http://www.truthout.org/090209R?n
Truthout Original
Wednesday 02 September 2009
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes
galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture,
giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market,
military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over
the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power
became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled
by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of
economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven
pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and
inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not
employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics
into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a
culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday
life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the
disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the
production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture
to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is
important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally
transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical
moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is
being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of
cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that
government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be
turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving
millions of an essential right?
Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find
themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms
of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer
about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups,
who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color,
elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American
dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products
of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain
the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the
transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and
no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option?
What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2
million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting,
soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather
than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or,
for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination
and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken
bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system?
Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that
substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state
and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden
dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are
increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice
system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide
who may live and who may die.
The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a
pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for
a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of
education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This
educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not
just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of
cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in
support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain,
coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive
of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly
constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres
and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly
expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform.
There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for
those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency
and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to
curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law
enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy
illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure
to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment.
The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble
that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric
shocks." [1]
A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a
toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are
not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist
criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality;
the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture
and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big"
government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white
people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it
goes. Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the
"Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a
"racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred
for white people or the white culture." [2] Nationally syndicated radio
host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed
killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor,
[3] while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage,
states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a
burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi
who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." [4] He also
claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping
America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter,
who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist." [5] Even worse,
Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to
"force children into a paramilitary domestic army." [6] And this is
just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media.
This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not
for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose
to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. [7] On the contrary, while it
may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational
forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time
extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of
politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert
dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.
Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee
during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such
that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a
summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human
suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence
pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it. Rather
than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life had become both
visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant
and popular culture. Americans had grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm
bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike were seduced with
commercial and military video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and
"America's Army," [8] the television series "24" and its
ongoing Bacchanalian fête of torture, the crude violence on display in World
Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and an endless
series of vigilante films such as "The Brave One" (2007) and
"Death Sentence" (2007), in which the rule of law is suspended by the
viscerally satisfying images of men and women seeking revenge as laudable
killing machines - a nod to the permanent state of emergency and war in the
United States. Symptomatically, there is the mindless glorification and
aestheticization of brutal violence in the most celebrated Hollywood films,
including many of Quentin Tarantino's films, especially the recent "Death
Proof" (2007), "Kill Bill" 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), and
"Inglorious Bastards" (2009). With the release of Tarantino's 2009
bloody war film, in fact, the press reported that Dianne Kruger, the co-star of
"Inglorious Bastards," claimed that she "loved being tortured by
Brad Pitt [though] she was frustrated she didn't get an opportunity to get
frisky with her co-star, but admits being beaten by Pitt was a satisfying
experience." [9] This is more than the aestheticization of violence, it is
the normalization and glorification of torture itself.
If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of
its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture
of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on
September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than
four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a
hundred." [10] Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the
villains, but the heroes of prime-time television. The most celebrated is, of
course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV
thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often
presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," [11] but Bauer is portrayed
as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect
American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes
society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear
it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a
television celebrity. [12] The show has over 15 million viewers, and its
glamorization of torture has proven so successful that it appears to have not
only numbed the public's reaction to the horrors of torture, but it is so
overwhelmingly influential among the US military that the Pentagon sent Brig.
Gen. Patrick Finnegan to California to meet with the producers of the show.
"He told them that promoting illegal behavior in the series ... was having
a damaging effect on young troops." [13] The pornographic glorification of
gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO
television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a
sympathetic, even lovable, character. Visual spectacles steeped in degradation and
violence permeate the culture and can be found in various reality TV shows,
professional wrestling and the infamous Jerry Springer Show. These programs all
trade in fantasy, glamorized violence and escapism. And they share similar
values. As Chris Hedges points out in his analysis of professional wrestling,
they all mirror the worse dimensions of an unchecked and unregulated market
society in which "winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant....
It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge,
while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood." [14]
The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture
travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few
years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet,
"shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay
transients a few dollars to fight each other." [15] The culture of cruelty
mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms
of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web,
mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming
their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless
claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos
with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum
fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008."
[16] Rather than problematize violence, popular culture increasingly normalizes
it, often in ways that border on criminal intent. For instance, a recent issue
of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the
Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one
for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'" [17] In this context,
violence is not simply being transformed into an utterly distasteful form of
adolescent entertainment or spectacularized to attract readers and boost
profits, it becomes a powerful pedagogical force in the culture of cruelty by
both aligning itself and becoming complicit with the very real surge of
violence against the homeless, often committed by young men and teenage boys
looking for a thrill. Spurred on by the ever reassuring presence of violence
and dehumanization in the wider culture, these young "thrill
offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set
afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the
sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society." [19] All of
these elements of popular culture speak stylishly and sadistically to new ways
in which to maximize the pleasure of violence, giving it its hip (if fascist)
edginess.
Needless to say, neither violent video games and television
series nor Hollywood films and the Internet (or for that matter popular
culture) cause in any direct sense real world violence and suffering, but they
do not leave the real world behind either. That is too simplistic. What they do
achieve is the execution of a well-funded and highly seductive public
pedagogical enterprise that sexualizes and stylizes representations of
violence, investing them with an intense pleasure quotient. I don't believe it
is an exaggeration to claim that the violence of screen culture entertains and
cleanses young people of the burden of ethical considerations when they, for
instance, play video games that enabled them to "casually kill the
simulated human beings whose world they control." [20] Hollywood films such
as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the
spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young
viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully
suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty. No
warnings appear on the labels of these violent videos and films, suggesting
that the line between catharsis and desensitization may become blurred, making
it more difficult for them to raise questions about what it means "to live
in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products." [21] But
these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical
assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities
of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all
economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that
exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering. Even the suffering of
children, we must note, as when government officials reduce the lives of babies
and young children lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to collateral damage.
Tragically, the crime here is much more than symbolic.
The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American
culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and
individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up
crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized
media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a
"symbiosis of suffering and spectacle." [22] As Chris Hedges argues,
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of
corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality
television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant,
corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral
choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the
mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick. [23]
Bailouts are not going to address the ways in which
individual desires, values and identities are endlessly produced in the service
of a culture of cruelty and inequality. Power is not merely material, it is
also symbolic and is distributed through a society in ways we have never seen
before. No longer is education about schooling. It now functions through the
educational force of the larger culture in the media, Internet, electronic
media and through a wide range of technologies and sites endlessly working to
undo democratic values, compassion and any viable notion of justice and its
accompanying social relations. What this suggests is a redefinition of both
literacy and education. We need, as a society, to educate students and others
to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage,
and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of public pedagogy
that produce hate and cruelty as part of the discourse of common sense.
Otherwise, democracy will lose the supportive institutions, social relations
and culture that make it not only possible but even thinkable.
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Notes:
[1] Barbara Ehrenreich, "Is It now a Crime to Be
Poor?," New York Times (August 9, 2009), p. wk9.
[2] David Bauder, "Fox's Glenn Beck: President Obama is
a Racist," Associated Press (July 28, 2009).
Online at: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5imGTdQH8JbOAWo_yKxNHpAMTCq_gD99NO3TG0
[3] Limbaugh cited in Casey Gane-McCalla, "Top 10
Racist Limbaugh Quotes," NewsOne (October 20, 2008).
Online at: http://newsone.com/obama/top-10-racist-limbaugh-quotes/
[4] Savage quoted in Thinkers and Jokers (July 2, 2007).
Online at: http://thinkersandjokers.com/thinker.php?id=2688
[5] Coulter quoted in Don Hazen, "The Tall Blonde Woman
in the Short Skirt With the Big Mouth," AlterNet (June 6, 2006).
Online at: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/37162
[6] These quotes are taken from an excellent article by Eric
Boehlert in which he criticizes the soft peddling that many in the press give
to right-wing fanatics such as Michael Savage. See Eric Boehlert, "The New
Yorker raises a toast to birther nut Michael Savage," Media Matters for
America (August 3, 2009).
Online at: http://mediamatters.org/print/columns/200908030038
[7] See Chris Hedges, "America the Illiterate,"
CommonDreams (November 10, 2008).
Online at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/10-6
Terrence McNally, "How Anti-Intellectualism Is
Destroying America," AlterNet (August 15, 2008).
Online at: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/95109
[8] For an excellent collection on military video games, see
Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. "Joystick Soldiers: The
Politics of Play in Military Video Games" (New York: Routledge, 2010).
[9] Arts and Entertainment, "Torture Will Just Have to
Do," The Hamilton Spectator (August 12, 2009), p. Go 3.
[10] Jane Mayer, "Whatever It Takes: The Politics of
the Man Behind 24," The New Yorker (February 26, 2007), p. 68.
[11] Alessandra Stanley, "Suicide Bombers Strike, and
America Is in Turmoil. Just Another Day in the Life of Jack Bauer," New
York Times (January 12, 2007), p. B1.
[12] See Judith Butler, "Frames of War." Also,
Slavoj Zizek, "The Depraved Heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of
Hollywood," The Guardian (January 10, 2006).
Online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/10/usnews.comment
[13] Faiz Shaker, "US Military: Television Series '24'
is Promoting Torture in the Ranks," Think Progress (February 3, 2007).
Online at: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/13/torture-on-24/
[14] Chris Hedges, "Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (New York: Knopf Canada, 2009). p.
10.
[15] Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring Push on
Hate Crime Laws," New York Times (August 8, 2009), p. A1.
[16] National Coalition of the Homeless, "Hate,
Violence, and Death on Main Street," 2008, (Washington, DC, National Coalition
of the Homeless, 2009).
Online at: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/hatecrimes/hate_report_2008.pdf
, p. 34.
[17] Ibid., Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring
Push on Hate Crime Laws."
[18] National Coalition of the Homeless, "Hate,
Violence, and Death on Main Street," 2008, (Washington, D. C., National
Coalition of the Homeless, 2009).
Online at: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/hatecrimes/hate_report_2008.pdf
[19] Ibid., Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring
Push on Hate Crime Laws."
[20] Mark Slouka, "Dehumanized: When Math and Science
Rule the School," Harper's Magazine (September 5, 2009), p. 40.
[21] Ibid., Mark Slouka, "Dehumanized," p. 40.
[22] Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, "Traffic in
Pain," in "Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in
Pain," ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.9.
[23] Chris Hedges, "America Is in Need of Moral
Bailout," Truthdig (March 23, 2009).
Online at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/
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Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.