Henry A. Giroux - The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond Americas Disimagination Machine

PRAISE FOR HENRY A. GIROUX

Giroux lays out a blistering critique of an America governed by the tenets of a market economy.... He cites French philosopher Georges Didi-Hubermans concept of the disimagination machine to describe a culture and pedagogical philosophy that short-circuits citizens ability to think critically, leaving the generation now reaching adulthood unprepared for an inhospitable world. Picking apart the current malaise of 21st-century digital disorder, Giroux describes a world in which citizenship is replaced by consumerism and the functions of engaged governance are explicitly beholden to corporations.

Publishers Weekly

In terms that are both eloquent and prophetic, Henry Giroux succeeds in raising the ante in the current debate about Americas madness. His concept of disimagination captures the emotional as well as the material dimensions of the Western crisis. Beyond economic distress, Giroux paints a far more comprehensive portrait of the alarming descent into violence that afflicts our societies. Yet, as is Girouxs wont, he does not leave us hanging. The final section of the book is a ringing affirmation of hope and struggle for the revival of the radical imagination.

Stanley Aronowitz, author of Taking it Big: C.Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals

One of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think.

Toronto Star

Once again Henry Giroux shows why he is one of the most important public intellectuals in the world today... he positively reinforces his commitment to a critical pedagogy that refuses to accept the inevitability of the abuses of power that appear right before our eyes.

Brad Evans, founder/director, Histories of Violence Project, University of Bristol

Henry Giroux is one of our most important public intellectuals. Though he vividly describes the privatization of compassion, the rapid decline of higher educations commitment to democracy and shared notions of the public good, the force of Girouxs writings shows us we are not alone and there is power in his arguments of resistance.

David H. Price, professor of anthropology, St. Martins University

The Violence
of Organized Forgetting

THINKING BEYOND AMERICAS
DISIMAGINATION MACHINE

Henry A. Giroux

Open Media Series | City Lights Books

Copyright 2014 by Henry A. Giroux

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 9780872866195

Open Media Series editor: Greg Ruggiero

Cover design by John Yates at Stealworks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giroux, Henry A.

The violence of organized forgetting : thinking beyond Americas disimagination machine / Henry A. Giroux.

pages cm. (City lights open media)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87286-619-5 (paperback)

1. Political cultureUnited States. 2. Corporate powerUnited States. 3. Mass mediaPolitical aspectsUnited States. 4. Power (Social sciences)United States. 5. Social valuesPolitical aspectsUnited States. 6. Collective memoryPolitical aspectsUnited States. I. Title.

JK1726.G57 2014

306.20973dc23

2014006179

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

www.citylights.com

To Susan, again and again
To Rob, Ray, and Reno, my working-class comrades

Contents

INTRODUCTION

AMERICAS DESCENT INTO MADNESS

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war.

John Le Carr

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 spin stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsiblestories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging their pedagogical influence under the glossy veneer of entertainment. Violence now offers the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, or offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest inor compassion and responsibility forothers. Anti-public intellectuals who dominate the screen and aural cultures urge us to spend more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, while producing a depoliticized Congressional lobbyists hired by big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be re-created at home in order to market military-grade surveillance tools and weapons to a full range of clients, from gated communities to privately owned for-profit prisons.

The stories we tell about ourselves no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. The landscape of American politics no longer features towering figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose stories interwove moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough. A culture that once opened our imagination now disables it, overwhelming the populace with nonstop marketing that reduces our sense of agency to the imperatives of ownership, shopping, credit, and debt. 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,

These stories reciting the neoliberal gospel are all the more powerful because they seem to defy the publics desire for rigorous accountability, critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue for right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to satisfy the content dictates of corporate media advertisers. Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine both greed and indifference, encouraging massive disparities in wealth, health, nutrition, education, housing, and debt. In addition, they sanctify the workings of the market, forging a new political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rands dystopian society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatchers nonfiction invocation of the mantra of the wealthy: there is nothing beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.

The stories that now dominate the American landscape, and of which I write in the following pages, embody what stands for common sense among market and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the disadvantaged, elderly, and sick; attacks on womens reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter-ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; and an ongoing attack on unions, social provisions, and the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone they touchfrom the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions at home forced into underemployment, foreclosure, poverty, or prison.