Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  On July 20, 1944, von Stauffenberg carried two small bombs in a briefcase to a meeting with Hitler. He struggled before the meeting to arm the bombs with pliers, a difficult task as he had lost his right hand and had only three fingers on his left hand after being wounded in North Africa. He managed to arm only one bomb. After placing the briefcase with the bomb under the table near Hitler, he left the room. Von Stauffenberg was outside at the time of the explosion, which killed four people—including Hitler’s security double—but only slightly wounded Hitler, who was shielded by a table leg. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announced over the radio that Hitler had survived. Hitler spoke to the nation not long afterward. Von Stauffenberg and other conspirators were captured and executed by a firing squad.

  Von dem Bussche, recovering from the loss of his leg in a Waffen-SS hospital outside Berlin, anxiously followed the news of the assassination attempt on the radio. He listened to Hitler’s angry tirade against the “traitors” who had attempted to kill him. He knew it would not be long before the SS appeared at his bedside. He spent the night eating page after page of his address book, which had the names of every major conspirator who was being hunted, was under arrest, or was dead. The British explosive material from his aborted suicide bombing was in a suitcase under his bed. He asked another officer to carry the suitcase out of the hospital and toss it into a lake. He was repeatedly interrogated over the next few days, but because none of the other plotters had implicated him, even under torture, he managed to elude their fate.

  He did not succeed, at least not in killing Hitler and overthrowing the Nazis. He felt that as an army officer, even with his involvement in the assassination plots, he remained part of the murderous apparatus that had unleashed indefensible suffering and death. He worried that he had not done enough. The brutality and senselessness of the war haunted him. The German public’s enthusiastic collusion with the Nazi regime tormented him. And the ghosts of the dead, including those he admired, never left him. He understood, as we must, that to do nothing in a time of radical evil is to be complicit.

  “I should have taken off my uniform in the Ukraine,” he told me on the last afternoon of my visit, “and joined the line of Jews to be shot.”

  Those with sublime madness accept the possibility of their own death as the price paid for defending life. This curious mixture of gloom and hope, of defiance and resignation, of absurdity and meaning, is born of the rebel’s awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and the remote chances for success. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism,” Havel wrote. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”35

  Optimism, especially the naive optimism fed to us by the corporate state, engenders self-delusion and passivity and is the opposite of hope. Rebels who are self-aware, who are possessed of sublime madness, are also often plagued by a gnawing despair. When the movie producer Abby Mann, who wanted to film Martin Luther King’s life story, asked King facetiously, “How does the movie end?” King responded, “It ends with me getting killed.” As Mann recalled, “I looked at him. He was smiling, but he wasn’t joking.”36

  Social and economic life will again have to be rationed and shared. The lusts of capitalism will have to be curtailed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This recovery will require a very different vision for human society.

  William Shakespeare lamented the loss of the medieval Catholic rituals eradicated by the Reformation. When Shakespeare was a boy, the critic Harold Goddard pointed out, he experienced the religious pageants, morality plays, church festivals, cycle plays, feast and saint’s days, displays of relics, bawdy May Day celebrations, and tales of miracles. The Puritans, the ideological vanguard of the technological order, made war on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters for celebrating these premodern practices.

  The London authorities in 1596 prohibited the public presentation of plays within city limits. The theaters had to relocate to the south side of the River Thames. The Puritans, in power under Cromwell in 1642, closed the London theaters and in 1644 tore down Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. Within four years, all theaters in and around London had been destroyed. The Puritans understood, in a way that is perhaps lost to us today, that Shakespeare was attacking the cold ethic of modernity and capitalism.

  Shakespeare portrays the tension between the dying ethic of the premodern and the modern, a theme that would be explored by William Faulkner in American fiction. Shakespeare, like Faulkner, saw the rise of the modern as dangerous. The premodern reserved a place in the cosmos for human imagination, what the poet John Milton called “things invisible to mortal sight.”37 The new, modern Machiavellian ethic of self-promotion, manipulation, bureaucracy, and deceit—personified by lago, Richard III, and Lady Macbeth—deforms human beings and society. Shakespeare lived during a moment when the modern world—whose technology allowed it to acquire weapons of such unrivaled force that it could conquer whole empires, including the Americas and later China—instilled this new secular religion through violence. He feared its demonic power.

  Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is master of a magical island where he has absolute power. He keeps the primitive Caliban and the spirit Ariel as his slaves. Shakespeare reminds us that the power unleashed in the wilderness can prompt us to good, if we honor the sacred, but to monstrous evil if we do not. There are few constraints in the wilderness, a theme that would later be explored by the novelist Joseph Conrad. The imagination triumphs in The Tempest because those who are bound to their senses and lusts are subjugated and Ariel is freed from enslavement. But in the Spanish, French, and British colonies in the Americas, as Shakespeare had seen, the lust for power and wealth, embodied by the evil dukes of the world, led to an orgy of looting, subjugation, and genocide.

  “Imagination,” as Shakespeare scholar Harold Goddard writes,

  is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two—as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend—the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.38

  In the presence of the natural world, all of the great visionaries have heard it speak to them. It spoke to Shakespeare, as it spoke to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. This communion blurs the lines between the self and the world. It is what Percy Shelley meant when he wrote that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar things as if they were not familiar.”39 Too often this wisdom comes too late, as it does when Othello stands contrite and broken over the dead Desdemona, or when Lear lifts up his murdered daughter, Cordelia. This wisdom makes grace and transformation possible.

  In the kind of visions that were experienced by Black Elk and revered by Native Americans, the kind that inspire artists and rebels, the visionary encounters the strange, unexplainable, mysterious forces that define life. And visionary language speaks, as poets and rebels do, only in abstractions and allegory. It is the language of sublime madness. “ ‘The Lord at Delphi,’ says Heraclitus, ‘neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign,’ ” writes Goddard.

  Dreams have the same Delphic characteristic. So does poetry. To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it. The subservience of so much of our science to invention is the proof of this. We want the facts for the practical use we can
make of them.40

  Black Elk expressed the power and importance of the reality of human existence that lies beyond articulation. “Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body,” he said, “but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.”41

  Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance, and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain the imagination. “For the art—the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom,” Ralph Ellison wrote.42 It was sublime madness that permitted African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Fannie Lou Hamer to resist during slavery and Jim Crow. It was sublime madness that sustained the defiance of Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized, their people were slaughtered, and their cultures and means of existence were decimated. The oppressed—for they know their fate—would be the first to admit that, on a rational level, it is absurd to think that it is only through the imagination that they survive—but they also know that it is true. It was sublime madness that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to hold on to the sacred. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust. They condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the guilty verdict to lead the evening prayers.

  African Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated. The suffering of the oppressed was tangible, and death was a constant companion. And it was only their imagination, as William Faulkner notes at the end of The Sound and the Fury, that permitted them—unlike the novel’s white Compson family, which self-destructed—to “endure.”43

  The theologian James H. Cone, who stresses the importance of Niebuhr’s “sublime madness” for all those who resist oppression, captures this in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone says that for oppressed blacks, the cross is a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.” Cone continues:

  That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible through God’s “amazing grace” and the gift of faith, grounded in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.44

  Primo Levi, in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz, writes of teaching Italian to another inmate, Jean Samuel, in exchange for lessons in French. Levi recited to Samuel, from memory, fragments of Canto XXVI of Dante’s “The Inferno.” It is the story of Ulysses’ doomed, final voyage. Levi writes that as he recited the lines it was “as if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am.”45

  And three times round she went in roaring smother

  With all the waters; at the fourth the poop

  Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.

  And over our head the hollow seas closed up.

  “He has received the message,” Levi writes of his friend and what they shared in Dante, “he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular.” Levi goes on: “It is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand … before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again.”46

  It was sublime madness that let bluesman Ishman Bracey in Hinds County, Mississippi, sing: “I’ve been down so long, Lawd, down don’t worry me.” And yet, in the mists of this despair also lies the absurdity and certainty of justice:

  I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;

  I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;

  Someday it’ll burst this levee and wash the whole wide world away.47

  King Lear, who after suffering and affliction is finally able to see, warns us that unbridled human passion and unchecked hubris spell the suicide of the species. “It will come,” Albany says in King Lear. “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.”48

  The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Under-shaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, says that poverty is “the worst of crimes” and “all the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts.49 It was the poems of Federico García Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Covering the war in El Salvador, I saw that the rebel units often traveled with musicians and theater troupes.

  Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. Culture can express what lies deep within us and give words to our reality. Making us feel as well as see, culture allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. Even as it reveals what is happening around us, it honors mystery. It saves us from ourselves. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” Baldwin writes, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”50

  “Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” writes Baldwin. “Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”51

  Rebellion requires an emotional intelligence. It requires empathy and love. It requires self-sacrifice. It requires the honoring of the sacred. It requires an understanding that, as with the heroes in classical Greece, one cannot finally overcome fate or fortuna, but that we must resist regardless.

  “Ours is a time that would have sent the Greeks to their oracles,” Goddard writes. “We fail at our own peril to consult our own.”52

  “The people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than ever,” Black Elk says in Black Elk Speaks, remembering the great Oglala Lakota warrior in the final days of the wars of Western expansion.

  He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them. He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found him out alone like that, and he said to my father: “Uncle, you have noticed me the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me. I am making plans for the good of my people.”53

  I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.54 And this is a fight that in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires that we follow those possessed by sublime madness, that we become stone catchers and find in acts of rebellion the sparks of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside the possibility of success. We must grasp the harshness of
reality at the same time as we refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. People of all creeds and people of no creeds must make an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good.55 The fight for life goes somewhere—the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Eunice is my most important critic and editor. She challenges and amplifies ideas, clarifies and corrects passages, restructures whole sections, and fixes sentences that drift into obscurity. All ideas are filtered, often first in conversation, through her. This book, like so many of my books, is dependent on her intellectual and artistic brilliance and her considerable skill as a critic, editor, and writer. That theater rather than writing is her profession makes her literary talent all the more impressive and intimidating. I dedicate this book to her not only because I adore her, not only because our love is the most wondrous thing in my life, but because, as with so many books before this one, it is in many ways her book. She has enriched and deepened this work, as she has my life and the lives of our children.

  There is material in the book that made up some of the columns I wrote for the online magazine Truthdig, along with articles I wrote for The Nation, Smithsonian, and The Walrus magazines. The Truthdig columns were edited by Thomas Caswell. I worked at the New York Times with some of the finest copyeditors in the newspaper industry, but few of them come close to Tom. Copyediting is an art, one I fear is dying, and I am deeply grateful that each week Tom applies his decades of expertise and experience at the Los Angeles Times to my columns. There are more times than I can count that he has saved me from myself.