We've been shocked to see and hear town hall crowds mobs boo and scream at the handicapped, the sick and even the recently deceased, but respected media critic Henry Giroux says its all part of America's "culture of cruelty."
Giroux has taught about culture and media issues at Boston U., Miami of Ohio, Penn State and now McMasters in Ontario, Canada. His indictment of American culture in yesterday's Truthout connects this town hall behavior with core cultural values:
Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value.
Giroux highlights one symptom of this culture of cruelty--the increasingly popular practice of beating the homeless or paying them to beat each other.
The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other." [15] The culture of cruelty mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web, mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008."
Giroux connects this pop culture phenomenon not with a general breakdown of morality but instead with a calculated program advanced by the power elite that controls the American socio-economic system:
But these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering.
Beating on the poor is nothing new. While Giroux views the American landscape from 30,000 feet and sees media empires cooperating with the military-industrial complex to trivialize violence against the weak, the disadvantaged and "the other," we have all seen it within our personal experience if we were looking.
I grew up on a farm in the 50s and 60s. There were still small farmers back then, and they constituted the "middle" where I lived. There were a few families who owned far more land than the rest, and they also employed tenants to raise and harvest these crops. The tenant families were usually very large, but were housed in one- or two-room houses, many without even running water.
The tenant children comprised about 25% of the students where I went to school. Their clothes were ragged. They often had little chance to bathe. Many were flat-out hungry, and gobbled down their school lunches like it was their only meal of the day.
There were two types of responses to these children. Most of the teachers, small farmer families, even the town doctor, had sympathy for these kids. Clothes were found. Free medical care was provided. Children were invited home overnight to get a chance for a bath, even a night in a warm house in the midst of a cold winter. Food baskets were dropped off for the families.
But some reacted differently. There were some who ridiculed these children, treated them as lepers and often beat them. Who were the worst offenders? Some were just the school bullies who beat on everyone, but the worst offenders, kids who were otherwise well-behaved, were the sons of the big landowners who were exploiting these tenant families in the first place. How ironic it was to have a kid make fun of a classmate because he smelled bad when it was that rich kid's father who put that poor tenant child in a shack with no plumbing.
Giroux would explain this abhorrent behavior as self-interested, designed to de-humanize the poor tenants so that neighbors would not demand that the landowners treat them better. I'd suggest that guilt enters into it as well. The horrible thing is that mistreating the poor produces a need for the misfeasors to take things to another, more violent level in order to cover their crimes and guilt.
If such a vicious cycle is at work in America, then we poor are in for a very bad time. As our numbers rise dramatically in this Great Recession and the conditions of our poverty worsen significantly because of the collapse of what's left of the safety net, then we will surely be in for more beatings and abuse in order to cover all that criminality and guilt.