by Chris Hedges
26 “Canada’s Shame,” The National, Canadian Broadcasting Company, May 24, 2006.
27 Cited in Frank Füredi, Where Have all the Intellectuals Gone? (New York: Continuum, 2004), 73.
28 Benjamin DeMott, “Junk Politics: A Voter’s Guide to the Post-Literate Election,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2003): 36.
29 Boorstin, The Image, 61.
30 Ibid., 255.
31 Gabler, Life: The Movie, 205.
32 Boorstin, The Image, 36.
33 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1997), 59.
34 Cited in Gabler, Life: The Movie, 197.
35 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977), 24.
CHAPTER 2: THE ILLUSION OF LOVE
1 “The Directors,” Adult Video News (2005), 54.
2 Gag Factor. http://www.gagfactor.com/gagfactordotcom.html, accessed, April 5, 2009.
3 Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 3-4.
4 Marc Cooper, The Last Honest Place in America (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 42.
5 Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2007), 126.
6 Bill Margold, quoted in Robert J. Stoller and I.S. Levin, Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated Video (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 31.
7 Gail Dines, “The White Man’s Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 18 (2006), 296-297.
8 Ibid., 297.
9 Scott Simon, host. “Promoting Healthcare for the Porn Industry,” Weekend Edition. National Public Radio, Dec. 8, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17044239.
10 Lubben, Shelley, and Jersey Jaxin. “Jersey Jaxin on Why She Quit Porn,” YouTube. Accessed Aug. 12, 2007. Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACLK5ccKfM and Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1NObcJV8r0&feature=related.
CHAPTER 3: THE ILLUSION OF LOVE
1 Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz” (http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/auschwitz/AdornoEducation.pdf), 10.
2 Ibid., 6.
3 Charles Ting, “The Dormitories at U.C. Berkeley.” in Nader, Laura, et al., Controlling Processes: Selected Essays, 1994-2005. The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 92/93 (2005): 197-229.
4 Charles Schwartz, Home page. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/.
5 Schwartz, “Good Morning, Regents.” UniversityProbe.org. http://uni- versityprobe.org/2009/02/good-morning-regents/.
6 Josh Keller, “For Berkeley’s Sports Endowment, a Goal of $1 Billion.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 23, 2009. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i20/20a01301.htm.
7 Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 110.
8 Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 47.
9 Mills, The Power Elite, 321.
10 Joseph A. Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Universities (Stanford, Calf.: Stanford University Press, 2007), http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/11/soares; Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Random House, 2006), http://insidehigh- ered.com/news/2006/09/05/admit.
11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). This is the last line of the book. The original publication was in the Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921: “Woven man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”
12 William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” The American Scholar (Summer 2008). http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages of-an-elite-education.
13 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Transaction Publishers, 1957), 229.
14 Ibid., 230.
15 Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 121.
16 Cited in Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 230.
17 Deresiewicz, “Disadvantages.”
18 William Hazlitt, “Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft,” in Collected Works, Vol. 2 (London: J.M. Dent, 1902), 155.
19 Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 91.
20 Andrew J. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York, Oxford University Press, rpt. Pittsburgh: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 837; Richard Teller Crane, The Utility of all Kinds of Higher Schooling (Chicago, H.O. Shepard, 1909), 106.
21 Donoghue, The Last Professors, 3.
22 David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 243.
23 Donoghue, The Last Professors, 56.
24 Quoted in full in Condé Nast Portfolio.com, “Daily Brief: Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F——You,” Oct. 17, 2008. http://www.portfolio.com/v iews/blogs/daily-br ief/2008/10/17/hedge-fund-manager-good bye-and-f-you.
25 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 6-7.
CHAPTER 4: THE ILLUSION OF HAPPINESS
1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Grafton Books, 1977), 99- 100.
2 Randall Colvin and Jack Block, “Do Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health? An Examination of the Taylor and Brown Formulation,” Psychological Bulletin 116:1 (July 1994), 3-20.
3 One group that applies positive psychology to business practices, and touts the worldwide goodness this spreads, posts this laudatory message sent to the group in July 2004 by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “I would like to commend you for your innovative methodology of ‘apprecia tive inquiry’ and to thank you for introducing it to the United Nations. Without this, it would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to constructively engage so many leaders of business, civil society, and government.” Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB) Global Forum. http://www.bawbglobalforum.org/content/view/47/115.
4 Anthropologist Laura Nader strongly disagrees with the assertion that positive emotions and health go together.
5 Huxley, Brave New World, 99-100.
6 Mihály Csikszentmihály, “Brain Channels Thinker of the Year Award: 2000: Mihály Csikszentmihály, ‘Flow Theory.’” Brain Channels. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://www.brainchannels.com/thinker/mihaly.html; Jamie Chamberlin, “Reaching ‘Flow’ to Optimize Work and Play,” American Psychological Association Monitor 29:7 (July 1998), http://www.apa.org/monitor/ju198/joy.html.
7 Csikszentmihály, “‘Flow Theory.’”
8 E. Diener, C. Nickerson, R. E. Lucas, and E. Sandvik, “Dispositional Affect and Job Outcomes,” Social Indicators Research 59 (2002), 229-259.
9 S. E. Taylor, “Adjustment to Threatening Events: A Theory of Cognitive Adaptation, American Psychologist 38 (1983), 1161-1173. Quoted in Colvin and Block, “Do Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health?”
10 C. Peterson, “The Future of Optimism,” American Psychologist 55:1 (Jan. 2000), 4-55.
11 D. A. Jopling, “‘Take away the life-lie . . . ’ Positive illusions and creative self deception.” Philosophical Psychology 9 (1996), 525-544.
12 Chris Cochran. “The Production of Cultural Difference: Paradigm Enforcement in Cultural Psychology,” Psychology at Berkeley Spring 2008.
13 “In Good We Trust,” in Mother Jones, January/February 2009. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/02/books-good-we-trust.
14 Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, “Peaceful Parenting,” The Greater Good 4:3 (Winter 2007-2008). http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2007winter/HartHodson.html.
15 Richard S. Lazarus, “Author’s Response: The Lazarus Manifesto for Positive Psychology,” Psychological Inquiry 14:2 (2003), 176.
16 “The New Industrial Relations,” Business Week 2687 (May 11, 1981): 84-89.
17 David Noble, America by Design (Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 1977).
18 Frank M. Gyrna Jr., Quality Circles: A Team Approach to Problem Solving (New York: American Management
Associations, 1981); Neal Q. Herrick, Joint Management and Employee Participation: Labor and Management at the Crossroads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990); Paul Bernstein, Workplace Democratization: Its Internal Dynamics (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1976); Robert S. Ozaki. Human Capitalism: The Japanese Enterprise System as World Model (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991).
19 Roberto González, “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” Controlling Processes: Selected Essays, 1994-2005. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 92/93 (2005), 113.
20 Gyrna, Quality Circles, 53.
21 Ozaki, Human Capitalism, 169.
22 Ibid.
23 Satoshi Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider’s Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory, Tatsuru Akimoto, ed. and trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 71.
24 Ibid., 24, 30.
25 Ibid., 109-110.
26 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 109.
27 Noble, America by Design, 274-278.
28 Ibid., 290.
29 Ibid., 259-260.
30 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 111.
31 Ibid., 118.
32 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 124.
33 Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Managers Find ‘Quality Time’ on a Brainstorming Retreat,” The New York Times, Jan. 11, 1994: A7; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 107.
34 J. P. Womack, D. T. Jones, and D. Roos. The Machine That Changed the World (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 200-203.
35 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 75.
36 R. Ofshe and Margaret T. Singer, “Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of Self and the Impact of Thought Reforming Techniques,” Cultic Studies Journal 3:1 (1986): 6.
37 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 116.
38 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 48.
39 Alejandro Lugo, “Cultural Production and Reproduction in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Tropes at Play among Maquiladora Workers,” Cultural Anthropology, 5:2. (1990): 178-180.
40 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 156-157.
41 Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 19; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 115.
42 Parker, Inside the Circle, 20; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 116.
43 P. C. Thompson, “U.S. Offered Unusual Class on Diversity,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1995: 34.
44 R. E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). Quoted in Barbara S. Held, “The Negative Side of Positive Psychology,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 44:1 (Winter 2004), 9, 24.
CHAPTER 5: THE ILLUSION OF AMERICA
1 Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 172.
2 David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2008: 172.
3 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 285.
4 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review (May 1949). Rpt. In http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm.
5 Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “There’s Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer,” Salon 13 (March 2009), www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938. In John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15637.
9 Dennis C. Blair, “Far-Reaching Impact of Global Economic Crisis,” Annual Threat Assessment, Senate Armed Services Committee (March 10, 2009), 3. http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2009_hr/031009blair.pdf.
10 Quoted in James Bamford, “Big Brother Is Listening,” Atlantic (April 2006), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance/4.
11 Nathan Frier, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB890.pdf.
12 George Orwell, The Collected Letters, Essays and Journalism of George Orwell. Vol, 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950. Eds. Sonia B. Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 67.
13 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 410.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without Eunice. She watched and transcribed everything from professional wrestling, to reality television shows, to the scenes described in the chapter on pornography. She edited and rewrote passages. She clarified incomplete thoughts, challenged shaky assertions, and added paragraphs that always enhanced the points I was trying to make. She stayed up many nights long after I had gone to bed, reworking sections of the book. Nothing I write is published before it goes through her hands. Our marriage is a rare combination of spiritual and intellectual affinity. “She’is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is,” as John Donne wrote in his poem “The Sunne Rising”:Princes doe play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; all wealth alchimie.
Thou, sunne, art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
I am deeply indebted to The Nation Institute and the Lannan Foundation. The support of these organizations permitted me to write this book. I am especially grateful to Hamilton Fish, Ruth Baldwin, Taya Grobow, and Jonathan Schell, as well as Peggy Suttle and Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation magazine. Carl Bromley at Nation Books is a remarkably talented and brilliant editor, a fine writer and scholar in his own right, who helped shape and guide this book. In an age when editing seems to be a dying art, he upholds the highest standards of the craft. He loves books and ideas, and his insight and enthusiasm are infectious. It was a privilege to work with him. Michele Jacob, whom I have worked with before, handled publicity and book events with her usual efficiency. Patrick Lannan and Jo Chapman at the Lannan Foundation have been constant and steadfast supporters of my work. It was Patrick, who has done more than perhaps anyone in the country to nurture, promote, and protect great writing, who first gave me Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated.
The Reverend Coleman Brown, my professor of religion at Colgate University and mentor, once again guided me through the writing. Coleman generously shared his profound wisdom, at once always humbling and always correct. His voice of compassion and deep insight into the human condition serve to temper the tone of my writing and pull me back from the edge of despair to remind me, and my readers, that good exists and is never as powerless as it appears.
John Timpane, a fellow lover of books, poetry, and theater, again edited the final manuscript. All my final manuscripts end up in his hands at my request. John, the greatest line and content editor in the business, is the Olympian authority who makes the last decisions on what is in or out, what should be changed and what amended. No writer could be in better hands, even if he has a hard time accepting my supremacy at Balderdash.
Chris Hebdon, a student at Berkeley, worked tirelessly on the book. He attended the seminar on positive psychology, did all the interviews and recordings, and wrote up the proceedings. The chapter on positive psychology is largely his work. Chris is a very talented young man whose conscience is as impressive as his intellect, which must make some of his professors very uncomfortable. My son Thomas, whose integrity is matched by a superb intellect, as well as a maturity and sensitivity that extend far beyond his years, worked during his Christmas vacation from Colgate University on the book in the Princeton University library. Robert Scheer and Zuade Kaufmann, who run the Web magazine Truthdig, where I write a weekly column, care deeply about maintaining the standards of great writing and reporting. I am fortunate to count them as friends and write for their site. Gerald Stern, Anne Marie Macari, Mae Sakharov, Rick McArthur, Richard Fen
n, James Cone, Ralph Nader, Maria-Christina Keller, Pam Diamond, June Ballinger, Michael Goldstein, Irene Brown, Margaret Maurer, Sam Hynes, Tom Artin, Joe Sacco, Steve Kinzer, Charlie and Catherine Williams, Mark Kurlansky, Ann and Walter Pincus, Joe and Heidi Hough, Laila al-Arian, Michael Granzen, Karen Hernandez, Ray Close, Peter Scheer, Kasia Anderson, Robert J. Lifton, Lauren B. Davis, Robert Jensen, Cristina Nehring, Bernard Rapoport, Jean Stein, Larry Joseph, Wanda Liu (our patient and skillful Mandarin tutor), as well as Dorothea von Molke and Cliff Simms, who together run one of the finest bookstores in America, are part all of our cherished circle. Cliff was one of the most prescient critics of the manuscript and greatly improved its sharpness and focus. Thanks as well to Boris Rorer, Michael Levien, who recommended David Foster Wallace’s brilliant essay on the porn industry, and the staff at Bon Appetit, where I buy my daily baguette.
Lisa Bankoff of International Creative Management, as she has for all my books, negotiated contracts and eased the maddening minutiae of putting this book together. I am fortunate to be able to work with her.
My children, Thomas, Noëlle, and Konrad, are my greatest joy. After years in which I have witnessed too much violent death and suffering, they are the balms to my soul, the gentle reminders that trauma can be slowly healed through love and that redemption is possible.
Bibliography
ABC News. Living in the Shadows: Illiteracy in America. Feb. 25, 2008. Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1963.
———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1966.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.
Bacevich, Andrew J. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptional-ism . New York: Metropolitan, 2008.
Bakan, Joel, writer. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Canada: Big Picture Media Corporation/Zeitgeist Films, 2003.
Barstow, David. “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex.” New York Times (Nov. 29, 2008). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html.