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| Waterboarding scene in “Zero Dark Thirty.” |
On 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. The
United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is
viewed as virtue, mass incarceration the default welfare program and chief
mechanism to “institutionalize obedience.”[1] 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, Hilary Clinton’s much
publicized call for controlling the gun lobby and background checks, however
well intentioned, have nothing to say about a culture of lawlessness and
violence reproduced by the government, the financial elites, the defense
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 ample
reporting of gun violence, what has flown under the radar is that in the last
three years 1 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 [the United States] in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28
minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week.”[2] 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.[3] 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 and packing heat 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.[4] 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 behavior; 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:
This suggests that there is an institutional
insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control, for which
individual interactions with the police are the means. Indeed, with their
command position over people, the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing
individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the
militarist principle. 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. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or
insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed
on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of
democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat.[5]
Violence feeds on
corporate controlled disimagination machines that celebrate it as a sport while
upping the pleasure quotient for the public. 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 militarize 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.”[6] 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
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.”[7] 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 defense establishment. As Gabriel Kolko observes
such war-like investments “reflect a pathology and culture that is expressed in
spending more money regardless”[8] of
how it contributes to running up the debt or for that matter thrives on “the
energies of the dead.”[9] 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 neighborhoods, streets and schools year in and year out.”[10]
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.”[11] 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.[12] 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-defense 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 standardized — and also less
dangerous. Perhaps they offer an escape from the boredom and regimentation of
work and consumption.[13]
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 provide 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.[14] 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.[15] 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.[16] 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. In a world in which nothing matters but a
survival-of-the-fittest ethos, pleasure and gratification slide into boredom,
shielding a pornography of violence from any sense of moral and public
accountability.
Please continue this article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/25/americas-addiction-to-violence-2/
Please also read Henry's America At War With Itself: https://www.amazon.com/America-Itself-City-Lights-Media/dp/0872867323
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