and organized violence that circulates through various registers of commercial culture extending from television shows and Hollywood movies to violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon. The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of compliance: silenced intellectuals and a fully entertained population distracted from the living nightmare of correctable injustices all around them. There is also a need for subjects who can be shaped to derive pleasure in the commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty. Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique. Very little appears to escape the infantilizing influence and moral vacuity of those who run the market. Film, television, video games, children’s toys, cartoons, and even high fashion are all shaped to normalize a society centered on war and violence. For instance, in 2013, following disclosure of NSA and PRISM spying revelations, the New York Times ran a story on a new line of fashion with the byline: “Stealth Wear Aims to Make a Tech Statement.”62
As the pleasure principle becomes less constrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations. Advanced by commercialized notions of aggression and cruelty, a culture of violence has become commonplace in a social order in which pain, humiliation, and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles endlessly circulated through new and old forms of media and entertainment. But the ideology and the economy of pleasure it justifies are also present in the material relations of power that have intensified since the Reagan presidency, when a shift in government policies first took place and set the stage for the contemporary reemergence of unchecked torture and state violence under the Bush-Cheney regime. Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultra-rich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and eliminating all viable public spheres—whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation, or any other aspect of a democratic culture that addresses the needs of the common good.
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.63 Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it appears unchecked by any sense of conscience or morality. How else to explain right-wing billionaire Charles Koch insisting that the best way to help the poor is to get rid of the minimum wage? In response, journalist Rod Bastanmehr pointed out that “Koch didn’t acknowledge the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, but he did make sure to show off his fun new roll of $100-bill toilet paper, which was a real treat for folks everywhere.”64 It gets worse. Ray Canterbury, a Republican member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, insisted that “students could be forced into labor in exchange for food.”65 In other words, students could clean toilets, do janitorial work, or other menial chores in order to pay for their free school breakfast and lunch programs. In Maine, Republican Representative Bruce Bickford has argued that the state should do away with child labor laws. His rationale speaks for itself. He writes: “Kids have parents. Let the parents be responsible for the kids. It’s not up to the government to regulate everybody’s life and lifestyle. Take the government away. Let the parents take care of their kids.”66 This is a version of Social Darwinism on steroids, a tribute to Ayn Rand that would make even her blush.
Public values are not only under attack in the United States and elsewhere they appear to have become irrelevant. Those spaces that once enabled an experience of the common good are now disdained by right-wing and liberal politicians, anti-public intellectuals, and an army of media pundits. State violence operating under the guise of increasing personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy “as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.”67 Symptoms of ethical, political, and economic impoverishment are all around us. One recent example can be found in the farm bill passed by Republicans, which provides $195 billion in subsidies for agribusiness, while slashing roughly $8 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP provides food stamps for people living below the poverty line. Not only are millions of food stamp beneficiaries still at risk for malnourishment and starvation, it is estimated that benefits would be entirely eliminated for nearly two million Americans, many of them children. Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in the Washington Post that it is hard to believe that any party would want to publicize such cruel practices. She states:
In this time of mass unemployment, 47 million Americans rely on food stamps. Nearly one-half are children under 18; nearly 10 percent are impoverished seniors. The recipients are largely white, female and young. The Republican caucus has decided to drop them from the bill as “extraneous,” without having separate legislation to sustain them. Who would want to advertise these cruel values?68
Neoliberal policies have produced proliferating zones of precarity and exclusion that are enveloping more and more individuals and groups who lack jobs, need social assistance and health care, or are homeless. According to the apostles of modern-day capitalism, providing “nutritional aid to millions of pregnant mothers, infants, and children . . . feeding poor children, and giving them adequate health care” is a bad expenditure because it creates “a culture of dependency—and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.”69 What is left out of the spurious and cruel assertion that social provisions create a culture of dependency, especially with respect to the food stamp program, is that “six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income. [Many describe] themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid—no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay. . . . About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.”70 Needless to say, there is more to the culture of cruelty than ethically challenged policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, particularly children. There is also the emergence of a carceral state that operates a governing-through-crime youth complex and a school-to-prison pipeline that essentially functions as a new extension of Jim Crow.71
The strengthening of the school-to-prison pipeline—seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools—is a grotesque symptom of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system. Under such circumstances, not only do schools resemble the culture of prisons, but young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial. How else to explain the case of a diabetic student who, because she fell asleep in study hall, was arrested and beaten by the police or the arrest of a seven-year-old boy who, because of a fight he got into with another boy in the schoolyard, was put in handcuffs and held in custody for ten hours in a Bronx police station?72 In Texas, students who miss school are not sent to the principal’s office or assigned detention. Instead, they are fined and in too many cases actually jailed.73 It is hard to imagine, but in a Maryland school, a thirteen-year-old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance.74 In these examples, we see more at work than stupidity and a flight from responsibility on the part of educators, parents, and politicians who maintain these laws. We see actions motivated by an underlying belief and growing sentiment that young people constitute a threat to adults and that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to mind-crushing punishment.
The consequences have been disastrous for many young people. Even more disturbing is how the legacy of slavery informs these practices, given that “arrests and police interactions . . . disproportionately affect low-income schools with large African-American and Latino populations.”75 Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, low-income white youth and children of color are being funneled directly from schools into prisons. Feeding the expanding prison-industrial complex, justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact