Henry Giroux is an American Canadian who specializes in education. In his 2014 book “The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Thinking beyond America’s Disimagination Machine,” he tries to explain all the growing problems in modern (pre-Trump) American politics, their causes, and his solution which involves the telling of different stories. In that sense his book is an example of his solution. First Giroux tells the human hell of the problems as a pedagogical tool to educate. The second part involves expanding the imagination beyond what is given and to see how things could be – this is the failing job of schools and universities.
The problems in American politics are huge in number and significance. In the book the author touches on many more but spends most of his time on: 1) popular stories on TV and movies that are “filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem” 2) news media that “spin stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible—stories that celebrate power and demonize victims” 3) violence as the most effective and glorified strategy for all problems, 4) a “hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in—or compassion and responsibility for—others.” 5) a general anti-intellectualism, 6) making “a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain”, 7) consumerism, 8) the militarization of police forces, 9) the prevalence of big money in politics. All of this is manifestly obvious in the stories we hear and these stories provide the ground for what is normal, tolerable, and thinkable. It is in the medium of storytelling that all evil and good can be turned into their opposite. In the stories we tell we can also undo the harm that is perpetuated with bad stories that are entertaining and exciting but very harmful to the body politic.
These problems in American politics are perpetuated by a disimagination machine that cranks out stories that are helpful to the neoliberal world view. Giroux “argues that a politics of disimagination has emerged, in which stories, images, institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation are undermining our capacity to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics, and collective resistance. The ‘disimagination machine’ is both a set of cultural apparatuses—extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture—and a public pedagogy that function primarily to short-circuit the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue, or, put simply, to become critically engaged citizens of the world.” The author gives many concrete examples, three more general ones are 1) the “script of cost-benefit analysis” in which every perversion of the good is justified and determined by monetary value as the highest form of value, in other words if it makes money it has to be good, 2) where the “creative powers of citizenship are being redefined as a narrow set of consumer choices.” This means that our freedom and discourse is only useful for determining the best deal, 3) playing the fear card or “insecurity by design” in which people are “urged to adjust to survival mode, be resilient, and bear the weight of the times by themselves—all of which is code for a process of depoliticization.”
Neo-liberalism is the great enemy and it is not just an economic theory. To best understand what neo-liberalism is and what is power is, Giroux brings up Antonio “Gramsci’s notion of conjuncture…it provides both a conceptual opening into the forces shaping a particular moment and a framework for merging theory and strategy. Conjuncture in this case refers to a period in which different elements of society come together to produce a unique fusion of the economic, social, political, ideological, and cultural in a relative settlement that becomes hegemonic in defining reality. That fusion is today marked by a neoliberal conjuncture.” Where the five forces of economy, society, politics, ideology and culture combine to create what we understand as intelligible truth. The most obvious example is in the military. The author speaks of a “military metaphysics” which is “a complex of forces that includes corporations, defense industries, politicians, financial institutions, and universities. War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reaches into every aspect of society.” But this military metaphysics can also be seen in the metaphors we live by, the games we play, and some of the values we espouse when we think them to be universal and/or necessary. “State violence—particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations—is now justified as part of a state of exception in which a ‘political culture of hyper-punitiveness’ has become normalized.”
Where America is today was an ideological extreme position. And even now, especially in the Republican Party extreme ideology is threatening the last bits of democracy. 1) They openly want less government and model themselves on the corporation – they are answerable to the most wealthy – corporations not citizens. 2) They want to privatize everything and take away the places for critical thinking and replace it with the instrumental thinking of corporations. 3) Government austerity and the disintegration of public and social programs – or contracting them out to corporations. “One consequence of this attack on the welfare state and the social contract has been the emergence of a market fundamentalism that trivializes democratic values and public concerns. In other words growth at any cost is got to be good and damn democracy if it gets in the way. 4) “The fourth feature of the new extremism is its use of the media and other cultural apparatuses to promote a neo-liberal form of public pedagogy engaged in the production of identities, desires, and values that disparage any mode of sociality that supports the common good, public values, and shared responsibilities.”
Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina that hit the USA drove home the new reality of the disposable class. They are the groups of people (not white and not rich) who can be safely ignored. Neoliberalism does not have to worry too much about them during a natural crisis as was evident in some neighbourhoods and cities. “For all those affect by Hurricane Sandy, wealth mattered in a number of ways that exacerbated the storm’s devastation. The privileged elite could draw from savings or strong credit to move into hotels, fly out of town, take off from work, pay for immediate tree removal and emergency responses….Not so for those who lacked wealth or resources. The area’s poor—often caricatured as parasites feeding on the body politic—had to stay…while the working class provided the infrastructure for fighting fires, policing the streets, cooking food in the city’s elite restaurants, driving taxis providing door services, and taking care of the children of the rich.” Those that cannot provide a service to the rich are part of a disposable class who must take care of themselves but against whom the deck is stacked. If they try to fend for themselves in the midst of a natural crises (ie if they loot) they are labeled and punished. The neoliberal narrative spins a story that criminalizes social problems to the detriment of the disposable class.
A tipping point has passed in the US in which the democracy has become a sham due to neglect. The fact that the US president has the legal power to kill American citizens without due process (without trial or without giving the accused the right to defend him- or herself) and that he acquired this power without any major objection from the American people was the vanishing point of US democracy. This first happened under Bush and was accelerated during Obama’s term. “The culture of ambient violence, manufactured fear, and invasive surveillance takes a toll politically and ethically on any democratic society, especially when challenging them is portrayed as suspicious, unpatriotic, gateway behavior that could lead to serious crime in the same way that sipping beer might eventually lead to injecting heroin.”
The lockdown of Boston after the attack on the Boston Marathon should be a teaching moment. When violence like that hits other cities like Belfast or Beirut with much more experience in dealing with terrorist violence they don’t lockdown. Their people will have none of that. They have more “primitive” ways of finding out from the community who committed the acts. In Boston, civil liberties were suspended without protest. This simple exercise of power is possible as the result of a lack of community, a lack of shared national ideals, and a lack of imagination. In the US the “notion of security is limited to concerns over personal safety and the fear of attacks by terrorists, rather than the imminent dangers posed by predatory corporate enrichment practices, the shredding of the safety net for millions of Americans, the imprisonment of one out of every hundred Americans, or the transformation of public schools into adjuncts of the punishing and surveillance state”.
The stories we tell are the problem and the solution. One new kind of story is of the bad and the harm that has been done – these stories must never be forgotten because when they are the expediency of the moment takes over that is all hell takes over. Education must continue to tell of the atrocities committed by the US. The second half is to tell the positive stories that enliven democracy, the community, and the public good and that expand the imagination of what is possible. “In an educated democracy, society would not revolve around the corporation but around the school, the library, the plaza, the airwaves, the parks and other non-commercial institutions that defend and advance the health, intelligence, environment, and egalitarian processes necessary for society to thrive.”