Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges on Thursday’s unreported protest at the White House, his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, and Obama’s Faustian bargain with corporate power. (It’s grim stuff… To be honest, I wish I’d watched 30 Rock reruns instead.)
Part-two of the interview can be found here.
update: Speaking of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman also had a good segment today featuring feminists Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf on the sex crime allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. If you have a moment, I’d highly recommend watching their debate.
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My sense is that this guy won’t be voting for Obama come 2012.
Truthdig has an excerpt:
You’ll find it continued here.
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_death_of_the_liberal_class_20101029/
I’d like a few minutes alone with Mr. Hedges to introduce him to the free market.
Grim, yeah, but hearing someone speak (more or less publicly/openly, and articulately) of how thoroughly—and how—power is being asserted is so much better than not hearing it; there’s something about it that bolsters sanity and thus feels, in one (vital) arena, zounds better than a 30-Rock-ish drugging.
Not that I don’t have my many ostrich moments.
“Universities no longer train students to think critically, to examine and critique systems of power and cultural and political assumptions, to ask the broad questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. ”
I would like to know the evidence behind this. I speculate (without anything more than observational evidence) that the expectations of undergraduates in 2010 is much lower than that of 1990. A trip through the recycling bin at Angell Hall at the University of Michigan will confirm the banality of student papers in 2010. However, I believe that it’s an incredible stretch to indicate that universities uniformly do not teach students to think critically.
Yes, there has been an expansion of technical and vocational programs and cuts to humanities programs in response to student demand and shrinking resources, but I think that a look at course offerings as any number of Universities will confirm that this man does not know of which he speaks.
I think you’re helping the man make his case, Peter. The humanities, at least at UofM, run a far distant second to the ‘real’ sciences. That, after all, is where the money is. I love UofM, but let’s not kid ourselves.