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A review by janthonytucson
Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison by Chris Hedges
5.0
I received this book from my local, locally owned, bookstore as a bonus for spending so much on books, as the copy I received is a promotional copy.
Do we need another book that lays out the injustice of our carceral state, in which we go over pages and pages of data that show the rise of poverty that tracks the rise of the Chicago School of macroeconomic shock doctrine championed by Milton Friedman that dislocated labor productivity gains from wage growth and instead transferred those gains to the asset owning class through policy tools like the Phillips Curve, which created a permanent unemployable class of Americans that were, and still are, sacrificed to maintain a consistent YoY increase in asset prices whereby this degrading, spiritually crushing policy impels people to find any means necessary to survive, who are then caught in a system that criminalizes their rational behavior, and turns them into a permanent slave-labor class in the carceral state?
No we don't need more data, what we need is more humanizing of this state of things.
This book does that and I applaud Chris Hedges for being the instrument through which the humanization of these fellow subjugated citizens is transmitted.
I want to share two sections from the book that resonated with me. The first is from Chris the second from Dr. Cornel West.
"The role of art is transcendence, creating the capacity for empathy, especially for those who appear strange, foreign, or different. Art is not about entertainment, or at least not solely about entertainment. It goes deeper than that.
It's about dealing with what we call the nonrational forces in human life. These forces are not irrational. They are nonrational. They are absolutely essential to being whole as a human being. They are not quantifiable. They cannot be measured empirically. Yet they are real-maybe more real than those things we can see and touch and count. Grief, beauty, truth, justice, a life of meaning, the struggle with our own mortality, love. Sigmund Freud said he could write about sex, but he could never write about love.
These nonrational forces are honored by the artist. The origins of all religions are fused with art, poetry, music. This is because religion, like art, deals with transcendence, with empathy, with justice, with love- realities we experience viscerally but that are often beyond articulation. Religion, like art, allows us to hear” -Chris Hedges
"August Wilson said that Black people authorize an alternative reality from the nightmarish present reality by performance- performance in a communal context. There is a call and a response. This creates agency. It creates self-confidence and self-respect. You saw this in churches under slavery. You saw this in communal music and art under Jim and Jane Crow. Ma Rainey. Bessie Smith. Sarah Vaughan. Mary Lou Williams. Miles Davis. Duke Ellington. Count Basie. I decided long ago to stay on the love train Curtis Mayfield talked about when he sang 'People get ready,' the love train of the Isley Brothers, the love train of the O'Jays. Those are not just songs. They are existential declarations of a certain way of being in the world. I come from a people who've been Jim and Jane Crowed, enslaved and despised and devalued, who dished out to the world the love supreme of John Coltrane, dished out to the world the love and essays of a James Baldwin. How is it that these particular people, so hated, had the courage and the imagination to dish out love-figures like Martin King and Toni Morrison, and a whole host of others?” -Dr. Cornel West.
Do we need another book that lays out the injustice of our carceral state, in which we go over pages and pages of data that show the rise of poverty that tracks the rise of the Chicago School of macroeconomic shock doctrine championed by Milton Friedman that dislocated labor productivity gains from wage growth and instead transferred those gains to the asset owning class through policy tools like the Phillips Curve, which created a permanent unemployable class of Americans that were, and still are, sacrificed to maintain a consistent YoY increase in asset prices whereby this degrading, spiritually crushing policy impels people to find any means necessary to survive, who are then caught in a system that criminalizes their rational behavior, and turns them into a permanent slave-labor class in the carceral state?
No we don't need more data, what we need is more humanizing of this state of things.
This book does that and I applaud Chris Hedges for being the instrument through which the humanization of these fellow subjugated citizens is transmitted.
I want to share two sections from the book that resonated with me. The first is from Chris the second from Dr. Cornel West.
"The role of art is transcendence, creating the capacity for empathy, especially for those who appear strange, foreign, or different. Art is not about entertainment, or at least not solely about entertainment. It goes deeper than that.
It's about dealing with what we call the nonrational forces in human life. These forces are not irrational. They are nonrational. They are absolutely essential to being whole as a human being. They are not quantifiable. They cannot be measured empirically. Yet they are real-maybe more real than those things we can see and touch and count. Grief, beauty, truth, justice, a life of meaning, the struggle with our own mortality, love. Sigmund Freud said he could write about sex, but he could never write about love.
These nonrational forces are honored by the artist. The origins of all religions are fused with art, poetry, music. This is because religion, like art, deals with transcendence, with empathy, with justice, with love- realities we experience viscerally but that are often beyond articulation. Religion, like art, allows us to hear” -Chris Hedges
"August Wilson said that Black people authorize an alternative reality from the nightmarish present reality by performance- performance in a communal context. There is a call and a response. This creates agency. It creates self-confidence and self-respect. You saw this in churches under slavery. You saw this in communal music and art under Jim and Jane Crow. Ma Rainey. Bessie Smith. Sarah Vaughan. Mary Lou Williams. Miles Davis. Duke Ellington. Count Basie. I decided long ago to stay on the love train Curtis Mayfield talked about when he sang 'People get ready,' the love train of the Isley Brothers, the love train of the O'Jays. Those are not just songs. They are existential declarations of a certain way of being in the world. I come from a people who've been Jim and Jane Crowed, enslaved and despised and devalued, who dished out to the world the love supreme of John Coltrane, dished out to the world the love and essays of a James Baldwin. How is it that these particular people, so hated, had the courage and the imagination to dish out love-figures like Martin King and Toni Morrison, and a whole host of others?” -Dr. Cornel West.