In the wake of the horrific weekend in Las Vegas, Henry Giroux writes about American violence and the part Donald Trump plays in ginning it up:
Violence, sadly, runs through the United States like an electric current. And it’s become the primary tool both for entertaining people and addressing social problems. It also works to destroy the civic institutions that make a democracy possible.
Needless to say, Trump is not the sole reason for this more visible expression of extreme violence on the domestic and foreign fronts.
On the contrary. He’s the endpoint of a series of anti-democratic practices, policies and values that have been gaining ground since the emergence of the political and economic counterrevolution that gained full force with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, along with the rule of financial capital and the embrace of a culture of precarity.
Violence has been part of American culture long before Trump arrived on the scene. Nevertheless,
Trump is the unbridled legitimator-in-chief of gun culture, police brutality, a war machine, violent hypermasculinity and a political and social order that expands the boundaries of social abandonment and the politics of disposability — especially for those marginalized by race and class.
His language is full of violence:
He revels in a public discourse that threatens, humiliates and bullies.
He has used language as a weapon to humiliate women, a reporter with a disability, Pope Francis and any political opponent who criticizes him. He has publicly humiliated members of his own cabinet and party, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a terminally ill John McCain, not to mention the insults and lies he perpetrated against former FBI Director James Comey after firing him.
It is no accident that the worst mass murder in American history has occurred during the Trump administration.
Image: NBC News
8 comments:
Maybe we should just admit we are ruled by violence. I believe thats what our leaders honestly believe. Humans are just a few chip generations away from mountain gorillas.
I think the elite hate this quote by GWB more than any other. " in history we are all dead"
Elites love violence because it cements their position.
The right says if you force people to give up their guns only the criminals will have them,
case closed. Mind closed, as if their is no place for goverment to make sure criminals do not have guns. 273 mass killings so far this year in the USA. If you where running a country, on your list of top ten problems would this not be a priority?
You'd think so, Steve. But Americans have had a hard time agreeing on priorities for a long while now.
I read an article once where someone tried to calculate U.S. spending on the military, national guard, police, courts, jails, and all the other government police the agencies like border control and fbi. He came up with 1 in 4 U.S. tax dollars waisted on these services that required multiple wars on other countries, drugs terrorism etc. to keep them funded. considering that once a country spends more than 5% of gdp on these services they enter the realm of use it or lose it.
f you compare North Korea, Russia, Britain and the u.s. on one hand with Iceland, Japan, Belgium and even Canada on the other the world is a bit easier to explain to me anyway. I suspect that there is a strong correlation between violent crime and gun deaths with how militarized a country is.
I suspect your theory would be borne out by research, bill. The more a nation spends on militarization, the more violent it will be. What goes around comes around.
Nothing to see here. Like gun control nothing can be done because the system is corrupt.
Lake Erie serves as a good metaphor for our politics, Steve. But some progress has been made in cleaning up the Lake. In the 1970's, it was dead. What it took was the will to do something about it. Gun control presents the same kind of problem.
Owen what cleaned up lake Erie was an invasive species. No one can take credit for the zebra mussel, it must be intelligent design. Many US cities still put raw sewage into the lake,
Check your history, Steve, there was a concerted effort -- on both sides of the border -- to clean up Lake Erie. Neo-liberal governments -- on both sides of the border -- have cut back on that effort.
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