Days of Fantastic Nonfiction

In Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco illuminate what they call “sacrifice zones,” “those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.”  As they say in their excellent introduction, 

We wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit.  We wanted to look at what the ideology of unfettered capitalism means for families, communities, workers, and the ecosystem.

The result of this investigation is a one-of-a-kind non-fiction book that is insightful, moving, and illuminating.

The book is cut into 5 relatively equal sections that look at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the destitute city of Camden, New Jersey; the remains of the coal town of Welch, West Virginia; the state of migrant and immigrant farmers in Immokalee, Florida; and the gathering at Liberty Square by the Occupy movement from September 2011 to January 2012.  The politics of the book are clear (as you can tell from the introductory passage I already quoted), but what makes the book more than a political diatribe is how they present the lives of those affected by the forces of institutionalized corruption and greed.

The sections play out like a documentary in writing.  Every aspect about a subject—and Hedges and Sacco do a fantastic job of looking at a wide variety of these aspects in each and every section—is anchored by the tales of individuals living in the specific sacrifice zone.  There are no abstractions, because every effect is seen and heard in the lives of those interviewed.  Hedges gives extensive quotations from the various people he features, letting them speak for themselves, often capturing the speakers’ dialects to bring the spoken nature of their speeches to the fore.  The result is like having a voice-over in a documentary.  To add the visual element, Sacco provides drawings of the various speakers and landscapes instead of photographs.  In each section (except for the final one) at least one person tells his or her life story, and Sacco turns that into a 10-or-so-page graphic novel.  The result is a unique combination of essay and graphic novel that creates a world all its own.

The first four sections of the book are unassailable.  Hedges and Sacco bring the sacrifice zones to life and bring the reader face to face with the cost of capitalism in America.  The weakest section is the final section, mainly because it is the least grounded in the tales of those who were there.  As Hedges and Sacco say in their introduction, the Occupy Wall Street event happened as they were concluding their travels and their book, and they saw it as “the nationwide revolt” that had so far been “absent”: 

This revolt rooted our conclusion [that a revolution was the inevitable result of the sacrifice zones left in capitalism’s wake] in the real rather than the speculative.  It permitted us to finish with a look at a rebellion that was as concrete as the destruction that led to it.  And permitted us to end our work with the capacity for hope.

But of course, the Occupy movement did not lead to a lasting nationwide revolt, or at least not yet, and it’s hard to picture America, with its vastness and complicated government and economic design, yielding to  revolution in any way similar to the Eastern European examples given in the book.  In fact, living in a Post-Trump age, it’s hard to read this call to action the same in 2017 as I would have in 2012: 

We must stop being afraid.  We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president.  All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act.  On the issues that matter, there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats.

Even with those final bits sitting at odds with my own experiences, the book is entirely worth reading and experiencing.  Even as a relatively educated and liberal man, there was a lot here for me not only to learn but to think about and consider.  Hedges is a fantastic writer who makes his political insights clear and compelling, and I will eagerly read more of his work, both his short- and long-form journalism.