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america's favourite pastime
VIOLENCE
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
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YOUR
COMMENTSOn
December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and more than 20 wounded
in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Mass shootings
have become routine in the United States and speak to a society
that both lives by violence and uses it as tool to feed the
coffers of the merchants of death. Violence runs through American
society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from
all sources of the culture, whether it be the nightly news and
Hollywood fanfare or television series that glorify serial killers.
At a policy level, violence drives an arms industry, a militaristic
foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state’s
major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism,
especially against black youth. Moreover, the United States
is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is
viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the
default welfare programme and chief mechanism to institutionalize
obedience. At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition
replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion
self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism.
All of these forces point to modes authoritarianism and registers
of state violence and an increasing number of mass shootings
that are symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear,
militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power.
Moderate
calls for reining in the gun culture and its political advocates
amount to band aid solutions that do not address the roots of
the violence causing so much carnage in the United States, especially
among children and teens. For example, Obama’s executive
order to expand background checks for firearms and increase
enforcement of existing gun laws and Hilary Clinton’s
much publicized call for controlling the gun lobby and background
checks are well intentioned. But neither attempt at curbing
the gun culture have nothing to say about a culture of lawlessness
and violence reproduced by the arms industries, the financial
elites’ investments in instruments of war and death, the
defence industries, or a casino capitalism that is built on
corruption and produces massive amounts of human misery and
suffering. Moreover, none of the calls to eliminate gun violence
in the United States link such violence to the broader war on
youth, especially poor minorities in the United States.
In
spite of the media’s ample reporting of gun violence,
what has flown under the radar is that in the last three years
one child under 12 years-old has been killed every other day
by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in
three years. An even more frightening statistic and example
of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data
provided by the Centers for Disease control and Prevention (CDC),
which stated that “2,525 children and teens died by gunfire
in (US) in 2014; one child or teen death every 3-hours and 28-minutes,
nearly 7/day, 48/week.” In addition, 58 people are lost
to firearms every day. Such figures indicate that too many youth
in America occupy what might be called war zones in which guns
and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and its insane
culture of violence and hyper-masculinity are given more support
than young people and life itself.
The
predominance of a relatively unchecked gun culture and a morally
perverse and politically obscene culture of violence is particularly
evident in the power of the gun lobby and its gun rights political
advocates to pass legislation in eight states that allow students
and faculty to carry concealed weapons “into classrooms,
dormitories and other buildings” on campuses. Texas lawmakers,
for instance, passed one such ‘campus carry bill,’
which will take effect in August of 2016. Such laws not only
reflect “the seemingly limitless legislative clout of
gun interests,” but also a rather deranged return to the
violence-laden culture of the wild west. As in the past, individuals
will be allowed to walk the streets openly carrying guns as
a measure of their love of guns and their reliance upon violence
as the best way to address any perceived threat to their security.
This return to the deadly practices of the wild west is neither
a matter of individual choice nor some far-fetched yet allegedly
legitimate appeal to the second amendment. On the contrary,
mass violence in America has to be placed within a broader historical,
economic and political context in order to address the totality
of forces that produce it. Focusing merely on the mass shootings,
or the passing of potentially dangerous gun legislation, does
not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce America’s
love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic
institutions that produce it.
Imperial
policies that promote aggression all across the globe are now
matched by increasing levels of lawlessness and state repression,
which mutually feed each other. On the home front, civil society
is degenerating into a military organization, a space of lawlessness
and war-like practices, organized primarily for the production
of violence. For instance, as Steve Martinot observes, the police
now use their discourse of command and power to criminalize
behaviour; in addition, they use military weapons and surveillance
tools as if they are preparing for war, and create a culture
of fear in which militaristic principles replace legal principles.
He writes:
When
the pregnant woman steps away from the cop, she is breaking
no law. To force her to ground and handcuff her is far from
anything intended by the principle of due process in the Constitution.
The Constitution provided for law enforcement, but not for police
impunity. When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they
are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their
person but the command and control principle that is threatened.
To defend that control through assault or murderous action against
a disobedient person implies that the cop’s own identity
is wholly immersed in its paradigm.
Americans
do not merely engage in violence, they are also entertained
by it. This kind of toxic irrationality and lure of violence
is mimicked in America’s aggressive foreign policy, in
the sanctioning of state torture, and in the gruesome killings
of civilians by drones. As my colleague David L. Clark pointed
out to me in a private email correspondence, “bombing
make-believe countries is not a symptom of muddled confusion
but, quite to the contrary, a sign of unerring precision. It
describes the desire to militarise nothing less than the imagination
and to target the minutiae of our dreams.” War-like values
no longer suggest a flirtation with a kind of mad irrationality
or danger. On the contrary, they have become normalized.
For
instance, the United States government is willing to lock down
a major city such as Boston in order to catch a terrorist or
prevent a terrorist attack, but refuses to pass gun control
bills that would significantly lower the number of Americans
who die each year as a result of gun violence. As Michael Cohen
observes, it is truly a symptom of irrationality when politicians
can lose their heads over the threat of terrorism, even sacrificing
civil liberties, but ignore the fact that “30,000 Americans
die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died
in 2012 in terrorist attacks.” It gets worse. As the threat
of terrorism is used by the American government to construct
a surveillance state, suspend civil liberties and accelerate
the forces of authoritarianism, the fear of personal and collective
violence has no rational bearing on addressing the morbid acceleration
of gun and other forms of unnecessary violence in the United
States. In fact, the fear of terrorism specifically as it applies
to immigrants and Muslims appears to feed, recuperate and expand
a toxic culture of violence produced, in part, by the wide and
unchecked availability of guns. America’s fascination
with guns and violence functions as a form of sport and entertainment,
while offering the false promise of security, which even trumps
a more general fear of violence on the part of terrorists. In
this logic one not only kills terrorists with drones, but also
makes sure that patriotic Americans are individually armed so
they can use force to protect themselves against the dangers
whipped up in a culture of fear and hysteria promoted by right-wing
politicians, pundits and the corporate controlled media.
Rather
than bring violence into a political debate that would limit
its production, various states increase its possibilities by
taking a plunge into insanity with the passing of laws that
allow “guns at places from bars to houses of worship.”
Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, based on
the notion that one should shoot first and ask questions later
is a morbid reflection of America’s national psychosis
regarding the adulation of gun culture and the paranoiac fears
that fuel it. This fascination with guns and violence has produced
a pathology that reaches the highest levels of government and
serves to further anti-democratic and authoritarian forces.
The U. S. government’s warfare state is propelled by a
military-industrial complex that cannot spend enough on weapons
of death and destruction. Super modern planes such as the F-35
Joint Strike Fighter cost up to $228 million each and are plagued
by mechanical problems and yet are supported by a military and
defence establishment.
As
Gabriel Kolko observes such war-like investments “reflect
a pathology and culture that is expressed in spending more money
regardless” of how it contributes to running up the debt
or for that matter thrives on “the energies of the dead.”
Militarism provides ideological support for policies that protect
gun owners and sellers rather than children. The Children’s
Defense Fund is right in stating “Where is our anti-war
movement here at home? Why does a nation with the largest military
budget in the world refuse to protect its children from relentless
gun violence and terrorism at home? No external enemy ever killed
thousands of children in their neighbourhoods, streets and schools
year in and year out.”
There
is a not so hidden structure of politics at work in this type
of sanctioned irrationality. Advocating for gun rights provides
a convenient discourse for ignoring a “harsh neoliberal
corporate-state order that routinely generates pervasive material
suffering, social dislocation, and psychological despair —
worsening conditions that ensure violence in its many expressions.”
It says nothing about the corrupt bankers and hedge fund managers
who invest in the industries of death and trade in profits at
the expense of human life, all the while contributing to the
United States being the largest arms exporter in the world.
More specifically, the call for gun rights also conveniently
side steps and ignores criticizing a popular culture and corporate
controlled media which uses violence to attract viewers, increase
television ratings, produce Hollywood blockbusters and sell
video games that celebrate first person shooters.
While
it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates
popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society,
it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce
an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to
normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice
for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin
to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness
and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and
practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize,
resist and transform. Many critics have argued that a popular
culture that endlessly trades in violence runs the risk of blurring
the lines between the world of fantasies and the world we live
in. What they often miss is that when violence is celebrated
in its myriad registers and platforms in a society, even though
it lacks any sense of rationality, a formative culture is put
in place that is amenable to the pathology of totalitarianism.
That is, a culture that thrives on violence runs the risk of
losing its capacity to separate politics from violence: A. O.
Scott recognizes such a connection between gun violence and
popular culture, but he fails to register the deeper significance
of the relationship. He writes:
.
. . it is absurd to pretend that gun culture is unrelated to
popular culture, or that make-believe violence has nothing to
do with its real-world correlative. Guns have symbolic as well
as actual power, and the practical business of hunting, law
enforcement and self-defence has less purchase in our civic
life than fantasies of righteous vengeance or brave resistance.
. . [Violent] fantasies have proliferated and intensified even
as our daily existence has become more regulated and standardised
— and also less dangerous. Perhaps they offer an escape
from the boredom and regimentation of work and consumption.
Popular
culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, it also
delivers violence to a society addicted to an endless barrage
of sensations, the lure of instant gratification and a pleasure
principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering,
mayhem and torture. Violence is now represented without the
need for either subtlety or critical examination. Relieved of
the pedagogical necessity to instruct, violence is split from
its moral significance, just as it becomes more plentiful and
lurid in order to infuse the pleasure quotient with more shocks.
Americans now live in “a culture of the immediate”
which functions “as an escape from the past” and
a view of the future as one of menace, insecurity, and potential
violence. In an age of cruel precarity and uncertainty, the
present becomes the only register of hope, politics, and survival.
Americans now “look to the future with worry and suspicion
and cling to the present with the anguish of those who are afraid
of losing what they have,” all the while considering those
deemed other as a threat to their security. Under such circumstances,
trust and mutual respect disappear, democratic public spheres
wither, and democracy becomes a cover for false promises and
the swindle of fulfillment. Another consequence is the merging
of pleasure and cruelty in the most barbarous spectacles of
violence. One telling example of this can be found in those
films in which the use of waterboarding has become a prime stable
of torture. While the Obama administration banned waterboarding
as an interrogation method in January 2009, it appears to be
thriving as a legitimate procedure in a number of recent Hollywood
films including, GI Jane, Safe House, Zero Dark Thirty, and
Taken 3.
Guns
are certainly a major problem in the United States, but regulating
guns does not get to the root of the problem. Zhiwa Woodbury
touches on this issue when he writes:
In
truth, the gun issue is an easy chimera that allows us to avoid
looking in the mirror. It is much easier for us to imagine that
this is an unfortunate political or regulatory issue than it
is to ask what our own complicity in this ongoing, slow motion
slaughter of innocents might be. Think about this. We are a
country of approximately 300 million people with approximately
300 million firearms – a third of which are concealable
handguns. Each one of these guns is made for one purpose only
– to kill as quickly and effectively as possible. The
idea that some magical regulatory scheme, short of confiscation,
will somehow prevent guns from being used to kill people is
laughable, regardless of what you think of the NRA. Similarly,
mentally ill individuals are responsible for less than 5% of
the 30,000+ gunned down in the U.S. every year.
Surely,
two of the major crises of our times are the crisis of agency
and civic literacy, on the one hand, and the withering of public
values, trust and democratic public spheres on the other. The
current drumbeat of fascism and its embrace of violence does
not rely only on mimicking the infamous brownshirts of Nazi
Germany but also on the collapse of democratic politics, the
concentration of power in the hands of the few, the myth that
only individuals are responsible for the systemic assaults they
have to weather and that self-interest is the only value that
matters. Consumerism becomes a form of soma, memory no longer
serves as a moral witness and politics is in the hands of the
1 per cent, utterly corrupted by money and power. Traces of
a totalitarianism now appear, stripped of memory and the horrors
they produced. In their new forms, the threats they pose go
unrecognisable and are tolerated as politics as usual, only
with less civility. Under such conditions, the social withers,
solidarity is replaced by shark like competition and state violence
and the spectacle of violence become normalised. We live in
a time of monsters and Trump is simply symptomatic of the financial
class he represents and the history we refuse to learn from.
Brutal
masculine authority now rules American society and wages a war
against women’s reproductive rights, civil liberties,
poor black and brown youth, and Mexican immigrants. Americans
inhabit a society run by a financial elite that refuses to recognize
that war is a descent into madness and the scope and breadth
of the violence it produces infects our language, values, social
relations and democracy itself. War has become an all-embracing
ideal that feeds the most totalitarian practices and shores
up an authoritarian state. As an organizing principle of society,
the politics and culture of violence unravels the fabric of
democracy suggesting that America is at war with itself, its
children and its future. The political stooges who have become
lapdogs of corporate and financial elites must be held accountable
for the deaths taking place in a toxic culture of gun violence.
The condemnation of violence cannot be limited to police brutality.
Violence does not just come from the police. In the United States
there are other dangers emanating from state power that punishes
whistle blowers, intelligence agencies that encourage the arrests
of those who protest against the abuse of corporate and state
power, and a corporate controlled media that that trades in
ignorance, lies and falsehoods, all the while demanding and
generally “receiving unwavering support from their citizens.”
State violence aimed at terrorism is too often code for using
force against black protesters as in Ferguson, Baltimore and
other cities. At the same time, when white right-wing anti-government
protestors waging a struggle against what they call the tyranny
of the federal government and take over the Malheur National
Wildlife refuge in Oregon, their actions backed by the threat
of using weapons and ammunition they are labeled by the mainstream
media as protesters rather than terrorists. White men with guns,
disregarding the law, and seizing government property are left
untouched by the government while black protesters march in
the streets in opposition to police violence are met by the
national guard loaded up with tanks and high tech weapons.
What
we don’t hear about are the people who trade their conscience
for supporting the gun lobby, particularly the National Rifle
Association. These are the politicians in congress who create
the conditions for mass shootings and gun violence because they
have been bought and sold by the apostles of the death industry.
These are the same politicians who support the militarization
of everyday life, who trade in torture, who bow down slavishly
to the arms industries, and who wallow in the handouts provided
by the military-industrial-academic complex. These utterly corrupted
politicians are killers in suits whose test of courage and toughness
was captured in one of the recent Republican Party presidential
debates, when Ben Carson, was asked by Hugh Hewett, a reactionary
right-wing talk show host, if he would be willing to kill thousands
of children in the name of exercising tough leadership. As if
killing innocent children is a legitimate test for leadership.
This is what the war-mongering politics of hysterical fear with
its unbridled focus on terrorism has come to — a future
that will be defined by moral and political zombies who represent
the real face of terrorism, domestic and otherwise.
Clearly
the cause of violence in America will not disappear by merely
holding the politicians responsible. America has become a society
in which the illegitimacy of violence is matched by the illegitimacy
and lawlessness of politics. What is needed is a mass political
movement willing to challenge and replace a broken system that
gives corrupt and warmongering politicians excessive and corrupting
political and economic power. Democracy and justice are on life
support and the challenge is to bring them back to life not
by reforming the system but by replacing it. This will only
take place with the development of politics in which the obligation
to justice is matched by an endless responsibility to collective
struggle, one with a politics and social formation that speaks
to the highest ideals of a democratic socialism.
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