Cruelty & Invisiblity

In Athens I got to begin some good conversations with folks about spectacle and how state violence becomes everyday. This article by Henry Giroux (thx, Nick B!) captures this sense of how everyday cruelty is produced.

Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a
culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to
corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

What Giroux captures is feeling really visceral to me on this road trip when military bases and detention centers pop out of nowhere and just as quickly recede, and when a friend tells me about a white mob @ town hall meeting on health care. What kind of health system could possibly be created when some politicians are working "to make sure the health plan did not become a magnet drawing new illegal immigrants to the United States"? The nativist, racist animus that would see spending $8 million to keep 8 undocumented people off the health care rolls speaks not only to a sort of blind fury, but also to the many times in the past when white folks have cut off their own noses to make sure other folks don't have basic services.