Review of “Day of Destruction, Days of Revolt”
by the Rev. John Kirkley
Joe Gibson is a modest man, who has inherited a rich legacy:
one that he is desperately trying to preserve.
He lives on the fifty acres remaining of his family’s five hundred acre
property on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia.
It is an island of beauty surrounded by a vast swath of ecological
destruction. Barren plateaus, poisoned
aquifers, and a fine layer of coal dust is all that remains of thousands of
acres of the Appalachian Mountains blasted into a wasteland in the pursuit of
seams of coal.
Gibson is one of the few holdouts in a region decimated by
the stripping of forests; the leakage from slurry ponds holding billions of
gallons of coal waste; and the assaults on the health and culture of rural
communities exploited and the cast aside by big coal companies. These companies have done everything possible
to buy or force Gibson out of his land, which probably sits on hundreds of
thousand of dollars worth of coal. In 1992, he set up a nonprofit foundation to
protect his property.
He pays a steep price for his resistance. His cabin was burned down. Two of his dogs were shot dead, and he has
been subjected to drive-by shootings and attempts to run him off the road. He lost water in 2001 when the blasting from
nearby mountain top removal dropped the water table. He is painted as an enemy of Big Coal and the
few remaining good jobs it provides in a desperately poor part of the country. But he knows who the real enemy is.
Coal emissions are directly related to 24,000 deaths and
some 640,000 premature births and birth defects annually in the U.S. Referring to big coal, Gibson says,
They’re gonna destroy my state, and the
government’s gonna give them the incentives to do it. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren
won’t have any heritage here. They won’t
have any mountain culture here, ‘cause they’re wipin’ it out. I had the best of time of my life not knowin’
I wasn’t rich or comfortable or wealthy.
How could I enjoy myself outdoors if I wasn’t wealthy? Who measures wealth? How do you do it? All the energy we have, all the people they
destroyed, all the fatalities on these mine sites, and they keep makin’ reference
to this as cheap energy.
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Stories like that of Joe Gibson give Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt its narrative force and moral
clarity. Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Chris Hedges and American Book Award-winning cartoonist Joe Sacco
combine interviews, history, and first-person accounts in graphic novel form to
provide a richly textured description of life in the “sacrifice zones” of
America. At times, it reads almost like
an anthropological account of another culture:
a world of despair, violence, and ecological degradation rendered
invisible by corporate controlled media.
The book provides a tour of these sacrifice zones, with
stops to view the culmination of genocidal policies toward Native Americans at
the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the postindustrial decay of urban
America in Camden, New Jersey; the ecological devastation of West Virginia’s
coal country; and the new slavery imposed on migrant farm laborers in the
tomato fields of South Florida.
Hedges and Sacco offer a cautionary tale about the excesses
of capitalism in the vein of Upton Sinclair, Michael Harrington, and Howard
Zinn. It is a crie de couer lamenting the sacrifice of moral imagination on the
altar of financial markets, and the exploitation of the common wealth for the benefit
of corporate elites. It offers a moral
accounting of the cost of ignoring economic “externalities” that happen to
include huge swaths of the American people and landscape.
The book concludes with an account of the then emerging
Occupy movement, finding in it a rallying point for resistance to corporate
domination. In the end, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
moves beyond mere anthropological description, or even journalistic exposé, into the
language of prophetic critique. It is a
call to choose sides.
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt or you stand on
the wrong side of history. You either
obstruct through civil disobedience, the only way left to us, the plundering of
the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem
that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous
evil.[2]
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The rhetoric is heartfelt, and the arguments have merit, but
what persuades and inspires are the stories at the heart of the book. The moral conviction of Joe Gibson and his
recognition of the common wealth that truly enriches human life recalls the
biblical admonition: “Take care to guard
against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of
possessions.”[3] The life and death struggle of migrant farm
workers to hold corporate produce buyers to a Fair Code of Conduct Agreement
rings with the power of a New Testament epistle:
Come now you rich people weep and wail
for the miseries that are coming to you . . . Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your
fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters
have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure: you have fattened your hearts in a day of
slaughter. You have condemned and
murdered the righteous one, who did not resist you.[4]
Stories of the preservation and creation of sustainable
local communities, viable alternatives to the spiritually and ecologically
exhausted global corporate culture, provide us with a real future. As the authors themselves argue, “We have to
create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being
rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of
self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive.”[5] But why celebrate the emergence of such
“monastic enclaves” in the Occupy movement, but not in the revival of
indigenous cultural practices among Native Americans at Pine Ridge or the tiny
urban oasis created by Sacred Heart Church in Camden?
If the already fading Occupy movement is to have any lasting
significance, it has to connect to the work of such local communities. Noam Chomsky identified the real potential of
the Occupy movement when he noted that
There is a lot of sympathy for the
goals of the Occupy movement. They’re
quite high in polls, in fact. But that’s
a big step short from engaging people in it.
It has to become part of their lives, something they think they can do
something about. So it’s necessary to
get out to where people live. That means
not just sending a message, but if possible, and it would be hard, to try to
spread and deepen one of the real achievements of the movement which doesn’t
get discussed that much in the media – at least I haven’t see it. One of the main achievements has been to
create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic
interchange, care for one another, and so on.
This is highly significant, especially in a society like ours in which
people tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community
structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.[6]
Days of Destruction,
Days of Revolt provides a devastating critique of what is wrong with
America. It rightly urges us to resist
the corporate culture that is destroying the planet, placing before us a stark
alternative between a culture of life and a culture of death. “You cannot serve
God and wealth.”[7] Yet it fails to recognize the promise of the
alternative sustainable cultures whose emergence it chronicles. There is a curious disconnect between
Zuccotti Park and the “sacrifice zones” depicted in the book, as if those zones
represented the problem only, and not also the solution.
The signs of renewal must be found in the very heart of
despair, and they must become visible to one another across the sacrifice zones
of the American empire. Like Father Michael Doyle, pastor of Sacred
Heart Church in Camden, NJ, the poorest city in America, we have to understand
that “It is my job, my vocation, to promote and celebrate hope, to hold it up.”[8]
The great strength of Days
of Destruction, Days of Revolt is its ability to do just that: even,
perhaps especially, when it doesn’t realize that it is doing so.
[1]
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of
Destruction, Days of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2012), p. 124.
[2]
Hedges and Sacco, p. 260.
[3]
Luke 12:15.
[4]
James 5:1-6.
[5]
Hedges and Sacco, p. 267.
[6]
Noam Chomsky, Occupy (Brooklyn:
Zuccotti Park Press, 2012), pp. 72-73.
[7]
Luke 16:13.
[8]
Hedges and Sacco, p. 110.
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