Charting America's (And Our Own) Descent Into Madness

He's one of the most under-celebrated sages of this era but that doesn't stop American Henry Giroux from dispensing invaluable pearls of wisdom and insight.  He currently is Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster.  Perhaps from Canada he's able to more clearly chart his native land's descent into madness.

America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.  The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.   Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.  Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible.  And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

...The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. There are no towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories interweave moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough.  Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it, overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of agency to the imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a permanent war economy.

...All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.” That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people.  Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they inflict on Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.  

It is genuinely painful to read this, mainly because it is so true and because the social contagions of America eventually spread north.   Our FinMin, Jimbo "The Gnome" Flaherty, entertains top Canadian CEOs at a retreat every summer where they deliver their wish lists that are invariably anchored on the notion of staying competitive with the Americans which is a twisted form of "keeping up with the Joneses."  If America shreds its social safety net, so too must Canada in the name of remaining competitive.  If America skews its tax code to the benefit of the richest of the rich, so too must Canada in the name of competitiveness.  If America tolerates rampant inequality, so too must Canada.   As long as it's masked in the guise of competitiveness it is just and right somehow.

We need to see it as a lung cancer patient persisting in a pack-a-day habit.  Should we then take up a pack-a-day habit  - in the name of competitiveness, of course?   Yet this is what appeals to our social darwinist prime minister's every instinct.  It is the rancid marrow that fills his bones.

Would that Henry Giroux was writing policy for Tom Mulcair or Trudeau the Lesser.   For we need minds like Giroux's to inform our political conscience, to rehabilitate our collective sensibilities. We need every Giroux we can find that we might finally wake up to the war that is being waged against us and understand what we can and must do to fight back.