Introduction

This is a book about oppressive power today. Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic dark comedy Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb may then seem to be an inappropriate reference for the title to take. After all, the Cold War has thawed, ideas such as mutually assured destruction are no longer common parlance, and there seems to be no longer a red menace threatening democracy and free markets. We won the war and we won it without Slim Pickens having to ride the H-bomb bronco style into what Ronald Reagan referred to as the Evil Empire.

Yet, the collapse of the ideological nemesis of the United States has not conferred to most citizens the fruits of victory—freedom and wealth. As political power has concentrated in the nether realms of the corporate elite, as political parties are increasingly indistinguishable ideologically, and as access to power for most citizens appears as unapproachable as ever, the promise of democracy appears to have eluded our victory.

But at least we got free markets.

Well, not really.

If access to political power seems as remote as ever, then access to capital is even farther, not only for U.S. citizens but for the bulk of the world’s population. While corporate news media heralded economic boom at the millennium’s turn, disparities in wealth have reached greater proportions than during the Great Depression with the world’s richest 300 individuals possessing more wealth than the world’s poorest forty-eight countries combined, and the richest 15 have a greater fortune than the total product of sub-Saharan Africa.

Austerity measures imposed by world trade organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ensure that poor nations stay poor by imposing "fiscal discipline" while no such discipline applies to entire industries such as defense, entertainment, and corporate agriculture that are heavily subsidized by the public sector in the United States. While the official U.S. unemployment rate hovers around 5 percent, the real wage has steadily decreased since the seventies, to the point that not a single county in the nation contains one bedroom apartments affordable for a single minimum-wage earner. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have enriched corporate elites in Mexico and the United States while intensifying poverty along the border. Free trade has meant capital flight, job loss, and the dismantling of labor unions in the United States and the growth of slave labor conditions in nations receiving industrial production such as Indonesia and China. But perhaps the ultimate failure of liberal capitalism is indicated by its success in distributing Coca Cola to every last niche of the globe while it has failed to supply inexpensive medicines for preventable diseases or nutritious food or living wages to these same sprawling shanty towns in Ethiopia, Brazil, and the United States. Forty-seven million children in the richest twenty-nine nations in the world are living below the poverty line. Child poverty in the wealthiest nations has worsened with real wages as national incomes have risen over the last half century. The effects of globalization on world populations are a far cry from freedom. As Stephen Sholom writes:

In the face of what the victory of the Cold War looks like globally, the sounds of triumph at the global ascendancy of liberal capitalism echo with the same mad call of joy emanating from Slim Pickens as he descends on the bomb to the obliteration of himself and the world. Yeeeee Hawwww!

One must identify sources other than the "Soviet Threat" to explain widespread feelings of powerlessness, insecurity, and political defeatism at a time when protesters are denied permits to march for the allegedly "extremist," "radical" causes of health care, racial equality, and housing. If the ultimate spectre of destruction hanging over the world of the Cold War was the mushroom cloud, nuclear winter, and long half lives of radiation, today it is global capitalism and what Ellen Meiskins Wood calls the "new imperialism," which is "not just a matter of controlling particular territories. It is a matter of controlling a whole world economy and global markets, everywhere and all the time." The project of globalization according to New York Times foreign correspondent Thomas L. Friedman "is our overarching national interest" and it "requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States" for "it has a large standing army, equipped with more aircraft carriers, advanced fighter jets, transport aircraft and nuclear weapons than ever, so that it can project more power farther than any country in the world. . . . America excels in all the new measures of power in the era of globalization." As Friedman explains rallying for the "humanitarian" bombing of Kosovo, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps."

The impoverishing power of globalization is matched by the military destructive power of the new imperialism that enforces neoliberal policy to make the world safe for U.S. markets. Kosovo is a case in point.

During the Cold War it was hard to put a happy face on nuclear holocaust. Kubrick probably came as close as anybody but this was not a lighthearted laughter. No one really emerged from the theater after seeing Strangelove free of nuclear worry and now in love with the bomb. However, despite the savage and brutal effects of global capital—effects not seen since the time of the robber barrons and the Great Depression—the new imperialism, global capital, and the ideologies known as neoliberal that bolster it are appearing today in such varied places as mass media, school curriculum, and multicultural literature not merely as a happy face. Global capital and the "new imperialism" that expands it are appearing as love.

This violent imperialism increasingly takes the duplicitous guise of humanitarianism—what Noam Chomsky has dubbed "The New Military Humanism":

Globalization does move forward through policy initiatives and the military force to back them. However, it is not predominantly guns that keeps Americans consenting to the evisceration of social services while the Pentagon’s budget "a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with no credible ‘enemy’ in sight—sat at $268 billion during the Clinton years, and looks like it will either stay the same or increase with Bush’s hawks at the controls. That’s four times more than Russia spends and about eight times more than China." Then there is the special $112 billion Clinton authorized in 1999 for the Pentagon over the next six years and the political consensus of the necessity for a missile defense system (even as feasibility tests have failed) and the $400 billion appropriation for three new tactical aircraft programs and the continued expenditure of $2.5 billion per plane on the B-2 bomber—a plane designed to penetrate the air defenses of the Soviet Union, a nation that no longer exists. Dr. Strangelove himself would be sending back the weapons.

These unending armaments are not aimed at U.S. citizens, forcing them to go along with the mad misuse of public funds to expand a globalization system that is failing them and the world. While some—labor unionists, environmentalists, progressives—have taken to the streets to challenge globalization, what keeps most people consenting to and even risking their lives for globalization is largely the successes of corporate cultural production. Mass mediated ideologies of neoliberalism function pedagogically in a variety of ways: (1) market triumphalism, or the disseminating as common sense the notion that there are no alternatives to the current order of capitalism and that consumerism is the only possibility of self-definition, self-fulfillment, and the only path to success; (2) creating a sense that the nation-state’s power is diminishing before the relentless growth of trade and financial networks while simultaneously fantasizing a paranoid defensiveness around borders between races and nations; (3) making the private sphere sacred by defining freedom as an innocent, sentimental space where government cannot enter; (4) projecting anti-federalism as redemptive, or a vilification of the state at all levels, and representing the state as inherently authoritarian because it imposes restrictions on capital; (5) representing ignorance as a virtue, and knowledge as purely instrumental, so that learning falls into the service of a service economy; (6) building an ambivalence around technology as both the only protection from evil and the sure course towards universal destruction. In curricula, literature, and film, such ideological claims have been made common sense in order to school citizens in the virtues of corporate power over democratic power, the beauty of global aggression, the innocence of markets, and the new imperialism as a form of love.

Forecast

Strange Love: Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market is about the corporatization of education as well as about how education is the means through which globalization is achieved, in part, through the corporatization of identities, values, notions of citizenship, and the broader social and political field. We unravel what we are calling "strategies of neoliberal benevolence" promoted in both corporate curricula and corporate mass media. Strange Love shows how multiple cultural forms are presently drawing on discursive traditions of sentimentalizing the family, humanitarianism, and compassionate action in order to sanctify the private and eradicate the very notion of the public and the political, to replace the language of community and solidarity with the language of radical individualism, affect, and the personal. Strange Love situates the values projected through corporate, multicultural, and mass-mediated curricula within current policies easing the internationalization of capital. Corporate and neoliberal powers are creating the conditions of their expansion by masking oppression in narratives about childhood innocence, philanthropy, humanitarianism, and family compassion. As Arvind Rajagopal asserts, "the task of educating individuals into modern citizenship occurs at least as much through markets as it does through politics." Strange Love studies corporate power’s destructive expansion through its use of traditional discourses of schooling and values of benevolence.

Strange Love is also concerned with how teaching critical consciousness can make the conditions for social change. It argues that educators can and, indeed, must show how cultural representations are supporting a power structure in the interests of multinational capital and at the expense of democracy. Teachers can draw on the insights of critical pedagogy in order both to expose and to challenge the feel-good sentiment in which the mainstream media is cloaking corporate expansion and neo-imperialism. This book aspires to help teachers critique such cultural representations and expose the cruelties of neoliberal practices, pointing to the ways that the power structure is reinforced, but also envisioning ways of constructing more equitable and just futures and alternatives.

At stake here is not only a form of academic investigative journalism that exposes particular corporations and cultural producers such as Michael Milken’s Knowledge Universe, BPAmoco, Scholastic, TimeWarner, Waste Management, Monsanto, and ExxonMobil for their unethical practices and cynically self-interested war on the public sector, though with the rise of the corporate media monopoly, academic work is a more likely place to find investigative journalism than news media. Such corporate influence over culture also limits creativity and the sense of the possible. While Strange Love does indeed offer examples of how multinational corporations are infiltrating public education through pro-corporate propaganda, it would be inadequate to understand corporate curriculum as merely propaganda or as merely what goes on in schools. In the words of Henry Giroux, "‘Pedagogy’ . . . is about linking the construction of knowledge to issues of ethics, politics, and power and to challenging the institutions and ideologies that are setting in place regimes of racism, sexism, hatred, and poverty." Highlighting the pedagogical dimension of all corporate cultural production points to the hegemonic struggle over meanings that cultural production engages. As Judith Butler writes,

In the context of this book, pedagogy refers not only to teaching and learning but to how the struggle over meaning constructs identities, frames issues and understandings, produces values and desires, and promotes particular visions for the future. Critical pedagogy as a counterhegemonic practice involves holding those in power responsible for their cultural productions. Strange Love does not only concern questions of pedagogy as teaching and learning nor simply is it about the possibility to challenge corporate public school curriculum. As well, Strange Love argues that the pedagogical needs to be understood as a constitutive element of all cultural politics. As Henry Giroux has significantly elaborated,

Strange Love

Strange Love demonstrates how corporate values currently provide the conceptual basis through which schooling is understood. The logic of the corporation (through languages of management, efficiency, and choice as well as through the emphasis on methods and standardization) affects educational policies from privatization, vouchers, and magnet and charter schools to standardized testing, inner city school closings, defunding, technologization, and increased surveillance. The corporatized school prepares for the corporatist future.

To exemplify the themes that the book will take up, we use in this introduction an analysis of how the media’s reporting on the tragedy at Columbine High School interrelates with their simultaneous coverage of the war on Kosovo. We use this juxtaposition to explore how sentimental family discourses and popular representations of schools are currently tied to calls for increased enforcement policies protecting market expansion and global war.

Coming Home to Kosovo

As mass mediated news accounts of the war in Kosovo were expressed through stories of families abroad, the school shooting in Littleton, Colo., refocused the nation’s attention on violence at home. As the story unfolded, "The Littleton Massacre" and "The Kosovo Massacre" began to merge, elements of one bleeding into the other. On 20 April 1999—Hitler’s 110th birthday—two white boys calling themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia shot and killed twelve of their fellow students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. This event was a tragedy that caused terrible, even devastating sadness for many people. The enormous, spectacular coverage of the event,—of the magnitude of the 1992 L.A. uprising—however, participates in broader public dialogues, particularly in the way it works to assign blame variously to errant parents, crazy kids, lack of adequate policing, and violent video games while exonerating the institutions of power—particularly in the ways they configure economic, political, and social agency. How many black kids died in the United States that day because of violence and guns, and why is that information so comparatively hard to access, particularly during a media spectacle that is highlighting the dangers that kids confront in public schools? In reality, violence in schools has diminished in the past ten years even while people perceive there to be more violence in schools. Even more relevant, how many Serbian and ethnic Albanian kids were killed in NATO bombings that day? Adults pose a far greater threat to youth than youth do. How and in whose interests are these perceptions manufactured?

The 20 December 1999 issue of Time magazine featured exclusive coverage of "The Columbine Tapes: The Killers Tell Why They Did It, the Five Home Videos They Made Before Their Death, What the Families are Doing to Prevent Another Tragedy." The cover shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold assessing their damage from a frame of the school cafeteria surveillance video. Open Time magazine and immediately following the contents page is a two page advertisement for Internet search engine AltaVista. The advertisement displays the Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter plane in an exploded blueprint diagram with every part labeled and with the external body of the plane invisible so that the interior is revealed, as in Wonder Woman’s aviational aesthetic. The AltaVista search box overlaying the schematic reveals a search for "Who will guide my sleigh tonight?" Another box headed "AltaVista Shopping" contains a first category "find product" and is filled in "F-16"; the second category "compare with" is filled in with "Reindeer." Turn the page and the advertisement continues with Santa’s sled being pulled by an F-16, a weapon that U.S.-led NATO used to bomb Serbia "back to the stone ages."

At the top of the page an elf sips a soda and accompanying text reads,

At the bottom of the page, eight cute out-of-work, clearly non-unionized reindeer are accompanied by a search box that reads, "Where can I sell eight tiny reindeer?" Between the three pages of AltaVista ads, Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson editorializes on "Why We Went Back to Columbine." The title, which references a slew of recent stories on returning to Vietnam after a quarter of a century, is headed by a photograph of triumphant white boy high school football players with the caption: "Healing the Wounds: Columbine celebrates its recent state championship."

On one level there is nothing particularly new here in Time’s spread. The white male violence of football, toy weapons, violent video games, and global imperialist ventures such as Vietnam and Kosovo arise as the tools for recovering the health of youth and family threatened by the insane and random joyride of the gun-toting Columbine murderers. The AltaVista ad restores the innocence of technology and violent aggression—Internet technology that Klebold and Harris used in their little war. The ad recuperates the Web technology to innocence by associating it with the destructive NATO attack done in the name of love or at least humanitarian intervention but also by associating it with consumerism.

A large part of the public incredulity over Columbine stems from the very fine line between the "innocent" yet pervasive culture of violence that sells consumer goods and the "pathological" culture of violence that does not sell consumer goods or expand markets. The "innocent" culture of violence transforms imperialist slaughter into Christmas morning family love and fuzzy cuteness. It portrays as healing and recovery violent team sports that emulate war—Columbine High School football team’s "state conquest." It mutates military hardware into a fashion show for viewers to identify with destructive power (AltaVista’s motto adorning the F-16 blueprint is "Smart Is Beautiful"). Central to this recovery of the "innocent" culture of violence is the transformation of justice into the act of consumption. The final text of the ad reads:

What is so shocking and even terrifying in this spread is an open admission that U.S. military aggression in such places as the Balkans and Iraq is fundamentally about the expansion of markets.

Yet the big lie at work here is the suggestion that the dropping of bombs is the same as the dropping of consumer goods (the expansion of markets) and all in the name of the preservation of childhood innocence as the stronghold of a civilization severely menaced when these values go awry. The ad suggests that destruction is really about the enrichment of the place being bombed because it is about the expansion of American wealth, markets, and consumer goods. While multinational corporations did line up to take advantage of infrastructural rebuilding, some estimates placed former Yugoslavia’s recovery time from the bombing at fifty years. Perhaps more pertinent, those places that have agreed to Americanization without bombs have also suffered terribly from "structural adjustment." If Isaacson’s interceding headline "Why We Went Back to Columbine" resonates with a spate of articles about why we went back to Vietnam, that is because the bombing of Kosovo as a part of the new imperialism really is a return to Vietnam and Isaacson’s headline is simultaneously about how Time magazine’s return to Columbine is also a return to Vietnam.

In fact, the imperialist venture of bombing Kosovo is replicated in the call for increased discipline, mostly in inner cities, that followed the Columbine massacre. As Harris and Klebold let a slew of bullets loose on the suburban kids who were calmly eating their lunches or studying chemistry before the attack, the tragedy of a cruel Milosevic performing ethnocide came home. The need for the intervention to defend the defenseless Albanians blurred into the need to defend our kids at home through increasing police enforcement of inner cities. Reflected in the coverage of the Columbine massacre, Kosovo thus appeared as the exporting of the inner city. Columbine coverage entered a discourse on youth innocence that is essentially an imperialist discourse assigning criminality to the colonized. It thus treats youth differently depending on race and class. As Harris and Klebold created public Web site paeans to Hitler, declared hatred for blacks, Asians, and Latinos, still no one believed white kids from the suburbs were capable of such violence. As Henry Giroux points out,

In the words of Patricia Williams, Klebold and Harris,

What Time and AltaVista add to this scenario is that this presumption of innocence saturating the Columbine coverage promotes the innocence of the imperialist mission in Kosovo.

Returning to Vietnam in Kosovo

Similar to the public conversation at the beginning of the Gulf War, endless articles debating the Kosovo air war focused on the danger of a ground war that would get the United States embroiled in "another Vietnam." As Noam Chomsky points out, there has been a long project in mass media of getting the public to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome." That is, the conservative restoration of the last three decades has involved making global aggression and the murder of combatants and non-combatants in foreign nations once again palatable to the public. Yet, Kosovo is different from Vietnam and the hot wars of the Cold War in that the ventures of militarized globalization since the end of the cold war are still not viewed by the public as worth U.S. lives. Writes Ellen Meiskins Wood,

For Wood, part of what successfully undercut popular and particularly left opposition to Kosovo, unlike Vietnam, was the pretense of humanitarian intervention that mystified the imperialism.

Open claims in news outlets as to the humanitarianism of the bombing were matched by a spate of popular war films such as Saving Private Ryan and culminating in The Patriot that brought the "good war" theme back after a long stretch of "bad war" Vietnam films.

If pre-Kosovo Saving Private Ryan reinvented the public and political motives for World War II as the redemption of the private and apolitical maintenance of the family, then post-Kosovo The Patriot took this theme even further, suggesting that the American Revolution—the good war par excellence—was about nothing but family. "What difference does it make if I’m ruled by a tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away," orates Mel Gibson’s character at the South Carolina meeting about whether to enter the war on the side of the colonies, just before joining up to defend his southern plantation family. In other words, fighting for the politics of democracy poses dangers to the preservation of the family and, in fact, Gibson’s two eldest sons get killed in the fray.

The film further marks the disruption of the family through the British enslavement of the black plantation farmhands who claim to be working as free labor, the system many characters in the film insist the revolutionaries are defending. In the film, the black plantation laborers explicitly claim to be working as free labor rather than as slaves (until the tyrannical British arrest them and turn them into slaves), even though the images of black labor are surely borrowed from a cultural repertory of traditional, familiar images from slavery. The film suggests that the war was about freeing the slaves in defense of ideas about self-determination and free will (represented in the defense of the family against state authoritarianism), the goal of the "good war." It is only when the British threaten this self-determination—by entering the home and killing one of the kids, and by enslaving black labor—that a defense campaign can be taken up. Just as the AltaVista ad replaces fanciful toy reindeer with real fighter planes, in The Patriot Mel Gibson’s character melts down his dead son’s toy lead soldiers into bullets. The campaign against Kosovo involved getting over the "Vietnam Syndrome" to return to the "good war" by reinventing imperialist aggression as a loving gift, associating it with the childhood innocence of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer and Santa Claus himself. Merry Christmas, Kosovo. Merry Christmas, Serbia.

Dr. Strangelove feels envy.

War Games: Returning to Vietnam in Littleton

The Columbine shooting coverage was also a return to the battlefield. As mentioned, Isaacson’s title "Why We Went Back to Columbine" references the return to Vietnam after twenty-five years in order to open markets. It is contextualized with a photo of Columbine’s football team conquest captioned, "Healing the Wounds: Columbine celebrates its recent state championship." Isaacson begins,

It is, perhaps, a coincidence that the leader of Time’s team that went in search of "answers" about Columbine is named "Goodgame." It is not however, a coincidence that Isaacson uses the metaphor of the "good game" to discuss the Columbine recovery, health, and healing. The AltaVista ads link global trade and military competition between nations to parental competition for children’s love. "Only one [Pokemon toy] is going to win you most-favored parent status for the coming year."

It is not only the editorial and the AltaVista spread that refer to gaming. Page after page of Time is filled with "news" and advertisements that tout the salubrious power of gaming as well as its dangers: Headline page eight—"Is Your Dog an Athlete?" "Border collies...get psychotic if they don’t have work." Page nine: "Enter to win the APC Home Power Protection Package." Two page spread on twelve and thirteen advertising ClearStation.com: "I’m simply going to move to the sidelines until the trend becomes more clear." Turn the page and Mohegan Sun Casino asks, "Who needs caffeine? Experience the rush of 190 gaming tables, over 3,000 slot machines... All in a setting that’ll blow you away." Turn the page and see James Bond, the regal and suave gamer extraordinaire who blows away his opponents, pitching an Omega watch. Turn the page and find a colorful two page spread with a man on the Olympic rings transforming into mercury and information for a Web application called Akamai, "Why embrace mediocrity and risk indifference when intensity and impact are at your fingertips." Turn two pages and a girl shoots hoops in an idyllic black and white photo of the heartland as State Farm Insurance tells us that "She learned about life in a world of broken glass and blacktop where nothing is given. Especially to those trying to play a man’s game. . . . State Farm is a proud supporter of women’s sports and women’s dreams. Little girls have big dreams too." Turn the page and the daily game of the stock market advertises Compaq computers. Turn again and the new ExxonMobil oil conglomerate tells us that their anti-competitive merger is in fact, "A future where the best combination of ideas, technology and talent will win." A page turn later and an arthritis drug called Vioxx has a two page spread of a father and son on a soccer field, "Vioxx can help make it easier for you to do the things you want to do. Like sitting down on the grass to watch your kid’s game." But you may not be sitting too long as, "Commonly reported side effects included upper respiratory infection, diarrhea, nausea, and high blood pressure." Other news content of Time is, of course, also framed in terms of competition from the education article on the dangers of cheating to the "Winners and Sinners of 1999" column to the Columbine tapes feature itself.

The difficulty that parents, teachers, and the police had in identifying the violent outbursts of Harris and Klebold owes, in part, to the normalcy of such competitive violence that saturates not only Time magazine’s reporting and advertisements but pervades mass media more generally, particularly as it sells the public on globalization. Such a fine line between "healthy" and "pathological" competitive violence became particularly blurry as Bill Clinton himself said after the tragedy, while continuing the bombing campaign on Kosovo, refusing diplomatic solutions, "We must teach our children . . . to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons."

The Columbine story involves regularly repeated acts of playing: "Eric Harris adjusts his video camera a few feet away, then settles into his chair with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. He calls it Arlene, after a favorite character in the gory Doom video games and books that he likes so much. He takes a small swig. The whiskey stings, but he tries to hide it, like a small child playing grown-up." "It’s going to be like f—ing Doom. Tick, tick, tick, tick-Haa! That f—ing shotgun is straight out of Doom." "It’s easy to see the signs: how a video-game joystick turned Harris into a better marksman like a golfer who watches Tiger Woods videos." Whereas Clinton equates "playing grown-up" with playing with words, Harris and Klebold equate "playing grown-up" with the violence of adults like Clinton and the valorization of violent competition more generally.

News coverage downplayed the fact that Harris and Klebold were resolving a conflict in a way consistent with the competitive violence surrounding them. Instead Time opts to emphasize the shooters’ thirst for fame. A photo in the Time coverage of angry and imposing-looking football players is titled, "The classmates Harris and Klebold felt immense rage toward all, not just jocks." Yet later commentary reveals the extent to which the shooters did seek revenge against the violent culture that targeted them.

Time’s commentary, in the tradition of nineteenth century sciences of race, positions Harris and Klebold as uppity, mutinous colonized subjects practicing magical curses against the righteous, governing elite. Because they practice voodoo and because they are "homos," the jocks, like nineteenth century colonials, serve as defenders of the morality on which civilization is founded and which was threatened by the evil superstitious practices and the unlawful, ungodly sexual proclivities. The superstitious violence of Harris and Klebold is used to justify the disgust and then the violence of the morally upholding jocks.

Remarkably, Time uses the above quote as evidence that the shooters were not responding to systematic cruelty by other students. Instead, the article emphasizes a desire for celebrity. However, in the following article, "The Victims: Never Again," the father of victim Daniel Rohrbough says, "Jocks could get away with anything. If they wanted to punch a kid in the mouth and walk away, they could. Had I known this, my son wouldn’t have been there. They did nothing to protect the students from each other." Rohrbough’s statement clearly attests to how the thin façade of innocence barely covered a vicious culture of violence. The tapes themselves reveal the killers’ motive to settle a score at being unable to compete: "Harris recalls how he moved around so much with his military family and always had to start over, ‘at the bottom of the ladder.’ People continually made fun of him—‘my face, my hair, my shirts.’ As for Klebold, ‘If you could see all the anger I’ve stored over the past four f—ing years. . . .’"

The Time coverage charges that the police, parents, and the community failed to see how Harris and Klebold’s violent fantasies were motivated not so much by the desire for revenge as ultimately the desire for celebrity. "Because this may have been about celebrity as much as cruelty. "They wanted to be famous," concludes FBI agent Mark Holstlaw. "And they are. They’re infamous. It used to be said that living well is the best revenge; for these two, it was to kill and die in spectacular fashion." The emphasis on the killers’ desire for fame in the coverage downplays the extent to which the shootings were politically motivated as Giroux and Williams show, but the emphasis on fame as an alibi also effaces the extent to which the shootings took the competitive culture of violence to its logical extension, even turning themselves into commodities, notorious for an instant. Harris and Klebold were even willing to sacrifice their own lives to win at the game they had been losing for years.

There is an overwhelming sense in the coverage that police and parents lost the competition with the kids by failing to see the signs, failing in the shootout at the school and due to the suicides even losing the satisfaction of a legal trial to see authority restored symbolically. Just as endless Vietnam films of the 1970s and 80s brought to national consciousness a notion of the Viet Cong as an enemy that cannot be seen, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously culpable aggressors and innocent victims, media coverage surrounding Columbine and Kosovo framed youth simultaneously as innocent victims in need of saving and as violent aggressors hell-bent on destruction. These Vietnam films produced a nostalgia for a good war in which the enemy was visible, thereby replacing a meaningful public discussion of the motives for U.S. imperial aggression with a suggestion that the real problem behind a war that caused roughly 60,000 U.S. and over 2 million Vietnamese lives, was that the United States was denied an opportunity to fight the good fight. Such representation both denies the politics undergirding U.S. global aggression and it transforms the aggressor into the victim. Similarly, Columbine coverage produced nostalgia for the "good school" with its innocent culture of violence exemplified by white boy warriors on the football field. The coverage denies the relationship between the pervasive culture of violence that structures the lived realities of school for many students and the broader social structures that such violence serves.

It is precisely this connection that Time’s editor denies in the "Why We Returned to Columbine" editorial. Says Time Editor-in-Chief Norman Pearlstine, defending Time’s sensationalist coverage, "It’s not our tendency to sensationalize crime or do covers on the crime of the week. Sometimes, however, a shocking picture—of a wartime execution, a brutality, a kid with a gun—along with an analysis of the tale behind it serves to focus our eyes on things we would prefer to ignore but instead should try to understand." Yet, not unlike the Vietnam War practice of measuring success through body counts, understanding and even justice ultimately become the compilation of the most possible minute details of the event by Time’s team, thereby replacing with spectacle a meaningful discussion of the role that the innocent culture of violence plays in maintaining a social order in the service of the corporation.

Family Values

In the post–Cold War world, a family values rationale justifies the repackaging of military action as humanitarian action. One can easily read this in the coverage of Kosovo. A Time magazine Special Report on Kosovo shows on its cover a Madonna-like woman holding a baby at her breast. The headline reads, "Are Ground Troops the Answer?"—tying the intentions of military action into a loving and redemptive image of mother and child. A People magazine article called "Who Will Save the Children?" talks about a number of ethnic Albanian children who have lost touch with their families in the flight from their homes. Serb soldiers are repeatedly represented as burners of homes and tormentors of children, even throwing grenades at ten-year-olds, while NATO soldiers are depicted as fatherly figures who rescue children, adopt them, buy them toys and offer them secure shelters, care, and safety in the refugee camps. "The only place I want to go next is my home," the children repeatedly confess to the reporters. In the issue reporting on the end of the war, the New York Times features an article about a mother who has witnessed a Serb soldier slaughtering her son on her living-room carpet. The death of the child is used to represent the widespread devastation that the Serbs have caused in the Kosovar countryside, while the NATO troops enter as saviors: "[Mrs. Selvinaze (the mother)] kissed the hand of the first foreigner she saw." The top photograph of this front page exhibits a KLA solider holding a gun in one hand and a little girl in the other. Affectionately hugging the soldier with one arm, the little girl holds up two fingers of her other hand in a sign of victory.

The war coverage used family imagery to justify a global and even a military defense of privacy. The constant return, in the press coverage, to images of the reuniting family serve to create the family as pure privacy, love, and safety, a pure moral goodness sanctified and untouched by technologies of aggression, evil states, or the movement of history. This defense of privacy would form, in turn, as an ideology of private interest and private enterprise that were really being projected as the goal of the war. Not incidentally, a spate of films such as Three Kings appeared in 1999, suggesting that the real problem with the massive human rights abuses of the Gulf War were the way the war interrupted business, hindered the distribution of consumer goods, and hurt families. Corporate lobbying for the expansion of NATO, the corporate support of the 1999 NATO summit, and the consolidation of corporate military contractors all testify to the interests multinational companies have in the furtherance of the war effort in particular, but also future militarization more generally. In this setting, the family is simply a tool to make aggressions seem both benign and redemptive as NATO force clears new territories for economic infrastructures benefiting private companies in their expansion into new enclaves.

The pursuit of profit on the part of corporations depends on the reproduction of families and their consumption patterns. The life cycle—birth, marriage, childrearing—is defined through successive stages of products, from toys and weddings to houses, entertainment, appropriate clothing, cars, and furniture. We are criticizing here not affective relations between people, but rather a symbolic structure that limits people’s capacities for imagining any possibilities for the future except for a world saturated in consumption, where minds are ensconced in corporate slogans while credit and identity become one, where the desire to consume becomes the primary motivation for an array of cruelties easing the corporate colonization of everything. Part of what capitalism depends on is a continually expanding economy, so social values need to be configured for continually expanding consuming practices. This involves producing ever-diversifying and changing needs.

There have been a number of theories to talk about why the nuclear family has become such a dominant form of social organization in modernity—from Engels who identifies it as the first form of class division ushering in the primary form of social struggle under capitalism; to Freud who identifies the family as the foundation of civilization; to Lévi-Strauss who sees marriage as the primary form of trading and alliance; to Foucault who sees the bourgeois family as the primary place where power operates in its regulation of bodies; to Danzelot who shows the family emerging in response to the failings of philanthropy, the rise of juvenile justice, and the subsequent need of mothers to take charge of the newly privatized practices of preventive health care and education; to the contemporary Christian right who defines it as a return to morality following the unraveling of the moral fabric of the counterculture sixties. However, the current and incessantly repeated return to the family in many popular representations and political discourses needs to be addressed, as Nancy Fraser has pointed out, because the idea of the family has been used as the primary organization for the distribution of social goods—in the welfare system and elsewhere—and the primary justification for many present inequalities. Set up as a way to facilitate production under industrialization, the traditional family, Fraser argues, is no longer a valid arrangement for funneling public funds or legislating equal access, as the demands of the contemporary economy are often forcing the traditional family to unravel, requiring forced mobility, lack of attachments, instability, increasing working hours, double incomes, and the like. Not only does the holdover of family imagery in most mainstream political rhetoric demonize gays and lesbians as the anti-family, but it also serves to scapegoat non-whites as the evil seed of social disintegration, accusing them of not taking family values seriously enough.

Family values discourse depoliticizes the social by designating the family, rather than the citizen or the society as a whole, as the foundational social unit. When Margaret Thatcher said that there is no England, there are only English families, she was actively redefining social responsibility from the public (in the form of government support) to the private in the form of the family. The privatization of social responsibility through the elevation of the family to the fundamental social unit renders a state in the service of the private sphere. When the impeachment of a president hinges on the idea of illicit sexuality, a real political dialogue of the administration’s failings gets precluded. The symbolism of the family ends up decimating any notion of the public good. Responsibility for social services like health care, education, basic needs, shelter, and the like is shifted to the family. The danger of this shift is that it creates a historical amnesia around the fact that in the past there were social services, instead harkening back to a nostalgic moment in which an idyllic, Leave It to Beaver family could provide (but never really did). The neoliberal state contributes public revenue to the furtherance of private profit-seeking activities rather than programs dedicated to public welfare and public interest. It also contributes to a central tenet of market ideology—namely, that the good of private enterprise is the good of society.

Within such representations, the family is not a political entity. For example, we see the family take over where political concerns are most pressing. When right-wing radical Timothy McVeigh detonated a federal building in Oklahoma City, the event was framed in terms of the actions of a loner attacking innocent children in a daycare center. Emotional press coverage of the children killed in the building’s day care center, along with sentimental photographs of firemen carrying infants out of the flames, did not merely eclipse but also replaced the political issues and conversation surrounding domestic right-wing terrorism, for example, issues concerning how the relationship between a government and its citizens ought to be defined. This can be seen, too, in the federal attack on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Waco was staged in the mainstream press as the government’s botched attempt to route out a family that was bursting the seams of morality through rape, incest, drugs, the stockpiling of weapons, and child sacrifice. The spectacle of horror seething from the attack on the sacred social unit of the family replaced meaningful public discussion of the implications for a society composed of multiple political factions competing for different agendas. Focusing on the family hindered a consideration of the relationship of the incident to broader public concerns about the role of the state in both policing and supporting the private. In both examples, the liberal imperative for consensus and the effacement of right-wing dissent instead took the form of family-centered pathos or a narrative about dysfunctionality and psychological deviance.

In The Democratic Paradox, Mouffe warns that the refusal of "third way" liberals and former Marxists to admit the constitutive agonism at the core of the social increasingly results in the rise of right-wing populism as the only viable form of political dissent:

The rise of the Reform Party, the successes of David Duke and his National Organization for European American Rights, the militia movement, increasing incidents of right-wing domestic terrorism, and George W. Bush’s talk of compassion as he defends racist institutions and practices and admits members of the Confederacy into his cabinet, all testify to the dangers of denying the conflictive nature of social life. In this context, the turn to the besieged family in endless representations needs to be understood as a part of the inability of neoliberalism to admit dissent. The failure of such ‘center-left’ politicians as Bill Clinton to take political positions ideologically distinct from the right resulted in the inability of U.S. political discourse to amount to more than squabbles over family values. Worries about Oval Office sex, divorces, and other private family matters toppled many politicians who should have been toppled for failing to represent the interests of their constituents in matters such as labor rights, civil rights, and environmental destruction. Representations of the family function politically and pedagogically to produce consensus around issues of private morality, simultaneously eradicating dissent over crucial public issues.

Representations of the family convey a fetishistic sense that the family is in dire danger, assaulted by sin and cruelty from every imaginable figure of villainy, from outerspace aliens in a movie like Independence Day to the tyranny of the state in Life Is Beautiful to, say, organized crime or the perfidies of disease or sleazy teachers or natural disasters or drugs or pornography or killer nineteen-year-olds with guns. Whereas, in the seventies, TV programs like The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch or Sanford & Son took divorce or widowhood as a matter of course, not necessarily posing problems that would threaten the social bonding of the family, in the nineties the family seems on the verge of massive devastation, fragile and weakened by any new social force from technology to gay and lesbian marriages to day care centers. This phenomenon has arisen in conjunction with a backlash on feminism, a squeezing of the workforce, and a downgrading of salaries.

Women are being blamed for working. Feminism can thus be condemned as at best elitist, at worst useless, as it was in Time magazine’s 1999 issue on "Is Feminism Dead?" Feminism can sometimes even seem no longer relevant as, it can be claimed, women have already reached high management levels, or detrimental because their professionalization leads to the abandonment of children and thus the growth in pathologies, street crimes, drug abuse, and the like. Blaming women for working limits the popular understanding of feminism’s political agenda, making it seem that feminism is only concerned with access to professional careers, so that some feminist traditions’ integral involvement with questioning distributions of wealth and with challenging white supremacy can be overlooked, dismissed, and even erased. The assumption in such advocacy is that children are better off and healthier with stay-at-home moms. In most regards, this assumption is embedded in a racist hierarchy of values. As many black feminists have argued, "Like their men, Black women have worked until they could work no more. Like their men, they have assumed the responsibilities of family providers. . . . Unlike the white housewives, who learned to lean on their husbands for economic security, Black wives and mothers, usually workers as well, have rarely been offered the time and energy to become experts at domesticity." The fear of working women and working moms is thus implicated in a fear of cultural values being blackened and de-classed as dysfunctionality and other crimes enter into homes of those in power. The movie Traffic shows this: when the mother lets down her vigilance, the nice white daughter of the drug czar becomes embroiled in black cultures of deviance through getting addicted to drugs, destroying the picture-perfectness of the white family. What is more, this tendency to blame working women for social problems forms into a contingent tendency to blame non-working women for social problems, as in the welfare debates. For example, whereas working class and poor women are being accused of poor parenting for not working, professional class mothers are being accused of poor parenting for working. What seems like a contradiction here is not really a contradiction. A discourse about women’s labor is replacing a recognition of class warfare. As Valerie Amos and Patibha Parmar have written, "Internationally, while Black and Third World women are fighting daily battles for survival, for food, land, and water, western white women’s cries of anguish for concern about preserving the planet for future generations sound hollow. Whose standards of life are they trying to preserve?"

Similar to the 1999 films Life Is Beautiful and Enemy of the State, the Kosovo conflict is a story about a repressive state (the Serbs, with the criminal, power-corrupted Milosevic at their head) that threatens private space and sovereignty by endangering the family. The conflict in Kosovo actually stages a very similar conflict as the one featured in Life Is Beautiful. Nazi imagery is used time and again to describe the atrocities of the Serbs, even while their systematic removal of the ethnic Albanians from the province of Kosovo was incessantly compared to the Holocaust. The collapse of Nazi imagery into representations of the Serbs was neatly set off from contingent images of NATO soldiers as benevolent fathers and Albanian mothers as figures of redemption. Such Nazi imagery reflects a patriarchy in disarray where the father abuses his excessive authority. Military technology becomes the means through which the family is saved.

The protection and salvation of the family are launched in this deification of private industry through images of war machinery. These images of military power are meant to glorify corporate efficiency and to testify to the superiority of capitalism. CNN reports of the war in Kosovo were interspersed with Lockheed-Martin commercials. This massive military contractor reminded viewers that it does not only produce the weapons of war but also improves the domestic front. Their warplanes happily fly through computer-generated U.S. neighborhoods. (In reality, part of what Lockheed-Martin does domestically is destroy families by participating in the privatization of federal family services). In many instances, the family images in the Kosovo coverage seem almost organically connected to such images of military technology. The cover photograph of Time’s Special Report, for instance, shows the Albanian mother breast-feeding her child, but the child’s face is invisible, folded inside a bundle of blankets. Two weeks later, the article "Who Will Save the Children?" in People starts with a photograph of children running across Kosovar fields towards flying army helicopters. The helicopters here stand spatially in the same place as the mother in the former photograph, giving the same sense of salvation and safety as the mother does in the Special Report. The mother’s nourishment seems to blend into the army’s presence. The mother figure with her deadened eyes represents a technological fulfillment, the deployment of salvational instruments to defend the innocence of children.

News coverage of Littleton assigned blame for this horrific event to the Internet, video games, movies, schools, violence on TV, and, significantly, to poor parenting. The message conveyed suggests that pedagogical sites like the media and schools are demonic, vampiristically sucking away at children’s brains as Lucy did on her gravestone in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Such pedagogical influences are here part of a unified assertion about the failure of the adequate policing of youth. Instead of being a potential field for creating resistant identifications, mass media characterizes pedagogy as failed families and mothers. As Time asks in a post-Littleton article considering if "character education" would fix the problem of youth violence, "Where are the parents?" If the kids were building bombs in the garage and stockpiling semi-automatic weapons in their bedrooms, why didn’t the parents know about it? Time magazine begins its report with a picture of Dylan Klebold being cared for by his mother many years before the incident, with the caption reading that Dylan "grew up in what friends called a happy home." It is the subsequent absence of such proper mothering—a loosening of everyday surveillance—that leads to, then, the catastrophe, suggesting that if this family love had continued, there would have been no violence. The coverage makes clear that Klebold’s mother was a professional psychologist specializing in job placement for the disabled. The same Time magazine article goes on to talk about Dylan Klebold’s "disturbed fictions," which he wrote in his creative-writing class, about "Satan opening a day-care center in hell." The press coverage of Dylan’s disturbed fantasies bolster a sense of dereliction pervading in the mother’s absence, the complete undermining of social control in the image of the working mother.

The perceived crisis in the family is not just a representational field existing in some ethereal state. It is actually guiding social policies as well as globalization initiatives in very real ways. As Tipper Gore, in the wake of Littleton, urges parents to keep a sharper eye on their kids’ moods or depressive urges, and parents in general are encouraged to turn in their kids for "suspicious" behavior, there is an emphasis in the coverage—paralleling the Kosovo coverage—on sentimental reunions between parents and children, as though such reunions ensure the return to social order. People, for example, gives the testimony of Zak Cartaya who, in the midst of the Columbine shooting, while hiding under the desks in the choir room, managed to make a telephone call to his mother and tell her that he loved her. "I had to be sure I told my mom I loved her in case I died," he confessed. Like the link to God during the Christian last rites, the call to the mother at the moment of death serves to re-establish the family as order, goodness, and the site of survival at a time when it has been disrupted by the chaotic explosion of violence and immorality.

It can be said that the growth of state military action abroad is producing the ideological support for the shrinkage of state social action at home. The family functions as the core principle behind the rise of technological power, the very structure through which a military might can assert itself in a territorial take-over. Here is the contradiction: on the one hand, the state military action defends the sacred family unit abroad while, on the other hand, on the domestic front, the family is seen as the limits of the state, responsible in itself for everything from child care to the enforcement of moral behaviors in every corner. While Kosovo was discussed in the media as a maiden-in-distress, in need of the military father to protect her from villainy, rape, and pillage, on the homefront the danger to the family is staged as the "bitch’s own fault," as the working mother takes the blame for the child’s deviant behavior, or the welfare mother needs to stand on her own and stop sucking from the system.

The Public and the Private

On both an ideological and material level, attacks on feminism and blaming social problems on women’s work or family values can be seen as resulting from widespread corporatization and the privatization of the social sphere. They shift public responsibility onto the private sphere by claiming that the private family, rather than the collective public, should maintain the social order. This shift of responsibility towards the private sphere is happening concomitantly with a strident ideological anti-federalism. Anti-federalism proclaims that the public sphere, in the form of an overly burdensome state, is at the root of social rot and degradation and that limits need to be placed on its influence. The family, in this sense, becomes representationally the safe haven against the recklessness of public involvement, including, for example, feminism and other social movements. On the ideological plane, this configuration between the public and the private means that any attempt to define and defend a public role seems to fall into a defense of the state, as the state seems, in the popular mind, to be the primary source of an entrenchment in a public will which curtails individual freedoms. The idea of the public seems only possible as an operation of the state, even though in actuality the state is only one possible place to negotiate and to build public power.

Strange Love is therefore concerned with how narratives about private life and freedom are being used to protect corporate powers and actions which are inimical to private life. It therefore points to how the increasingly global movement of capital redefines the relation between public and private. As multinational corporations grow more powerful, state power shrinks not only in terms of the welfare state but also in the defunding of public spaces like schools and parks, as well as in the privatization of state disciplinary functions like military contracting, and police, not to mention educational testing and accreditation. Part of this redefinition, as well, has occurred as a result of social movements such as feminism and gay/lesbian liberation which have publicized private life and politicized subjectivity. Legislatively, civil rights to privacy in search and seizure have been reduced while the powers of private businesses now fall under the protections, like the First Amendment, previously serving civil liberties and privacy.

The pressing question here is how the new distribution of powers between public and private life affects material distribution and the distribution of cultural-valuation (how the cultures of different groups come to be valued differently). As philosopher Nancy Fraser has shown, the division between public and private life has been instrumental in determining material distribution: "It is clear, too, that the old forms of welfare state, built on assumptions of male-headed families and relatively stable jobs, are no longer suited to providing this protection [against economic uncertainty]." A reconfiguration of private life which results from the new global economy is certainly manifesting itself in different arrangements for family living and influenced by different cultural traditions interacting in zones of production. Immigration and migrant labor have been a major factor in defining new relations between public support and private freedoms, as children are denied school enrollment on the basis of language ability, or their "failure" as students—the standard argument against bilingual public education—gets attributed to inadequate parental attention and dysfunctional family life. Material distribution, Fraser points out, must be understood in relation to culture. "Struggles for [cultural] recognition," she formulates, "occur in a world of exacerbated material inequality—in income and property ownership; in access to paid work, education, health care, and leisure time; but also, more starkly, in caloric intake and exposure to environmental toxicity, and hence in life expectancy and rates of morbidity and mortality."

The state remains a dominant mechanism for defending public life, as it has traditionally through institutions like welfare and public schooling, which are currently, and tragically, being dismantled. Though clearly the nation-state has historically been an arm of capital, it has also created and/or funded institutions serving the public good, it continues to be a key site of struggle, and it is certainly worthwhile to think through the following:

1. In what ways can the state still support the public interest?

2. How can economic distributions be equitably relegated without state interventions—are there other types of institutions that can perform this function? "Any conception of the public sphere," Nancy Fraser contends, "that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, interpublic coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society"

3. In what ways and under what terms, indeed, can a public free of the state be imagined, created, and developed, both nationally in terms of a civil society, and internationally in terms of global labor and global social movements? One sees now that international bodies of justice, finance, and distribution are being formed, and it is crucial therefore to envision how such institutions can induce a more just world.

Modernist and postmodernist political theories have offered a spectrum of possibilities for thinking of ways of resisting what is becoming a major ideological assault on the public, providing arguments for supporting the public sphere as a defense for democracy. A Habermasian notion of the public sphere, for example, relies on the state to secure and legitimate democratic communication among citizens. "The constitutional state as a bourgeois state," explains Habermas, "established the public sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the connection between law and public opinion." One of the problems with Habermas’ model of liberal democracy, however, is that it relies too much on the idea of rational communication among subjects, particularly subjects thinking freely and versed in the values of enlightenment through their increased access to books of literature, art, and philosophy. Not only does such a viewpoint not take into account unequal distributions of access to learning, but also begs the question of whose knowledge counts. As Habermas himself points out about the eighteenth century establishment of the public sphere, "Women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere." As well, this Habermasian logic also assumes that the free reading of cultural texts determines the interpretation, so that all subjects reach consensus as to rules, procedures, and assumptions. Habermas’ focus on free communication and interpretive communities of the eighteenth century means that he does not consider current corporate controls of meaning in the culture industry and how the range of possible interpretation are at least partially already a product of the distribution of money and power and thus already embedded in ideology.

Alternatively, a theory of radical democracy has offered a way of thinking about difference, rather than consensus, as constitutive of the public sphere. Unlike Habermas, Chantal Mouffe has shown how democracy depends on conflict and antagonism, or on Wittgensteinian language games, rather than on consensus, so that deliberation is radically indeterminate. For her, liberal democracy relegates difference to the private sphere, whereas the public is composed of consensus reached through rules and procedures. Mouffe believes that differences need necessarily to be brought into spaces of public deliberation, particularly establishing a democratic ethos where the general good can be thought in relation to individual rights as posed under liberalism. "We should acknowledge and valorize," she insists, "the diversity of ways in which the ‘democratic game’ can be played, instead of trying to reduce this diversity to a uniform model of citizenship. This would mean fostering a plurality of forms of being a democratic citizen and creating the institutions that would make it possible to follow the democratic rules in a plurality of ways." The problem here is that differences—including differences based on material access, like differences in class—become a matter of subjective identifications and individuation, obfuscating an explanation of how identifications are anything other than cultural or aesthetic questions of taste or again today how identifications are produced largely through corporate mass media. Indeed, Mouffe envisions class as just another category of difference, another nodal point on the chain of equivalencies. As Mouffe emphasizes justice through politics, the idea of the economic as a pivotal basis for political fairness disappears. Again, the political economy of meaning production, including the production of taste, is left out in favor of a model of negotiating language-meanings between equal parties with equal access to the negotiating table.

The shortcomings in these models of a democratic public sphere result from their focus on the language of communication in a region free of political interventions and impositions, in other words, a space of communication existing between public citizens separate from the state, exterior to the political yet affecting it. This clearly conforms to the way democracy has been defined in the interests of corporate deregulation. In a world where the rights to reap profits free from controls becomes the discursive equivalent of "free speech," it is absolutely essential that a model for democratic public communication and deliberation include the possibility of state or other types of institutional guidance as a lever for justice, where justice would necessarily include material redistributions. The need for an institutional body to assure economic fairness continues until international organizations for the expansion of economic justice are formed and methods of enforcement enacted to counter the opposing force—towards the growing powers of accumulation on the parts of rich, corporate elites worldwide—promised by the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and other such global coalitions. Thus we believe that selective elements of the democratic liberal tradition need to be maintained, particularly in terms of institutional and legal supports for freedom, though we would substitute ideas about collectivity, social justice, and the public good for the individuation which the liberal discourse on private rights so uncompromisingly assumes. As Zygmunt Bauman astutely points out, individual liberty "can only be a product of collective work. . . . We move today though towards privatization of the means to assure . . . individual liberty."

Vital, in this regard, is Antonio Gramsci’s notion of civil society, where there is an interaction between private apparatuses for the production of meaning ("hegemony") and the direct domination of the state:

This notion of civil society allows us to imagine a civil society forming as part of the State and yet distinct from its coercive functions in order to institute more just material distributions.

Because of the consolidation of corporate mass media, meanings, language, and significations are themselves the basis for both economic relations and culture. So while on the one hand it is still possible to distinguish public ownership and control of institutions, it becomes very difficult to locate public culture. What stands in for public culture is the privately owned yet widely disseminated productions such as TV talk shows, talk radio, and the corporate Internet community. The question is how to expand genuinely public cultures and places—that is, how to shift control of public space to more people. It must be recognized, following Gramsci, that struggles over pedagogy are fundamentally implicated in struggles over the relation between public vs. private power. As such, pedagogical questions point to the potential role of teaching, learning, and cultural production in expanding the public sphere and hence democratic participation. Concomitantly, what needs to be theorized and developed is a notion of the public that is neither reduced to the state nor reduced to private enterprise, but yet takes into account the influence of both. We do not have the scope of foresight to predict the future of the state or the market, but we feel confident in predicting that the death of a notion of the public is akin to the end of the possibility of democracy.

Chapter Breakdown

Strange Love seeks to answer the question as to how varied cultural forms—in this case, curriculum, multicultural literature, and popular films—educate the public ideologically through cultural politics. While such ideological analysis of cultural politics is hardly unique in the fields of cultural studies and critical education, Strange Love marks the entry into critical education of a global critique of cultural politics that reveals the extent to which domestic stories such as the Columbine school shooting justify global aggression and conversely the way that representations of the global mediates the coverage of domestic incidents and social policy. That is, Strange Love interrogates the relationship between the political economy of globalization and the new human rights imperialism and the cultural politics that educate the public into complicity with it through such narratives as family, war, politics, privatization, and innocence. While much has been written about the policy of the new human rights imperialism, very little has been written about the cultural pedagogical project accompanying and supporting it. Strange Love looks to the ways education itself is being infiltrated by corporate curricula that make the most destructive elements of the new imperialism appear as their diametrical opposite.

The book has three parts. Each part comprises two chapters. Part I details how corporate initiatives in education are presenting themselves as philanthropy, entertainment, and even progressive pedagogy when in reality they are part of an attack on the public sector and democracy; part II shows the ways some recent multicultural and postcolonial literature purports to further democratic inclusion and "humanize the other" yet we show how it supports neoliberal doctrine and neoliberal foreign and domestic policies which undermine democracy in multiple ways and tend towards destroying others abroad for corporate profit; part III shows how two recent popular films appear to champion family and childhood innocence when, in fact, they function to deny the social and sanctify the private sphere and consumerism.

Chapter 1: Junk King Education. Michael Milken is sold to the public in mass media as a benevolent savior of education when in fact he is spearheading a destructive move for a hostile corporate takeover of education and the redefinition of education as a private rather than a public good.

Chapter 2: Rivers of Fire: Amoco’s iMPACT. Amoco distributes science curriculum which promotes their notion of "progressive pedagogy" as entertainment, fun, and love. Following on the critique of the corporate raid on education as recounted in the previous chapter, this chapter focuses specifically on how corporate curriculum functions as both ideology for corporate culture and as diversion from what this oil giant is doing globally. The curriculum does not mention Amoco’s use of science for its profit-seeking domestic and overseas destruction of the environment, displacement of indigenous peoples, human rights violations, or the undermining of democracy.

Chapter 3: A Time for Flying Horses: Oil Education and the Future of Literature. Keri Hulme’s novel The Bone People, winner of Mobil Oil’s Pegasus Prize as well as the Booker Prize, has been hailed by scholars in postcolonialism and multiculturalism as a celebration of family, spiritual healing, and Maori recognition. Following on the prior chapter’s critique of the oil industry’s intervention in public school curriculum, this chapter shows how this novel, widely read as postcolonial higher education curriculum, celebrates international finance and presents nature as ripe for corporate exploitation while attacking public institutions and labor.

Chapter 4: The Mayor’s Madness: So Far from God. Ana Castillo’s acclaimed Chicana novel So Far from God receives praise for setting up ideals of a caring feminist community. Yet, its anti-federalism and critique of public institutions in conjunction with its celebration of the private, bolsters cruel ideologies that are enacted in such policies as New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attacks on the homeless. Following from the prior chapter’s discussion of corporate influence in seemingly progressive higher education curriculum, this chapter is concerned with how individualist values promoted through particular versions of multicultural higher education curriculum are feeding ideologies that justify the gutting of the public sphere.

Chapter 5: Enemy of the State. Equality and freedom appear as major concerns of this popular 1999 film. However, this chapter, the first of two chapters on media pedagogy, discusses how these seemingly democratic values are transformed by the filmmakers into equality as the effacement of difference and freedom as the freedom to consume the vast array of commodities advertised by the film. Ideal for neoliberal vilification of the public sphere, as in So Far from God, the public appears as the enemy of ethnic difference and affective human communities in this film.

Chapter 6: A Hilarious Romp Through the Holocaust. Academy Award winning Life Is Beautiful stresses the virtue of parental sacrifice for the protection of children and youthful innocence. However, as this chapter discusses, the film shows how the political is demonized through making political knowledge seem dangerous to children, defining freedom as the free pursuit of business and public action as an obstacle to private happiness and affective human relations. This chapter discusses how the neoliberal ideology promoted in Life Is Beautiful poses the private family and business in a cosmic battle against the evils of the public sphere. Expanding the prior chapter’s discussions of the ideologies of anti-federalism, this analysis shows how film promotes values that endanger youth by propagating ideologies favorable to the privatization and elimination of the welfare state designed to protect them.

Strange Love is fundamentally concerned with possibilities of resistance and the politics of hope, in short with changing the social vision of the world that corporate capitalism imposes. In doing so, Strange Love takes Cultural Studies beyond its current entrenchment in representational analysis, image wars, and the aesthetics of recognition, arguing that culture is vitally connected to the building of political agendas and policy. As Edward Said writes,

Strange Love is concerned with how teaching critical consciousness can make the conditions for social change. It offers educators tools to show how cultural representations are political, supporting a power structure in the interests of multinational capital and at the expense of democracy. Teachers can draw on the insights of critical pedagogy in order both to expose and to challenge the feel-good sentiment in which the mainstream media is cloaking corporate expansion and neo-imperialism. Critical pedagogy, writes Giroux, "as a form of political activism refers to a deliberate attempt by cultural workers to influence how knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular social relations."

Notes