Kenneth J. Saltman
Military generals running schools, students in uniforms, metal detectors, police presence, high-tech ID card dog tags, real-time Internet-based surveillance cameras, mobile hidden surveillance cameras, security consultants, chain-link fences, surprise searches—as U.S. public schools invest in record levels of school security apparatus they increasingly resemble the military and prisons. Yet it would be a mistake to understand the school security craze as merely a mass media spectacle in the wake of Columbine and other recent high-profile shootings. And it would be myopic to fail to grasp the extent of public school militarization, its recent history, and its uses prior to the sudden interest it has garnered following September 11.
This book argues that militarized education in the United States needs to be understood in relation to the enforcement of global corporate imperatives as they expand markets through the material and symbolic violence of war and education. As an entry into the themes of the book this introduction demonstrates how militarism pervades foreign and domestic policy, popular culture, educational discourse, and language, educating citizens in the virtues of violence. This chapter demonstrates how, prior to September 11, a high level of comfort with rising militarism in all areas of U.S. life, particularly schooling, set the stage for the radically militarized reactions to September 11 that include the institutionalization of permanent war, the suspension of civil liberties, and an active hostility of the state and mass media toward attempts at addressing the underlying conditions that gave rise to an unprecedented attack on U.S. soil.
Militarized schooling in America can be understood in at least two broad ways: “military education” and what I am calling “education as enforcement.” Military education refers to explicit efforts to expand and legitimate military training in public schooling. These sorts of programs are exemplified by JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) programs, the Troops to Teachers program that places retired soldiers in schools, the trend of military generals hired as school superintendents or CEOs, the uniform movement, the Lockheed Martin corporation’s public school in Georgia, and the army’s development of the biggest online education program in the world as a recruiting inducement. The large number of private military schools such as the notorious Valley Forge Military Academy that service the public military academies and the military itself could be thought of as a kind of ideal toward which public school militarization strives. Military education seeks to promote military recruitment as in the case of the 200,000 students in 1,420 JROTC army programs nationwide. These programs parallel the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts by turning hierarchical organization, competition, group cohesion, and weaponry into fun and games. Focusing on adventure activities these programs are extremely successful, as half (47 percent) of JROTC graduates enter military service.
In addition to promoting recruitment, military education plays a central role in fostering a social focus on discipline. In short, to speak of militarized schooling in the United States context, it is inadequate to identify the ways that schools increasingly resemble the military and prisons. This phenomenon needs to be understood as part of the militarization of civil society exemplified by the rise of militarized policing, increased police powers for search and seizure, anti-public gathering laws, “zero tolerance” policies, and the transformation of welfare into punishing workfare programs. The militarization of civil society has been intensified since September 11, as conservatives and most liberals have seized upon the “terrorist threat” to justify the passage of the USA Patriot Act. As Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights explains, the Patriot Act sacrifices political freedoms and dangerously consolidates power in the executive branch.
It achieves these undemocratic ends in at least three ways. First, the Act places our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and political association in jeopardy by creating a broad new crime of “domestic terrorism” and denying entry to non-citizens on the basis of ideology. Second, the Act reduces our already low expectations of privacy by granting the government enhanced surveillance powers. Third, the Act erodes the due process rights of non-citizens by allowing the government to place them in mandatory detention and deport them from the United States based on political activities that have been recast under the Act as terrorist activities.1
As Chang persuasively argues, the Patriot Act does little to combat terrorism yet it radically threatens basic constitutional safeguards, most notably the freedom of political dissent, which is, in many ways, the lifeblood of democracy as it forms the basis for public deliberation about the future of the nation. The repressive elements of the state in the form of such phenomena as militarized policing, the radical growth of the prison system, and intensified surveillance accompany the increasing corporate control of daily life. The corporatization of the everyday is characterized by the corporate domination of information production and distribution in the form of control over mass media and educational publishing, the corporate use of information technologies in the form of consumer identity profiling by marketing and credit card companies, and the increasing corporate involvement in public schooling and higher education at multiple levels. The phrase “Education as Enforcement” attempts to explain these merging phenomena of militarization and corporatization as they are shaping not only the terrain of school but the broader society. The term refers both to the ways that education as a field is being transformed by these trends but also it refers to the extent to which education is central to the workings of the new forms that power is taking.
What I am calling “Education as Enforcement” understands militarized public schooling as part of the militarization of civil society that in turn needs to be understood as part of the broader social, cultural, and economic movements for state-backed corporate globalization that seek to erode public democratic power and expand and enforce corporate power locally, nationally, and globally. In what follows here, I lay out these connections. Then, by reading news coverage of NATO’s attack against Kosovo in relation to the shooting at Columbine High School, the latter half of this introduction shows how both events were driven by the same corporate-driven cultural logic of militaristic violence. I continue by discussing how the movement against militarism in education must challenge the many ways that militarism as a cultural logic enforces the expansion of corporate power and decimates public democratic power.
Corporate globalization, which should be viewed as a doctrine rather than as an inevitable phenomenon, is driven by the philosophy of neoliberalism. The economic and political doctrine of neoliberalism insists upon the virtues of privatization and liberalization of trade and concomitantly places faith in the hard discipline of the market for the resolution of all social and individual problems. Within the United States, neoliberal policies have been characterized by their supporters as “free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic and parasitic government, that can never do good even if well intended, which it rarely is.”2 Within the neoliberal view, the public sphere should either be privatized as in the call to privatize U.S. public schools, public parks, social security, health care, and so on, or the public sphere should be in the service of the private sphere as in the case of U.S. federal subsidies for corporate agriculture, entertainment, and defense.
As many critics have observed, globalization efforts have hardly resulted in more just social relations either in terms of access to political power or democratic control over the economy. While corporate news media heralded economic boom at the millennium’s turn, disparities in wealth have reached greater proportions than during the Great Depression,3 with the world’s richest 300 individuals possessing more wealth than the world’s poorest 48 countries combined, and the richest fifteen have a greater fortune than the total product of sub-Saharan Africa.4
According to the most recent report of the United Nations Development Programme, while the global consumption of goods and services was twice as big in 1997 as in 1975 and had multiplied by a factor of six since 1950, 1 billion people cannot satisfy even their elementary needs. Among 4.5 billion of the residents of the “developing” countries, three in every five are deprived of access to basic infrastructures: a third have no access to drinkable water, a quarter have no accommodation worthy of its name, one-fifth have no use of sanitary and medical services. One in five children spend less than five years in any form of schooling; a similar proportion is permanently undernourished.5
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 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 1970s to the point that not a single county in the nation contains one-bedroom apartments affordable for a single minimum-wage earner.6 Free trade agreements such as NAFTA (and the FTAA that aims to extend it) and GATT, have enriched corporate elites in Mexico and the United States while intensifying poverty along the border.7 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 29 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 past half century.8 The effects of globalization on world populations are a far cry from freedom.
Neoliberalism as the doctrine behind global capitalism should be understood in relation to the practice of what Ellen Meiskins Wood calls the “new imperialism,” that 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.”9 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 “[i]t 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, “[t]he 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.”10 The Bush administration’s new military policies of permanent war confirm Wood’s thesis. The return to Cold War levels of military spending approaching $400 billion with only 10–15 percent tied to increased antiterrorism measures can be interpreted as part of a more overt strategy of U.S. imperial expansion facilitated by skillful media spin amid post-September 11 anxiety. The framing of those events enabled not only a more open admission of violent power politics and defiant U.S. unilateralism but also an intensified framing of democracy as consumer capitalism. Who can forget the September 12 state and corporate proclamations to be patriotic and go shopping? Post-September 11 spin was a spectacularly successful educational project. Suddenly, in teacher education courses, students who would have proudly announced that they could see no relationship between U.S. foreign policy and U.S. schooling now proudly announced that teachers must educate students toward the national effort to dominate, control, and wage war on other nations who could threaten our economic and military dominance because we have the best “way of life,” because “they are jealous of our freedoms,” because “they are irrational for failing to grasp that our way of life benefits everybody.” Yet, the new Bush military expenditures are part of a longer legacy of World War II military spending that has resulted in a U.S. economy that is, in the words of economist Samir Amin, “monstrously deformed,” with about a third of all economic activity depending directly or indirectly on the military complex—a level, Amin notes, only previously reached by the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era.11
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. However, weapons are not the predominant means for keeping Americans consenting to economic policies and political arrangements that impoverish the world materially and reduce the imaginable future to a repetition of a bleak present. Rather, education in the form of formal schooling and predominantly the cultural pedagogies of corporate mass media have succeeded spectacularly in making savage inequalities into common sense, framing issues in the corporate interest, producing identifications with raw power, presenting history in ways that eviscerate popular struggle, and generally shifting the discussion of public goods to the metaphors of the market.12
Though initially received as a radical and off-beat position by liberals and conservatives at the time of its promotion by Milton Friedman during the Kennedy administration, neoliberalism began to take hold with the Reagan/Thatcher era. Significantly, the Reagan era is also the origin of the landmark A Nation at Risk report published in 1983. This formulated a crisis of U.S. public education through the language of global business and military competition. It began, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The report suggested that there was a crisis of education requiring radical reform. Because the crisis was framed in economic and militaristic terms, the solution would be sought in those domains. This marked a turning point in the public conversation of American education. While such earlier initiatives as the GI Bill and Sputnik indicated a strong link between the military and education, what can be seen as new is the way that militarism was tied to the redefining of education for the corporate good rather than the public good. In other words, this marked a new conflation of corporate profit with the social good, the beginnings of the eradication of the very notion of the public. Corporate CEOs became increasingly legitimate spokespersons on educational reform. Such high-profile corporate players as Louis Gerstner of IBM began declaring that education needs to serve corporate needs. Increasingly, as David Labaree has noted, this trend marked a shift toward defining the role of schools as preparing students for upward social mobility through economic assimilation. So, while on a social level, schools were suddenly thought to exist for the good of the national economy, that is the corporate controlled economy, on an individual level, schools came to be justified for inclusion within this corporate-controlled economy.
The case of Michael Milken nicely exemplifies the relationship between the neoliberal redefinition of the goals of public schooling and the privatization movement. Upon release from prison for 98 counts of fraud and insider trading that resulted in the milking of the public sector of billions of dollars, junk bond king Michael Milken immediately began an education conglomerate called Knowledge Universe with his old pals from the investment bank Drexel. As he bought up companies engaged in privatizing public schooling, he declared on his website that schools should serve corporate needs. He was wildly lauded throughout the press by such respectable papers as the New York Times, and was declared a greater figure than Mother Teresa by Business Week for redeeming himself from a tainted past by such good works in education. In addition to Knowledge Universe, Milken established the Milken Institute that propagandizes neoliberal social policy, and he set up the Milken Family Foundation that funds research and lobbies for privatization of Israel’s economy and education system through the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He also funded Justus Reid Weiner’s slanderous attack in Commentary Magazine on Palestinian human rights spokesperson and progressive intellectual Edward Said. Milken was instrumental in the growth to monopolistic proportions of Time Warner, which included Time’s swallowing of Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting, and the growth of MCI. As Robert W. McChesney, Edward Herman, and others have shown, the radical consolidation of corporate media with its stranglehold on knowledge production has contributed significantly to the success of neoliberal ideology.13
Neoliberal ideals were not taken seriously until the 1990s, in part because of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This began a tide of claims that we live in the best and only social order. This is a social order marked by what Zygmunt Bauman calls the TINA thesis: There Is No Alternative to the present system.14 The TINA thesis was started by Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” argument and runs through Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree with its circular logic: everyone in the world wants to be American because this is the best of all possible systems, and if anyone does not want to be American, this proves their irrationality and we must bomb them into realizing that this is the best of all possible systems. The dissolution of the Soviet system as a symbol of a possible alternative allows a growing insistence on the part of neoliberals that since the present order is the only order, then the task should be one of enforcing the ideals of the order, aligning institutions and social practices with these ideals. So for example, you get Washington Post columnist William Rasberry (who favors full-scale public school privatization) writing that scripted lessons may seem harsh but after all “it works.”15 Such an instrumentalist approach to schooling, which overly relies on supposedly value-free and quantifiable measures of “success,” fails to account for how efficacy needs to be understood in relation to broader social contexts, histories, and competing notions of what counts as valuable knowledge. So, for example, how did the canon championed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., with his Core Knowledge Schools come to be socially valued knowledge? Whose class, racial, and gender perspectives does such knowledge represent? There are high social costs of measures such as scripting, standardization, and the testing fetish. Citizenship becomes defined by an anti-critical following of authority; knowledge becomes mistakenly presented as value-free units to be mechanically deposited; schooling models the new social logic that emphasizes economic social mobility rather than social transformation—that is, it perceives society as a flawed yet unchangeable situation into which individuals should seek assimilation in the New World Order.
This criticism of instrumental schooling would seem not to be a terribly new insight. In education, the tradition of critical pedagogy that includes Freire, Apple, Giroux, and others made this critical insight a basic precept. However, what is distinct about instrumentalism under the neoliberal imperative is that prior taken-for-granted ideals of an education system intended to ameliorate, enlighten, and complete the individual and society no longer hold. For neoliberalism is not simply about radical individualism, the celebration of business, and competition as a virtue; it is about a prohibition on thinking the social in public terms. In the words of Margaret Thatcher “there is no such thing as English society,” there are only English families.16 The insidiousness of the TINA thesis cannot be overstated. When there is no alternative to the present order then the only question is the method of achieving the goal—the goal being the eradication of anything and anyone that calls the present order into question. This is why it has been so easy following September 11 to discuss methods that are radically at odds with the tradition of liberal democracy in the war on terrorism. (It is no coincidence that the new war is declared on a method of fighting rather than an ideological opponent or another nation. Precisely because there is no alternative to the present order, the values, ideologies, and beliefs of the opponent are not discussable. Ethics can only be a matter of strategy.) Torture of prisoners, disappearances of suspects, spying on the population without limit, and an unprecedented level of secrecy about the workings of the government are a few of the protofascist developments that have been achieved within the first year since September 11. But the destruction of the Trade Towers did not itself make this rush to fascism possible so much as did the success of neoliberal ideology’s prohibition on thinking, discussing, and creating another more just system of economic distribution, political participation, and cultural recognition.
Ronald Reagan entered office with plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and implement market-based voucher schemes. Both initiatives failed, largely due to teachers’ unions and the fact that public opinion had yet to be worked on by a generation of corporate-financed public relations campaigns to make neoliberal ideals appear commonsensical.17 Despite this failure, in his second term Reagan successfully appropriated the racial, equity-based, magnet school voucher model developed by liberals to declare that the market model (rather than authoritative federal action against racism) was responsible for the high quality of these schools.18 What should not be missed here is that the real triumph of such rhetoric was to shift the discussion of U.S. public schooling away from political concerns with the role that education should play in preparing citizens for democratic participation. The market metaphors redefine public schooling as a good or service that students and parents consume like toilet paper or soap. Despite a history of racial and class oppression, that owes in no small part to the fact that U.S. public schooling has been tied to local property wealth and hence unequally distributed as a resource, public schooling has been a site of democratic deliberation where communities convene to struggle over values. Despite the material and ideological constraints that teachers and administrators often face, the public character of these schools allows them to remain open to the possibility of being places where curricula and teacher practices can speak to a broader vision for the future than the one imagined by multinational corporations. Thus, to speak of militarized public schooling in the United States, it is not enough to identify the extent to which certain schools (particularly urban nonwhite schools) increasingly resemble the military or prisons, nor is it adequate to point out the ways public schools are used to recruit soldiers. Militarized public schooling needs to be understood in relation to the enforcement of globalization through the implementation of all the policies and reforms that are guided toward the neoliberal ideal. Globalization gets enforced through privatization schemes such as vouchers, charters, performance contracting, and commercialization; standards and accountability schemes that seek to enforce a uniform curriculum and emphasize testing and quantifiable performance; assessment, accreditation (in higher education), and curricula that celebrate market values and the culture of those in power rather than human and democratic values. Such curricula and reforms are designed to avoid critical questions about the relationships between the production of knowledge and power, authority, politics, history, and ethics. While some multinational corporations, such as Disney in their Celebration School, and BPAmoco (see Chapter 2), with their middle-level science curriculum, have appropriated progressive pedagogical methods, these curricula, like ads, strive to promote a vision of a world best served under benevolent corporate management.
JROTC and standard recruitment, prior to September 11, proved insufficient to keep the voluntary U.S. military stocked with enough soldiers to wield, in the words of Thomas Friedman, “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies and McDonald’s.”19 In fact, military recruiting in the United States has seen a crisis in the past few years. As of 1999 the army suffered its worst recruiting drought since 1979 with a shortage of 7,000 enlistees to maintain a force size of 74,500. The air force fell short by 1,500–1,800, while the navy had to cut its target numbers and lower its requirements to make numbers.20 As recruitment target numbers have not been met, the military has invested heavily in a number of new advertising campaigns that radically redefine the image of the military and use “synergy” to promote the branches of the service in Hollywood films and on television. For example, navy ads use clips from the film Men of Honor, with military advertising preceding the film. Because the U.S. military must rely fully upon consent rather than coercion to fill its ranks, the military is portrayed in ads as fun and exciting, and the heroism of service is tied to the most sentimental depictions that play on childhood innocence and family safety to sell youth on the business of killing.
The new campaign for the air force titled “Lullaby” promotes its new slogan “No One Comes Close.” Quadrupling its advertising budget to $76 million (all the services are spending $11,000 per recruit on advertising),21 buying national television slots for the first time, and using a “brand identity” based approach, the new marketing seeks to induce recruitment by filling the airwaves with “value-based” advertising that emphasizes the “intangibles” of military service.22 For example:
An ad called “Lullaby,” for example, shows home videos of happy children and their mother with a soft voice singing in the background. At the words “guardian angels will attend thee all through the night,” the visual image shifts to an F-117 “stealth” fighter roaring across a dark sky. The only explicit appeal to recruits comes in the final second, when the Air Force’s new slogan, “No One Comes Close,” appears on a black screen followed for an instant by the words “Join Us.”23
A central strategy of this campaign as well as the army’s new “Army of One” campaign is to suggest a heroic exclusivity of service in this particular branch. All of the branches are following the marine corps’ successful campaign that “portrayed enlistment as a chance to become a dragon-slaying knight in shining armor. The macho ads were designed to convince young people that joining the Marines was not merely a career choice but a powerful statement about what kind of adults they intended to become.”24
The Air Force advertisement draws on Judeo-Christian imagery of an angry and protective techno-god. By joining the air force one can be the protector of the innocent and approach the infinite power of the almighty—interchangeably God and the unmatchable techno-power of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, and Raytheon. To be in the air force, the ad suggests, is to be in an elite and exclusive, powerful, and moral position. Another set of public service announcement ads aimed at adults seeks to “ensure that parents, teachers and other ‘adult influencers’ know about the educational programs so that they, in turn, can advise young people.”25 These ads stress tangible rewards such as educational opportunities, high-tech skills training, and managerial expertise, which can later translate into cash in the corporate sector.
While the United States offers no public universal higher education program in civil society, it does so through the military. Ryan’s statement about the higher calling of serving our nation is hardly a sentiment reserved for a conservative military establishment. Liberals and conservatives join in proclaiming the virtues of a military form of public service at a time when public spending goes increasingly for militarized solutions to civic social problems. These militarized solutions have translated into the United States having by far the largest prison system in the world with over two million inmates. Rapidly rising investment in the prison industrial complex, which includes for-profit prisons and high-tech policing, is matched by rapid privatization of the public sector.26 As U.S. citizens enjoy few of the social safety nets of public health care, education, or welfare, enjoyed by citizens of most industrialized nations, U.S. public institutions such as hospitals, schools, and social security are subject to the fevered call to privatize. At the same time that public investment in militarizing civil society has come into vogue, the world of the corporate class has discovered military chic. The first issue of Harper’s Bazaar for the new millennium shows a serious looking fashion model goose-stepping down the runway in uniform. The accompanying text sounds off: “Military Coup. Never thought you would crave camouflage? Think again … fashion’s military scheme will have even the most resistant shopper succumbing to the latest protocol.”27 The model’s designer jacket is listed for $1,500, and the cotton skirt runs to $370. Military chic for corporate elites extends to the nationwide trend for private boot-camp-style exercise classes.
The same marketing strategies designed to lure recruits are used by weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Boeing (along with a lot of money) to lobby the U.S. Congress to continue funding such miserably failed and unbelievably expensive and unnecessary weapons programs as the F-22 joint strike fighter and “Star Wars.”28 As Mark Crispin Miller observes, the defense industry’s advertisements not too subtly suggest that the public had better fund the weapons projects or American family members will die in foreign wars and from terrorist attacks at home.29 The weapons manufacturers also use the ads to propose that peace is a result of heavy military investment, thereby obviating the need for social movements for peace such as those that influenced the end of the Vietnam War.
The new campaign for the army, “An Army of One,” replaces the “Be All That You Can Be” slogan that was the number two jingle of the twentieth century behind McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today.”30 The “Army of One” campaign, like its predecessor, stresses individual self-actualization, yet goes a step further to insist upon the ideal of radical individualism. A lone recruit runs across a desert in full gear as troops pass in the opposite direction. Such images would seem to chafe against the necessity of self-sacrifice and teamwork, which more accurately characterizes the military. The new ads insist that every soldier is a hero, is an army. The promise is not merely one of becoming the “best” that one can be, a promise that implies there might still be someone better; the “Army of One” slogan promises that one incorporates the army into oneself, one renounces oneself and actually becomes the army with all of its power and technology. The Army slogan is consistent with the virtual tour offered by the marine corps. This tour begins by explicitly linking the militaristic renunciation of self to economic metaphors:
One must first be stripped clean. Freed of all the notions of self. It is the marine corps that will strip away the façade so easily confused with the self. It is the corps that will offer the pain needed to buy the truth. And at last each will own the privilege of looking inside himself to discover what truly resides there.31
One renounces oneself. One’s body undergoes torments of the flesh. Yet this pain inflicted through training is currency that allows one to buy knowledge of one’s new self. At the end of the tour one learns that self-renunciation, pain, the breaking and remaking, and ultimate purchase of self-knowledge results in the privatized social unit: “We came as orphans, we depart as family,” concludes the marine tour.
Just as family restoration becomes the aim of war in the marine ad, so too does it appear in such blockbuster films as Saving Private Ryan, Men of Honor, Three Kings, and The Thin Red Line. The brilliant innovation of Saving Private Ryan was to make the goal of the good war not the protection of the public so much as the preservation of the private family unit. Saving Private Ryan simultaneously shifted democratic ideals onto the market metaphor. Freedom, we are told in the end of Saving Private Ryan, needs to be earned by individuals. When they have earned their freedom they can go home.
Fifty years ago, movies were homogenous, meant to appeal to the whole family. Now pop culture has been Balkanized…. Recent teen films, whether romance or horror, are really about class warfare. In each movie, the cafeteria is like a tiny former Yugoslavia, with each clique its own faction: the Serbian jocks, Bosnian bikers, Kosovar rebels, etc. And the horror movies are a microcosm of ethnic cleansing.
—Time magazine reporting on the shootings at Columbine
We must teach our children … to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.
—President Bill Clinton responding to the Columbine High School shooting as the U.S. dropped more bombs on former Yugoslavia than were dropped in World War II
This section32 illustrates how the corporate-produced violent culture of mass media and competitive sports informs both U.S. public schooling and U.S. foreign policy. As mass-mediated news accounts of the war in Kosovo were expressed through stories of families abroad, the school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, 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 April 20, 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 LA 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.33 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.34 How and in whose interests are these perceptions manufactured?
The December 20, 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.”
Thanks to the F-16’s top speed of 1,320 mph, Santa will be delivering your presents faster this holiday season. Furthermore, the F-16’s armament of one 20mm M61A1 three-barrel cannon with 515 rounds and 20,450 pounds of ordnance guarantees the safe arrival of those presents.
At the top of the page an elf sips a soda and accompanying text reads,
Who needs elves when you have AltaVista Shopping.com? At AltaVista Shopping.com you can research products you know nothing about: stereos, computers, TVs, digital cameras and Pokemon toys, for example. There are 126 different Pokemon characters and over 2,000 licensed Pokemon toys on the market. Only one of them is going to win you most-favored parent status for the coming year. We can help you find out which.
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 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 returns 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:
Can I really purchase military aircraft online? Let’s put it this way: if military aircraft were available for purchase by the general public, we’d not only find it for you, we’d find you a deal that would make the Defense Department jealous. That said, AltaVistaShopping.com lets you scour the entire Web for just about anything you can buy, even if we don’t sell it.
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), done 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 50 years. Perhaps more pertinently, 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, which 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 website 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,
If these kids had been black or brown, they would have been denounced not as psychologically troubled but as bearers of a social pathology. Moreover, if brown or black kids had exhibited Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s previous history of delinquent behavior, including breaking into a van and sending death threats to fellow students over the Internet, they would not have merely been given short-term counseling. On the contrary, they would have been roundly condemned and quickly sent to prison.35
In the words of Patricia Williams, Klebold and Harris,
seem to have been so shrouded in presumptions of innocence—after professing their love for Hitler, declaring their hatred for blacks, Asians and Latinos on a public Web site no less, downloading instructions for making bombs, accumulating the ingredients, assembling them under the protectively indifferent gaze (or perhaps with the assistance) of parents and neighbors, stockpiling guns and ammunition, procuring hand grenades and flak jackets, threatening the lives of classmates, killing thirteen and themselves, wounding numerous others and destroying their school building—still the community can’t seem to believe it really happened “here.” Still their teachers and classmates continue to protest that they were good kids, good students, solid citizens.36
What Time and AltaVista add to this scenario is that the presumption of innocence saturating the Columbine coverage promotes the innocence of the imperialist mission 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 past 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,
In his Manifesto [for the Fast World], [Thomas L.] Friedman explains that Americans, who “were ready to pay any price and bear any burden in the Cold War,” are unwilling to die for that “abstract globalization system.” That’s why “house-to-house fighting is out; cruise missiles are in.” He could just as easily have said “that’s why ground troops are out and high-tech bombing is in. We don’t want to die ourselves for globalization, but we don’t mind killing others.”37
For Wood, part of what successfully undercut popular and particularly left-wing opposition to Kosovo, unlike Vietnam, was the pretense of humanitarian intervention that mystified the imperialism.
We now have what some have called “human rights imperialism,” based on a conception of human rights in which the particular interests of the U.S. and its arbitrary actions have effectively displaced the common interests of humanity and the international instruments designed to represent them. The notion of “human rights imperialism” nicely captures the mystification that seems to have swayed a lot of people on the left in the case of Kosovo.38
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, which 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 Red-nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus himself. Merry Christmas, Kosovo. Merry Christmas, Serbia.
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 25 years in order to open markets. It is contextualized with a photo of Columbine’s football team conquest. Isaacson begins:
I want to explain why we returned to Columbine this week, running a chilling cover photo and stories about killers we would rather forget … we sent a team back to Littleton, Colo., to investigate what actually motivated the killers and find out what they were really like. What could we learn about how to spot—and deal with—the demons that can lurk inside the souls of seemingly average kids? … Assistant managing editor Dan Goodgame, who led our team, is the father of three schoolkids and the husband of a teacher, and he was sympathetic to the concerns of the survivors and others in the community.39
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.”40 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 anticompetitive 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 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 grownup.” “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.”41 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.
Evan Todd, the 255-lb. defensive lineman who was wounded in the library, describes the climate this way: “Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects,” Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends. “Most kids didn’t want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It’s not just jocks; the whole school’s disgusted with them. They’re a bunch of homos, grabbing each other’s private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ’em. So the whole school would call them homos, and when they did something sick, we’d tell them, “You’re sick and that’s wrong.”42
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.”43 Rohrbough’s statement clearly attests to how the thin facade 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.’”44
The Time coverage charges that the police, parents, and the community failed to see how Harris’s 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.”45 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 1980s 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 cost roughly 60,000 U.S. and over two million Vietnamese lives, was that the U.S. was denied an opportunity to fight the good fight. That 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 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.”46 Yet, not unlike the Vietnam War practice of measuring success through body counts, understanding and even justice ultimately become the compilation of the most minute details possible 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.
Within the climate of the innocent culture of violence the endlessly repeated images of collapsing twin towers were nearly seamlessly contextualized as a complete surprise, a fall from American innocence. Rather than confronting the problem with U.S. intervention in the Middle East, central and South America, and elsewhere as the originary violence that has been some of the most brutal of the past century, the event was interpreted as unthinkable and irrational rather than as a political response, thereby justifying an escalation of violence in the Middle East, central and south Asia, and South America. In the declaration of permanent war not on a specific enemy but on a method of warfare, mindless vengeance trumps understanding the history of U.S. imperial violence overseas that brought about such brutal reaction. Moreover, the enemy’s ideological commitments, basic values, and historical relation to the U.S. cannot be discussed as the ground of discussion in the war on terrorism is shifted to the methods of struggle. The enemy is anyone in the world who does not pledge allegiance.
Education is becoming increasingly justified on the grounds of national security. This can be seen in the Hart-Rudman commission that in 2000 called for education to be classified as an issue of national security, in the increase of federal funding to school security simultaneous with cuts to community policing, in the continuation of the Troops to Teachers program, as well as the original A Nation at Risk report. Why is this? It is tied to the attack on social spending more generally, the antifederalist aspect of neoliberalism, a politics of containment rather than investment, the political efficacy of keeping large segments of the population uneducated and miseducated, the economic efficacy of keeping funds flowing to the defense and high-tech sectors and away from the segments of the population that are viewed as of little use to capital. As well, the working class, employed in low-skill, low-paying service sector jobs, would be likely to complain or even organize if they were encouraged to question and think too much. Education and literacy are tied to political participation. Participation might mean that noncorporate elites would want social investment in public projects or at least projects that might benefit most people. That won’t do. There is a reason that the federal government wants soldiers rather than say the glut of unemployed Ph.D.s in classrooms. Additionally, corporate globalization initiatives such as the FTAA seek to allow corporate competition into the public sector at an unprecedented level. In theory, public schools would have to compete with corporate for-profit schooling initiatives from any corporation in the world. By redefining public schooling as a national security issue, education could be exempted from the purview of this radical globalization that such agreements impose on other nations. Consistent with the trend, education for national security defines the public interest through the discourse of discipline that influences reforms that deskill teachers, inhibiting teaching as a critical and intellectual endeavor that aims to make a participatory citizenry capable of building the public sphere.
What to do? As Seymour Melman argues in After Capitalism, a central task for the future is to transform a war economy to a civilian one not only for former Soviet states but for the United States as well. Considering the ways that the global financial system maintains poverty and the military system produces war, a key task for educators is to imagine the role of education as a means of mobilizing citizens to understand and transform these systems toward a goal of global democracy and global justice. Militarized schooling can be resisted at the local level. Many activists and critical educators already do so. For example, Kevin Ramirez started and runs the Military Out of Our Schools campaign that seeks to eject JROTC programs from public schools. Ramirez points out to parents, teachers, administrators, and newspaper reporters that school violence is an extension of social violence, which is taught. Like Ramirez, other civic and religious organizations work to eliminate military recruiting in schools. I have argued that militarized education in the United States needs to be understood in relation to the enforcement of corporate economic imperatives and in relation to a rising culture of “law and order” that pervades popular culture, educational discourse, foreign policy, and language. The movement against militarism in education must go beyond challenging militarized schooling so as to challenge the many ways that militarism as a cultural logic enforces the expansion of corporate power and decimates public democratic power. Such a movement against education as enforcement must include the practice of critical pedagogy and also ideally links to multiple movements against oppression such as the antiglobalization, feminist, labor, environmental, and antiracism movements. These movements and critical educational practice and theory need to form the basis for imagining and implementing a just future.
1 Nancy Chang, Silencing Political Dissent: How Post-September 11 Anti-Terrorism Measures Threaten Our Civil Liberties (New York: Seven Stories, 2002).
2 Robert W. McChesney, “Introduction,” in Profit Over People, Noam Chomsky (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 7.
3 “Since the mid-1970s, the most fortunate 1 percent of households have doubled their share of the national wealth. They now hold more wealth than the bottom 95 percent of the population.” Chris Hartman, “Facts and Figures” in Shifting Fortunes, Chuck Collins, Betsy Leondar-Wright, and Holly Sklar (Boston: United for a Fair Economy, 1999). In a report to the World Bank’s Board of Governors, James D. Wolfensohn attests, “Across the world 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 a day; 3 billion live on under $2 a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to power.” “The Other Crisis” (October 6, 1998), available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/jdwsp100698-en.pdf (accessed April 15, 2010). In the United States alone, “by far the richest country in the world and the homeland of the\ world’s wealthiest people, 16.5 per cent of the population live in poverty; one-fifth of adult men and women can neither read nor write, while 13 per cent have a life expectancy shorter than sixty years.” Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001), 115.
4 Bauman, The Individualized Society, 115.
5 Bauman, The Individualized Society, 114.
6 “Index,” Harper’s Magazine (July 2000).
7 “According to data from the 2000 consensus, fully 75 percent of the population of Mexico lives in poverty today (with fully one-third in extreme poverty), as compared with 49 percent in 1981, before the imposition of the neoliberal regimen and, later, NAFTA. Meanwhile, the longstanding gap between the northern and southern regions, as manifested in poverty, infant mortality and malnutrition rates, has grown wider as the latter has borne the brunt of neoliberal adjustment policies. Chiapas, for example, produces more than half of Mexico’s hydroelectric power, an increasing portion of which flows north to the maquiladora zone on the Mexico–US border. Yet, even including its major cities of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and San Cristóbal de las Casas, only half of Chiapanecan households have electricity or running water. Additional water sources have been diverted to irrigate large landholdings devoted to export-oriented agriculture and commercial forestry, while peasant farmers have suffered reductions in water and other necessities as well as an end to land reform, even as they have endured a flood of US agribusiness exports that followed the NAFTA opening. According to the Mexican government’s own official estimates, 1.5 million peasants will be forced to leave agriculture in the next one to two decades, many driven northward to face low-wage maquiladoras on one side of the border and high-tech militarization on the other.” Jerry W. Sanders, “Two Mexicos and Fox’s Quandary,” The Nation (February 26, 2001): 18–19.
8 John Williams, “Look, Child Poverty in the Wealthy Countries Isn’t Necessary,” International Herald Tribune (July 24, 2000). See also Chris Hartman, “Facts and Figures”: nine states have reduced child poverty rates by more than 30 percent since 1993. These states include Tennessee, Michigan, Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey. Michigan is a prime example of a national trend, in that even the recent dramatic improvement did not counter the losses of the previous 15 years, in which its poverty rate increased 121 percent. In California, the number of children living in poverty has grown from 900,000 in 1979, to 2.15 million in 1998.
9 Ellen Meiskins Wood, “Kosovo and the New Imperialism,” in Masters of the Universe?, edited by Tariq Ali (New York: Verso, 2000), 199.
10 Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), 304, 373.
11 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Zed Books, 2000), 48.
12 Public schooling has come increasingly to be described in the language of monopoly, accountability, choice, and efficiency, and decreasingly described in the language of the public, the civic, community, and solidarity. For a longer discussion of the political use of market language in educational policy see Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public School—a Threat to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
13 Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media Poor Democracy, and McChesney and Edward Herman The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (Washington, D.C.: Cassell, 1997).
14 Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 1999).
15 William Raspberry, “Sounds Bad, but It Works,” Washington Post (March 30, 1998): 25A.
16 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2000), 30.
17 McChesney, “Introduction,” 7.
18 See Jeffrey Henig’s Rethinking School Choice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) for an excellent history of the appropriation of equity-based programs by privatization advocates.
19 Friedman, 373.
20 Steven Lee Myers, “Drop in Recruits Pushes Pentagon to New Strategy,” New York Times, (September 27, 1999): A1.
21 Robert Suro, “Army Ads Open New Campaign: Finish Education,” Washington Post (September 21, 2000): A3.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
27 Harper’s Bazaar (January 2001): 35.
28 See Ken Silverstein’s Washington on $10 Million a Day for a detailed exposé on the way the lobbying industry ensures that weapons manufacturers keep politicians voting in favor of their projects.
29 Marketing Tomorrow’s Weapons video produced by America’s Defense Monitor.
30 News Services, “Army to Try New Advertising Maneuver to Boost Recruiting,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (January 8, 2000): 12A.
31 Available at http://www.marines.com (accessed April 15, 2010).
32 This section is reprinted from Goodman and my Strange Love, or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) which offers a book-length analysis of the ways that the public is educated to embrace neoliberal ideology through depictions of family sentimentality and private life.
33 See “Facts about Violence among Youth and Violence in Schools,” a study published by the National Centers for Injury Prevention and Control and the 1999 annual School Safety Report published by the U.S. Department of Education, both showing decreases in school violence in the 1990s. Both reports suggest that schools are some of the safest places that kids can be. See also Mike Males, Scapegoat Generation (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996).
34 Mike Males, Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999), 10.
35 Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 8.
36 Patricia J. Williams, “The Auguries of Innocence,” The Nation (May 24, 1999): 9.
37 Ellen Meiskins Wood, “Kosovo and the New Imperialism,” 196–7.
38 Ibid., 195.
39 Walter Isaacson, “Why We Went Back to Columbine,” Time (December 20, 1999): 6.
40 Kenneth Miller, “Is Your Dog an Athlete?” Time (December 20, 1999): 8.
41 Nancy Gibbs and Timothy Roche, “The Columbine Tapes,” Time (December 20, 1999): 40–41, 42, 44.
42 Ibid., 50–51.
43 Andrew Goldstein, “The Victims: Never Again,” Time (December 20, 1999): 53.
44 Gibbs and Roche, “The Columbine Tapes,” 44.
45 Ibid., 42.
46 As cited in Isaacson, “Why We Went Back to Columbine,” 6.