Excerpt, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Henry Armand Giroux is an American cultural critic, a
founding theorist of critical pedagogy in the United States best known for pioneering
work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education,
media studies, and critical theory. He has been described as one of the top
fifty educational thinkers of the modern period. Currently living in Hamilton,
Ontario, Canada, Henry Giroux has held teaching positions on several North
American university faculties including Boston University professor of
education (1977-1983); Miami University (Oxford, Ohio, 1983) professor of
education and renowned scholar in residence, Director at the Center for
Education and Cultural Studies; Penn State University Waterbury Chair
Professorship, Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural
Studies (1992-2004); and since May of 2004, McMaster University Global
Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.
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| Dr. Henry A. Giroux |
Giroux appeared today on KPFA’s news and interviews program “Upfront.”
Published today at Counterpunch and Rebellious Independent News and Film (RINF)
are what I consider compellingly spot-on thoughts in his article “The Politics
of Cruelty: America’s Descent into Madness.”
BEYOND the entrenched, regressive is
“The American public needs more than a show of outrage or
endless demonstrations.
“It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a
language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change. Such a
project is indispensable for developing an organized politics that speaks to a
future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality
education, and communities of solidarity and support for young people. 
…but also to struggle for those
values, hopes, modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that
infuse democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social
justice.
“For this reason, any collective struggle that matters has
to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic
vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism.”
Warped stories ripe for change
“The stories we tell
about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to the ideals of justice,
equality, liberty, and democracy. 
“There are no
towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories interweave
moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that
was never just enough. 
“Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it,
overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of
agency to the imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives
that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world.
| “W |
e are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that
undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future.
Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social
responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our
parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders.
“Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals
and as a nation are told by right-wing
and liberal media that broadcast the conquests of celebrities,
billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related
virtues of the free market and a permanent war economy.
“… The stories that
dominate the American landscape embody what stands for commonsense among market
and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties:
shock-and-awe austerity measures;
tax cuts that serve the rich and
powerful and destroy government programs that help the poor, elderly, and sick;
attacks on women’s reproductive
rights;
attempts to suppress voter ID laws
and rig electoral college votes;
full-fledged assaults on the
environment;
the militarization of everyday
life;
the destruction of public
education, if not critical thought itself;
an ongoing attack on unions, on
social provisions, and on the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care
reform.
“These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and
neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out
of everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions
incarcerated in our nation’s prisons.”
Cruelty compounded
Yields brutality
“Every once in a
while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives
spun by politicians whose arrogance and quests for authority exceed their
interest [in concealing] the narrow-mindedness, power-hungry blunders, cruelty,
and hardship embedded in the policies they advocate.
“Echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in
politicians such as Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who
believes that even assistance to those unemployed, homeless, and working poor
suffering the most in his home state should be cut in the name of austerity
measures.
“In the words of Mike Reynolds, we hear another politician
from Oklahoma who insists that government has no responsibility to provide
students with access to a college education through a state program ‘that
provides post-secondary education scholarship to qualified low-income students.’
“We find evidence of a culture of cruelty in numerous
policies that make clear that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American
society—whether low-income families, poor minorities of color and class, or
young, unemployed, and failed consumers—are considered disposable, utterly
excluded in terms of ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.”
New ethos
New/renewed stories
Imperative
“Before this dangerously
authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective
imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all
Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S.
culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them.
“It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the
stories we are told. We also need to create alternative narratives about what
the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves.
“This
demands
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a break from established political parties, the creation of
alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and
visions, and a notion of politics that is educative,
…one that takes seriously how
people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to
others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act
otherwise.
Why are millions not protesting in
the streets over these barbaric policies that deprive them of life, liberty,
justice, equality, and dignity? 
What are the pedagogical
technologies and practices at work that create the conditions for people to act
against their own sense of dignity, agency, and collective possibilities? 
“Progressives and others need to make education central to
any viable sense of politics so as to make matters of remembrance and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical and engaged
citizens.
“There is also a need for social movements that invoke
stories as a form of public memory,
…stories that have the potential to
move people to invest in their own sense of individual and collective agency,
…stories that make knowledge
meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative.
“If democracy is to once again [or for the first time]
inspire a populist politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social
movements in which the stories told are never completed, but are always open to
self- and social reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of
our collective imagination and struggles against injustice wherever they might
be.
“Only then will the stories that now cripple our
imaginations, politics, and democracy be challenged and hopefully overcome.”
Sources and notes
[Editor’s insert bracketed]
“The Politics of Cruelty: America’s Descent into Madness” by
Henry Giroux, August 12, 2013, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/12/americas-descent-into-madness/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=americas-descent-into-madness
Full article republished at RINF “America’s Descent into
Madness” http://rinf.com/alt-news/latest-news/americas-descent-into-madness/58072/
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
His most recent book is The Educational
Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), His web site is
www.henryagiroux.com
Henry Giroux has published more than 50 books and more than 300
academic articles, addition to being a co-editor-in-chief of the Review of
Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies; he is published widely throughout
education and cultural studies literature.
Among Giroux’s major, recent publications
The University in
Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007)
Against the Terror of
Neoliberalism: Beyond the Politics of Greed (2008)
Youth in a Suspect
Society: Democracy or Disposability? (2009)
Politics beyond Hope:
Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy. (2010)
Hearts of Darkness:
Torturing Children in the War on Terror (2010)
Zombie Politics in the
Age of Casino Capitalism (2011)
Education and the
Public Sphere: Ideas of Radical Pedagogy (co-authored with Lech Witkowski)
Cracow, Poland: Impuls (2011)
Education and the
Crisis of Public Values (2011)
Disposable Youth:
Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty (2012)
Twilight of the
Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (2012)
“The Education Deficit and the War on Youth” (2013)
“Neoliberalism’s War Against Higher Education” (2013)
“Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues”
(co-authored with Jeffrey DiLeo, Sophia McClennen, and Kenneth Saltman) (2013)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Giroux
“Up Front” is a program of interviews, debates, and news
updates produced by KPFA’s News Department, http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/94244
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