Youth in Revolt

Reclaiming a Democratic Future

Henry A. Giroux

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317248576
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Sociologie

Recently, American youth have demonstrated en masse about a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. Youth in Revolt chronicles the escalating backlash against dissent and peaceful protest while exposing a lack of governmental concern for society's most vulnerable populations. Henry Giroux carefully documents a wide range of phenomena, from pervasive violent imagery in our popular culture to educational racism, censorship, and the growing economic inequality we face. He challenges the reader to consider the hope for democratic renewal embodied by Occupy Wall Street and other emerging movements. Encouraging a capacity for critical thought, compassion, and informed judgment, Giroux's analysis allows us to rethink the very nature of what democracy means and what it might look like in the United States and beyond.

CHAPTER 1
Countermemory and the Politics of Loss after 9/11

Violence, the War on Youth, and the Limits of the Social

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.

—Antonio Gramsci

The barely audible whisper protesting the extreme measures taken by military and state authorities against peaceful demonstrators in 2011 and 2012 becomes more intelligible, though no less disturbing, when considered in tandem with the decadeslong global campaign to legitimate violence, retaliation, and force as “just measures” in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States. The national security policies of the Bush/Cheney administration in conjunction with the dominant media’s role in desensitizing the American public toward forms of mass cruelty worked together to accelerate the militarizing processes that were already in place before 9/11. The response to the despicable actions of terrorists against the United States was manipulated to sanction unthinkable human and civil rights violations, terrorism, surveillance, and acts of torture that any properly democratic state would have denounced. As if handing to terrorists the evidence they required to justify their heinous acts, the United States-turned-warfare state exposed to the world its true face as a potential instrument of global oppression capable of unrelenting violence. Yet, there was a moment when other choices could have been made that would have taken the United States down a very different path. Now, with economic devastation expanding the dark shadows that continue to enshroud the United States, it becomes an important and purposeful act to remember the light that shone out in the days following 9/11—the resilience, social consciousness, and collective hope of the American people—as a sign that things could and still can be otherwise.

In the hours and days that bled out from the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the unfolding sense of collective vulnerability and loss drew many Americans and others together in a fragile blend of grief, sacrifice, compassion, and a newfound respect for the power of common purpose and commitment. The translation of such traumatic events into acts of public memory and memorializing is crucial, though deeply unsettling. In spite of the militarized moment in which we now live, we must remind ourselves that traumatic events not only bring about states of emergency and the suspension of civil norms and order. They also can, and did, give birth to enormous political, ethical, and social possibilities. Yet, such enlightened moments for the American public proved fleeting. A society has to move with deliberate speed from the act of witnessing its collective pain to the practice of responsible memorializing—in other words, to make self-reflection an integral part of the effort to rethink what politics, ethics, and civic engagement should mean after such a senseless horror as 9/11. Ten years after that tragic day, the struggle to remember and reclaim those moments in good faith is being constantly challenged, and in ways that few of us would have dared to imagine a decade earlier.

We have learned, and continue to learn, about the high cost of living in a society with an overabundance of violence and inequality and an impoverished supply of long-term commitments and permanent bonds. We live in a hyper-market-driven, fast-paced society of consumers committed only to throwing caution to the wind, whose merits are measured in profit margins and gross domestic product. As New York Times writer Stephen Holden stated, “the modern corporation [has become] a sterile Darwinian shark tank in which the only thing that matters is the bottom line.”¹ As the United States increasingly produces social forms that too quickly exceed their use-by date, uncertainty and precariousness shape every aspect of daily life. Millions no longer have the satisfaction of a decent job or the security that comes with decent health care, pensions, and vacations. For many Americans, especially young people, alienation and cultural dissatisfaction include but go far beyond “joblessness and falling economic prospects.”² Despair often turns into cynicism, which undercuts the development of any viable opposition. Under such circumstances, memory is often stripped of its responsibility to justice and becomes flat and self-serving, if not expendable when inconvenient. As the gravity of loss is divorced from both the past and the present, memory relinquishes its claim upon social institutions, politics, democracy, and the future. Daily experience in the age of instant pleasure, living for the moment, and the compulsive pursuit of materialism is no longer mediated by our vulnerability or responsibility as a function of memory. Instead, memory is rendered irrelevant by either the pressing demands of consumerism for the privileged few or the cruel reality of lost jobs, smashed hopes, and hard lives for the majority.³

In a society that increasingly punishes civic engagement and disavows the greater good, the web of human bonds is weakened through an emphasis on the socially adrift, free-roaming individual. One consequence is a growing disdain for community and a vanishing sense of any moral and political obligation to care for the fate and well-being of the other. How else to explain Republican congressman Ron Paul’s comment during a Republican Party presidential debate in 2011 when he stated that letting the uninsured die rather than providing them with government health insurance is “what freedom is all about”?⁴ In this instance, a culture of cruelty not only appears as a legitimate form of political discourse but does so with no apologies and a great deal of enthusiasm. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, we are witnessing “a weakening of democratic pressures, a growing inability to act politically, [and] a massive exit from politics and from responsible citizenship.”⁵ Politics is emptied of its democratic vitality as more and more Americans make an obsession out of creating wealth, dismiss the welfare state as a pathology, define government as the problem, and reduce popular culture to traffic in pain, humiliation, and spectacular violence. In this instance, “loss tends to be an experience we are advised to ‘get past.’”⁶

In the decade after 9/11, it has become clear that loss, memory, and remembrance share a wary embrace. Remembrance can become dysfunctional, erasing the most important elements of history and trivializing what survives of the event through either crude appeals to an untroubled patriotism or a crass commercialization that reduces 9/11 as an object of remembrance to just another commodity. But remembrance can also recover what has been sacrificed to this historical amnesia. It can produce difficult thoughts, bringing forth not only painful memories of personal loss and collective vulnerability but also new understandings of how specific events infuse the present and become a force for how one imagines the future, including, to quote Roger Simon, how “one imagines oneself, one’s responsibility to others, and one’s civic duty to a larger democratic polity and range of diverse communities.”⁷ Memory can be an instigator of both despair and hope, often in ways in which the division between desperation and optimism becomes blurred. The spectacularized shock and violence of 9/11 ruptured an arrogant and insular period in American history that had proclaimed the unrivaled triumph of national progress and the end of ideology, history, and conflict—all the while imposing an unbearable experience of loss, grief, sorrow, and pain on large segments of the world’s population.

A decade later, the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon require of us not only the noble burden of remembering the victims of the barbarous violence of 9/11 but also the questioning of what survives from that moment of intense pain and fear when the very possibility of community, solidarity, and compassion returned, however briefly, from the exile imposed by decades of neoliberal governance. What does it mean to transform the experience of loss after 9/11 in order to suggest that what we witnessed for a short time in the days following the terrorist attack was a revitalization of both civic responsibility and democratic public life?⁸ I think it is fair to say that in the period immediately following 9/11, the American public was provided with a glimpse of what Etienne Balibar has called “the insurrectional element of democracy” in which “the very possibility of a community among humans” was put into high relief while at the same time the essence of democratic politics and the formative culture that makes it possible appeared to hang in the balance.⁹

Mourning was fused with a renewed sense of idealism immediately following that shocking moment in history. One can hear it in the words of a young man named Jedediah Purdy, who wrote that it had been “amazing to see how in these past few days we—who have been so used to living with our selves front and center—are suddenly all aware that a common condition comes first. We have not been flip, self-involved, needlessly sarcastic or focused on small divisions. We have all been looking for ways to help. All of us. That is new to us.”¹⁰ From the smoldering ruins of 9/11 emerged a deep embrace of civic values and a newfound sense of global solidarity. Shared vulnerability elicited compassion rather than contempt for those of us too long marooned on Survivor Island. The galloping materialistic obsessions, rampant greed, antigovernment rhetoric, and Gilded Age cruelty of the 1980s and 1990s gave way to notions of shared sacrifice and collective hope. For a fleeting moment, the social as a democratic and communal register came alive in both a public and an existential sense. The general abandonment of community, public values, and public goods that had advanced in force and intensity since the Reagan era appeared to be in retreat next to a newly rediscovered sense of solidarity and the common good. Public values took precedence over private interests. Communal concerns were given priority over the materialistic fixations of the market and a fatuous celebrity culture. Public servants, especially the 9/11 firefighters and police officers, were praised for their unflagging courage and unwavering commitment to saving lives. And the Bush regime was forced to expand its mandate, providing security not only for the corporate sector but also for the general public in terms of both physical protection and crucial public services. The United States had become the object of near universal goodwill; its democratic ideals and spirit of leadership resonated with the deepest and most profound elements of an embattled global democracy. The French newspaper Le Monde proclaimed in banner headlines, “WE ARE ALL AMERICANS .”¹¹

Echoes of this lost idealism are evident in the accounts of those public servants in whose memories the horrors and the heroism of 9/11 will be forever etched. One such story recounts, ten years later, how a sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice made its appearance, however briefly. It is a story told by former New York City firefighter Ray Pfeifer. Right after the Twin Towers fell, Pfeifer worked at the World Trade Center site for seven months amid “a choking dust cloud—a brew of pulverized cement and known carcinogens such as asbestos, benzene, pcbs, and dioxin”—what he would later call a “toxic soup.” Nine years later, he was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer that eventually spread to his bones and required the removal of his leg and hip and a kidney. Pfeifer believed his cancer was related to the exposure from his work at ground zero. When asked by a CBS news correspondent if he regretted his rescue efforts after 9/11, he replied, “I’d do it again because I was searching for my buddies.” He added, “I had a good friend of mine’s son ask me, ‘Ray are we ever going to find my dad.’ . .. This is what this kid said to me. And I think we gave a lot of closure to a lot of families.”¹²

What seems exceptional in Pfeifer’s statement is not only his deep sense of social responsibility but the dignity and compassion he expressed over the suffering of a child in search of his lost father. I say “exceptional” because that period of unselfish being-for-others, that moment of hope and possibility following 9/11, quickly came to an end as the Bush/Cheney regime pushed the United States into an abyss of militarism, fear, insecurity, and what Alex Honneth has termed “a failed sociality.”¹³ David Simpson has persuasively argued that 9/11 became “a pretext for political opportunism and military adventurism [in which] in less than two years we went from the fall of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon to the invasion of Iraq, a process marked by propagandist compression and manufactured consent so audacious as to seem unbelievable, except that it happened.”¹⁴

Our collective fall from grace is now well known. Instead of being a threshold to a different future and a restored democratic faith, the decade following 9/11 became an era of buried memories and the monumentalization of what Joan Didion contemptuously called “fixed ideas.”¹⁵ Rather than initiating a period of questioning and learning, the war on terror morphed into a war without end, inspiring torture and abuses at home and abroad, all eventually revealed in an elaborate fabric of legal illegality in which practices that violated human rights were legitimated through the rewriting of the law itself. America’s status as a symbol of freedom that had once elicited worldwide respect gave way to a culture of fear, mass hysteria, and state secrecy. As the Bush administration waged war overseas, it unleashed equally destructive market forces at home—all camouflaged by a poisonous propaganda machine in which pressing public issues morphed into a catalog of individual failings and an excuse to disparage an overreliance on the state as a pathological culture of dependency. Finance capital replaced human capital, and the mechanisms of governance were now controlled by the apostles of market orthodoxy. Less than 1 percent controlled almost half of all wealth while “45 percent of U.S. residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children.”¹⁶ Economics was detached from ethics and managed to ignore any vestige of social costs. Youth, by definition vulnerable and dependent, became a deficient and dangerous population. The formative culture necessary to produce the next generation of critical citizens collapsed into a rampaging commercialism as citizens were defined exclusively as consumers, or excluded altogether. At the same time, the notion of the social was increasingly seen as a liability rather than a strength.

Shared sacrifice, compassion for others, and acting in concert as a basic condition of American life quickly expired under the Bush/Cheney administration. As Frank Rich reminds us, “the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his ‘hope’ that ‘they make no sacrifice whatsoever’ beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to ‘get down to Disney World in Florida’ and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism.”¹⁷ In the face of unimaginable loss, fear, and insecurity, Bush urged the American public to get a grip and go shopping. That wasn’t the worst of it. What has emerged in the last decade is an intensification of many antidemocratic forces that were only briefly interrupted by the outpouring of compassion and solidarity following 9/11. In many ways, as one New York Times reporter put it, “the New Normal [following 9/11] was very much like the Old Normal.”¹⁸

In fact, the forces that have undermined democracy since the 1980s received new life under the Bush administration. These included the growing power of corporations in American politics; an intensified attack on unions; the ascendency of the military-security state; a persistent and growing racism, especially targeting immigrants and Muslims; the suppression of civil rights under the Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act; the consolidation of the punishing state and the mass incarceration of people of color; the rise of a culture of precariousness and fear; the attack on the social state, especially provisions for young people; the increasing privatization of public life; growing support for a cutthroat form of economic Darwinism and its celebration of cruelty; and the reformulation under the Bush/Cheney regime of politics as an extension of war, both abroad and on the domestic front.

In a startling editorial published in 2007, the New York Times declared that in the years since 9/11, “lawless behavior has become standard practice,” most evident in the attempt on the part of high-ranking government leaders “to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators.”¹⁹ The editorial went further, arguing that “the White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws throug...