Violence,USATheWarfareStateandtheHardeningofEverydayLife.docVIP

/2013/05/01/violence-usa Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Hardening of Everyday Life Henry A. Giroux Henry A. Giroux more on Global Economic Crisis , US Politics/Economy Henry A. Giroux is a social critic and educator, and the author of many books. He currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. This article is adapted from America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, forthcoming, Monthly Review Press. Since 9/11, the war on terror and the campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the tactics of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both a media spectacle and a bone-crushing reality have become prominent and influential forces shaping U.S. society. As the boundaries between “the realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” social relations and the public services needed to make them viable have been increasingly privatized and militarized.1 The logic of profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of warfare and organized violence into universities, market-based service providers, Hollywood cinema, cable television, and deregulated contractors. The metaphysics of war and associated forms of violence now creep into every aspect of U.S. society. As the preferred “instrument of statecraft,” war and its intensifying production of violence crosses borders, time, space, and places.2 The result is that the United States “has become a ‘culture of war’…engulfed in fear and violence [and trapped by a military metaphysics in which] homeland security matters far more than social security.”3 Seemingly without any measure of self-restraint, state-sponsored violence now flows and regroups effortlessly, contaminating both foreign and domestic policies. The criticism of the military-industrial complex, along with its lobbyists and merchants of death, that was raised by President Eisenhower seems to have been relegated to the trash can of his