Reviewing \u201cEmpire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle<\/a>\u201d 16 years after it was published allows a reader to determine if Chris Hedges<\/a> had a prescient understanding of where America was headed. Has America been a declining empire where media and cultural illusions deceive residents into a false sense of literacy, love and happiness? Or did he allow sensationalist storytelling and examples of worst scenarios in America to exaggerate the extent to which America is declining?<\/p>\n You can argue both cases. America is still around, our country rebounded from the great recession, and for many years experienced degrees of economic growth. Or you can say it is just taking longer than the book presumed it might for America to fall in complete disarray or decline.<\/p>\n The national debt is substantially higher than the numbers used in the book, the wealth divide is more significant and the reliance on a multimedia culture to distract us from reality is even higher. Nonetheless, we continued to grow. We survived, at least for the time being, a major assault on our democratic norms.<\/p>\n Since he wrote this book, Mr. Hedges followed up with \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour<\/a>\u201d eight years ago where he went into even more detail of a culture and society in decline. Does the follow up book lend more credence to the decline argument, or was it cherry picking stories of deprivation to create a false narrative? And does the answer to the argument depend on the reader\u2019s moral or political view point?<\/p>\n