America’s ‘culture of cruelty’ The violence in AZ has deep/pervasive roots

[kpete]

America’s ‘culture of cruelty’
The violence in Arizona has much deeper, more pervasive roots than mental illness or even lack of civility
Julie Jacobson/The Associated Press

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Within this politics, there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of colour and/or market forces that increasingly decides who may live and who may die.

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Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all non-commercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation.

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Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life has become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture. Americans have grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike are seduced with an endless stream of violence that runs through the endless production of video games, extreme sports and the nonstop production of Hollywood blockbusters. The celebration of hyperviolence and torture travels all too easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of “bum fight” videos on the Internet, increased acts of bullying in schools and the workplace, and young boys investing in a mode of masculinity organized around pummelling each other for sport. 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 ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a spectacle of suffering and spectacle. While much of this violence is passed off as entertainment, it should not be surprising when it travels from the major cultural apparatuses of our time to real life, exploding in front of us, refusing to be seen as just another entertaining spectacle.

the rest:
http://www.thespec.com/opinion/article/475834--america-s-culture-of-cruelty

[Bluebear]

1. too good to let fall off into oblivion

[gratuitous]

2. Violence is our national religion - it isn't just Arizona

We believe in the power of violence to redeem any situation, any evidence to the contrary. Violence is the first, last and every resort in between. If a problem doesn't yield to the application of violence, the solution is always . . . more violence. Trouble in Afghanistan? Let's try violence. Isn't working as well as we had hoped? How about more violence? Hmmm. Seems like all we're doing is getting in deeper and deeper. How about a surge of violence? Did that settle things? No? Well, there's really ony one thing to do: Use violence!

Why? Because anything else is just too slow, takes too much time, and costs too much. Violence is immediate and practically free! Well, immediate for sure.

[BuelahWitch]

3. kick