Chris Hedges - America: The Farewell Tour

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ALSO BY CHRIS HEDGES

Unspeakable

(with David Talbot)

Wages of Rebellion:

The Moral Imperative of Revolt

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

(with Joe Sacco)

The World as It Is:

Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Death of the Liberal Class

Empire of Illusion:

The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

When Atheism Becomes Religion:

Americas New Fundamentalists

Collateral Damage:

Americas War Against Iraqi Civilians

(with Laila Al-Arian)

American Fascists:

The Christian Right and the War on America

Losing Moses on the Freeway:

The 10 Commandments in America

What Every Person Should Know About War

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2018

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design and photo illustration by Oliver Munday

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hedges, Chris, author.

Title: America : the farewell tour / Chris Hedges.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058039| ISBN 9781501152672 (hardback) | ISBN 150115267X (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Working classUnited States. | UnemploymentUnited States. | Drug abuseUnited States. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 21st Century. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / General. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy.

Classification: LCC HD8072.5 .H43 2018 | DDC 305.5/620973dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058039

ISBN 978-1-5011-5267-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-5269-6 (ebook)

For Eunice,

Shes all states, and all princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honors mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and thunder. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror, in fact, I am... inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a present to its hundredor four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if we dont, the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment.

WALTER BENJAMIN , letter from Paris, 1935

This nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples. Instead, it is again a specifically Western nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost manifestation of all the forces opposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative nothingness that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true essence until it soon disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded. Life, history, family, people, language, faiththe list could go on forever because nothingness spares nothingall fall victim to nothingness.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER , Ethics

Hard as it may be for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but will suffer dissolution.

PLATO , The Republic

I walked down a long service road into the remains of an abandoned lace factory. The road was pocked with holes filled with fetid water. There were saplings and weeds poking up from the cracks in the asphalt. Wooden crates, rusty machinery, broken glass, hulks of old filing cabinets, and trash covered the grounds. The derelict complex, 288,000 square feet, consisted of two huge brick buildings connected by overhead, enclosed walkways. The towering walls of the two buildings, with the service road running between them, were covered with ivy. The windowpanes were empty or had frames jagged with shards of glass. The thick wooden doors to the old loading docks stood agape. I entered the crumbling complex through a set of double wooden doors into a cavernous hall. The wreckage of industrial America lay before me, home to flocks of pigeons that, startled by my footsteps over the pieces of glass and rotting floorboards, swiftly left their perches in the rafters and air ducts high above my head. They swooped, bleating and clucking, over the abandoned looms.

The Scranton Lace Company was America. It employed more than 1,200 workers on its imported looms, some of the largest ever built.stood in front of one. The looms, weighing nearly twenty metric tons and manufactured in Nottingham, England, were twenty feet tall. They stretched across the expanse of the old factory floor. The word Nottingham was embossed on the black arms of the machines. Another age. Another time. Another country.

The factory, started in 1891, was once among the biggest producers of Nottingham lace in the world. On the loom before me, the white lace roll sat unfinished. Punch cards, with meticulous, tiny holes for the needles to pass through, lay scattered on the floor. The loom was stopped in the middle of production, arrested in time, an artifact of a deindustrialized America.

For more than a century, the factory stood as a world unto itself. I wandered through the remains. The old bowling alley, the deserted cafeteria with its rows of heavy cast iron stoves, the company barbershop, a cluttered and dusty gymnasium, the auditorium with a stage, the infirmary, and outside, the elegant clock tower with the cast iron bell and large whistle that once signaled shift changes.