August 19, 2012
Tomgram: Hedges and Sacco, A Twenty-First Century American Sacrifice Zone
[ Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today, a rarity at this site, a book excerpt -- from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,
a new work by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and
American Book Award-winning graphic artist Joe Sacco, a cartoonist I
much admire. The book itself is a unique all-American road trip, part
riveting text by Hedges, part comics by Sacco. It takes the reader
through the most extreme “sacrifice zones” in a country that is slowly
hollowing itself out. In this excerpt, the two road warriors have made
it to an area of West Virginia where coal mines, dangerous as they were,
once supported town life, but more recently have either mechanized or
closed down. This particular community, Gary, West Virginia, writes
Hedges, has “fallen into terminal decay. There are today 861 people in
Gary. There were 98,887 in McDowell County in 1950. Today there are
fewer than 23,000. The countywide per capita average income is
$12,585. The median home value is $30,500. Gary’s rutted streets are
lined by empty clapboard houses with sagging roofs.”
Hedges himself has written a TomDispatch introduction to the excerpt, which follows. Check out the book! Tom]
A World of Hillbilly Heroin
The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal
By Chris Hedges
Illustration by Joe Sacco
During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest
pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the
altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only
decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives. There comes a
moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge
wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human
beings. Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their
lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the
power to resist and even rebel.
On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years,
the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured
the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge
rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day
Sun Dance which I attended, where dancers fast and make small flesh
offerings.
In Camden, New Jersey, it was the power and cohesiveness of the
African-American Church. In the coalfields of southern West Virginia,
it was the fundamentalist and evangelical protestant churches, and in
the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic mass.
Those who are not able to hang on, fall long and hard. They retreat
into the haze of alcohol -- Pine Ridge has an estimated alcoholism rate
of 80% -- or the harder drugs, easily available on the streets of
Camden: from heroin to crack to weed to something called Wet, which is
marijuana leaves soaked in PCP. In the produce fields, drinking was
also a common release.
In West Virginia, however, the drug of choice was OxyContin, or
“hillbilly heroin.” Joe and I went into some old coal camps, largely
abandoned, and there it was as if we were interviewing zombies; the
speech and movements of those we met were so bogged down by opiates that
they were often hard to understand. This passage from the book is a
look at some of those West Virginians, discarded by the wider society,
who struggle to deal with the terrible pain of rejection and
purposelessness that comes when there is a loss of meaning and dignity. Chris Hedges, August 2012
***
A Community on Overdose
About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of
relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security
Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement
benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check
to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The
most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file
disability claims and seek state and federal payments. “Disability and
Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car
Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP.
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