http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa
Since 9/11, the war on terror and the
campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the tactics
of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both
a media spectacle and a bone-crushing reality have become prominent
and influential forces shaping U.S. society. As the boundaries
between “the realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” social
relations and the public services needed to make them viable have
been increasingly privatized and militarized.1 The logic of
profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of
warfare and organized violence into universities, market-based
service providers, Hollywood cinema, cable television, and
deregulated contractors. The metaphysics of war and associated forms
of violence now creep into every aspect of U.S. society.
As the preferred “instrument of
statecraft,” war and its intensifying production of violence
crosses borders, time, space, and places.2 The result is that the
United States “has become a ‘culture of war’…engulfed in fear
and violence [and trapped by a military metaphysics in which]
homeland security matters far more than social security.”3
Seemingly without any measure of self-restraint, state-sponsored
violence now flows and regroups effortlessly, contaminating both
foreign and domestic policies. The criticism of the
military-industrial complex, along with its lobbyists and merchants
of death, that was raised by President Eisenhower seems to have been
relegated to the trash can of history. Instead of being disparaged as
a death machine engaged in the organized production of violence, the
military-industrial complex is defended as a valuable jobs program
and a measure of national pride and provides a powerful fulcrum for
the permanent warfare state.
It gets worse. One consequence of the
permanent warfare state is evident in the recent public revelations
concerning war crimes committed by U.S. government forces. These
include the indiscriminate killings of Afghan civilians by U.S. drone
aircraft; the barbaric murder of Afghan children and peasant farmers
by U.S. infantrymen infamously labeled as “the Kill Team”;4
disclosures concerning four U.S. marines urinating on dead Taliban
fighters; and the uncovering of photographs showing “more than a
dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade
Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the
severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in
2010.”5 And, shocking even for those acquainted with standard
military combat, there is the case of Army Staff Sergeant Robert
Bales, who “walked off a small combat outpost in Kandahar province
and slaughtered 17 villagers, most of them women and children, and
later walked back to his base and turned himself in.”6 Mind-numbing
violence, war crimes, and indiscriminate military attacks on
civilians on the part of the U.S. government are far from new and
date back to infamous acts such as the air attacks on civilians in
Dresden along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
during the Second World War.7
Military spokespersons are typically
quick to remind the U.S. public that such practices are part of the
price one pays for combat and are endemic to war itself. State
violence wages its ghastly influence through a concept of permanent
war, targeted assassinations, an assault on civil liberties, and the
use of drone technologies that justifies the killing of innocent
civilians as collateral damage. Collateral damage has also come home
with a vengeance as soldiers returning from combat are killing
themselves at record rates and committing mayhem—particularly
sexual violence and spousal and child abuse.8 After more than a
decade at war, soldiers in the U.S. military are also returning home
and joining the police, thus contributing to the blurring of the line
between the military and law enforcement.
The history of atrocities committed by
the United States in the name of war need not be repeated here, but
some of these incidents have doubled in on themselves and fueled
public outrage against the violence of war.9 One of the most famous
events was the My Lai massacre, which played a crucial role in
mobilizing protests against the Vietnam War.10 Even dubious appeals
to national defense and honor can provide no excuse for mass killings
of civilians, rapes, and other acts of destruction that completely
lack any justifiable military objective. Not only does the alleged
normative violence of war disguise the moral cowardice of the
warmongers, it also demonizes the enemy and dehumanizes soldiers. It
is this brutalizing psychology of desensitization, emotional
hardness, and the freezing of moral responsibility that is
particularly crucial to understand, because it grows out of a
formative culture in which war, violence, and the dehumanization of
others becomes routine, commonplace, and removed from any sense of
ethical accountability.
It is necessary to recognize that acts
of extreme violence and cruelty do not represent merely an odd or
marginal and private retreat into barbarism. On the contrary, warlike
values and the social mindset they legitimate have become the primary
currency of a market-driven culture that takes as its model a
Darwinian shark tank in which only the strongest survive. In a
neoliberal order in which vengeance and revenge seem to be the most
cherished values in a “social order organized around the brute
necessity of survival,” violence becomes both a legitimate
mediating force and one of the few remaining sources of pleasure.11
At work in the new hyper-social Darwinism is a view of the Other as
the enemy, an all-too-quick willingness in the name of war to embrace
the dehumanization of the Other, and an all-too-easy acceptance of
violence, however extreme, as routine and normalized. As many
theorists have observed, the production of extreme violence in its
various incarnations is now a source of profit for Hollywood moguls,
mainstream news, popular culture, the corporate-controlled
entertainment industry, and a major market for the defense
industries.12
This pedagogy of brutalizing hardness
and dehumanization is also produced and circulated in schools, boot
camps, prisons, and a host of other sites that now trade in violence
and punishment for commercial purposes, or for the purpose of
containing populations that are viewed as synonymous with public
disorder. The mall, juvenile detention facilities, many public
housing projects, privately owned apartment buildings, and gated
communities all embody a model of a dysfunctional sociality and have
come to resemble proto-military spaces in which the culture of
violence and punishment becomes the primary order of politics, fodder
for entertainment, and an organizing principle for society. All of
these spaces and institutions, from malls to housing projects to
schools, are beginning to resemble war zones that impose needless
frameworks of punishment. This is evident not only in New York City’s
infamous stop-and-frisk policy, but also in shopping malls that now
impose weekend teen curfews, hire more security guards, employ
high-tech surveillance tools, and closely police the behavior of
young people. Similarly, housing projects have become militarized
security zones meting out harsh punishments for drug offenders and
serve as battlegrounds for the police and young people.
Even public-school reform is now
justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which
increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts
of the surveillance and police state.13 The privatization and
militarization of schools mutually inform each other as students are
increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses that limit their
capacity for critical thinking while molding them into consumers,
testing them into submission, stripping them of any sense of social
responsibility, and convincing large numbers of poor minority
students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the
criminal justice system instead of being treated as valued members of
the public schools. Schools are increasingly absorbing the culture of
prisons and are aggressively being transformed into an extension of
the criminal justice system.
Many public schools are being
militarized to resemble prisons instead of being safe places that
would enable students to learn how to be critical and engaged
citizens. Rather than being treated with dignity and respect,
students are increasingly treated as if they were criminals, given
that they are repeatedly “photographed, fingerprinted, scanned,
x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.”14 The space of the school
resembles a high-security prison with its metal detectors at the
school entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in school corridors, and
surveillance cameras in the hallways and classrooms. Student
behaviors that were once considered child play are now elevated to
the status of a crime. Young people who violate dress codes, engage
in food fights, hug each other, doodle, and shoot spit wads are no
longer reprimanded by the classroom teacher or principal; instead
their behavior is criminalized. Consequently, the police are called
in to remove them from the classroom, handcuff them, and put them in
the back of a police car to be carted off to a police station where
they languish in a holding cell. There is a kind of doubling that
takes place here between the culture of punishment, on the one hand,
and the feeding of profits for the security-surveillance industries,
on the other.
What has emerged in the United States
is a civil and political order structured around the problem of
violent crime. This governing-through-crime model produces a highly
authoritarian and mechanistic approach to addressing social problems
that often focuses on low-income and poor minorities, promotes highly
repressive policies, and places undue emphasis on personal security
rather than considering the larger complex of social and structural
forces that fuels violence in the first place. Far from promoting
democratic values, a respect for others, and social responsibility, a
governing-through-crime approach criminalizes a wide range of
behaviors and in doing so often functions largely to humiliate,
punish, and demonize. The abuse and damage that is being imposed on
young people as a result of the ongoing militarization and
criminalization of public schools defy the imagination. And the
trivial nature of the behaviors that produce such egregious practices
is hard to believe. A few examples will suffice:
In November 2011, a 14-year-old student
in Brevard County, Florida, was suspended for hugging a female
friend, an act which even the principal acknowledged as innocent. A
9-year-old in Charlotte, North Carolina, was suspended for sexual
harassment after a substitute teacher overheard the child tell
another student that the teacher was “cute.” A 6-year-old in
Georgia was arrested, handcuffed and suspended for the remainder of
the school year after throwing a temper tantrum in class. A
6-year-old boy in San Francisco was accused of sexual assault
following a game of tag on the playground. A 6-year-old in Indiana
was arrested, handcuffed and charged with battery after kicking a
school principal. Twelve-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was arrested and
handcuffed for doodling on a desk. Another student was expelled for
speaking on a cell phone with his mother, to whom he hadn’t spoken
in a month because she was in Iraq on a military deployment. Four
high school students in Detroit were arrested and handcuffed for
participating in a food fight and charged with a misdemeanor with the
potential for a 90-day jail sentence and a $500 fine. A high school
student in Indiana was expelled after sending a profanity-laced tweet
through his Twitter account after school hours. The school had been
conducting their own surveillance by tracking the tweeting habits of
all students. These are not isolated incidents. In 2010, some 300,000
Texas schoolchildren received misdemeanor tickets from police
officials. One 12-year-old Texas girl had the police called on her
after she sprayed perfume on herself during class.15
Public spaces that should promote
dialogue, thoughtfulness, and critical exchange are ruled by fear and
become the ideological corollary of a state that aligns its
priorities to war and munitions sales while declaring a state of
emergency (under the aegis of a permanent war) as a major reference
for shaping domestic policy. In addition, the media and other
cultural apparatuses now produce, circulate, and validate forms of
symbolic and real violence that dissolve the democratic bonds of
social reciprocity. This dystopian use of violence as entertainment
and spectacle is reinforced through the media’s incessant appeal to
the market-driven egocentric interests of the autonomous individual,
a fear of the Other, and a stripped-down version of security that
narrowly focuses on personal safety rather than collective security
nets and social welfare. One consequence is that those who are viewed
as disposable and reduced to zones of abandonment are forced “to
address the reality of extreme violence…in the very heart of their
everyday life.”16 Violence in everyday life is matched by a surge
of violence in popular culture. Violence now runs through media and
popular culture like an electric current. As the New York Times
reported recently, “The top-rated show on cable TV is rife with
shootings, stabbings, machete attacks and more shootings. The top
drama at the box office fills theaters with the noise of automatic
weapons fire. The top-selling video game in the country gives players
the choice to kill or merely wound their quarry.”17
Under such a warlike regime of
privatization, militarism, and punishing violence, it is not
surprising that the Hollywood film The Hunger Games has become a
mega-box-office hit. The film and its success are symptomatic of a
society in which violence has become the new lingua franca. It
portrays a society in which the privileged classes alleviate their
boredom through satiating their lust for violent entertainment, and
in this case a brutalizing violence waged against children. Although
a generous reading might portray the film as a critique of
class-based consumption and violence, given its portrayal of a
dystopian future society so willing to sacrifice its children, in the
end the film should more accurately be read as depicting the terminal
point of what I have called elsewhere the “suicidal society” (a
suicide pact literally ends the narrative).18
Given Hollywood’s rush for ratings,
the film gratuitously feeds enthralled audiences with voyeuristic
images of children being killed for sport. In a very disturbing
opening scene, the audience observes children killing one another
within a visual framing that is as gratuitous as it is alarming. That
such a film can be made for the purpose of attaining high ratings and
big profits, while becoming overwhelmingly popular among young people
and adults alike, says something profoundly disturbing about the
cultural force of violence and the moral emptiness at work in U.S.
society. This is not the type of violence that is instructive about
how damaging the spectacle of violence can be. On the contrary, such
representations of violence are largely gratuitous, and they create
the conditions for a disturbing voyeurism while both mitigating the
effects of violence and normalizing it. Of course, the meaning and
relevance of The Hunger Games rest not simply with its production of
violent imagery against children, but with the ways these images and
the historical and contemporary meanings they carry are aligned and
realigned with broader discourses, values, and social relations.
Within this network of alignments, risk and danger combine with myth
and fantasy to stoke the seductions of sadomasochistic violence,
echoing the fundamental values of the fascist state in which
aesthetics dissolves into pathology and a carnival of cruelty. How
else to explain the emergence of superhero films that increasingly
contain deep authoritarian strains, films that appear to have a deep
hold on their dutifully submissive audiences. The film critic A. O.
Scott has argued that films such as Spider-Man, Dark Knight, and The
Avengers are marked by a “hectic emptiness,” “bloated
cynicism,” and “function primarily as dutiful corporate
citizens…serving private interests.”19 But most important, they
reinforce the increasingly popular notion that “the price of
entertainment is obedience.”20 There is more at work here than what
Scott calls “imaginative decadence.”21 There is also the
seductive lure and appeal of the authoritarian personality, which
runs deep in U.S. culture and finds its emergence in the longing for
hyper-masculine superheroes who merge vigilante justice with
anti-democratic values.22 Equally disturbing is the alignment of such
films with a corporate-controlled cultural apparatus that legitimates
and celebrates a passive embrace of authoritarian values, power, and
mythic authoritarian figures.
Within the contemporary neoliberal
theater of cruelty, war has expanded its poisonous reach and moves
effortlessly within and across U.S. national boundaries. As Chris
Hedges has pointed out brilliantly and passionately, war “allows us
to make sense of mayhem and death” as something not to be
condemned, but to be celebrated as a matter of national honor,
virtue, and heroism.23 One particularly egregious example of this
took place in the summer of 2012 when NBC decided to air Stars Earn
Stripes, a reality TV show in which celebrities are matched with U.S.
military personnel, including former Green Berets and Navy Seals, in
carrying out simulated military training, “including helicopter
drops in water and long-range weapons fire, all under the direction
of retired General Wesley Clark.”24 The various contestants compete
against each other to win prizes that are given to various armed
forces, charities, and some veterans groups. NBC celebrates the show
as a “fast-paced competition” and defends it as a “glorification
of service” rather than a “glorification of war.”25 War in this
rendering becomes a form of sport, amusement, and entertainment. The
violence of war and the human suffering and death it produces is both
sanitized and trivialized in this show. Amy Fairweather, a member of
the veterans’ organization Swords to Ploughshares, rightly
criticized the program: “The show ‘trivialized’ war, whose real
consequences were ‘not that you were knocked out of the competition
next week, the consequences are you don’t get to go on with your
life.’”26 Nine Nobel Prize winners, including Desmond Tutu,
echoed this view in a letter to NBC. They wrote:
It is our belief that this program pays
homage to no one anywhere and continues and expands on an inglorious
tradition of glorifying war and armed violence…. Real war is
down-in-the-dirt deadly. People—military and civilians—die in
ways that are anything but entertaining. Communities and societies
are ripped apart in armed conflict and the aftermath can be as deadly
as the war itself as simmering animosities are unleashed in horrific
spirals of violence. War, whether relatively short-lived or going on
for decades as in too many parts of the world, leaves deep scars that
can take generations to overcome—if ever. Trying to somehow
sanitize war by likening it to an athletic competition further calls
into question the morality and ethics of linking the military
anywhere with the entertainment industry in barely veiled efforts to
make war and its multitudinous costs more palatable to the public.27
Celebrating war, spectacularized
violence, and hyper-masculinity reveals more than an ethical descent
into barbarism. It also makes visible a market-driven social and
economic order that is driven by a financial elite who subordinate
all ethical, political, and material considerations to the altar of
profit-making and capital accumulation.28 War takes as its aim the
killing of others and legitimates violence through a morally bankrupt
mindset in which just and unjust notions of violence collapse into
each other, increasingly in the name of profit and the glorification
of celebrity culture. Consequently, it has become increasingly
difficult to determine justifiable violence and humanitarian
intervention from unjustifiable violence involving torture,
massacres, and atrocities, which now operate in the liminal space and
moral vacuum of legal illegalities. Even when such acts are
recognized as war crimes, they are often dismissed as simply an
inevitable consequence of war itself. This view was recently echoed
by Leon Panetta, who, responding to the killing of civilians by U.S.
Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, observed: “War is hell. These
kinds of events and incidents are going to take place, they’ve
taken place in any war, they’re terrible events, and this is not
the first of those events, and probably will not be the last.”29 He
then made clear the central contradiction that haunts the use of
machineries of war by stating: “But we cannot allow these events to
undermine our strategy.”30 Panetta’s qualification is a testament
to barbarism because it means being committed to a war machine that
trades in indiscriminate violence, death, and torture while ignoring
the pull of conscience or ethical considerations. Hedges is right
when he argues that defending such violence in the name of war is a
rationale for “usually nothing more than gross human cruelty,
brutality and stupidity.”31
War and the organized production of
violence have also become forms of governance, increasingly visible
in the ongoing militarization of police departments throughout the
United States. According to the Homeland Security Research
Corporation, “The homeland security market for state and local
agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from $15.8
billion in fiscal 2009.”32 The structure of violence is also
evident in the rise of the punishing and surveillance state,33 with
its legions of electronic spies and ballooning prison population—now
more than 2.3 million. Evidence of state-sponsored warring violence
can also be found in the domestic war against “terrorists” (code
for young protesters), which provides new opportunities for major
defense contractors and corporations to become “more a part of our
domestic lives.”34 Young people, particularly poor minorities of
color, have already become the targets of what David Theo Goldberg
calls “extraordinary power in the name of securitization… [They
are viewed as] unruly populations…[who] are to be subjected to
necropolitical discipline through the threat of imprisonment or
death, physical or social.”35 The rhetoric of war is now used by
politicians not only to appeal to a solitary warrior mentality in
which responsibility is individualized, but also to attack women’s
reproductive rights, limit the voting rights of minorities, and
justify the most ruthless cutting of social protections and benefits
for public servants and the poor, unemployed, and sick. There is also
the day-to-day effects of a hyped-up and militarized police force
that in light of the subordination of individual rights to matters of
individual security rarely questions the limits of their own
authority. One example of the emerging police state can be found in
roadside police stops in which any regard for privacy, individual
rights, and human dignity appears to have been abandoned. John W.
Whitehead, the director of the Rutherford Institute, provides one
disturbing but not untypical example of the police state in action.
He writes:
Consider, for example, what happened to
38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, who were
pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for
flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. First, the trooper
berated the women for littering on the highway. Then, insisting that
he smelled marijuana, he proceeded to interrogate them and search the
car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing
any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper,
who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into
the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same
procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No
marijuana was found. [And in a hard to believe second example,] Leila
Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in
plain view of passing traffic during a routine traffic stop, while
her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the
second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a
female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino’s
body. No contraband or anything illegal was found.36
The politics and pedagogy of death
begins in the celebration of war and ends in the unleashing of
violence on all those considered disposable on the domestic front. A
survival-of-the-fittest ethic and the utter annihilation of the Other
have now become normalized, saturating everything from state policy
to institutional practices to the mainstream media. How else to
explain the growing taste for violence in, for example, the world of
professional sports, extending from professional hockey to extreme
martial arts events? The debased nature of violence and punishment
seeping into the U.S. cultural landscape becomes clear in the recent
revelation that the New Orleans Saints professional football team was
“running a ‘bounty program’ which rewarded players for
inflicting injuries on opposing players.”37 In what amounts to a
regime of terror pandering to the thrill of the crowd and a
take-no-prisoners approach to winning, a coach offered players a cash
bonus for “laying hits that resulted in other athletes being carted
off the field or landing on the injured player list.”38
The bodies of those considered
competitors, let alone enemies, are now targeted as the
war-as-politics paradigm turns the United States into a warfare
state. And even as violence flows out beyond the boundaries of
state-sponsored militarism and the containment of the sporting arena,
citizens are increasingly enlisted to maximize their own
participation and pleasure in violent acts as part of their everyday
existence—even when fellow citizens become the casualties.
Maximizing the pleasure of violence with its echo of fascist ideology
far exceeds the boundaries of state-sponsored militarism and
violence. Violence can no longer be defined as an exclusively state
function, since the market in its various economic and cultural
manifestations now enacts its own violence on numerous populations no
longer considered of value. Perhaps nothing signals the growing
market-based savagery of the contemporary moment more than the
privatized and corporate-fueled gun culture of the United States.
Gun culture now rules U.S. values and
has a powerful influence in shaping domestic policies. The National
Rifle Association is the emerging symbol of what the United States
has come to represent, perfectly captured in T-shirts worn by its
followers that brazenly display the messages “I hate welfare” and
the biblical-sounding message “If any would not work neither should
he eat.”39 The celebration of guns and violence merges in this case
with a culture of cruelty, hatred, and exclusion. The National Rifle
Association begins to resemble a regime of terror as politics and
violence become an inseparable part of its message and the most
important mediating force in shaping its identity. The relationship
Americans have to guns may be complicated, but the social costs are
less nuanced and certainly more deadly. In a country with “90 guns
for every 100 people,” it comes as no surprise, as Gary Younge
points out, that “more than 85 people a day are killed with guns
and more than twice that number are injured with them.”40 The
merchants of death trade in a formative and material culture of
violence that causes massive suffering and despair while detaching
themselves from any sense of moral responsibility. Social costs are
rarely considered, in spite of the endless trail of murders committed
by the use of such weapons and largely inflicted on poor minorities
and young people.
With respect to young people, “Each
year, more than 20,000 children and youth under age 20 are killed or
injured by firearms in the United States. The lethality of guns, as
well as their easy accessibility to young people, are key reasons why
firearms are the second leading cause of death among young people
ages 10 to 19. Only motor vehicle accidents claim more young
lives.”41 Violence has become not only more deadly but flexible,
seeping into a range of institutions, cannibalizing democratic
values, and merging crime and terror. As Jean and John Comaroff point
out, under such circumstances a social order emerges that “appears
ever more impossible to apprehend, violence appears ever more
endemic, excessive, and transgressive, and police come, in the public
imagination, to embody a nervous state under pressure.”42 The
lethality of gun culture and the spectacle of violence are reinforced
in U.S. life as public disorder becomes both a performance and an
obsession. The obsession with violence is clearly reflected in
advertising and other everyday venues—advertising can even
“transform nightmare into desire….[Yet] violence is never just a
matter of the circulation of images. Its exercise, legitimate or
otherwise, tends to have decidedly tangible objectives. And
effects.”43
An undeniable effect of the
warmongering state is the drain on public coffers. The United States
has the largest military budget in the world and “in 2010–2011
accounted for 40% of national [federal government] spending.”44 The
Eisenhower Study Group at Brown University’s Watson Institute for
International Studies estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
have cost the U.S. taxpayers between $3.7 and $4.4 trillion. What is
more, funding such wars comes with an incalculable price in human
lives and suffering. For example, the Eisenhower Study Group
estimated that in these two wars there have been over 224,475 lives
lost, 363,383 people wounded, and 7 million refugees and internally
displaced people.45 But war has another purpose, especially for
neoconservatives who want to destroy the social state. By siphoning
funds and public support away from much needed social programs, war,
to use David Rothkopf’s phrase, “diminishes government so that it
becomes too small to succeed.”46
The warfare state hastens the
dismantling of the social state and its limited safety net, creating
the conditions for the ultra-rich, mega-corporations, and finance
capital to appropriate massive amounts of wealth, income, and power.
This has resulted between 2010 and 2012 in the largest-ever increase
in inequality of income and wealth in the United States.47 One acute
register of the growing inequality in wealth and income is provided
by Michael D. Yates:
In the United States in 2007, it is
estimated that the five best-paid hedge-fund managers “earned”
more than all of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations combined.
The income of just the top three hedge-fund managers (James Simon,
John Paulson, and George Soros) taken together was $9 billion dollars
in 2007…. Pittsburgh hedge-fund manager David Tepper made four
billion dollars…. If we were to suppose that Mr. Tepper worked
2,000 hours in 2009 (fifty weeks at forty hours per week), he took in
$2,000,000 per hour and $30,000 a minute…. Others are not so
fortunate. In 2010, more than 7 million people had incomes less than
50 percent of the official poverty level of income, an amount equal
to $11,245, which in hourly terms (2,000 hours of work per year) is
$5.62. At this rate, it would take someone nearly three years to earn
what Tepper got each minute. About one-quarter of all jobs in the
United States pay an hourly wage rate that would not support a family
of four at the official poverty level of income.48
Structural inequalities do more than
distribute wealth and power upward to the privileged few and impose
massive hardships on the poorest members of society. They also
generate forms of collective violence accentuated by high levels of
uncertainty and anxiety, all of which, as Michelle Brown points out,
“makes recourse to punishment and exclusion highly seductive
possibilities.”49 The merging of the punishing and financial state
is partly legitimated through the normalization of risk, insecurity,
and fear in which individuals not only have no way of knowing their
fate, but also have to bear the consequences of being left adrift by
neoliberal capitalism.
Increasingly, institutions such as
schools, prisons, detention centers, and our major economic
institutions are being organized for the production of violence.
Rather than promote democratic values and a respect for others or
embrace civic values, they often function largely to humiliate,
punish, and demonize any vestige of social responsibility. Our
political system is now run by a financial oligarchy that is
comparable to what Alain Badiou calls a “regime of gangsters.”50
And as he rightly argues, the message we get from the apostles of
casino capitalism carries with it another form of social violence:
Privatize everything. Abolish help for
the weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid
for everyone except the banks. Don’t look after the poor; let the
elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but reduce the taxes on
the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only teach
mathematics to traders, reading to big property-owners and history to
on-duty ideologues. And the execution of these commands will in fact
ruin the lives of millions of people.51
It is precisely this culture of cruelty
that has spread throughout the United States that makes the larger
public not merely susceptible to violence but induces it to luxuriate
in its alleged pleasures. In U.S. society, the seductive power of the
spectacle of violence is fed through a framework of fear, blame, and
humiliation that circulates widely in popular culture. The
consequence is a culture marked by increasing levels of inequality,
suffering, and disposability. There is not only a “surplus of
rage,” but also a collapse of civility in which untold forms of
violence, humiliation, and degradation proliferate. Hyper-masculinity
and the spectacle of a militarized culture now dominate U.S.
society—one in which civility collapses into rudeness, shouting,
and unchecked anger. What is unique at this historical conjuncture in
the United States is that such public expression of hatred, violence,
and rage “no longer requires concealment but is comfortable in its
forthrightness.”52 How else to explain the support by the majority
of Americans for state-sanctioned torture, the public indifference to
the mass incarceration of poor people of color, the silence on the
part of many Americans in the face of the increasing use of police
and state-sanctioned violence against peaceful Occupy Wall Street
protesters, or the public silence in the face of police violence in
public schools against children, even those in elementary schools? As
war becomes the organizing principle of society, the ensuing effects
of an intensifying culture of violence on a democratic civic culture
are often deadly and invite anti-democratic tendencies that pave the
way for authoritarianism.
In addition, as the state is hijacked
by the financial-military-industrial complex, the “most crucial
decisions regarding national policy are not made by representatives,
but by the financial and military elites.”53 Such massive
inequality and the suffering and political corruption it produces
point to the need for critical analysis in which the separation of
power and politics can be understood. This means developing terms
that clarify how power becomes global even as politics continues to
function largely at the national level, with the effect of reducing
the state primarily to custodial, policing, and punishing
functions—at least for those populations considered disposable.
The state exercises its slavish role in
the form of lowering taxes for the rich, deregulating corporations,
funding wars for the benefit of the defense industries, and devising
other welfare services for the ultra-rich. There is no escaping the
global politics of finance capital and the global network of violence
it has produced. Resistance must be mobilized globally and politics
restored to a level where it can make a difference in fulfilling the
promises of a global democracy. But such a challenge can only take
place if the political is made more pedagogical and matters of
education take center stage in the struggle for desires,
subjectivities, and social relations that refuse the normalizing of
violence as a source of gratification, entertainment, identity, and
honor.
War in its expanded incarnation works
in tandem with a state organized around the production of widespread
violence. Such a state is necessarily divorced from public values and
the formative cultures that make a democracy possible. The result is
a weakened civic culture that allows violence and punishment to
circulate as part of a culture of commodification, entertainment,
distraction, and exclusion. In opposing the emergence of the United
States as both a warfare and a punishing state, I am not appealing to
a form of left moralism meant simply to mobilize outrage and
condemnation. These are not unimportant registers, but they do not
constitute an adequate form of resistance.
What is needed are modes of analysis
that do the hard work of uncovering the effects of the merging of
institutions of capital, wealth, and power, and how this merger has
extended the reach of a military-industrial-carceral and academic
complex, especially since the 1980s. This complex of ideological and
institutional elements designed for the production of violence must
be addressed by making visible its vast national and global interests
and militarized networks, as indicated by the fact that the United
States has over 1,000 military bases abroad.54 Equally important is
the need to highlight how this military-industrial-carceral and
academic complex uses punishment as a structuring force to shape
national policy and everyday life.
Challenging the warfare state also has
an important educational component. C. Wright Mills was right in
arguing that it is impossible to separate the violence of an
authoritarian social order from the cultural apparatuses that nourish
it. As Mills put it, the major cultural apparatuses not only “guide
experience, they also expropriate the very chance to have an
experience rightly called ‘our own.’”55 This narrowing of
experience shorn of public values locks people into private interests
and the hyper-individualized orbits in which they live. Experience
itself is now privatized, instrumentalized, commodified, and
increasingly militarized. Social responsibility gives way to
organized infantilization and a flight from responsibility.
Crucial here is the need to develop new
cultural and political vocabularies that can foster an engaged mode
of citizenship capable of naming the corporate and academic interests
that support the warfare state and its apparatuses of violence, while
simultaneously mobilizing social movements to challenge and dismantle
its vast networks of power. One central pedagogical and political
task in dismantling the warfare state is, therefore, the challenge of
creating the cultural conditions and public spheres that would enable
the U.S. public to move from being spectators of war and everyday
violence to being informed and engaged citizens.
Unfortunately, major cultural
apparatuses like public and higher education, which have been
historically responsible for educating the public, are becoming
little more than market-driven and militarized knowledge factories.
In this particularly insidious role, educational institutions deprive
students of the capacities that would enable them not only to assume
public responsibilities, but also to actively participate in the
process of governing. Without the public spheres for creating a
formative culture equipped to challenge the educational, military,
market, and religious fundamentalisms that dominate U.S. society, it
will be virtually impossible to resist the normalization of war as a
matter of domestic and foreign policy.
Any viable notion of resistance to the
current authoritarian order must also address the issue of what it
means pedagogically to imagine a more democratically oriented notion
of knowledge, subjectivity, and agency and what it might mean to
bring such notions into the public sphere. This is more than what
Bernard Harcourt calls “a new grammar of political disobedience.”56
It is a reconfiguring of the nature and substance of the political so
that matters of pedagogy become central to the very definition of
what constitutes the political and the practices that make it
meaningful. Critical understanding motivates transformative action,
and the affective investments it demands can only be brought about by
breaking into the hardwired forms of common sense that give war and
state-supported violence their legitimacy. War does not have to be a
permanent social relation, nor the primary organizing principle of
everyday life, society, and foreign policy.
The war of all-against-all and the
social Darwinian imperative to respond positively only to one’s own
self-interest represent the death of politics, civic responsibility,
and ethics, and set the stage for a dysfunctional democracy, if not
an emergent authoritarianism. The existing neoliberal social order
produces individuals who have no commitment, except to profit,
disdain social responsibility, and loosen all ties to any viable
notion of the public good. This regime of punishment and
privatization is organized around the structuring forces of violence
and militarization, which produce a surplus of fear, insecurity, and
a weakened culture of civic engagement—one in which there is little
room for reasoned debate, critical dialogue, and informed
intellectual exchange. Patricia Clough and Craig Willse are right in
arguing that we live in a society “in which the production and
circulation of death functions as political and economic recovery.”57
The United States understood as a
warfare state prompts a new urgency for a collective politics and a
social movement capable of negating the current regimes of political
and economic power, while imagining a different and more democratic
social order. Until the ideological and structural foundations of
violence that are pushing U.S. society over the abyss are addressed,
the current warfare state will be transformed into a full-blown
authoritarian state that will shut down any vestige of democratic
values, social relations, and public spheres. At the very least, the
U.S. public owes it to its children and future generations, if not
the future of democracy itself, to make visible and dismantle this
machinery of violence while also reclaiming the spirit of a future
that works for life rather than death—the future of the current
authoritarianism, however dressed up they appear in the spectacles of
consumerism and celebrity culture. It is time for educators, unions,
young people, liberals, religious organizations, and other groups to
connect the dots, educate themselves, and develop powerful social
movements that can restructure the fundamental values and social
relations of democracy while establishing the institutions and
formative cultures that make it possible. Stanley Aronowitz is right
in arguing that:
the system survives on the eclipse of
the radical imagination, the absence of a viable political opposition
with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its
intellectuals who, to a large extent, are subjugated by their secure
berths in the academy [and though] we can take some solace in 2011,
the year of the protester…it would be premature to predict that
decades of retreat, defeat and silence can be reversed overnight
without a commitment to what may be termed “a long march” through
the institutions, the workplaces and the streets of the capitalist
metropoles.58
The current protests among young
people, workers, the unemployed, students, and others are making
clear that this is not—indeed, cannot be—only a short-term
project for reform, but must constitute a political and social
movement of sustained growth, accompanied by the reclaiming of public
spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development
of democratic public spheres, new modes of education, and the
safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities,
and collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. Without broad
political and social movements standing behind and uniting the call
on the part of young people for democratic transformations, any
attempt at radical change will more than likely be cosmetic.
Any viable challenge to the new
authoritarianism and its theater of cruelty and violence must include
developing a variety of cultural discourses and sites where new modes
of agency can be imagined and enacted, particularly as they work to
reconfigure a new collective subject, modes of sociality, and
“alternative conceptualizations of the self and its relationship to
others.”59 Clearly, if the United States is to make a claim to
democracy, it must develop a politics that views violence as a moral
monstrosity and war as virulent pathology. How such a claim to
politics unfolds remains to be seen. In the meantime, resistance
proceeds, especially among the young people who now carry the banner
of struggle against an encroaching authoritarianism that is working
hard to snuff out all vestiges of democratic life.
Notes
↩ Melinda Cooper, Life as
Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 92.
↩ Andrew Bacevich, “After Iraq,
War Is US,” ReadersNewsService, December 20, 2011,
http://readersupportednews.org.
↩ bmazlish, “Blog #18: Why
Bombs, Not Books,” Activism, May 7, 2012, http://bmazlish.blog.com.
↩ Henry A. Giroux, “‘Instants
of Truth’: The ‘Kill Team’ Photos and the Depravity of
Aesthetics,” Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural
Criticism (Summer 2011): 4–8.
↩ Thom Shanker and Graham Bowley,
“Images of GIs and Remains Fuel Fears of Ebbing Discipline,” New
York Times, April 18, 2012, http://nytimes.com.
↩ Craig Whitlock and Carol
Morello, “U.S. Army Sergeant Faces 17 Murder Counts in Afghan
Killings,” Toronto Star, March 22, 2012, http://thestar.com.
↩ Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So,
eds., War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the
Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Denver, CO: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004); Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith,
eds., In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and
Beyond (New York: Macmillan, 2005); Jordan J. Paust, Beyond the Law:
The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the “War” on
Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Andrew
Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
↩ Common Dreams Staff, “Report:
US Soldiers Bringing Their Violence Home from Overseas,” Common
Dreams, January 20, 2012, https://commondreams.org; Mary Slosson,
“Violent Sex Crimes by U.S. Army Soldiers Rise: Report,” Reuters,
January 19, 2012, http://reuters.com.
↩ Joachim J. Savelsberg and Ryan
D. King, American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2011); Carl Boggs, The Crimes of Empire: The History
and Politics of an Outlaw Nation (London: Pluto Press, 2010).
↩ See Nick Turse’s new book,
Kill Anything That Moves, which shows how systematic murder of
civilians was in Vietnam. Wars are now conceived in efficient
production terms, with dead bodies as the output. Nick Turse, Kill
Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013).
↩ A.O. Scott, “Finding Comfort
in Easy Distinctions,” New York Times, February 28, 2013,
http://nytimes.com.
↩ See, for example, Catherine A.
Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Carl Boggs, ed., Masters of War:
Militarism and Blowback in the Era of the America Empire (New York:
Routledge, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2004); Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American
Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Nick Turse, How
the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2008); and Bacevich, Washington Rules.
↩ Joe Klein and Condoleezza Rice,
U.S. Education Reform and National Security (Washington, DC: Council
on Foreign Relations, 2012), http://cfr.org. For a brilliant critique
of this right-wing warmongering screed, which is really a front for
privatizing schools, see Jennifer Fisher, “‘The Walking Wounded’:
Youth, Public Education, and the Turn to Precarious Pedagogy,”
Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies 33/5
(November–December 2011): 379–432.
↩ John Whitehead, “Arrested
Development: The Criminalization of America’s Schoolchildren,”
NJToday.net, May 7, 2012, http://njtoday.net.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Etienne Balibar, We, The People
of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004), 120.
↩ Editorial comment, “Big Bang
Theories: Violence on Screen,” New York Times, February 28, 2013,
http://nytimes.com.
↩ I want to thank Grace Pollock
for this idea. See also Henry A. Giroux, “The ‘Suicidal State’
and the War on Youth,” Truthout, April 10, 2012,
http://truth-out.org.
↩ A. O. Scott, “Superheroes,
Super Battles, Super Egos,” New York Times, May 3, 2012,
http://nytimes.com.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Ibid.
↩ See the classic text: Theodor
Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt
Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993).
↩ Chris Hedges, “Murder Is Not
an Anomaly in War,” TruthDig, March 19, 2012, http://truthdig.com.
↩ Stephen Foley, “NBC Rejects
Calls to Cancel Show That ‘Glorifies War,’” Independent, August
15, 2012, http://independent.co.uk.
↩ See the show’s website:
http://nbc.com/stars-earn-stripes.
↩ Foley, “NBC Rejects Calls to
Cancel Show That ‘Glorifies War.’”
↩ Jody Williams, Desmond Tutu,
Mairead Maguire, Shirin Ebadi, José Ramos-Horta, Adolfo Pérez
Esquivel, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Betty
Williams, “NBC’s ‘Stars Earn Stripes’ Continues an Inglorious
Tradition of Glorifying War,” Guardian, August 14, 2012,
http://guardian.co.uk.
↩ For a critical rendering of the
current age of greed, see Jeff Madrick, Age of Greed: The Triumph of
Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (New York:
Random House, 2012).
↩ Phil Stewart, “Death Penalty
Possible in Afghan Massacre: Panetta,” Reuters, March 12, 2012,
http://reuters.com.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Hedges, “Murder Is Not an
Anomaly in War.”
↩ Robert Johnson, “Pentagon
Offers U.S. Police Full Military Hardware,” ReaderSupportedNews,
December 11, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org.
↩ Dana Priest and William Arkin,
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New
York: Little, Brown, 2011).
↩ Andrew Becker and G. W. Schulz,
“Cops Ready for War,” ReaderSupportedNews, December 21, 2011,
http://readersupportednews.org.
↩ David Theo Goldberg, The Threat
of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 334.
↩ John W. Whitehead, “Invasion
of the Body Searchers: The Loss of Bodily Integrity in an Emerging
Police State,” The Rutherford Institute, January 14, 2013,
https://rutherford.org.
↩ Richard McAdam, “On Bounties
and the Integrity of Professional Sports,” SportsCardForum, April
2012, http://sportscardforum.com.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Gary Younge, “America’s
Deadly Devotion to Guns,” Guardian, April 16, 3012,
http://guardian.co.uk.
↩ Ibid.
↩ David and Lucille Packard
Foundation, “Children, Youth, and Gun Violence: Analysis and
Recommendations,” The Future of Children 12, no. 2 (2002),
http://futureofchildren.org.
↩ Jean and John Comaroff,
“Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing,
and the Metaphysics of Disorder,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Summer
2004): 803–4.
↩ Ibid, 804, 808.
↩ Stanley Aronowitz, “The
Winter of Our Discontent,” Situations 4, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 57.
↩ The complete findings of the
study are available at http://costsofwar.org.
↩ David Rothkopf, Power, Inc.:
The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the
Reckoning That Lies Ahead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2012), 258.
↩ For an excellent article on
inequality, see Michael D. Yates, “The Great Inequality,” Monthly
Review 63, no. 10 (March 2012): 1–18; Paul Krugman, “America’s
Unlevel Field,” New York Times, January 8, 2012,
http://nytimes.com; Nicholas Lemann, “Evening the Odds: Is There a
Politics of Inequality?,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012,
http://newyorker.com. See also Charles M. Blow, “Inconvenient
Income Inequality,” New York Times, December 16, 2011,
http://nytimes.com; David Moberg, “Anatomy of the 1%,” In These
Times, December 15, 2011, http://inthesetimes.com; and Hope Yen and
Laura Wides-Munoz, “U.S. Poorest Poor at Record Highs,”
ReaderSupportedNews, November 4, 2011,
http://readersupportednews.org.
↩ Yates, “The Great
Inequality.”
↩ Michelle Brown, The Culture of
Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 194.
↩ Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of
History (London: Verso, 2012), 12.
↩ Ibid, 13.
↩ Ibid.
↩ Aronowitz, “The Winter of Our
Discontent,” 69.
↩ Nick Turse, “Empire of Bases
2.0,” South Asia Times, January 12, 2011, http://atimes.com.
↩ C. Wright Mills, “The
Cultural Apparatus,” The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C.
Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 204.
↩ Bernard Harcourt, “Occupy’s
New Grammar of Political Disobedience,” Guardian, November 30,
2011, http://guardian.co.uk.
↩ Patricia Ticento Clough and
Craig Willse, “Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and
Death,” in Clough and Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011), 3.
↩ Aronowitz, “The Winter of Our
Discontent,” 68.
↩ Brown, The Culture of
Punishment, 207.
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