A culture of fear, a culture of violence

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I live in the Toronto area, and am a Canadian, but, as you may know, I lived in the U.S. for a long time. (I can prove it with my high school and college diplomas.) And while I love Canada, I wanted to stay in the U.S. after graduating college. ('Twas grad school that brought me to Toronto.) If not a citizen, I was still very American -- and I remain so still.

Like many Canadians, and like many around the world, I have mixed feelings about the U.S. It's hard not to. It's a force for good in so many ways but also an arrogant, bullying empire. But I certainly still love America a great deal, in spite of its massive flaws, and, needless to say, I spend a great deal of time thinking about, and blogging about, American politics and culture. This blog, after all, is almost entirely focused on the U.S.

But things have changed. I used to think seriously about going back. Now, not so much. (Not unless, say, Obama offered me a job.) It's partly nostalgia on my part, but America just isn't what it was as recently as 15-20 years ago. There was a period of optimism and hope following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when I was in high school and college, but that quickly came to an end. Basically, what I sense whenever I go down to the States now is not hope and optimism but fear.

Simply put, the American Empire is collapsing. The manufacturing economy, long the engine of geopolitical supremacy, is struggling and not about to improve. Ever. The political system, both because of its structure (thanks to Madison) and because one of the two major parties, the GOP, has descended into madness, is unable to respond, paralyzed. Income inequality continues to worsen, while a plethora of social problems, including poverty, are tearing the country apart. And the celebrity-entertainment culture has proved to be a narcotic that distracts from meaningful civic engagement.

At some level, I think, Americans know this. They know, if only vaguely, that their time is up, that it will never be the same, that the glory years of the last century will recede further and further into the mists of time. All the flag-waving nationalism, all the stupid talk of exceptionalism, is just denial. You can say you're the greatest country in the world and you can strut around like an unrivaled hegemon, but you can't escape the truth, the force of history that is leaving you behind. It happens to every empire. America is no exception. Like Rome, like Britain, America is crumbling. The gap between perception and reality is growing. And there's no turning back.

Of course, 9/11 only made this worse. It brought Americans' long-percolating fears to the surface. Instead of compelling them to confront who they are and to think seriously about what they're doing around the world, it truly and utterly terrorized them. The mythology built up quickly: They hate us and our freedom. They're out to get us. And so America responded, as you know, by turning itself into a sort of police state. It responded to an act of terror by constructing an infrastructure of terror, both domestic and international, based on, and then perpetuating, the terror that was felt on and after 9/11 and that, more broadly, was an core component of the American psyche long before that fateful day. The Patriot Act, the Iraq War, domestic surveillance, torture -- you know what happened. America decided to defend its freedom by becoming decidedly less free.

That's a long and overly general introduction, perhaps, but I think it helps explain this:

According to the FBI, over 1.5 million background checks on customers were requested by gun dealers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in December. Nearly 500,000 of those were in the six days before Christmas.

It was the highest number ever in a single month, surpassing the previous record set in November.

On Dec 23 alone there were 102,222 background checks, making it the second busiest single day for buying guns in history.

The actual number of guns bought may have been even higher if individual customers took home more than one each.

Explanations for America's surge in gun buying include that it is a response to the stalled economy with people fearing crime waves. Another theory is that buyers are rushing to gun shops because they believe tighter firearms laws will be introduced in the future. 

There is no doubt some truth to these surface explanations, but I don't think they hit at the underlying problem. Americans are scared. Understandably, perhaps, but scared nonetheless. Their world is collapsing all around them. The comfort and security of the world they knew is no more. And 9/11 terrified them.

And when you add all that to a violent and gun-loving culture, well, is it really any wonder they're buying up all the guns they can get their hands on?

The gates of hell

By Carl 

I've been contemplating the problems that face America: the economy, the insecurity, the unemployment, the classist state of our society, the (marginal, admittedly) rise in civil unrest.

I've been coming to grip with, as David Byrne would sing, "Well, how did I get here?" What systemic problems does America have that put us in the position of practically being at each other's throats when we should, in point of fact, be all over the powers that be, both actual and implied?

I came up with one I hadn't given much thought to before: gated communities.

It never really occured to me how deeply this facet of America affects the people who live within and without, and more, how culture reinforces this paranoid creation.

You can go all the way back to colonial America to find a form of isolated community in this nation. Indeed, the moment people started looking for more room and leaving the harbor cities and towns, people have effectively gated themselves off from other people. When you have to ride a day on horseback to get to the city, you've become out of touch with social interactions of a diverse sort. People who move out and are closer to you share at least one attribute, the need to be out of the city.

Western expansion, with all the room to the left of the coast, made this phenomenon part of the American experience. Indeed, the customs and mores of that era -- personal responsibility, multiple gun ownership, a rugged individualism, paranoia about strangers-- echo to this day amongst people who ought to know better. The distances involved in moving through Montana or Colorado, the rugged terrain, and the natural dangers abounding, these all made for a healthy distrust of people who just showed up at the end of Main Street. How did they get there, and what did they want?

Natural questions. The very topography and isolation formed what would be in effect gated communities, with their own security forces as well as their own media, their own medical care, commerce, and justice.

Slide forward to the 20th century. While out west, these isolated communities were slowly, glacially, becoming less and less isolated, back east, people were being thrust together in larger and larger cities and megalopolises.

See, until the rise of the automobile and public transportation, a city dweller with a lot of extra cash could buy a "country" home just a few miles away fro the squalor of the inner city. Believe it or not, for example, in New York, Coney Island was once the reserve of the well-to-do like the Astors and Vanderbilts. If you went there now, you'd be hard pressed to find remnants of those families. Indeed, you'd find an inner city environment, squatting right by the shore. Affordable housing, paved streets, infrastructure... and a gated community.

At least the denizens of this gated community have to leave to shop for food.

In a nutshell, we start to see where the problem lies. When a community stops being part of the community, then it is no longer a community. At least in those old west towns, a body could walk in and have a drink at the saloon and talk to people, however uncomfortably. In today's modern gated communities, you can't even make it past the security booth, and woe betide you if you do have a reason to be there: you're under constant surveillance, marked and tagged as an outsider from the second you walk in to the second you leave the compound.

One can understand how these compounds could have arisen in the redder parts of the country, but why have these "reservations" sprouted up in some of the most diverse and integrated parts of the nation?

Fear. Nothing more, nothing less. And it's a manufactured fear, if you ask me.

Fear of crime. Fear of terror. Fear of them. Fear of information. I'll get to that last in a moment.

And the media feed these fears, despite the fact that there's more important news to be covered.

If five years ago, you had led a newscast with the fact that the American debt is skyrocketing through the roof because of spending on two wars and the Bush tax cuts, you'd have been fired from any local newscast, much less a network cast. "If it bleeds, it leads," is a truth, not a truism, in journalism. And if you watch the news closely, despite the fact that most violent crime is committed by the majority race of white people, inevitably and disproportionately one of the lead stories is about a minority criminal.

Why? What is the point and/or purpose of fomenting that aspect of American society? To foment fear. And fear drives like-minded people closer together.

The dynamic of huddling together for protection is nothing new to the American experience. Indeed, the very cliche "circle the wagons" was in response to an attack on the (mostly) white folks heading through (mostly) Native American territories.

And probably acting like jerks as they did, but I digress.

Gated compounds are just circled wagons with lawns and hot tubs.

But look. A gated compound also gives the illusion of being responsible to a community without the mess of actually having dissenters and outsiders to inject an opposing viewpoint. It encourages "samethink" and punishes, through ostracism and shunning, people with minority views.

Or worse, views that would be majority in the larger world. It allows for a purification of the belief system that reinforces whatever squeaky wheel is the loudest. This is where things get interesting.

We've all seen the dissonant memes coming from the far right: there is no poverty in America, blacks are doing much better than ever, but committing crimes at an alarming rate.

Not that middle class or even wealthy people don't commit violent crimes, but huh? How is that even a possible line of logic? Why would any people who as a whole are "doing better" commit crimes at an increasing rate?

It's the perception of crime. It's the fact that the media hump this shit until they're blue in the face, and these memes get made up by the opinion makers who feed into these pockets of purity. And those pockets echo these inconsistent and mistaken (to be kind) memes until they are conventional wisdom, common knowledge and accepted as fact.

Which they aren't. By any means.

But worse than this it gets. See, it's one thing to reinforce a wrong-headed belief amongst a group, that's wrong, but when confronted outside the group, say at work, with conflicting information, and suddenly the violent reactions range from utter close-mindedness to rage at the person trying to put a new perspective on things.

This gets carried back to the community as "you know what this idiot at work told me?" There's no reasoning with fear, you see. It's not a logical construct. It is, in fact, a deeply emotional reverberation because it fits that most basic of human emotions, terror.

Fear is hell.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Allen West

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Think Progress:

Rep. Allen West (R-FL), a newly-elected member who has loudly scapegoated Muslims and campaigned on a promise to oppose religious diversity, appeared on Frank Gaffney's radio program last week. Gaffney, who routinely says that Obama is both a secret Muslim and a member of the "Muslim Brotherhood," asked West about how the new Republican Congress plans to "take on Sharia as the enemy threat doctrine?"

West said that, although he has not spoken with all of the new members, he hoped that Congress would focus on the "infiltration of the Sharia practice into all of our operating systems in our country as well as across Western civilization." He explained that targeting Sharia should be part of America's "national security strategy" and that a response to Sharia would somehow include "tailor[ing]" American "security systems, our political systems, economic systems, our cultural and educational systems, so that we can thwart this."

Thwart what? A completely fabricated threat?

(Seriously, what would George Orwell make of this? It's like we're in the world of 1984, with the totalitarian state essentially sustaining itself on conspiracy theories designed to distract the citizenry into targeting whatever Other the state claims is the enemy. Let's call it Republican Bolshevism.) 

Simply put, there is no Sharia threat to American society. Muslims are not trying to impose Sharia law on America, nor even in their own communities.

Indeed, if there's a danger of the imposition of intolerant and bloodthirsty theocratic rule in America today, it comes not from Muslims (the vast majority of whom accept and abide by the American legal system, not a fundamentalist Islamic system, and are as fully of separating their faith from secular law as any Christian or Jew) but from those on the right (including West) who seek to impose Christian fundamentalism (akin to Islamic fundamentalism) on the country, if not on the rest of the world.

There is the real danger to the Constitution and to the American way of life, not Muslims, a distinct minority that, made up mostly of new Americans, wants only to fit in and peacefully live the American Dream. 

So what is this, then? Does West really believe that the threat is real?

Yes, maybe so. While there is a good deal of political cynicism and manipulation on the right, I suspect that many conservatives really do believe their own propaganda.

But this is bigotry, plain and simple, with Muslims targeted as the Other (just as undocumented Mexicans so often are). It's the politics of division, of discrimination, of hate. And it's an extremely potent force in today's America, with the economy struggling, with the world changing, with America's future uncertain.

History, of course, is littered with the remains of such official, state-sanctioned bigotry, not to mention with the bodies of those who have died as a result of it, and the Republicans, taking over the House, are making it their own as they seek to feed, and capitalize electorally on, the culture of fear.

We are in the midst of an ugly chapter in American history, and the ugliness is only going to get worse.

There's craziness on the loose in North Carolina

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This is what happens when the culture of fear takes over: 

Sanford, N.C. — An athletic and academic standout in Lee County said a lunchbox mix-up has cut short her senior year of high school and might hurt her college opportunities.

Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school personnel found a small paring knife in her lunchbox.

Smithwick said personnel found the knife while searching the belongings of several students, possibly looking for drugs.

"She got pulled into it. She doesn't have to be a bad person to be searched," Smithwick's father, Joe Smithwick, said.

The lunchbox really belonged to Joe Smithwick, who packs a paring knife to slice his apple. He and his daughter have matching lunchboxes.

"It's just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple," he said.

Ashley Smithwick said she had never gotten in trouble before and was surprised when the principal opened her lunchbox and found the knife.

The teen was initially given a 10-day suspension, then received notice that she was suspended the rest of the school year.

"I don't understand why they would even begin to point the finger at me and use me as an example," she said.

This month, Ashley Smithwick, a soccer player who takes college-level courses, was charged with misdemeanor possession of a weapon on school grounds. She is no longer allowed to set foot on campus.

There are many nefarious forces behind this ever-growing culture of fear: news media sensationalism (hyping threats beyong all reasonable perspective), the cult of law and order, post-9/11 security obsession, a general disregard for young people and youth culture, etc.

In this case, it's school security run amok (as schools have been hyped up into cesspools of violence), with no apparent consideration for the specifics -- which clearly exonerate this young woman.

Those responsible for suspending Ms. Smithwick and potentially ruining her life, or at least her academic career, should themselves be suspended, if not fired, for abuse of power.

And, if need be, the governor should step in and make sure that these absurd charges are dropped, that Ms. Smithwick receives not just a formal apology but whatever reparations she may be owed, and that policies are put in place to prevent this sort of madness from recurring in future.