measured in things, rather than in being.

From that point, we're shown how these personal illusions contribute to & help sustain a national, even global, illusion of power, self-righteousness, corruption & control. It's bread & circuses for the masses, with digital soma mainlined at every waking moment. Meanwhile, the real elites, the corporate masters of our world, do whatever their insatiable appetites demand. This invariably requires bloodshed & suffering inflicted upon those least able to resist it. .

Is Hedges overwrought? Is he exaggerating the crisis at hand? If so, it's not by very much. As a war correspondent of some 20 years, he's seen the brutal results of illusionary thinking first-hand. This book is born of bitter experience, as Hedges bears witness to the ongoing destruction of the human soul, which is lost in a world of glittering superficiality which can't conceal its innate cruelty, ugliness & emptiness.

Not a reassuring book by any means, but certainly an eye-opening one -- most highly recommended!

Hedges describes how corporate entertainment provides spectacle and fantasy. It encourages people to desire to be rich and famous and buy a great many things that they do not need and can't afford. It encourages a focus on material things and the drive for reckless self-gratification. It degrades values like compassion, empathy, solidarity, etc. It encourages people to care much more about news relating to movie stars and socialites than news relating to important events. Hedges analyzes episodes of TV shows, including Jerry Springer, WWE wrestling and "The Swan."

He devotes a particularly long chapter to the porn industry. Porn actresses are portrayed as a nothing more than wild animals whose only desire is to fulfill the most sadistic sexual fantasies of men. Most porn actresses are heavy drinkers and drug addicts as a result of the mental pain and serious physical damage to their private areas, front and back, caused by their line of work. Most of them appear to work in escort services on the side. Hedges give an account of one porn movie featuring an actress who engages in the very unhealthy activity of engaging in sex acts with 65 different men over the six hour shoot of the film. Porn is one of the biggest industries in this nation; a great many of our male citizens appear to take pleasure in the degrading and brutal version of sex found in modern porn.

In the last chapter of the book, Hedges gives kind of a general survey of the dismal state of this country. The financial crises did not start in 2008, he writes. It is rooted in the slow but steady destruction of American manufacturing since the 1970's. An example of the decline of American manufacturing ability, he observes, occurred when the city of New York in 2003 offered a several billion dollar contract for a company to build subway cars. No American company took the offer. Canadian and Japanese companies ended up constructing the new cars. Since the 1970's our economy has rested on the accumulation of un-unsustainable amounts of corporate and house-hold debt, used to a large extent not for productive investment but for participation in speculative bubbles and consumption to support luxurious living. Our economy is kept afloat by the willingness of foreigners to buy up this debt. As government social services are continuously slashed, the bailouts of 2008/2009 have only strengthened the stranglehold of corporate America on our economy and government resources. While the annual compensation packages of CEOs soar well into the tens of millions of dollars, the median American family income has declined in inflation adjusted terms since the early 70's. We call ourselves a free market economy but a leading pillar of our economy is the taxpayer funded military-industrial complex, powering companies like Lockheed Martin. Hedges notes the example of the US government's provision of 3 billion dollars of taxpayer funds to the dictatorship in Egypt, 1.3 billion dollars of which is required to be used for purchasing weapons from American defense companies. The aid money from US taxpayers used to purchase these weapons (produced with taxpayer funds) goes into the coffers of private arms companies. The US is the leading supplier of weapons and munitions to the rest of the world. The US uses half of its annual discretionary spending on the military and spends more on its military than all the other countries in the world combined. While trillions of dollars are spent producing weapons, waging military violence and illegally occupying other countries, our health care costs spiral out of control. Private health insurance companies spend 5 to 8 times more than traditional government run Medicare on administration and overhead. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 people die every year because of lack of access to proper health care. Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical costs. Americans pay 40 percent more than Canadiens for prescrption drugs. Our politicians, Obama included, do everything they can to avoid disrupting the entrenched power of the insurance companies.

Meanwhile, the politicians of both our political parties have lied to us about the scale of our unraveling. According to Hedges, the Consumer Price Index is constructed so it understates the true rate of inflation. Ronald Reagan lowered his unemployment rate by counting members of the military in the employment count. Bill Clinton lowered the official unemployment rate of his reign by excluding from the employment count people who had stopped looking for work and also by counting low wage under-employed workers as employed. So-called "free trade" agreements have only intensified economic trouble; American jobs have gone to the low wage third world. Hedges notes that, contrary to Clinton's prediction in 1993, NAFTA has thrown hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers off the land and many of them have ended up in the US as illegal immigrants.

Hedges gives a great deal of space to quoting various scholars and philosophers in order to back up his arguments. Other topics he discusses include positive psychology, the destruction of higher education and the willingness of media hacks to take the words of the powerful at face value.

Hedges suggests possible future scenarios where most Americans are virtual feudal slaves to corporate power and the power of government intrusion and surveillance capabilities expands dramatically to meet waves of crime and social discontent. He fears that the biggest contrast in this country will be between a literate marginalized minority on the one hand and on the other a barely functionally literate or functionally illiterate majority of the population that is enchanted by hollow corporate entertainment and the vacuous PR spectacles and slogans of politicians. He fears that as social conditions worsen, more and more people will turn to right wing demagogues for answers. He is very worried that major environmental destruction awaits us in the not too distant future. However he ends his book with the hope that the values of solidarity, compassion, etc. can be utilized to confront our growing corporate tyranny.