The leftist mentality fascinates me and I’ve been trying to figure it out. A most interesting case is that of the estimable Chris Hedges. I’ll begin by repeating some good things I said about him in 2012, and then refer you to his recent Substack articles. You tell me what’s going on in his head.
Hedges on Pornography
There are some half-way decent leftists. Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview of Chris Hedges on 7 January 2012, I would say he is a good example of one. On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them. Both leftists and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score. That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense. This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. If it weren’t for religion would ‘the people’ be able to think in moral categories at all? Would they have any moral sense? You can’t make a person moral by giving him courses in ethics at age 20. He must already be (unreflectively) moral for those courses to do him any good, just as he must already be (unreflectively) logical for courses in logic to do him any good.
Hedges has the good sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of pornography is a major factor in our decline as a nation. The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. (What a great title!)
And if leftists care about women, how can they defend pornography? Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives whom they hate more than they love women. Similarly, leftists are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Ed Schultz the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race. If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions. But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from his ilk. [The link I supplied documenting the Schultz’s viciousness has gone bad.]
For a taste of Hedges today, take a gander at his Substack article Imperial Boomerang, which I reproduce in full:
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.
I have time for only one response. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed but not murdered. They brought about their own deaths by their illegal and imprudent behavior. Their killing was both morally and legally justified as self-defense. The ICE agent who shot Renee Good reasonably believed that she was about to commit vehicular homicide.