Chris Hedges: The Idol Smasher!

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols. Idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols, and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another, to create the nation's prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe: Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them, to show us what we have become. He names the corrosive disease of empire. He excoriates what Alexis de Tocqueville called our "perpetual practice of self applause." He battles back against the sophisticated forms of propaganda, especially from Hollywood, that perpetuate patriotic fantasies, and pander to the dark streams of paranoia, racism and fear that run like electric currents through white society. Reed's righteous fury is a heartening antidote to the squeamishness of liberals and the lunacy of the right wing. He says the editors of The New York Times, and most other major media outlets "sound like they get their instructions from Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist, when it comes to blacks." He calls the HBO series "The Wire", "a Neo Nazi portrait of of black people" and dismisses the movie "Precious" as a film that makes D W Griffith look like a progressive." "Lazy, no good black people, who are welfare cheats, sitting around eating chicken, and having sex with their children, right out of Lee Atwater, Master of tactics for Bush and GOP, Paul Ryan playbook, he said of the portrayals in Precious, when I reached him by phone at his home in Oakland California, "The wonderful novelist Diane Johnson was right, when she said that largely white audiences are thrilled by images of black people as dysfunctional. This has become a billion dollar market, which led critics to assert that Black Bogeyman movies sell better than sex, according to the critic C Liegh McInnis.