I have read a few books of Chris, and used to listen to him on video in the past. I have moved away somewhat in recent months since I find him sort of vaguely repetitive. He is a radical journalist, and sounds almost like a die hard communist – not that I have any instinctive disdain about communists. I used to be left leaning for as long as I remember, but more like a social democrat than an out and out communist.
I am likely to read this book, or rather, listen to it being read to me, through this audio book. The reason is not so much that I expect to learn some great insight. I already instinctively agree, I think, to most things that the author has to say in this book.
Chris has been singularly critical of the American government, society and civilization, in many of his books, with a very penetrating and focussed point of view. However, I know that Chris, in all his wisdom, misses the point when it comes to describing the mistakes and sorrows of the American civilization.
He is more of often than not focussed only on the degeneration of the American system from within, and the complacence of its civil society.
He, however, does not appear to spend much time on the degenerative and corrosive influence that the US has exerted across the planet in the last few generations, in this age of American Empire. In this regard, Noam Chomsky has been far more aware of USA’s global negative impact, than Chris Hedges, in my view. Neither of them go far enough though – again in my view.
The reason for the current ongoing phase of planetary mass extinction and possible near future collapse of the life sustaining environment of the planet, is human endeavour. Humans have singularly been the greatest agents of death – a fact that others have realized and talked about. But if Hedges and Chomsky have come to the same conclusion – they have shied away from mentioning it.
In many ways, the American Civilization has set the tone and the music, for the rest of the world to dance to. Therefore, the later phase of the original human influenced era of planetary climate decline – the age of anthropocene, could now be termed the age of Americene, or some such – implying the culmination of the age of anthropocene where the American Civilization drives what remains of the planet – as the ultimate act of the human species – the homo sapiens sapiens.
Radical as it may appear to the non-plussed, this has been obvious for a long time to a lot of smart people. Talking about it, or writing about it – has not been that common though.
Another thing that Chris Hedges misses, is identifying the role of the immigrant, in the evil US Empire. He does not dwell much on the fact that the US in peacetime years, have killed perhaps upwards of 20 million people across the world on phoney wars including the recently coined expression – war on terror, a tactic that legitimizes toppling of democratically elected Governments that did not dance to the US tune an includes assassination of foreign heads of state with impunity.
He does not dwell on the fact that a lot of mercenaries employed by the US as their foot soldiers are actually immigrants that have not yet gotten the US passport but whose service would place citizenship on a fast track. This is more or less exactly the same tactic used by the Romans in employing mercenary killers in their vaunted Roman Legions of the past.
Also absent is the mention that the huge influx of legal immigrants, mostly highly skilled, are in essence collaborators and enablers of this evil empire, cogs in the wheel of the machinery that exploits the planet and runs it into the ground. Being recent converts, they are even less willing to criticize the hand that feeds them, and are more hypocritical in their pretence of being liberal minded. Although both the liberals and the conservatives have been captured by the corporations, it is the so called liberals that are out and out war mongers and promoters of bombing the rest of the planet for whatever reason they could cook up. They appear in my eyes as the bigger groups of hypocrites in a hall full of hypocrites.
Making bombs and planes and exploding them in far off lands is the biggest and about the only real business in town, in the US. The rising tide of immigrants are the biggest enablers of this mechanism – a view that Chris Hedges fights shy of nailing in his books, as does Noam Chomsky. Criticizing the greatest reader block is bad for business.
Poisoning of the society is also not mentioned, I think, in that many words, but it does mention failure of the civil society. In many ways this is similar to the last phase of the Roman Empire., Then too the civil society was self engrossed, over complacent and oblivious to the world outside of their palaces.
However, Chris Hedges also misses the poisoning of the environment, the water, the air, the oceans, the land and the food, not to mention the medical system, with toxic chemicals and viruses masquerading as technological solutions to existing problems.
Then there are the issues of infiltrating, and spoiling, every institution created to safeguard the planet from being polluted by any single nation through hegemony. Most glaring of course is the United Nations and all the branches and twigs under it.
I do not think either Hedges or Chomsky is stupid, or ignorant of these facts. However, I understand that if you are writing a book for the express purpose of hoping to sell a lot of copies as a means of income, it does not pay to piss off your potential – liberal leaning – readership.
I understand these limitations, and do not hold a grudge against Chris Hedges or Noam Chomsky per se. They are good at what they do, even if they do not go far enough to satisfy me.
But I look at Donal Trump’s win, on apprehensions against immigrants on one side, and the disappearance of real industrial jobs on the other, and a sense of deep gloom, might have prompted folks that live far away from urban centres to vote for Trump. Urban centres are known to live within their own bubble, and are apt to see the world from their own coloured lenses, filtered and sanitised to fit their point of view, which is – they themselves are good citizens, it is only bad politicians and mad Trump, that makes America a bad country.
Another way of looking at it is – the deep state hated Donald Trump because he was a maverick and did not play ball the way a well groomed politician has been trained to play, irrespective of which side of the US political aisle he or she belonged to. Therefore, it was difficult for the system, to control Donald Trump and ensure business as usual policies could continue and progress. Trump posed a threat of toppling the apple-cart by merely being unpredictable and anti-establishment. The deep state would have to work on him overtime. To remodel him and make him heel. It is almost like breaking in a recalcitrant wild horse that does not want to have a saddle attached to its back, even less a rider sitting atop it and holding the reins. It is a horse that was likely to buck and and try to kick the rider in the teeth if it could.
It therefore paid, to have the media to stoke idea that Trump was the root of most of the problems. It helped to steer public opinion, much like a sheep dog steers sheep into the pen, into singularly hate Trump and pin all ills of mankind on him.
If the ends up with him getting fed up and doing something reckless so that he could be successfully impeached out of his chair- all the better. If not, perhaps he can be made to lose the next election. Either way, there was a chance that the horse would eventually learn to bite the bit and resign itself into being ridden.
While I do not like politicians in general, and have an extremely low opinion of anyone that has been a career politician, with very few exceptions, I did not dislike Trump quite that way. I found him to be a curiosity, and an indication that the America electoral system was entering a phase of uncharted territory. Unpredictable things are likely to happen in future more regularly than not.
I did not thing Chris Hedges would mention it though – since pointing him out as the cause of most of US’s problems is good for business, if your business is writing books aimed at the American readership.
So, the question remains – why do I read such books?
Well, these books places an anchor in my mind, first of all, that the world as I know it is truly coming to an end. Even the sixth mass extinction on its own will change the world into an unrecognizable place. But from all logic, it is not just the disappearance of living animal that is changing. Humans have greatly over-stayed the planetary welcome. It is time for most of us to go. And this century, like so many scientists are saying, is going not going to end on a business as usual track.
Books such as these are vague reminders of the greater gloom across the horizon. Instead of being depressed, one might consider all this philosophically, moving away from ourselves and watching it from far away and above, as a curious but inevitable flow of events that forever intertwine creation with destruction. Everyone comes for a brief period, plays out his or her role, and then disappears, leaving the stage for the next group.
Our time is coming to an end. Time to say good bye. Chris Hedges covers a small part of the evolving drama. Perhaps worth a read. These however, are my views by reading the sampler and editors notes. I might change my mind, or fine tune this opinion piece, after I read the book. I doubt though, that there would be any need for a major revision.
I have a notion of including these writings into chapters in the book “Lonely Road”.
I do not see hope in a horizon dominated by sky scrapers, our paths dominated by automobiles and our society sprinkled with politicians that betray their constituents and advanced nations ruled by warlords.
Perhaps it is in the mitochondrial DNA that we might have inherited from the microbial world and could not genetically digest properly. Perhaps this is what the old sages meant – about creation being the flip side of destruction and that the universe is forever is a duel dance of creation and destruction.
I had already turned a non-believer of raising awareness. I had lost faith in speaking with people. I had come to believe that – should there is a need to do something to help the society, one should try to do what one can by one’s own self, without ever expecting anybody to help. There is no value in trying to muster public support, or raising awareness. People thus made aware simply take selfie pictures with you, clap hands, and go back to sleep. Therefore, if I am driven by wanting to do something, I either do it myself, or it wont get done.
A world where bee are still around, and one can still find a bee eater on a twig.
But here I am – part of small pockets of people, being washed away by the human civilizational tsunami, and yet pretending to dream of building a seawall to stop this ecological juggernaut whose root may be in my very genes.
But it would also have room for the scaly breasted munia that landed on a piece of dried cow dung not far from me to allow me a few seconds to take a close up portrait. It would have room not only for the bee-eater in the forest, but also the white mushroom that the termites harvest in their termite hills, the civet cats that roam the land at night, and where domestic chicken range free all through the day, pecking at insects that have not gone extinct yet. There are some miniature chickens that move day and night around the ground, and at nightfall, they need not always return to their pen. They just go to the nearest bush and hunker down. They are often taken there by foxes, but that is there style. I saw a few moving around both in day time and at night under an electric light. I should be writing about all this – not just from this village, but also of other villages I visited, other efforts I saw, in other districts of Bengal.
There has to be a story inside a story inside a story – like the Mahabharata – epic of Indian mythology.
Edible mushrooms collected from the forest by villagers of Panchal area, Bankura. The spores of these mushroom fungus are collected, stored,, cultivated and harvested by white ants (termites). These are kept inside their anthills in off-season. The on-season starts now, and these spores sprout, grow on stalks with white mushroom heads sticking out. Knowledgeable villagers go looking for them at the right time – around now, cut the stalks and bring them home.
Anyhow, I was playing with some still images and video clips received from him, mostly about the use of glyphosate and other substances such as paraquat in the province of Odisha, India, on the bund around paddy fields. A bund is a raised wall that surrounds small paddy plots. The land is usually made flat so water could stand evenly across the plot. The bund ensures that the water stays and does not flow off. Rice often grows on standing water. This system works in lands with high rainfall and high ground water level during the rainy season in he flood plains. In other words, it suits a monsoon fed India, particularly along the Ganga-Brahmaputra river system of Eastern India.
Cattle were ancient and costly to maintain, even if they were ecologically more sustainable than chemicals and fossil fuel dependent machinery. Out went the cows, along with their dung and appetite for grass. In came fossil fuel dependent tractors that spilled industrial lubricants on the soil, left exhaust in the air, and had no use for grass. Since farmers did not usually have money to own such machines, they were rented. Poor farmers had to dole out money to rent these gas guzzlers to till their land.
And with the absence of crop rotation, and disappearance of Khesari pulse, the soil of course would not support two successive crops of rice without nutrient supplement. Smart scientists figured out that plants got carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. The next three nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, gets depleted by the crop. If most of the leftover stuff is lot allowed to recycle into the soil then the soil needs to be replenished. Thus, the term NPK as combination fertilizer that was to be industrially produced, became a catch word of modern agriculture. This also boosted on paper economic activity, since industry had to cater to this new kind of chemical fertilizer that was not used before.
India is not known to keep detailed statistics of health conditions of its citizens, particularly the rural low income class. However, India is supposed to be developing. It is among the fastest rising large emerging nations.
I have not had much time proof reading these pages. All that would be done later. So, reader is requested to pardon any strange grammar or spelling that might pop up as odd in these pages.
Along with this abject capitulation, comes a large swatch of disgruntled people from the west that are increasingly aware of the destruction of their belief and value system but unable find a way out. Like mindless groupies they flock around an increasing number of instant “guru” that are mushrooming out of this toxic landscape like maggots on a carcass.
I need to say it clearly here. There is a concerted effort to downgrade and trivialise scientists that speak an unpleasant truth. This effort to trivialise select scientists, and deny them access to reputed journals and mainstream coverage, is a well established tactic used by the biotech and big Pharma industry and the political and media system that are often in cahoots with them.
These are the kind of scum that we find masquerading as the spearhead of a dysfunctional resistance system in a region that is speeding towards a toxic doomsday, California court case of Johnson versus Monsanto notwithstanding.
Cattle in the United States, Mexico and of course Canada are born with an underbite, just like the wild grazing animals. Here in our area, some of the larger ranchers were loosing up 30 or 35 calves each spring in the late 1990s, through 2001. I put letters to the editor in our local papers saying that the symptoms on the calves were consistent with thyroid hormone disruption as a result of mineral deficiencies. I also told local veterinarians. I suddenly stopped hearing about birth defects on calves here in our area and called a rancher friend to ask him if the ranchers were doing something different. He said they were having their cows tested to determine what minerals they were deficient in and then giving their herd the specific minerals they needed. That apparently mitigated the birth defects significantly, suggesting that chelation of the minerals the livestock obtained in grass and hay by exposure to the Roundup on the grass or hay was the likely culprit. As far as I know, their grass and hay was never tested for glyphosate, because the ranchers wouldn’t believe that Roundup was responsible. Many spray their Roundup Ready alfalfa fields and didn’t want to admit that they were poisoning their own animals. Funny how that works.
If you google Microcephaly in India, the search result starts to show up a whole list of links relating to zica virus. There are regions where the zica virus has reportedly been present since the 1940s and yet there is no microcephaly. On the other end, there are cases of microcephaly where no zica virus has been found. But reports that link microcephaly with exposure to glufosinate is given right here, below, though in real life, the direct link has not yet been established. Potentially, glufosinate can lead to microcephaly since it is a neurotoxin. The insecticide NALED (
Dual herbicide (Glufosinate and Glyphosate) resistant genetically engineered crops, which include some varieties of corn etc have both the PAT gene and a glyphosate tolerant gene. I have 50 varieties of these GE corn hybrids in my seed refrigerator for experimental purposes which also includes these GLyphsoate/glufosinate dual herbicide resistant varieties. 
Glufosinate is an analog of Glutamic acid one of our 20 proteinogenic amino acids. Its 
