“Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. The “conquest of nature” is our biggest illusion for we have not gained control of our own nature.”
Carl Gustav Jung

Here is a link to a Lannan Foundation podcast which anyone with concerns about the times we live in, the war in Iraq, and the global political situation would be well advised to listen to. It’s an hour and a half long, but infinitely more rewarding than your average daytime radio fare. The podcast is a recording of a reading ( from the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning) and subsequent conversation between journalists Christopher Hedges and Amy Goodman which took place before an audience in Santa Fe 11 days ago.

Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent, has survived ambushes in Central America, being shot at in the marshes of Southern Iraq, imprisonment in the Sudan, deportation from Libya and Iran, strafing by Russian MiG21s in Bosnia, a beating by Saudi military police, being captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard, being fired upon by Serb snipers and shelled for a week in Sarajevo, and a lot more besides. He is the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a stark look at the effects of war on combatants, and War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Hedges joined the staff of The New York Times in 1990 and previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio.

Amy Goodman is the host of Pacifica Radio’s daily newsmagazine Democracy Now! She is a 1998 recipient of the George Polk Award for the radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Military Dictatorship,” in which she and co-producer Jeremy Scahill exposed the oil company’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers on May 28, 1998. Goodman and Scahill co-wrote two articles in The Nation magazine on the Chevron-related killings.

The broadcast cuts right through the spin and political rhetoric that fills our media these days to the bare bones of real experience. How is it that journalists like these seem to be such a rare and dying breed? Hedges even has the answer to that.