This title caught my attention on Salon this morning: “Jan. 6 committee is spectacle taking the place of politics: It will accomplish nothing —The aesthetic of spectacle is all the ruling class has left. Too bad it can't even stage an entertaining one.” It was so unlike the usual fare published on this liberal website that I took a look at it.
According to this ranking website Daily Kos has 19,900,000 unique visitors a year and Salon has 12,200,000. Competition for readership aside, the websites are very different and both have a substantial number of regular readers. I read it because they publish opinion pieces I like, especially by two of my favorite columnists, Heather “Digby” Parton and Amanda Marcotte and interviews by Chauncey DeVega.
Like most of the liberals, progressives, and anti-Trump Republicans who read or who I hear on MSNBC, I thought the January 6 Committee is doing an excellent job of presenting the case against Trump. Not so the author of this article who it turns out has disavowed liberalism.
This is how it begins:
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing substantially new in the accusations.
Note that the second sentence is patently false.
Some other gems from his article jumped out but perhaps none more than a gratuitous attack against President Biden (my bold) in the screed of gibberish:
The far right, which believes vaccines cause autism, angels exist, a cabal of satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children that run a global child sex trafficking ring are trying to destroy Trump, and the inerrancy of the Bible, is far more entertaining, even as it accelerates the solidification of corporate tyranny. If the republic is dead, do you want to watch Joe Biden mumble his way through another press conference or the burlesque of Rand Paul chain-sawing the tax code in half and Ted Cruz accusing Barack Obama of trying to provide "expanded Medicaid" to ISIS? Do you want to wake up to the newest rhetorical outrage by Trump, who when he campaigned for president accused Obama of founding ISIS, suggested Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, argued that noise from windmills cause cancer and recommended ingesting disinfectant to fight COVID, or pay homage to a set of values long ago discarded by the ruling class for lies, corruption and greed?
Hedges, the socialist and anarchist, wanted the committee to address the following and in fact it was highlighted in the article:
There was no acknowledgment by committee members that the "will of the people" has been subverted by the three branches of government to serve the dictates of the billionaire class. No one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the legalized bribery of our elections and write the pro-corporate legislation that it passes.
Obviously it wasn’t the mission of the committee to discuss the above.
Here are two other excerpts about the committee from his article:
- What should have been a serious bipartisan inquiry into an array of constitutional violations by the Trump administration has been turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for a Democratic Party running on fumes.
- Committee members cloyingly seek to sanctify themselves and their hearings by holding up the Constitution, democracy, the Founding Fathers, due process, the consent of the governed and the electoral process.
His concluding sentence ignores the fact that most if not all of the people he refers to are Republicans:
A new game is taking its place, one where narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us to death.
I wondered why Salon, a progressive website, deems his ideas worthy of publishing. I looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered the following:
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, author, and commentator.
In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and Dallas Morning News. Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005,[1] and served as the Times Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
Hedges produced a weekly column for Truthdig for 14 years until the outlet's hiatus in 2020. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with cartoonist Joe Sacco.
Hedges hosted the television program On Contact for RT America from 2016 to 2022.[2][3]
His political views are described in Wiki as follows:
Hedges has described himself as a socialist[66][67] and an anarchist.[68][69] His books Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion are strongly critical of American liberalism.
Hedges' 2007 book American Fascists describes the fundamentalist Christian right in the United States as a fascist movement. In March 2008, Hedges published the book titled I Don't Believe in Atheists, in which he argues that new atheism presents a danger that is similar to religious extremism.[70]
My opinion is that Salon, just like Daily Kos, has no obligation to present contrasting opinions like, for example The New York Times and The Washington Post in their opinion sections in an attempt to be balanced, do . Both Kos and Salon are liberal websites. I do not think the later should have published this particular article by Hedges (and many others) and given this author more of a forum for these ideas.
They have published many other pieces by him (here). Even if they don’t pay him they enable him to promote his books and website like Sheerpost where he is listed as a regular contributor. Some of his essays are decent but unoriginal ones, like an explanation about why some American love their guns, but also some like those he wrote against the US helping Ukraine I do not think should have been published on Salon.
Addendum:
Kos (of course)), HUFFPOST, RawStory, The New York Times, and The Washington Post all allow comments. Salon doesn’t. I wonder why. I wonder what kind of reaction this article would have prompted. Oddly, because Rawstory and Salon sometimes share articles like these, you can comment on them on Rawstory when they appear there.
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