Hedges be Crazy.

Take it easy, Hedges.  As I read through Hedge’s article “America the Illiterate” I immediately went, “whoa there, this guy’s an extremist”. Chris Hedge’s portrays America’s society of today as an illiterate, uneducated, ignorant, conforming society living in a fantasy world made up of lies and illusions. WHAT?! Sorry, but I cannot agree on this one. Not for a bit. I didn’t even understand where he was coming up with half of his “facts”. He basically says that images have taken over words in our society to help out the illiterate bunch. That instead of slogans, one is manipulated by images. I’m sorry, that’s called advertising. Of course, images will be used to make things look more appealing, or for people to get a different perspective on a subject. Duh, if one sees a picture of the Bacon Cheeseburger and the Fettuccine Alfredo on a menu, they have something to supplement the written description; this might help make their decision between ordering one or the other much simpler. It’s not because we are dumb and can’t read, it just makes things more appealing. “We live in a permanent state of amnesia” (Hedges 1). Let’s be real…is this a joke? I literally could have not been more confused with this article. Hedges basically said that the literate and political tier of the population controls and manipulates the illiterates with misleading images, causing them to live a complete myth. Apparently, we believe that just because we are citizens of the United States we are some “god given”, superior creatures and for us, that’s enough.  One of his main points is that “we have moved from a print based society to an image based society”. False. Chris Hedges never takes into account what society was like before. What about in the days of Uncle Sam, Rosy the Riveter, civil rights, hippies etc.? Propaganda was FILLED with images. The images defined society just as much then as they do now, images are a glimpse a facilitator of an idea, a memory, that we can keep in our mind, one that we can closely identify with; it by no means simply just a way to cope with our new, illiterate society. Actually, this isn’t just an emerging problem . . . we’ve had illiterates in every single era of America. How about the slaves, and the Natives? They were a large portion of our country's population, and they were illiterate. How about the women and children factory workers? Illiterate. Our society will always have an uneducated class, and an educated one. It’s reality. Nowadays for example, we have predominant, lower Hispanic immigrant class of workers who are much more likely to be illiterate than a middle class family who can afford to send their child to a quality education. So no, illiteracy isn’t just a new trend. Reality check...it’s been here. No, it hasn’t left. We still haven’t been able to fully address it. But that doesn’t mean our society is a bunch of image crazed, confused, unrealistic people. Honestly, I found most of the article quite troubling, but what really set me off was one of his closing lines “the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other view, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.” (Hedges 3). WHAT?! What am I in college for? If this were actually the case, I think we’d all just be robots. 


These last two authors, Hedges and Carr have made me realize that there truly are people with the firm belief that society of today is becoming quite dumber.