Photo Credit: Commons.wikimedia.org
May 7, 2013
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The
American public rightfully expressed a collective sigh of relief and a
demonstration of prodigious gratitude towards law enforcement
authorities when the unprecedented manhunt for the Boston marathon
bombers came to an end. The trauma and anxiety felt by the people of
Boston and to some degree by the larger society over the gratuitously
bloody and morally degenerate attacks on civilians was no doubt
heightened given the legacy of 9/11. Since the tragic events of that
historical moment, the nation has been subjected to “a media spectacle
of fear and unreason delivered via TV, news sites and other social
media;”[ii] it has also been engulfed in a nationwide hysteria about
Muslims. Moreover, the American public has been schizophrenically
immersed within a culture of fear and cruelty punctuated by a
law-and-order driven promise for personal safety, certainty, and
collective protection that amounted to a Faustian bargain with the
devil, one in which Americans traded constitutional rights and numerous
civil liberties for the ever expanding presence of a militarized
security and surveillance state run by a government that has little
regard for human rights or the principles of justice and democracy.[iii]
The
collective expressions of relief, compassion, and adulation were
reasonable and appropriate once the threat from the Boston marathon
bombers had ended. But such feelings are short-lived in a country that
infamously is losing its capacity to question itself, embracing instead a
mode of historical amnesia “in which forgetting has become more
important than learning.”[iv] What is needed in the aftermath of this
tragedy is a critical and thoughtful analysis about what the
significance of locking down an entire city meant not simply for the
present or the future of urban living, but for democracy itself.
Locking down Boston was generally left unquestioned by the mainstream
media, though a number of progressive and left intellectuals raised
serious questions about the use and implications of the tactic,
particularly the abridging civil liberties, squelching dissent, and
legitimating the spectacle of the war machine. For example, Michael
Schwalbe argues that he was troubled by what lockdown foreshadows with
its connotation of authoritarian control, its expanding use, and its
ongoing normalization in American society. He writes:
"When
I hear that authorities have locked down a school, a workplace, a
transit system, a cell phone network, or a city, the subtext seems
unmistakable: We are now in control. Listen carefully and do as you are
told. What I hear is the warden saying that communication will flow in
one direction only, and that silence and obedience are the only
options."[v]
Other critics suggested the lockdown
represented a massive overreaction that was symptomatic of a larger
social crisis. Steven Rosenfeld argued that “beyond lingering questions
of whether the government went too far by shutting down an entire city
and whether that might encourage future terrorism, a deeper and darker
question remains: why is America’s obsession with evil so
selective?”[vi] This was an important point and was largely ignored by
most commentators on the tragedy. Implicit in Rosenfeld’s question is
why the notion of security and safety are limited to personal security
and the fear of attacks by terrorists rather than the rise of a gun
culture, the shredding of the safety net for millions of Americans, the
imprisonment of one out of every 100 Americans, or the transformation of
public schools into adjuncts of the punishing and surveillance state.
Lockdown
as a policy and mode of control misrepresents the notion of security by
reducing it to personal safety and thereby mobilizing fears that demand
trading civil liberties for increased militarized security. The
lockdown that took place in Boston serves as a reminder of how narrow
the notion of security has become in that it is almost entirely
associated with personal safety but never with the insecurities that
derive from poverty, a lack of social provisions, and the incarceration
binge. Most importantly, it now serves as a metaphor for how we address
problems facing a range of institutions including immigration detention
centers, schools, hospitals, public housing, and prisons. Lockdown is
the new common sense of a militarized society, the zone of unchecked
surveillance, policing, and state brutality.
Security in
this instance is reduced to issues of law and order and mirrors a
Hobbesian free-for-all, a world that “reveres competitiveness and
celebrates unrestrained individual responsibility, with an antipathy to
anything collective that might impede market forces”—a world in which
the Darwinian survival of the fittest ethos rules and the only values
that matter are exchange values.[vii] In this panopticon-like social
order, there is little understanding of society as a public good, of the
importance of providing public necessities such as decent housing, job
programs for the unemployed, housing for the poor and homeless, health
care for everyone, and universal education for young people.
In
a society where critical analysis and explanation of violent attacks of
this nature are dismissed as terrorist sympathizing, there is a
stultifying logic that assumes that contextualizing an event is
tantamount to justifying it. This crippling impediment to public
dialogue may be why the militarized response to the Boston marathon
bombings, infused with the fantasy of the Homeland as a battlefield and
the necessity of the paramilitarized surveillance state, was for the
most part given a pass in mainstream media. Of course, there is more at
stake here than misplaced priorities and the dark cloud of historical
amnesia and anti-intellectualism, there is also the drift of American
society into a form of soft authoritarianism in which boots on the
ground and the securitization of everyday life now serve either as a
source of pride, entertainment, or for many disposable groups, a source
of fear.
Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the marathon
bombing, shock and collective dislocation left little room to think
about the context in which the bombing took place or the implications of
a lockdown strategy that hints at the broader danger of exchanging
security for freedom. Any attempt to suggest that the overly
militarized response to the bombings was less about protecting people
than legitimating the ever expanding reach of military operations to
solve domestic problems was either met with disdain or silence in the
dominant media. Even more telling was the politically offensive
reaction to such critics and the intensity of a right-wing diatribe that
used the Boston marathon bombing as an excuse to further the expansion
of the punishing state with its apparatuses of militarization,
surveillance, secrecy, and its embrace of lawless states of exception.
Equally repulsive was how the Boston bombing produced an ample amount
of nativist paranoia about immigrants and the quest for an “enemy
combatant” behind every door.
In the midst of the
emotional fervor that followed the bloody Boston marathon bombings,
various pundits decried any talk about a possible militarized
overreaction to the event and the hint that such tactics pointed to the
dangers of a police state. One critic in a moment of emotive local
hysteria referred to such critics as “outrage junkies,” claimed they
were “masturbating in public,” and insisted he was washing his hands of
what he termed “bad rubbish.”[viii] This particular line of thought
with its discursive infantilism and echoes of nationalistic jingoism
ominously hinted that what happened in Boston could only register
legitimately as a deeply felt emotional event, one that was desecrated
by trying to understand it within a broader historical and political
context.
Another register of bad faith was evident in
the comments of right-wing pundits, broadcasting elites, and squeamish
liberals who amped up the frenzied media spectacle surrounding the
marathon bombing. Many of them suggested, without apology, that the
country should be grateful for an increase in invasive searches, the
suspension of constitutional rights, the embrace of total surveillance,
and the ongoing normalization of the security state and
Islamophobia.[ix] One frightening offshoot of the Boston marathon
bombing was the authoritarian tirade unleashed among a range of
government officials that indicated how close dissent is to being
treated as a crime and how under siege public space is by the forces of
manufactured terrorism. For example, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
used the attacks in an effort to undo immigration reform, no longer
concealing his disdain for immigrants, especially Muslims and
Mexicans.[x] Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued that President Obama
should not only deny Tsarnaev his constitutional rights by refusing to
read him his Miranda Rights, but also hold him as “an enemy combatant
for intelligence gathering purposes.”[xi] As one commentator pointed
out, “This is pretty breathtaking. Graham is suggesting that an American
citizen, captured on American soil, should be deprived of basic
constitutional rights.”[xii] Graham is simply arguing what many
Americans have experienced since the tragic attack of September 11,
2001. The boundaries between the military and civilian life have been
abolished just as the boundaries between the “innocent and quality,
between suspects and non-suspects” have become increasingly
blurred.[xiii] The international claim of solidarity that took place in
the aftermath of September 11th, in which a number of countries insisted
that “We are all Americans”, has given way in American society to the
zombie-like notion that “We are all potentially enemy combatants”.
There is more at stake here than hyped-up security or the rise of the
surveillance state, there is a militarizing logic of war and
authoritarianism that can translate into the death of democracy.
Representative
Peter King (R-N.Y.) reasserted his long standing racism by repeatedly
arguing that the greatest threat of terrorism faced by the U.S. “is
coming from the Muslim community” and that it might be time for state
and federal authorities to spy on all Muslims.[xiv] According to King,
"Police have to be in the community, they have to build up as many
sources as they can, and they have to realize that the threat is coming
from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there," adding that
"we can't be bound by political correctness."[xv] King seems to think
that dismissing the rhetoric of political correctness provides a
rationale for translating into policy his Islamophobia and the national
hallucination it feeds. Of course, King and others are simply channeling
the racism of the cartoonish Ann Coulter who actually suggested that
all “unauthorized immigrants in the United States might be
terrorists.”[xvi] This nativist paranoia is not new and has a long and
disgraceful legacy in American history.
What is new in
the current historical moment is how easily nativist paranoia and a
culture of cruelty have become normalized and generated an acceptable
public lexicon more characteristic of state terrorism and a military
state than a “free and open” democracy. For instance, New York State
Sen. Greg Ball (R), channeling Dick Cheney, took this logic of state
terrorism to its inevitable end point, reminding Americans of the degree
to which the United States has lost its moral compass, when he sent a
message from his Twitter account, suggesting that the authorities
torture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. As Ball put it, “So, scum bag #2 in custody.
Who wouldn't use torture on this punk to save more lives?”[xvii] There
is more at work here than an evasion of principle, to say nothing of
international law. There is an erasure of the very notion of a
substantive and democratic polity, and a frightening collective embrace
of an authoritarianism that points to the final rasp of democracy in the
United States. Such unconsidered remarks should compel us to examine
the state’s use of lockdown procedures within a savage market driven
society that sanctions the return of the 19th century debtor’s prisons
in which people are jailed—and their lives ruined--for not being able to
pay what amounts to trivial fines.[xviii] The culture of punishment and
cruelty is also evident in the attempt on the part of some West
Virginia Republican Party legislators who are pushing for a policy that
would force low-income school children to work in exchange for free
lunches.[xix] The flight from ethical responsibility associated with
the rise of the punishing state and the politics of the lockdown is also
evident in the willingness of police forces around the country to push
young children into the criminal justice system.[xx] More specifically,
there is a frightening, even normalized willingness in American life to
align politics and everyday life with the forces of militarization, law
enforcement officials, and the dictates of the national security state.
The
lockdown and ongoing search for those responsible for the Boston
marathon bombings was an eminently political event because it amplified
the dreadful potential and real consequences of the never-ending war on
terror and the anti-democratic processes it has produced at all levels
of government along with an increasing diminishment of civil liberties.
The script has become familiar and includes the authorized use of state
sponsored torture, the unchecked power of the president to conduct
targeted assassinations, the use of warrantless searches, extraordinary
renditions, secret courts, and the continuing monitoring of targeted
citizens.[xxi] Another consequence of the war on terror and the
increasing use of military drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan is that
many innocent children and adults are being killed and, as Noam Chomsky
points, such attacks are terrorizing villagers, turning them into
enemies of the United States-something that years of jihadi propaganda
had failed to accomplish…. There was no direct way to prevent the Boston
murders. There are some easy ways to prevent likely future ones: by not
inciting them.”[xxii]
Since 9/11 we have witnessed the
rise of a national-security-surveillance state and the expansion of a
lockdown mode of existence in a range of institutions that extend from
schools and airports to the space of the city itself. The meaning of
lockdown in this context has to be understood in broader terms as the
use of military solutions to problems for which such approaches are not
only unnecessary but further produce authoritarian and anti-democratic
policies and practices. Under such circumstances, not only have civil
liberties been violated in the name of national security, but the
promise of national security has given rise to policies which are
punitive, steeped in the logic of revenge, and support the rise of a
punishing state whose echoes of authoritarianism are often lost in the
moral comas that accompany the country’s infatuation with war and the
militarization of everyday life.
Glenn Greenwald, a
columnist for The Guardian, succinctly insists that Boston marathon
bombings is a political event because it “connects to larger questions
about our culture and because it was infused with all kinds of political
messages about Muslims, about radicalism, about what the proper role of
the police and the military are in the United States.”[xxiii] While
there has been some criticism over what was perceived as the unnecessary
imposition of a lockdown in Boston, and especially Watertown, what has
been missed in many of these arguments is that the U.S. is already in
lockdown mode, which has been intensifying since 9/11. A number of
critics have raised questions about the abridgement of civil rights and
the specter of excessive policing after the marathon bombing as one-off
events, but few have discussed the continuity and expansion of the logic
of lockdown predating September 11 which can be traced back to the
massive incarceration of disproportionate numbers of people of color
beginning in the early 1970s.[xxiv]
This history has
been addressed by Christian Parenti, Tom Englehardt, Angela Davis,
Michelle Alexander, and others and need not be repeated here, but what
does need to be addressed is how the concept and tactic of the lockdown
has moved far beyond the walls of the prison and now shapes a whole
range of institutions, making clear how the United States has moved into
a lockdown mode that is consistent with the precepts of an
authoritarian state. While the Boston lockdown was more of a request for
the public to stay inside, it displayed all of the attributes of
martial law, especially in Watertown where house-to-house searches took
on the appearance of treating the residents as feared criminals.
Lockdown
cannot be understood outside of the manufactured war on terrorism and
the view, aptly expressed by Lindsey Graham, that the Boston marathon
bombing “is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield.”[xxv]
Graham’s comments embrace the dangerous correlate that everyone is a
possible enemy combatant and that domestic militarization and its
embrace of perpetual war is a perfectly legitimate practice, however
messy it might be when measured against democratic principles, human
rights, and the most basic precepts of constitutional law. Lockdown as a
concept and strategy gains its meaning and legitimacy under specific
historical conditions informed by particular modes of ideology,
governance, and policies.
At a time when the United
States has embraced a number of anti-democratic practices extending from
state torture to the ruthless militarized logic of a Darwinian politics
of cruelty and disposability, the symbolic nature of the lockdown is
difficult to both ignore and remove from the authoritarian state that
increasingly relies on it as a form of policing and disciplinary
control. This becomes all the more obvious by the fact that the
lockdown in Boston appears to be a major overreach compared to the
response of other countries to terrorist acts. As Michael Cohen, a
correspondent for The Guardian, points out:
The actions
allegedly committed by the Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and
his brother, Tamerlan, were heinous. Four people dead and more than 100
wounded some with shredded and amputated limbs. But Londoners, who
endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that
America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They're
right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few
that we've seen previously in the United States. It was yet another
depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still
allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the "threat" of
terrorism.[xxvi]
Some would argue that locking down an
entire city because a homicidal killer was on the loose can be
attributed to how little experience Americans have with daily acts of
terrorism, unlike Israel, Baghdad, and other cities which are constantly
subject to such attacks. While there is an element of truth to such
arguments what is missing from this position is a different and more
frightening logic. Americans have become so indifferent to the
militarization of everyday life that they barely blink when an entire
city, school, prison, or campus is locked down. In a society in which
everyone is treated as a potential enemy combatant, misfit, villain, or
criminal “to be penalized, locked up or locked out,” it is not
surprising that institutions and policies are constructed that normalize
a range of anti-democratic practices.[xxvii] These would include
everything from invasive body searches by the police and the mass
incarceration of people of color to the ongoing surveillance and
securitization of schools, workplaces, the social media, Internet,
businesses, neighborhoods, and individuals, all of which mimic the
tactics of a police state.[xxviii] At a time when prison, poverty, and a
culture of cruelty and punishment inform each other and ensnare more
and more Americans, the “governing-through-crime” complex moves across
America like a fast-spreading virus.[xxix] In its wake, Mississippi
schoolchildren are handcuffed for not wearing a belt or the wrong color
shoes,[xxx] young mothers who cannot pay a traffic ticket are sent to
jail;[xxxi] and according to Michelle Alexander "More African American
men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in
1850, before the Civil War began."[xxxii]
These examples
are not merely anecdotal. They point to the alarming degree to which
lockdown becomes a central tool and organizing logic in controlling
those growing populations now considered disposable and subject to the
machinery of social and civil death. The racist grammars of state
violence that emerged during and in the aftermath of the lockdown of
Boston speak to a connection between the violence of disposability that
haunts American life and the increasing reliance on the state’s use of
force to implement and maintain its structures of inequality, abusive
power, and domination. Within this system of control and domination,
matters of moral, social, and political responsibility are silenced in
the name of securitization, even as efforts to pass legislation on gun
control are routinely displaced by the assertion of individual rights.
For instance, Americans rightly mourn the victims of the Boston
bombings but say nothing about the ongoing killing of hundreds of
children in the streets of Chicago largely due to the abundance of
high-powered weaponry and the gratuitous celebration of the spectacle of
violence in American culture. Nor is there a public outcry and mourning
for the tragic deaths of over 200 children killed as a result of drone
attacks launched by the Obama administration on Afghanistan and other
countries alleged to harbor terrorists. Evil, when deployed by the
American media and its complicit politicians, becomes at once too broad
and too narrow, but insistently self-serving.[xxxiii] Evil is always
lurking out there in some objectively defined place, fixed spaces, and
territories but never within those who seize upon the category to
distance themselves for the crimes they are complicity with.[xxxiv]
Accordingly,
the rush to lockdown must be understood within a wider military
metaphysics, informed by the dictates of an increasingly authoritarian
society, the ongoing war on terror, and the establishment of the
permanent warfare state, which now moves across and shapes a wide range
of sites and institutions. As a metaphysic, lockdown is an essential
mode of governance, ideology, faith, and practice that defines everyone
as a soldier, enemy combatant, or a willing client of the security
state. Among the most severe implications is that the war on terror
actively wages a war on the very possibility of judgment, informed
argument and decision, and critical agency itself. More specifically,
the lockdown mode is hostile to dissent, the questioning of authority,
and its disciplinary practices are steeped in a long history of abuse
extending from harassing prison inmates, turning schools into prisons,
transforming factories into slave labor camps, bullying student
protestors, criminalizing social activists, transforming black and brown
communities into armed camps, and treating public housing as a war
zone. It is a practice that emerges out of the glorification of war and
the appeal to a state of emergency and exception. Moreover, the values
and practices it legitimates blur the lines between the wars at home and
abroad and the ongoing investment in the culture of war and machineries
of death. Citizens are now produced to serve the national security
state and “civic virtues such as freedom, equality and citizenship are
threaded into the militarized national narrative of conquest and
conversion.”[xxxv]
Tom Englehardt has eloquently argued
that the National Security Complex, with its “$75 billion or more
budget” continues to accelerate and that “the Pentagon is, by now, a
world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other
power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s
might.”[xxxvi] Moreover, under the guise of the war on terror, the Bush
and Obama administrations have “lifted the executive branch right out
of the universe of American legality. They liberated it to do more or
less what it wished, as long as ‘war,’ ‘terrorism,’ or ‘security’ could
be invoked. Meanwhile, with their Global War on Terror well launched
and promoted as a multigenerational struggle, they made wartime their
property for the long run.”[xxxvii]
The lockdown mode
exalts military authority and thrives in a society that “can no longer
even expect our public institutions to do anything meaningful to address
meaningful problems.”[xxxviii] One indication of the militarization of
American society is the high social status now accorded to the military
itself and the transformation of soldiers into uniformly heroic
subjects and objects of national reverence. As Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri point out,
What is most remarkable is not the
growth in the number of soldiers in the United States but rather their
social stature...Military personnel in uniform are given priority
boarding on commercial airlines, and it is not uncommon for strangers to
stop and thank them for their service. In the United States, rising
esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing
militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated
revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military's own
incarceration systems, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic
practices border on if not actually constitute torture.[xxxix]
At
the same time, military values no longer operate within the exclusive
realm and marginalized space of the armed forces or those governing
structures dedicated to defense. On the contrary, the ideas, values,
profits, and war talk emerging from the national security sector shape
the everyday lives of civilians, creating what Charles Derber and Yale
Magrass call a militarized society, which, as they put it,
develops
a culture and institutions which program civilians for violence at home
as well as abroad. War celebrates the heroism of soldiers who use the
same style weapons and ammunition used by the mass shooters at Newtown,
Los Angeles or Columbine. A warrior society values its armed forces as
heroic protectors of freedom, sending a message that the use of guns
[and the organized production of violence are] morally essential.[xl]
Ulrich
Beck is right in arguing that the “Military is to democracy as fire is
to water.” He writes that military values define: "... the life of a
person [as ] worth less than the lump of flesh in which he dwells. If
democracy demands the individual’s will, the military demands his
subordination. If, in the former case, all power originates from the
people, then, in the latter all orders come from above. …Wherever one
looks, it is the same: democracy means openness, questioning,
power-sharing, transparent decisions. Military is a synonym for secret,
command, killing, strictly prohibited. There is no need to recite the
rest."[xli]
Military values of pride, heroism,
sacrifice, and valor in America have become one of the few sources of
civic pride. This helps to explain a few things. First, the public’s
silence in the face of not only the eradication and suppression of
civil liberties, public values and democratic institutions by the
expanding financial elite and military-industrial-complex. Second, and
related, the transformations of a number of institutions into
militarized spheres more concerned about imposing a punitive authority
rather than creating the conditions for the production of an engaged and
critical citizenry. Lockdown signals the rise of an anti-politics, the
rise of a new authoritarianism--an era of liminal drift in which
democracy does not merely get thinned out but begins to morph into
dangerous forms of militarization that do not support open dialogue,
debate, transparency, or public accountability. Since when are SWAT
teams viewed as the highest expression of national honor?
Militarism
thrives on the mass produced culture of fear and the spectacle of
violence. It abhors dissent and flourishes in an ever expanding web of
secrecy. Both Bush and Obama have used the cult of secrecy and the
threat of punishment to silence whistleblowers, allow those who have
committed torture under the government direction to go free, and refused
those who have been “interrogated” illegally to take their case to the
courts. In the age of illegal legalities, the rule of law disappears
into a vast abyss of secret memos, personal preferences, classified
documents, targeted killings, and secret missions conducted by special
operations forces. Tom Engelhardt rightly argues that America has
become a country wedded to the ethical-stripping fantasy that the rule
of law not only still prevails but applies to everyone. He writes:
"What
it means to be in such a post-legal world -- to know that, no matter
what acts a government official commits, he or she will never be brought
to court or have a chance of being put in jail -- has yet to fully sink
in. In reality, in the Bush and Obama years, the United States has
become a nation not of laws but of legal memos, not of legality but of
legalisms -- and you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it. The result?
Secret armies, secret wars, secret surveillance, and spreading state
secrecy, which meant a government of the bureaucrats about which the
American people could know next to nothing. And it’s all
‘legal.’"[xlii]
Pervasive secrecy in the age of the
lockdown suggests that the United States has more in common with
authoritarian regimes than with flourishing democracies. Yet the
American people still believe they live in what is touted in the
mainstream media and right-wing cultural apparatuses as a country that
represents the apogee of freedom and democracy. As Brian Terrell argues,
“prisons and the military, America's dominant institutions, exist not
to bring healing to domestic ills or relief from foreign threats but to
exacerbate and manipulate them for the profit of the wealthiest few, at
great cost and peril for the rest of us”?[xliii] Why aren’t people
pouring into the streets of American cities protesting the rise of the
prison and military as America’s dominant institutions?
What
will it take for the American public to connect the increasing
militarization of everyday life to the ways in which the
prison-industrial complex destroys lives[xliv] and for-profit
corporations have the power to put poor people in jails for being in
debt.[xlv] Or for that matter when school authorities punish young
children by putting them in seclusion rooms[xlvi] while on a larger
scale the U.S. government increasingly relies on solitary confinement in
detaining immigrants.[xlvii] When will the American people link images
of the “shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries …and
terrified survivors” to the reports of over 200 young children killed in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia as a result of drone attacks
launched by faux video gamers sitting in dark rooms in cities thousands
of miles away from their targets?[xlviii] In the face of the Boston
marathon bombings, the question that haunts the American public is not
about our capacity for compassion and solidarity for the victims of this
tragedy but how indifferent we are to the conditions that too readily
have turned this terrible tragedy into just another exemplary register
of the war on terror and a further legitimation for the
military-industrial-national security state.
Violence
and its handmaidens, militarism and military culture, have become
essential threads in the fabric of American life. We live in a culture
in which a lack of imagination is matched by diminishing intellectual
visions and a collective refusal to challenge injustices, however
blatant and corrosive they may be. For instance, a political system
completely corrupted by big money is barely the subject of sustained
analysis and public outrage. [xlix] The mortgaging of the future of many
young people to the incessant greed of casino capitalism and the
growing disparities in income and wealth does little to diminish the
public’s faith in the fraud of the free market.[l] The embarrassing
judgments of a judicial system that punishes the poor and allows the
rich to go free in the face of unimaginable financial crimes boggles the
mind. The challenge facing Americans is not the illusory dream of
winning the war on terror but those undemocratic economic, political,
and cultural forces that hold sway over American life, intent on
destroying civic society and any vestige of agency willing to challenge
them.
Young people, especially those in the
Occupy movement, the Quebec protesters, and the student resisters in
France, Chile, and Greece seem currently to represent the only hope we
have left in the United States and abroad for a display of political and
moral courage in which they are willing individually and collectively
to oppose the authority of the market and an expanding state of lockdown
while still raising fundamental questions about the project of
democracy and why they have been left out of it.[li] Salman Rushdie has
argued that political courage has become ambiguous and that the
American public, among others, has “become suspicious of those who take
a stand against the abuses of power or dogma” or even worse, are blamed
increasingly for upsetting people given their willingness to stand
against and challenge orthodoxy or bigotry.[lii] Gone, he argues, are
the writers and intellectuals who opposed Stalinism, capitalist tyranny,
and the various religious and ideological orthodoxies that transform
thinking and critically engaged critics into anti-intellectual
fundamentalists and political cowards. In short, willing accomplices of
the abused of power.
Of course, there are brave counter
examples of brave intellectuals and artists all over the world such as
Ai Weiwei, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hall, Arundhati Roy, and
others who do not tie their intellectual capital to the possibility of a
summer cruise, the rewards provided to those who are silent in the face
of injustices or sell their souls to defense intelligence agencies who
offer research funds. Nor do they participate in Fox News-like
apparatuses that offer anti-public intellectuals instant celebrity
status and substantial reward for demonstrating the pedagogical virtues
of keeping the public politically illiterate while making it easier to
push the informed and thoughtful to the margins of society. An Noam
Chomsky has pointed out, these are pseudo intellectuals whose most
distinguishing feature is not only “acceptance within the system of
power and a ready path to privilege, but also the inestimable advantage
of freedom from the onerous demands of thought, inquiry, and
argument.”[liii]
American culture powers a massive
disimagination machine in which historical memory is hijacked as
struggles by the oppressed disappear, the “state as the guardian of the
public interest is erased,”[liv] and the memory of institutions serving
the public good evaporates. At the same time reinscriptions of violence
define notions of a dangerous and hardened notion masculinity in which
men (and increasingly women) have to learn to be tough, deny
vulnerability, learn to punish and kill and experience it as pleasure,
endure humiliation in the face of military authority, and be willing to
sacrifice limbs, mental stability, body parts, and life itself. In
opposition to this culture and machinery of death, there is a need to
reclaim the memories of diverse democratic movements in order to
reimagine a politics capable of resurrecting democratic institutions of
governance, culture, and education; moreover, the educative nature of
politics has to be addressed in order to develop both new forms of
individual and collective agency and vast social networks that can
challenge the global concentration of economic and political power held
by a dangerous class of financial and wealthy elites.
Gayatri
Spivak has argued that “without a strong imagination, there can be no
democratic judgment, which can imagine something other than one’s own
well-being.”[lv] The current historical conjuncture dominated by the
discourse and institutions of neoliberalism and militarization present a
threat not just to the economy but to the very possibility of imagining
an alternative to a machinery of punishment, isolation, and death that
now reaches into every aspect of daily life. A generalized fear now
shapes American society, one that thrives on insecurity, precarity,
dread of punishment, and a concern with external threats. Any struggle
that matters will have to imagine and fight for a society in which it
becomes possible once again to dream the project of a substantive
democracy. This means, as Ulrich Beck has pointed out, looking for
politics in new spaces and arenas outside of traditional elections,
political parties, and “duly authorized agents.”[lvi] It suggests
developing public spaces outside of the regime of casino capitalism and
developing a type of counter politics, one engaged in the shaping of
society from the bottom up. Central to such a challenge is the
educational task of inquiring not only how democracy has been lost under
the current regime of neoliberal capitalism with its gangster rulers
and utter disregard for its production of organized irresponsibility and
injustice but also how the project of democracy can be retrieved
through the joint power and efforts of workers, young people, educators,
minorities, immigrants, and others. At the present historical moment,
lockdown culture is being disrupted in many societies. A fight for
democracy is emerging across the globe led by young people, workers, and
others unwilling to live in societies in which lockdown becomes an
organizing tool for social control and repression. The future of
democracy rests precisely with such groups both in the United States and
abroad who are willing to create new social movements built on a
powerful vision of the promise of democracy and the durable
organizations that make it possible.
***
This is an extended version of an essay that appeared earlier on Truth Out.
[i].Eduardo Galeano, “The Theatre of Good and Evil, La Jornada (September 21, 2001), translated by Justin Podur.
[ii] Andrew O’Hehir, “How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain,” Salon.com (April 20, 2013). Online:http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain/
[iii] Andrew O’Hehir, “How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain,” Salon.com, (April 20, 2013). Online:
[iv] Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 13.
[v]Michael Schwalbe, “The Lockdown Society Goes Primetime,” Counterpunch, (April 24, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/24/the-lockdown-society-goes-primetime/; see also, Josh Gerstein and Darren Samuelsohn, “Boston lockdown: The new normal?” Politico, (April 20, 2013). Online: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/boston-bombing-lockdown-suspect-search-90364_Page2.html and Wendy Kaminer, “‘We Don’t Cower in Fear’: Reconsidering the Boston Lockdown,” The Atlantic, (April 21, 2013). Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/we-don’t-cower-in-...
[vi]
Steven Rosenfeld, “America’s Focus on Terrorism Blinds Us To Everyday
Violence and Suffering,” Alternet, (April 22, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/americas-focus-terrorism-blinds-us-everyday-viol...
[vii] Guy Standing, The Precariat: A Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsury, 2011), p. 132.
[viii] William Rivers Pitt, “Random Notes From the Police State,” Truthout (April 23, 2013). Online:http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15895-random-notes-from-the-police-state
[ix]
On the the cost of American militarism and national security, see
Melvin R. Goodman, National Insecurity: the Cost of American Militarism
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2013).
[x] Igor Volsky,
“Top Opponent Of Immigration Reform Totally Loses It During Immigration
Hearing,” ThinkProgress (April 22, 2013). Online:http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/22/1901611/top-opponent-of-immigration-reform-totally-loses-it-during-immigration-hearing
[xi] David A. Graham, “ Shorter Lindsey Graham: Constitution? What Constitution?” The Atlantic (April 19, 2013). Online:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/shorter-lindsey-graham-constitution-what-constitution/275157/
[xii] Ibid., Graham, “ Shorter Lindsey Graham: Constitution? What Constitution?”
[xiii] Ulrich Beck, “The Silence of words and Political Dynamics in the World Risk Society,” Logos 1:4 (Fall 2002), p. 9.
[xiv]
On the question of racism and the response to the Boston marathon
bomging, see David Sirota, “The huge, unanswered questions post-Boston,”
Salon, (April 21, 2013). Online:http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/the_huge_unanswered_questions_post_boston/ and Andrew O’Hehir, “How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain,” Salon.com, (April 20, 2013). Online: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/how_boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_91...
[xv] Adam Serwer, “5 of the Worst Reactions to the Boston Manhunt,” Mother Jones, (April 19, 2013). Online: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/five-worst-reactions-boston-manhunt.
Some critics argued persuasively that the government response to the
Boston marathon bombing indicated the degree to which bloated
surveillance state failed. See: John Stanton, “US National Security
State Fails in Boston,” Dissident Voice, (April 20, 2013). Online:http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/us-national-security-state-fails-in-boston/
and Falguni A. Sheth and Robert E. Prasch, “In Boston, our bloated
surveillance state didn’t work,” Salon, (April 22, 2013). Online: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/in_boston_our_bloated_surveillance_state...
[xvi] Ibid., Serwer, “5 of the Worst Reactions to the Boston Manhunt.”
[xvii]
Katie McDonough, “New York state senator on Boston suspect: “Who
wouldn’t use torture on this punk?”,” Salon, (April 20, 2013) http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/new_york_state_senator_on_boston_suspect_who_wouldnt_use_torture_on_this_punk/
[xviii]
A Report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, How Ohio’s
Debtors’ Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities (Cleveland,
Ohio: ACLU, 2013). Online: http://www.acluohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/TheOutskirtsOfHope201...
[xix] Hannah Groch-Begley, “Fox Asks If Children Should Work For School Meals,” Media Matters, (April 25, 2013). Online: http://mediamatters.org/mobile/blog/2013/04/25/fox-asks-if-children-should-work-for-school-mea/193768
[xx]
See: Annette Fuentes, Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a
Jailhouse (New York: Verso, 2011); Erik Eckholm, “With Police in
Schools, More Children in Court,” The New York Times, (April 12, 2013).
Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/education/with-police-in-schools-more-...
[xxi]
I am drawing from the excellent article by Jonathan Turley, “10 Reasons
the U.S. is no longer the land of the free,” The Washington Post
(January 13, 2012). Online:http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-13/opinions/35440628_1_individual-rights-indefinite-detention-citizens
[xxii] Noam Chomsky, “Boston and Beyond: Terrorism at Home and Abroad,” In These Times (March 13, 2013). Online: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/17259-boston-and-beyond-t...
[xxiii] Cited in Bill Moyers, “The Boston Manhunt as a ‘Political’ event,” Truthout (April 25, 2013). Online:http://truth-out.org/news/item/16007-the-boston-manhunt-as-a-political-event
[xxiv]
One of the few who made provided this type of analysis was Michael
Schwalbe, “The Lockdown Society Goes Primetime,” Counterpunch, (April
24, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/24/the-lockdown-society-goes-primetime/
[xxv]
Jennifer Rubin, “Sen. Lindsey Graham: Boston bombing “is Exhibit A of
why the homeland is the battlefield” The Washington Post (April 19,
2013). Online:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/04/19/sen-lindsey-graham-boston-bombing-is-exhibit-a-of-why-the-homeland-is-the-battlefield
[xxvi]
Michael Cohen, “Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore
its daily gun deaths?” The Guardian (April 21, 2013). Online:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law/print
[xxvii] Guy Standing, The Precariat: A Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsury, 2011), p. 132.
[xxviii]
A number of excellent sources take up this issue, see, for example,
James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the
Eavesdropping on America (New York: Anchor Books, 2009); Zygmunt Baum
and David Lyons, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (London: Polity,
2013); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo
Navis Author Services, 2012). Relatedly, see Stephen Graham, Cities
Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2011).
[xxix]
Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime
Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
[xxx] Nicole Flatow,
“Report: Mississippi Children Handcuffed in School For Not Wearing a
Belt,” Nation of Change, (January 18, 2013). Online: http://www.nationofchange.org/report-mississippi-children-handcuffed-school-not-wearing-belt-1358527224; Suzi Parker, “Cops Nab 5-Year- Old for Wearing Wrong Color Shoes to School,” Take Part, (January 18, 2013). Online: http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/01/18/cops-nab-five-year-old-wearin...
[xxxi]
Alex Kane, “Miss a Traffic Ticket, Go to Jail? The Return of Debtor
Prison (Hard Times, USA),” Alternet, (February 3, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/miss-traffic-ticket-go-jail-return-debtor-prison...
[xxxii]
Cited in Dick Price, “More Black Men Now in Prison System Then Were
Enslaved”, LA Progressive, (March 31, 2011) online at: http://www.zcommunications.org/more-black-men-now-in-prison-system-than-...
[xxxiii] See, for instance, Robert Scheer, “277 Million Boston Bombings,” Truthdig, (April 23, 2013) http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/277_million_boston_bombings_20130423...
[xxxiv]
Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of
Sensitivity in liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2013), p. 7.
[xxxv]
Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can you See? The
Semiotics of the Military in Hawai’i (Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999). P. 155.
[xxxvi] Tom Engelhardt, “Washington’s Militarized Mindset,” TomDispatch, (July 5, 2012). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175564/
[xxxvii] Tom Engelhardt, “The American Lockdown State,” TomDispatch, (February 5, 2013) http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175646/
[xxxviii]
Steven Rosenfeld, “What Is the Cause of Violent and Senseless Massacres
in America?” AlterNet, (July 24th, 2012). Online: http://www.alternet.org/story/156415/what_is_the_cause_of_violent_and_senseless_massacres_in_america
[xxxix] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo Navis Author Services, 2012), p. 22.
[xl] Charles Derber and Yale Magrass, “When Wars Come Home,” Truthout, (February 19, 2013). Onlike: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/14539-when-wars-come-home
[xli] Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). P. 78.
[xlii] Tom Engelhardt, “The American Lockdown State,” TomDispatch, (February 5, 2013) http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175646/
[xliii]
Brian Terrell, “Drones, Sanctions, and the Prison Industrial Complex,”
Monthly Review Magazine, (April 24, 2013). Online: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/terrell240413.html
[xliv]
See: Mark Karlin, “How the Prison-Industrial Complex Destroys Lives:
An Intterview with Marc Mauer,” Truthout (April 26, 2013). Online:http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/16003-the-prison-industrial-complex-the-pac-man-that-destroys-lives.
There are many excellent resources on the subject, see, for instance,
Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and
Empire Interviews with Angela Y. Davis (New York: Seven Stories, 2005);
Marc Bauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 2006);
Anne-marie-Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Michelle Alexander,
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New
York: New Press, 2012).
[xlv] Ethan Bronner, “Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation,” New York Times (July 2, 2012), p. A1.
[xlvi] Bill Lichtenstein, “A Terrifying Way to Discipline Children,” New York Times, (September 8, 2012). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/a-terrifying-way-to-discipline-children.html?_r=0
[xlvii]
Ian Urbina and Catherine Rentz, “Immigrants Held in Solitary Cells,
Often for Weeks,” New York Times, (March 23, 2013). Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/us/immigrants-held-in-solitary-cells-often-for-weeks.html?pagewanted=all
[xlviii]
Barry Lando, “The Boston Marathon Bombing, Drones and the Meaning of
Cowardice,” Counterpunch, (April 16, 2013). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/16/the-boston-marathon-bombing-drones-and-the-meaning-of-cowardice
[xlix] Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) and Hardt and Negri, Declaration.
[l]
Peter Edelman, So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in
America (New York: The New Press, 2012); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of
Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012); see also the brilliant article
on iequality by Michael Yates, “The Great Inequality,” Monthly Review,
(March 1, 2012) http://monthlyreview.org/2012/03/01/the-great-inequality
[li] See, Henry A. Giroux, Youth in Revolt (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013).
[lii] Salman Rushdie, “Wither Moral Courage,” New York Times (April 27, 2013). P. SR5.
[liii] Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), p. 21.
[liv] Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 1.
[lv]
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Changing Reflexes: Interview with Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak,” Works and Days, 55/56: Vol. 28, 2010, pp. 1-2.
[lvi] Ulrich Beck, Democracy Without Enemies (London: Polity Press, 1998), p. 38.
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at
McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His
newest book is: Education and the Crisis of Public Values (Peter Lang)
and Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of
Disposability (Paradigm Publishers) will be published in 2012). His web
site is www.henryagiroux.com.
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