POSTED RESPONSE TO A BOOK REVIEW BY LAURA PENNY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
What an intellectually impoverished effort Laura Penny serves up here.
I've not read Chris Hedges’ book yet, but I have heard him interviewed at length.
He is a thoughtful, intelligent, and educated person with something to say. Ms. Penny’s few, carefully selected quotes do not represent the sense of what Hedges has to say at all.
Like all writers on political and international affairs, he sometimes over-speaks himself, but that does not subtract from the freshness of his voice and the acuity of his intellect.
Sorry, Ms. Penny, but our mainline press almost never deals with the issues over which Hedges is concerned. It does offer large servings of stuff like your tired, mannered, “I’ve seen it all” vacuous comment.
Let’s first take Ms. Penny on her own ground, literacy, sadly a word our public education establishment has rendered close to meaningless.
“This claim is a fairly good litmus test….”
God, why didn’t Ms. Penny toss in “level playing field” or “peace process’ while she was at it? This misuse of the nasty, over-used “litmus test” is a perfect example of the decline of literacy over which Ms. Penny claims to be concerned: “test” is all that is required for such a statement.
“I don't recommend taking it to the beach, lest you pull a Virginia Woolf and seek refuge in the cleansing waters.”
Good God what an awkward remark, and Ms. Penny’s prose is an awkward combination of a pop cliché expression – “pull a [something]” – and a classical, almost-obsolete word - “lest” - a combination which comes off as just silly.
But it isn’t just public-school teacher literacy from which Ms. Penny suffers.
“Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those future-drunk techies who thinks the Internet solves everything and that blogs can replace book learnin' or the old journalism that many sites currently cannibalize. Those techies are just as fervent as Hedges, the optimistic Pollyannas to his outraged Cassandra.”
What an irrelevant comment to insert in a book review on this topic. It’s as though Ms. Penny felt like spouting this notion, and took this opportunity to toss it into the review.
And, please note, the return of clichés – Pollyannas and Casandra – to Ms. Penny’s writing. I might point out the clichés again include the pop and the classical – perhaps indicating Ms. Penny notion of breadth of learning?
But it gets worse, I’m afraid.
“The filthy heart of the beast is the military-industrial complex. Hedges contends that “war is the most dangerous drug of all,” and the United States is well and truly cracked out.”
What an absolutely trivial and pretentious way for Ms. Penny to write about one of the world’s great problems. Ms. Penny offers the tone of a person mainly educated by advertising and marketing and “communications,” the last being Sarah Palin’s major in her six-year, five-college B.A. odyssey. I’d almost bet Ms. Penny sounds like a Valley girl in her accent. What a shabby approach to a deadly serious subject, militarism.
“Most profs are good little careerist lickspittles, or poorly paid part-timers who cannot afford to rabble rouse.”
What a shabby generalization, again having nothing to do with the book’s ideas, and please note the genuine tone of contempt for part-time professors. Why? Ms. Penny is unwittingly revealing her own sad, narrow perspective: a lucky second-rate academic with a university sinecure.
God, we have few enough genuine critics in our society, and few enough of them worth hearing out. Chris Hedges is one of these few.
The truth is that Laura Penny is simply not up to the book she tries to review, and tries covering the fact with a bizarre tone that is both world-weary and flip.
