Julie Webber
We have already seen—in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that domestic unrest and conflict in weak states is one of the factors that create an environment conducive to terrorism. More importantly, demographic trends tell us that the world’s poorest and most politically unstable regions—which include parts of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa—will have the largest youth populations in the world over the next two decades and beyond. Most of these countries will lack the economic institutions or resources to effectively integrate these youth into society.
—“Worldwide Threat—Converging Dangers in a Post 9/11 World,” Testimony of the Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
The “Columbine event” crashed into our collective present on April 20, 1999, and to add further aspects of incomprehensibility to the event, the authors chose Adolf Hitler’s birthday to symbolize their rage at the students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. This event marked the trauma of school shootings in so serious a way that it took school violence outside the intelligible boundaries in which it had been previously contained; further, the choice of date identified the event with fascism. In the years preceding Columbine, the hermeneutic bandages provided by experts neutralized the effects of prior shooting events. Focusing on the specific themes raised by the means of violence, they exploited the obvious features (violent film, guns, psychiatric disorder), ignoring the role that schools and society might play in provoking violence. The public was able to contain its anxiety/hysteria by ingesting these explanations and managed to separate the experiences of those traumatized communities from ones that might take place closer to home. The media interpretations managed these events for the viewer by containing them to precise determinants/precipitants for indicators of school violence. After Columbine, the school became the locus of intervention, but when the critical gaze turned inward, it wasn’t the school that was examined, it was the student body.
Post-Columbine, the wound was continually torn open by episodic witnessing rituals (such as See You at the Pole) throughout the country or scare campaigns promoted by the antigun lobby; these forms of collective renewal were largely confined to the special interest groups that sponsored them. The boldest example of this has been the campaign suggested by Senator Jessie Helms and subsequently written into the Juvenile Justice Bill, to have the Ten Commandments posted in schools.1 The Family Research Council has extended this campaign, encouraging positive role models (lawmakers, teachers, and so forth) to post them in their offices. In the fall of 1997, students recruited into prayer circles following the shooting at West Paducah, Kentucky, were not primarily concerned with witnessing the shooting events in an effort to prevent their occurrence in the future. Nor were they speaking out to “work through” their emotional implications, but rather to witness the presence of God in their lives to others. This witnessing is significantly different from the type that would take place following Columbine. Instead of witnessing as an exercise of persuasion (persuading students to bring God “back” into the schools, to feel his presence in their lives, to serve as missionaries for the Christian cause) the post-Columbine testimonies mirrored the event, shattering the public’s defenses. Columbine ruptured the boundary between public mourning and civility demonstrating the fragile separation of church and state, faith and politics.2 No longer able to get the necessary “pathos of distance” from school violence, the public began talking, incessantly.3
What is ignored in most interpretations of youth violence is their inter-connectedness to the media and the polity; that is, how violent youth across the globe have, in the absence of what Mary Kaldor calls a “forward-looking political project,” engaged in violence, becoming increasingly militarized and justifying their violence by resorting to nostalgic images of past political movements they have not lived through or experienced.4 This chapter discusses the ways in which public indifference to global affairs and passive militarism has contributed to the transformation of social relations within the United States. Further, it uses the public’s reaction to school violence as an instructive example of how the popular mind-set equates containment strategies of the Cold War with effective public policy measures in a theoretically democratic society. While nonstop media attention has characterized the post-traumatic stages of Columbine era as a means of healing, more aggressive forms of preventive medicine have been favored to deal with the threat of repetition elsewhere. Within schools, any and all available means to contain student violence have been implemented without regard for the difficulty it may cause students and how it may possibly contribute to future violent episodes. We can see how this new trend in youth mobilization for violence, which is backward-looking and largely imaginary, surfaces in the Columbine shooting. Thus, the third, and perhaps most important concern is to make the connection, however fragile, between student disposition toward militarization and U.S. foreign policy objectives. (Indeed, even the teachers and administrators are “collateral damage” from the point of view of the student shooters—they’re aiming at students en masse.) By favoring epiphenomenal sources of motive such as predatory culture, violent masculinity, guns, video games, pornography, biology, and psychiatric illness, the “experts” have ignored the material evidence of the shootings. The fact is that shootings take place at school, against classmates in areas that are not beholden to the formal curriculum. I aim to show that the environment in which education takes place (by no means limited to the school site, but reflecting the school’s absorption into the political environment that houses it) determines the ways in which student resistance takes place. Central to understanding this impact on schools is the impact of foreign policy and militarization on domestic populations, for the form that this resistance takes is scripted by the militarized culture in the United States. By examining several texts that look at the connections between foreign policy and domestic civil practices we shall see the precise extent to which acting as an “American” is an outcome of foreign policy endeavors abroad and the military readiness necessary to carry out U.S. foreign policy objectives, specifically through a reorganized military based on fourth-generation warfare aided by liberal capitalist exploitation of every available resource from outer space to ideas about daily life.5 What was (and is) needed is a new way of looking at the hidden curriculum in the context of the changes in foreign and domestic policy pre- and post- September 11, one that applies new concepts to a radically altered form of hidden curriculum; one not tethered to the nation-state conceived of as an empirical entity with stable values and interests attached to it (e.g., nationalism), but a shifting concept of political allegiance that is semiotically driven by mediated events.
Borrowing a much-/over-/badly used term from foreign policy analysts, containment is said to have been first used by George Kennan in 1947 to “start” the Cold War,6 and expanded upon by American studies scholars more recently to describe the containment of schools by corporations within U.S. society.7 There are a number of other uses of the term containment, but this chapter will briefly outline a very specific form of containment that is used to seemingly pacify domestic populations, especially student populations, because they are not only potential fodder for the war machine, but they are the next generation of militarists, whose dispositions need to be effectively shaped to continue to justify future militarism and therefore support administrations that favor the military information complex. First, it is necessary to outline and discuss three important terms in relation to education as “enforcement” where the narrative of containment is most effective: the domestic analogy, the so-called RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), and militarization.
The domestic analogy is found in a famous realist school text by Hans Morgenthau called Politics among Nations. Morgenthau argues that relations between nations are different from relations between individuals within a society. This difference is owing to the peculiar arrangement of power in each sphere: in the domestic sphere, there is law, and in the international sphere, there is none (anarchy, which simply means the absence of a sovereign). The argument works like this: domestic factors do not (and should not) pollute U.S. foreign policy because they obscure the analyst’s ability to read the balance of power in the international realm and figure out where and when intervention is necessary. The analogy upon which this imperative rests is the smallest domestic group shared by most societies, the family (not individual). According to realist logic, humans have always (and will always) organized themselves in groups for the purposes of conflict, and the group is to be protected from outside forces, but the composition of the group itself and the relations between its members are said to be largely unimportant. Of course, embedded in this assumption is the idea that the internal aspects of the group are unimportant because they are cohesive and relatively peaceful compared to the bellicosity coming from other groups outside the family unit.8 During the Cold War, subversive and national liberation movements around the world discovered the flaw in this assumption: domestic populations can be turned against one another in foreign wars for which most of the citizens in the imperial nation-state—read the United States—do not see the value of supporting the war, economically and in terms of loss of human life on both sides of the conflict. All the weaker, or insurgent groups have to do is extend the war and not lose.9 When the Bush administration and Defense establishment make arguments to revamp relations between Congress and the executive branch, the reorganization of the military structure and command and the increase in budget devoted to national defense, they argue that it is to fight “asymmetric conflicts.” Asymmetrical warfare is simply another name for the strategy of guerrilla fighters and national liberation movements, only now it has been broadened to include terrorist attacks and groups that do not claim to “liberate” a named people or a land.10 Yes, this is Vietnam all over again, but with some notable exceptions. It is necessary first to understand how and why the U.S. military has conceptualized the post-Cold War era in this particular way.
Here we are in the year 2002, fighting the first war of the 21st century, and the horse cavalry was back and being used, but being used in previously unimaginable ways. It showed that a revolution in military affairs is about more than building new high tech weapons, though that is certainly a part of it. It’s also about new ways of thinking, and new ways of fighting.
—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “21st Century Transformation of US Armed Forces,” National Defense University, January 31, 2002
The new strategy of military thought that accompanies the response to asymmetric warfare is the “revolution in military affairs” as Donald Rumsfeld has consistently argued in public speeches. This revolution is severely debated by scholars, policy analysts, and the defense establishment as to whether it’s really a revolution, if it’s feasible or affordable, a genuinely new approach to warfare or simply another means to spend taxpayer dollars. What is no longer in debate post-September 11 is whether it will be implemented; the Bush administration has gone forward with the technological, strategic, and financial means necessary to implement the revolution (it’s a bit like Lenin’s reformation of Marx’s theory of capitalist revolution: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link). Although it must be said that the Clinton administration laid much of the groundwork for this revolution to take place by supporting the deregulation of the communications industry and allowing independent firms to militarize space without censure.11
Thus, what the RMA intends to accomplish is an overhauling of the U.S. military ground forces, its strategic command and sources of intelligence. This revolution does not aim to transform the military in light of the changing nature of conflict around the globe caused by economic disparity and globalization, but rather is intended to increase the United States’s comparative advantage in military technology in order to maintain stability in regions around the globe through monitoring and surveillance technologies. This increased advantage from “above” operates like a global panopticon, allowing the United States to eliminate potential asymmetric threats posed by groups that oppose globalization in its present form. Why would the United States do this? Well, before markets can be created, the areas on which firms have set their sights must be stabilized.
The most important trend inaugurated by the RMA that the Bush administration’s neorealist policy will institute is to transform social relations within the United States and perhaps abroad. The success of RMA will depend on U.S. citizens’ willingness to pay for it, with budgets already increased over 20 percent for military spending alone. This willingness will also depend on the media’s ability to influence citizens to support high military expenditures at the expense of other social welfare items, such as public schools and subsidies. This support to overcome the public divisiveness, which military spending in the absence of a clear threat poses, depends on two things: the success of militarizing the U.S. population and the necessary threats to sustain this militarization. This process will transform social relations within the United States and abroad by changing the nature of gender relations through the valorization of war technology and concepts of duty and sacrifice, and will disproportionately affect racial and class lines by coloring threats and prompting widespread austerity measures in a shrinking U.S. market-place. This will also disproportionately affect gender relations as we witness an ongoing retrograde movement to put women back in the domestic space, or contain them as necessary to go forward with militarization. Examples of this gender retro movement range from U.S. popular culture to justifications for waging war in Afghanistan.12 A recent television show demonstrates the split between the RMA and the effects of an increasing militarization of the U.S. mind-set. If you’re wondering why Meet the Folks is a popular television show, ask yourself how the original film Meet the Parents was so horribly misinterpreted by the media: a newly retired CIA agent monitors, interrogates, and tortures his proto-son-in-law and by the end of the film asks him for his hand in marriage! Dragging his militarized mind into the domestic space, the father played by Robert de Niro is a caricature of a bygone Cold War era, not a model for each and every American father to emulate as the new television show presents him. What makes Americans now imagine that they are CIA agents who should interrogate other Americans?
Populations worldwide will need to favor militarization on an increasing scale for the RMA to be successful. The nature of this militarization is less about old Cold War ideas of “us” versus “them” that are clearly stated and explicated by ideologies, but about fearing the other in any form. This new disposition toward a war (on four fronts as the Bush administration is now conceptualizing it, instead of two) does not depend on national unity. The schools had previously supplied the state with its national component; the group cohesiveness that sustained the competition of the Cold War. This explains why both Republicans and Democrats are like-minded concerning school vouchers and the disintegration of public schooling. Previously, the school was a citizen-building institution that formed nationalism in people at an early and impressionable age. It built the “nation” part of the nation-state. As is often noted by critical IR theorists, the sovereign nation-state is a relatively new concept and is often conceptualized as the vehicle for the goals and progressive claims of the Enlightenment.13 This newness should alert scholars and activists to the instability of the entity that it designates: the populations, territories and nationalisms that are assumed to follow from its logical premise. So, if we are to think about foreign policy, especially U.S. foreign policy, as a stable or fixed policy that is backed by the national will or interest, then, given the newness of both the United States and the concept, we have grounds for sufficient speculation. Further, I would note that at the outset of the Cold War, theorists had already pointed out the precariousness of assuming a stable “national interest” in foreign policy decision-making.14 Likewise, other scholars have pointed out that even the term foreign was not associated with national policy until Bentham coined the term and its actual use by states trailed long after that.15 In short, the nation-state is new and national unity has already been undermined by globalization since at least the 1970s. The government does not need national unity to continue the process of war-making; it only needs for the domestic population to become militarized, and it can do without the schools in this process. Key is understanding how this militarization will be continued and maintained (for it has already been achieved).
According to Michael Mann, we must at least “define militarism in a way that makes it at least potentially separate from states” and he goes on to define it this way, “Militarism is the persistent use of organized military violence in the pursuit of social goals.”16 The only change that has occurred post-Cold War in terms of militarization is that the organization of violence has changed; it is no longer fought through nation-states, but through groups whose allegiances constantly shift and change according to resources and capital. Fortunately for military planners, there is a perfect symmetry between capitalist growth and militarization as they both locate productive allegiance in the individual. All that is necessary to continue support for militarization is to make the individual afraid of potential threats in civilian life. Worldwide, 80 percent of casualties in military excursions are civilian, occurring in the poorest parts of the world, which, as George Tenet’s quote shows, also have the greatest youth populations and the smallest economies. And yet, if we look at the percentage of fear aroused in populations, we would have to say that the United States has quite possibly the greatest share. Arguably, this is because of the September 11 attacks; however, the United States has been deprived of terror relative to other states in Western Europe, Great Britain, and Asia.17
Essentially, what I am arguing is that this new homegrown militarization is the result of the emotional damage done to U.S. populations during the Cold War who are now freed from an identifiable enemy, but are encouraged to police themselves for the sake of security. Following the Cold War, populations, primarily in the United States, have become inundated with the ideas of militarization with no clear-cut military objective that would base its claims on the national interest (Waco, Oklahoma City, school shootings, workplace shootings).18 A clearly detached military disposition is what is responsible for this mentality.19 This mentality is detached because of the need for U.S. citizens to view themselves as individuals; that is, as “clearly delimited social agents” responsible for their own security, which is transformed into bodily and emotional integrity. By viewing themselves as separate (and vulnerable), citizens take on the policing of themselves. As Mary Kaldor has noted, private security in the United States now outnumbers the police by two to one, and, in the absence of clear threats, we can only be fearing ourselves. As Tom Ridge urges Americans to fear, police, and snitch on one another, we can see that he took a page out of the book of school violence. Homeland Security is designed to root out terrorists in our midst, but it is more likely to expose the ordinary idiosyncrasies of citizens to one another in a moral outrage the likes of which have not been seen since the McCarthy era. As Osama Bin Laden continues to elude U.S. intelligence the media must keep hope alive that he will be found and punished, as U.S. allies abandon support for a war on terror they sense is less about September 11 than the intervention strategies of a falling empire. And, finally as globalization marches on, by which I mean our unending support for ideologies of competition and valorization of information technologies and ill-advised labor exploitation worldwide, youth with nothing to do will find salvation in picking up arms and fighting wars that contribute nothing to global progress.20 Global youth movements will increase, it’s a demographic fact; but whether or not they are militarized is up to those who govern the world and the people who support them. Finally, we will continue to witness youth violence in the United States, not because the youth are “evil,” but because the culture that nourishes them is uncivil and increasingly militant with more and more competitive attitudes and less and less prospects for future progress.
We should view school violence as an effect of the extension of foreign policy no matter how far the signifying chain extends into the public sphere. In a globalized world, we cannot afford to think of the public school as a site for nation-building and consensus modeled on old Cold War paradigms. Recent literature has shown the school is less a citizen-building institution than a site for corporate exploitation, training individuals to think of themselves as consumers in a marketplace who need to compete against one another and fear the unknown.
My intervention into this discussion has been to argue that not only do states formulate and use foreign policy to reinforce their sovereignty, and to extend their sovereignty in the United States or simulate that it is really there,21 they also use it as a basis for their domestic policy; this is what Kennan attributes to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War. The conceptual apparatus of foreign policy comes to frame whatever domestic crisis the United States is currently experiencing. Arguably, the United States’ former policy of containment toward the Soviet Bloc was the basis for domestic policy with regard to militant movements within the United States. This is demonstrated in the case of the United States following the Cold War. In the absence of a dominant international paradigm on which to base foreign policy, the United States (and scholars of U.S. foreign policy) struggled to find a model for decision making based on the balance of power status of the international system (Was it bipolar, unipolar, multipolar, hegemonic, or an empire in decline?). As one paradigm waxed then waned, the executive office of the United States began to focus on the inside while trying to maintain a fragile “hold” on the aleatory outside. Without a coherent policy the United States foundered in its diplomatic missions and military interventions (Somalia, Bosnia, Dayton Accords, financial crises in Southeast Asia); the only clear-cut victory was in 1992, when President Bush forged a bombing campaign against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait only to find it was liberating less than a nation-state as the recognized government was able, thanks to the virtual age of technology, to flee the territory with all the national wealth.22 This era has been referred to as the era of “recline” in which all foreign policy endeavors failed but also failed to provoke political imagination, ushering in the “end of history” (Fukuyama) when all other states were to follow the United States’ path to development and history was said to remain forever launched on the same boring liberal capitalist path.23 September 11 changed all of that as those asked to follow the path resisted.
Education was an issue largely ignored by the federal government during the Cold War, except at the outset when school curriculum was encouraged to compete with that of the Soviet Union (e.g., Sputnik and the space race) in the late 1950s. However, once the Cold War had officially ended, education once again became a rhetorical issue in presidential debates. Goals 2000, as a means for helping U.S. students compete in international markets, was an important tool in this debate. Finally, the repeated failure of the United States to master any foreign policy endeavor was compensated for by containing the inside (e.g., student identity). Although one among many identities that were policed during the Cold War era (the political identities of the left-leaning, women as housewives, men as wage-earners and soldiers, and so forth) the student identity has always been the most important for the national security state because it needs a militarized population to support its wars, and most important, a reserve army of labor to fight them, even if in the United States this means “above the ground” through satellite technologies and unmanned aircraft.
It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.
—Mr. X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”
Educational researchers frequently reference the events of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union as determinants of curriculum development. For example, allusions to Sputnik as the watershed event in U.S. education often bring with them accusations that the space race reoriented the curriculum to over-represent certain subject areas—math and science. Alongside this curricular change, a significant amount of shaming took place in which educators were criticized for dropping the ball in the competition between the two superpowers. The metaphors of the Cold War were very important rhetorical devices used to motivate and at times coerce educational scholars and practitioners into dropping their own educational standards in favor of those inspired by U.S. foreign policy. This occurred even when such remarks were as unabashedly condescending as Reagan’s proud assertion that teachers were “clerks for the empire.”
Even though the Cold War is over, its policies still operate in the minds of U.S. policymakers, especially those who have been called on to address the problem of school violence. In the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, the media debated which level of the government should intervene to assess and recommend policies to prevent further student violence. The overwhelming response was that the federal government should address the problem immediately. President Clinton called on Attorney General Janet Reno to work out the prosecutorial options presented by the shooting (i.e., whether or not the case could try anyone and, if so, at the federal level). Congress put aside regular business to formulate a Juvenile Justice Bill that would effectively dismantle the juvenile justice systems operating at the state level. No longer content with panel sessions discussing student violence hosted by the First Lady and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, the public invited the federal government to enact large-scale policies that would be designed to prevent further violence. Meanwhile, this focused attention obliged school administrators to take under advisement the policy initiatives recommended by the federal government. Part of this initiative demanded that schools look to exemplars of school security such as Boston public schools and those systems that had already adopted surveillance strategies.
Perhaps it is an effect of policy lag; that is, that foreign policy during the U.S. reign as international hegemon operated at such an existential level that it became part of its national identity. This claim implies that the United States doesn’t know itself, as such, without containing resistance to an opposition. The influences that formerly presented themselves as capitalist contradictions are now signified as systemic “glitches.” Now that the Cold War was over and capitalist logic operated as uncontested victor, there was nothing more to do, as Baudrillard said, than perfect the model.24 Part of this model was and still is the perfect citizen-consumer, disciplined and quieted by consumer comforts. This disposition is molded by the hidden curriculum of the schools. When the media pundits call upon every American to support the war on terror they are asking them not to support an identifiable way of life that has a coherent political philosophy and value system behind it, but the right to consume without disruption by outside forces, even if they are suffering for our consumer habits. Either old Cold War policy, the one recommended by Kennan, or the one actually pursued by Paul Nitze’s Department of Defense conformed to a policy of containment similar to that practiced in the schools as a response to the “threat” of violence posed by shootings. The object of the policies is to never trust or consult the policy object directly, but to slowly and deliberately locate it and shut it down, forcing it to conform to the dominant ordering principle of society (e.g., herd mentality and vigilante justice) or, as I have argued here, a version of world order that imagines others as accessories to U.S. desires, including student populations.
Outside determines inside or, rather, is used to determine elections on the inside as well as increase output of certain markets as in Pentagon capitalism. “Foreign policy is a specific sort of boundary producing performance,” writes David Campbell, and it uses the outside, the concept of the “foreign” or “different,” to realize its (the state’s) identity.25 But I wish to go further here and argue that not only does foreign policy serve this boundary policing function, but it also serves domestic populations a heavy dose of hyper-identified nationalism that targets individuals and is exacerbated by the social effects of market competition and militarization. As the shootings at Columbine High School were taking place, media pundits moved between shots of students falling out of broken windows to coverage of the United States-led bombing of Kosovo. Moreover, mediated examples of masculinity circulate almost without value during this crisis as one masculine marker is exchanged for another in an economy of desire completely detached from any gendered regime of intelligibility.26
In schools whose communities and workers find overt security measures distasteful or harsh, programs designed to target nonconformist student behavior are becoming popular. Marketed as the “humanitarian” alternative, conflict management programs in which monitoring and surveillance of behavior are significant features of violence prevention are designed to mediate problems between students whose anger interferes with school functioning. Not only are students asked to conform to the rigid disciplinary concerns of the school administration through conflict management programs, but they are also asked to snitch on one another. What is so insidious about this ideological alternative is that it is justified as protectionism with the intention of looking after the welfare of those nonconformists. For their own good, school administrators reward peer reporting. Students in the new “leadership” programs report students whose behavior, dress, and extracurricular performance deviates from the (invisible) norm of the school. Most disturbing, however, is the revelation that medicated students are routinely monitored to ensure that they do not lapse in taking their antidepressants. This might not be so disturbing if studies were not reporting 25 percent of the student population on medicine for depression. Yet, as a school administrator claims, the situation is under control now that the normal students are cooperating with the disciplinary apparatus. As she is quoted as saying of the peer reporting, it “gives us 130 pairs of eyes.”27 This same response would later characterize the release of terrorist pictures to the public by the government asking citizens to identify and help find potential terrorists lurking in our midst.
Other forms of monitoring not popularly associated with security technology are more easily adopted yet infringe on student rights. Policies like dress codes prevent students from wearing clothing that could conceal weapons or demonstrate consumer preferences. Also, the banning of backpacks or the adoption of a clear-backpacks-only policy limit student confidence and trust. These forms of discipline are the most popular because they, unlike metal detectors and body searches, do not resemble prison security procedures. Yet, these forms of monitoring and control do slowly chip away at the confidence students have and the trust they feel for one another contributing to the overall militarization of the domestic population of the United States. Specifically, these disciplinary procedures act as subtle forms of fear-based indoctrination. It doesn’t matter how indirectly offensive the procedures may be (certainly the Cold War was indirectly offensive; primarily defensive), they still undermine the public trust necessary to develop the skills students need to cultivate to live and participate in a healthy democracy. Further, these measures also exist outside of public schools in places of business where employees are forced to carry clear purses, as the assumption is they might steal the merchandise. As Lipschutz underscores, the “insecurity dilemma,” a generalized and pervasive sense of fear with no identifiable source, has promoted active citizen participation in monitoring and surveillance throughout the public sphere, and it is these affective responses that animate reactions to crime, tragedy, and violence. Instead of asking, in a serious way, how these measures might affect the development28 of students’ democratic skills, they are enacted in the name of safety and protection. Security has become the only response to school violence, but it will never solve the problem. Meanwhile, a generation will grow up as if they were inmates in a prison, not citizens in a free society.
1 For more on this, see William Chaloupka, Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). As he writes in response to the “values remedy” to political cynicism, “Believers insist that a smothering layer of values will help reconcile democracy’s necessary noise, its many codes and strident voices, with the ongoing need for clear national focus and policies. The problem is that values talk provides an opening for resentful and cynical backlashes that corrupt institutions, including those institutions the believer endorses, such as education and journalism” (p. 23).
2 The media’s relentless portrayal of the battle between the parents of slain students and those who would publicly support the salvation of the perpetrators’ souls was played out with crosses built and placed on a hill overlooking the school site.
3 See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967 [1887]) for the pathos of distance. This term may be read as similar to Jacques Lacan’s ethical claim that one maintains a necessary distance from the object of desire.
4 Mary Kaldor, Old and New Wars (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7.
5 Donald Rumsfeld, on transforming the Department of Defense, is informative here, “We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach to developing military capabilities, one that encourages people, all people, to be proactive and not reactive, to behave somewhat less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be ‘validated,’ but rather anticipates them before they emerge and develops new capabilities that can dissuade and deter those nascent threats,” available at http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=183 (accessed April 25, 2010), 8.
6 There is much debate surrounding the origins of the Cold War. In fact, it is now a cottage industry. See Ernest May, Interpreting NSC-68 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1993), the Cold War Museum Project, and any book by revisionist historian John Lewis Gaddis.
7 Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995) and Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) (respectively).
8 Feminist critics have called attention to the fact the border is not stable because the domestic sphere is not the “safe” zone Morgenthau needs it to be in order to have an unstable outside. Further, the actual domestic space that Morgenthau uses as an analogy, the family, is problematic because this space is not safe or conflict-free either. See J. Ann Tickner, “Gender in International Relations” in Women and War, edited by Jean Bethke Elstain (New York: Basic, 1987). U.S. society has operated as if the inside should be (and is) stable with relatively little democratic discussion of the matter.
9 See Andrew J. R. Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” World Politics 27, 2 (1975): 175–200.
10 As Mary Kaldor has argued, the difference between “old” and “new” wars and our ability to apprehend their significance to the people fighting them is that new wars are driven by economic and political vacuums in poor, developing countries whose leaders use nostalgia for the past to gain allegiance to fighting causes. The difference between terrorist groups and rebel factions now she argues, is that they no longer aim to capture the “hearts and minds” of people but capitalize on their fear and hatred for the other. Kaldor, Old and New Wars.
11 See Jack Hitt, “The Coming Space War,” New York Times Magazine (August 5, 2001). Hitt’s most important analysis is of the deregulation of space for independent corporations and the explanation of how this was a way for the U.S. government to avoid violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which explicitly states that space cannot be used by governments for military purposes; however, corporations who wish to use it for commercial exploitation through satellite technology, which is the basis for fourth generation warfare, can rent it to governments for military purposes.
12 See Joan Wallach Scott, “Feminist Reverberations,” keynote address at Twelfth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (June 7, 2002), Storrs, Connecticut; this speech also appears in Differences 13, 3 (February 2003): 1–23.
13 Arguably, the state, as a legal term, predates the Enlightenment by over one hundred years, but politically and most important, ontologically, the realization of Enlightenment according to Hegel took place through the vehicle of the modern state.
14 Arnold Wolfers, “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol,” Political Science Quarterly 67 (1952): 481–502.
15 David Campbell, Writing Security: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992), 42.
16 Quoted in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, After Authority (New York: SUNY, 2000), 175.
17 Andrew J. Bacewich, “Terrorizing the Truth,” Foreign Policy 125 (August 2001): 74–75. The numbers are up in Asia, but there were zero in North America prior to September 11, with the next highest rates going to Africa, Latin America, and far behind in Western Europe.
18 And yet, we see it elsewhere, the increasing militarization of youth in the global south whose only access to economic security is to join mercenary armies or be sold into prostitution or slavery, in school shootings in northern Europe such as the Netherlands and Germany, as well as the European enclaves of South Africa, the incorporation of young women into the armed forces as the means for achieving upward mobility, but most important, gender equality, the use of rape as a war strategy, the inclusion of native women in militant liberation movements in Mexico also as a means for escaping previously accepted gendered roles, the influence of JROTC in schools all over the United States, and the incentives offered for continued participation in the national security state, and so on. See Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Enloe speculates that the reason the United States refuses to sign the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (or even begin the process of ratifying it) is because they would have to dismantle the JROTC program, which provides that children cannot be recruited for military purposes.
19 For a more theoretical discussion of this process see the classic by Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited, introduced, and trans. by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
20 For an explanation of this ideology, “globalism” see Manfred B. Steger, Globalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
21 Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty (London: Cambridge, 1993).
22 Timothy W. Luke, “The Discipline of Security Studies and the Codes of Containment: Learning From Kuwait,” Alternatives 16 (1994): 315–44. Enloe, Maneuvers, 12–14; 242–44. For an example of the tropes deployed during the Gulf War, see Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes,” in Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, edited by Frederick Dolan and Thomas L. Dumm (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
23 Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).
24 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1996).
25 Campbell, Writing Security, 69.
26 R. W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 150–55.
27 “A Week in the Life of a High School: What It’s Really Like Since Columbine,” Time (October 25, 1999): 75.
28 Lipschutz, After Authority.