The assault on the values of community and public service, funded by the Koch brothers and their ilk, and propagated by many Republican officeholders, has also advanced in popular culture. As Henry A. Giroux points out in The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (published by City Lights). He especially cites Won’t Back Down, a propaganda piece for charter schools, an anti-union diatribe disguised as a documentary and funded by the unctuous Bill Gates.
“The assault on public values is also evident in a media landscape that mirrors commercial culture’s celebration of wealth and violence,” he writes, and this includes “the proliferation of a dominant screen culture, extending from video games and Internet sites to blockbuster films and television programs that encourages immersion in a rush of gratuitous spectacles of violence.”
A professor of “scholarship in the public interest” at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, offers a provocative analysis of the drift of American politics and culture. Although the Republican Party represents the shock troops of extremism, he doesn’t spare the Democrats whose interests are also tied to corporate benefactors.
“The stories we tell ourselves no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy,” Giroux insists. Well, oppositional storytellers still exist, even in the entertainment industry, but his larger point about pop culture as the echo chamber of sociopaths and the market society is true. One critique: the Republicans win elections because they still their ideas into catch phrases. The Violence of Organized Forgetting needs a snappier title if Giroux hopes to reach beyond the choir.
