Chris Hedges’ 2008 book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, was not a book I planned on reading. It wasn’t in my ever-growing pile of “to-read” books but was something I found in a different sort of pile: a stack of discarded books someone had placed beside the recycling dumpster in my building’s garbage room. Naturally, I flipped through its pages and what I found were a number of striking passages its previous owner had highlighted in bright yellow: “America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions”; “At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real”; and: “This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance.” I was intrigued. And given how often one hears of the number of Americans described as “divorced from reality” (not to mention all the Nietzsche I’ve been reading), I knew this was something I had to read.