Art

A CULTURE

DIVIDED

America's Struggle for Unity

DAVID TREND

Paradigm Publishers

Boulder • London

A�tifURE DIVIDED

btiltural conformity. Indeed, to some theorists such an obsession with an articulated "common culture" has become synonymous with the integrity of national identity itself In this context then, the form of democracy we now face becomes "radical" in at least two senses of the term. Not only does it imply a fundamental rejection of mono­ lithic party politics in favor of broader models based on identity groupings, but it also suggests the rejection of a set of national accords seen by many to constitute the very glue that holds. the nation together. These two factors make possible the type of new spaces for engagement and new definitions of citizenship that radical democracy implies.

In other writings I have sought to delineate the problems pro­ duced by the binary epistemology of Enlightenment humanism across a range of disciplinary fields: photography, film, television, education, music, and new media.18

The roots of this enlightenment model are perhaps nowhere more dearly articulated than in philosopher George W. F. Hegel's phe­ nomenology, which mapped out a basic theory subject/object rela­ tions. Hegel postulated an abstract dyad of the self and other, constructed in the consciousness of individuals. Within this idealized rendering, the subject envisions an external object that it comes to recognize as different from itsel£ This difference produces a dissatis­ faction that prompts the subject to absorb the attributes of the exter­ nal other. He termed this process "sublation."19 According to Hegel, sublation was the motor force of human learning, as the subject is changed through the appropriatipn of new ideas and objects. What is important to remember is that this dialectic was a pure function of metaphysics. Although Hegel's fundamental subject/object dualism was replicated for many decades in western philosophies and institu­ tions, it was not a model of the world--as contemporary feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories have made dear. Indeed, it is now increasingly evident that it is less productive to view social relations in binary "either/or" terms than in multiple "ands."

CHAPTER THREE

Belief

Faith in What?

I N THE 2000s the topic of values reemerged in public discourse as a point of contention between liberals and conservatives, as well as a rallying call for moral absolutists. The values debate has emerged

most strongly in debates over "good" and "evil" in people's lives and on the international stage. In the 2000 presidential race, George W. Bush ran on a platform of moral platitudes, echoed in his victory speech by imploring Americans to vanquish "evil" from the world and "teach our children values." 1 While President Barack Obama has expressed his values in more nuanced terms, Obama' s appeals for dialogue, tolerance, and responsibility convey a distinct moral pro­ gram. All political agendas implicitly convey definitions of "right" and "wrong," imploring citizens to accept one set of such definitions over others. Framing issues of right and wrong in terms of good and evil intensifies the rhetoric of the discussion, evoking a heightened emotionalism and sometimes the specter of impending threat.

Throughout American history the nation's enemies frequently have been portrayed as evil-and such characterizations often have underpinned rationales for military action and war. Franklin Roose­ velt led the United States into World War II for the purpose of fighting a great "evil." Ronald Reagan called America's Cold War enemies "the focus of evil in the world."2 This rhetoric again went into high gear following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when President Bush labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil." It would be easy to dismiss these remarks as simple political

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posturing, lest we forget that George Bush won the presidency twice and Republicans gained the support of many in other elec­ tions. The language of good and evil resonates powerfully in the minds of voters because such concepts are deeply ingrained in pub­ lic consciousness.

Concepts of good and evil are fundamental to Western philoso­ phy, dating to pre-Socratic times. In both Eastern and Western phi­ losophy, these ideas are found at least as early as 500 BCE. The philosophies of Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, and the subse­ quent doctrines of Christianity all hinged on a fundamental dualism between the good or "the way" and evil or "falseness." Indeed, orga­ nized religion has functioned as an important institution of moral education throughout history. It has guided civilizations in their pur­ suits of peace as well as war. In some systems, goodness is seen as the natural state of humankind, with evil entering as an aberration. In the biblical account of the creation of humanity, Adam and Eve are initially innocent, existing in a sort of blissful ignorance. A serpent appears who convinces the pair to disobey God and consume fruit from the tree of knowledge, saying, "Eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."3 Thus Adam and Eve begin their encounters with sin. In some systems, good and evil are transposed with notions of truth and falseness. Socrates is remembered for his belief that certain great truths exist and humanity's task is to understand them. Plato, regarded by many as the most influential figure in Western philosophy, asserted that values such as absolute beauty and goodness exist in "ideal forms" that people can never truly lmow, but they can experience through copies manifest in things seen in the world. Unlike Socrates, who believed in many truths, Plato argued that there exists one basic truth-"the good" -to which people should aspire. Because the world we experience is but a realm of copies of "goodness," these copies render understandings that are always imperfect and can sometimes be evil.

Some psychologists argue that concepts of good and evil are hard­ wired into our brains. George Lakoff writes that such values are part of the basic architecture of thinking manifest in early childhood. In Lakoff's view, much of the way we think is organized by "deep frames" or fundamental concepts in the unconscious, which we

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develop through repeated exposure to ideas. Deep frames "structure how you view the world," Lakoff explains.4 They characterize the moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of our very identities. "Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure of the mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice."5 The surface thinking that goes with everyday experience, conversation, and media are effective to the extent they fit only within deep frames.

Owing to their centrality in human belief systems, concepts of good and evil have functioned as central elements in storytelling throughout history. Ancient myths, prehistoric renderings, early lit­ erature, and religious writings all depend on the simple opposition of good and evil in creating dramatic tension and conveying meaning­ ful narratives. Most fairy tales and children's stories hinge on a simple opposition of good and evil values. Characters encounter evil witches, giants, or monsters. Peter Pan fought Captain Hook, Harry Potter battled Voldemort, and Superman faced dozens of bad guys. It doesn't take much insight to recognize the transparent moralizing in myths and children's stories. Most of these narratives function both to entertain and to instruct. This is because the stories always come from adults who see them as a vehicle for instilling values in children. As Jack Zipes writes, "There never has been a literature conceived by children for children, a literature that belongs to children."6 Zipes points that children, when left to their own devices, often do not cre­ ate stories of menacing bad guys who are overcome by virtuous fig­ ures. Instead they recreate other forms of play in their narratives. Keep in mind that children not only don't write most children's sto­ ries, but they also don't frequently select and purchase the books, CDs, or videos. The choices come from the well-intentioned adults who make the decisions for children and hence create the cultural realm their children inhabit.

The moralizing in children's culture helps create a good versus bad worldview that sets the stage for a binary understanding of the world. But it would be a mistake to attribute this black-and-white worldview to fairy tales alone. Underlying this binary worldview are deeper philosophical structures that undergird human consciousness itself Before the Western enlightenment that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages, the opposition of life and death was manifest in the dualism between God and humankind, between heaven and earth,

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expressed in human experience in the division of man and woman. Plato wrote of the opposition of the corporeal and the spiritual. In the 1500s Nicolas Copernicus and Francis Bacon drew distinctions between science (fact) and religion (belief ). Two centuries later Rene Descartes formulated his famous mind/body dualism, writing that "the mind is completely distinct from the body: to wit, that matter, whose essence is extension in space, is always divisible, whereas the mind is utterly indivisible."7 Later philosophers parsed the various kinds of realities and images that the mind could formulate, as dis­ tinctions were drawn between perception and imagination, reason and emotion. Dualism could not have grown to such a large concept if it did have a use and importance. From early childhood through adulthood, the concept of opposing ideas, concepts, and values forms the basis of people's ability to see difference, draw distinctions, and engage in critical thought. It underlies legality and illegality, knowledge and ignorance, progress and the lack thereof Many see dualism as the essence of humanity and human thought.

But dualism has in fact been the rascal of human consciousness. Its apparent ubiquity and universal applicability have led people and civilizations to believe it is the only way of viewing the world. To many people, knowing the difference between good and bad is the very essence of traditionalism that passes ethical values from genera� tion to generation. Inabilities to make clear, black-and-white distinc­ tions in decision making and assigning value often have been seen as failures in judgment, insight, conviction, even courage. Knowing the difference between right and wrong is viewed by many as an essential element of adult consciousness and civilized society. What this tradi­ tionalist perspective fails to realize is that duality is in fact but one way of viewing the world. It is in many ways an abstraction or even a fiction conceived about existence. There are many degrees of value that lie between truth and untruth. There are many shades of moral­ ity and immorality between good and evil, just as there are many kinds of people. Admitting the shades of light and dark that exist between black-and-white distinctions obviously requires a more complex thought process, one that recognizes ambiguity and partial answers to questions. President Bill Clinton was criticized by politi­ cal conservatives for his resistance to dogmatic beliefs, and his presi­ dency even was termed a "gray era" for this reason.

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But in the post-Bush years, shades of gray seem to be making a comeback. Recent elections have shown both Democrats and Repub­ licans stepping over each other in efforts to stake out centrist posi­ tions, keeping voters nearly evenly divided in many races. Media critics have noted the decline of traditional "good" and "bad" charac­ ters in TV and movies, and the rising popularity of "antiheroes." Most frequently cited is the family man and mafia kingpin at the center of the long-running cable series, The Sopranos. Viewers never could decide whether to love or hate Tony, who strangled another mobster while touring colleges with his daughter. Jack Bauer of 24, Don Draper of Mad Men, Patty Hewes of Damages, and Dexter Morgan of Dexter all manifest similar blends of heroism and selfish­ ness, virtue and dishonesty. Joshua Alston wrote that the Bush presi­ dency "primed audiences for antihero worship, that in the midst of a war started with faulty intelligence, suspected terrorists sent to black sites and a domestic eavesdropping program, it's no wonder we would be interested in delving deeply into the true motives underly­ ing the actions of powerful people. "8 Is this emerging pattern in media preferences evidence of changing public attitudes-perhaps a new moment in American consciousness--or simply another pendu­ lum swing in popular taste?

Absolutism and Relativism

"Absolutism" is the belief that there are concrete standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, regardless of the context in which they occur. Abso­ lutism is often contrasted with moral "relativism," which asserts that moral truths are contingent upon social or historical circumstances. Absolutists believe that morals are inherent in the laws of the uni­ verse, the nature of humanity, or the will of God. From this perspec­ tive, all actions can be evaluated as either inherently moral or immoral. For example, an unprovoked war might be deemed a moral act by an absolutist.

Relativists eschew absolute black-and-white answers to questions. Rather than applying a fixed set of good or bad definitions that always apply in judgments, relativists often argue that new answers to questions must be created for every situation. What is true in one

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situation might not be true in another. For example, an absolutist view of the family might say that only conventional nuclear families, gender roles, and childrearing practices are universally valid, and that single-parent families, working mothers, or extended family models aren't good. A relativist approach would say that different kinds of families work in different situations. Some people criticize relativist views, especially when it comes to families, as too tolerant. Oppo­ nents to relativism say that such thinking allows important standards to be abandoned and leads people into undisciplined lifestyles. By some accounts, the origination of relativism can be dated to Protago­ ras (481-420 BC), who took issue with popular beliefs of the time that human beings should aspire to godlike ethical perfection. Argu­ ing for a more flexible approach to morality, Protagoras wrote that "man is the measure of all things."9

Nearly eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud famously debated moral absolutism versus relativism. Much of the discussion involved a disagreement over the existence of God and the impor­ tance of science. Lewis, born an Irish Christian and the author of the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) series, asserted that science could not adequat<;:ly explain the mysteries of the creation and workings of the universe. 10 Lewis wrote, "We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind what makes it what it is." 11 To Lewis, the only answer is that there must be a God who made the world and gave people the principles of moral law. Lewis believed that certain truths are hardwired into human consciousness, evi­ denced in the way codes of behavior-including abilities to discern right from wrong-replicate themselves from culture to culture and throughout human history. Freud, whose parents were Moravian Jews, contended that God was a mental fabrication that obscured the fact that moral conventions emerge from human experience. To Freud, morality is made up by people for practical reasons. Human­ ity discovers moral laws the way it came upon mathematics, through observation and reasoning. People are born as blank slates. Moral precepts are passed from adults to children through educational processes. Both Lewis and Freud argued about German Nazism. Lewis argued that the Nazis had mistakenly adopted an alternate reality in which they strayed from God, deceived into forgetting a

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morality they had originally recognized. For Freud, the Nazis proved that people could learn evil rather than goodness. Freud argued that the solution to Nazism was not religious virtue, but a superior system of reason.

Idealism, Realism, and Pluralism

Further insights into the debate over absolutism and relativism are found in the philosophies of idealism and realism. Idealists resemble absolutists in embracing tradition as a central value-a kind of anchor. Idealism argues that we perceive the world from an enduring perspective that transcends all other points of view. Idealism holds that reality is mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. To idealists, tangible objects are not independent of the conscious mind but exist only through processes of intellectual operations. The everyday world of things and people is not the "real" world but a representation as it appears to be. Late eighteenth-century idealist Hegel argued that an internal spirit guides all perceptions, including human reason. Hegel described a "world-soul," existing through all history, which emerges from a process now known as the Hegelian dialectic. A contempo­ rary of Hegel's, Immanuel Kant, wrote that the mind shapes our per­ ceptions of the world to take form in both time and space. Kant believed that all we can know are mental impressions of an outside world. Such mental impressions may or may not exist independently from the "real" because we can never access that outside world directly.

Idealists view people as governed by universal truths to which they should always aspire but can never achieve. These transcenden­ tal values exist for all time and apply to all people, regardless of their historical circumstance or cultural heritage. In social terms, idealists tend to put their emphasis on behavior, attributing human success or failure to attitudes people bring to their exercise of free will. Thus values like paternal authority and marriage are held up as goals to which everyone should subscribe. Idealists see a fundamental cor­ rectness in existing arrangements but fear its enabling values are eroding. This is the logic that argues that job discrimination, sexual harassment, and unfair housing practices really aren't that much of a problem, and the government programs to rectify them provide

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inegalitarian preferences upon which "minority" groups become dependent. Great importance is afforded to cultural issues, as mani­ fest in controversies over literary canons, artistic censorship, and the labeling of records and video games. Culture is seen as the embodi­ ment of these timeless values, not the reflection of everyday life or work. Idealist culture manifests itself in chosen lists of" great books" and masterpiece artworks housed in special preserves of aesthetic contemplation. Separated from the exigencies of daily life, art is seen as devoid of political content or implication. Ironically, rarely is any consideration given to the corrupting influence of a market that emphasizes competition, greed, and wealth as measures of human worth.

Realism assumes that reality inheres in everyday experience and that its functions can be accessed and known. Attending to immedi­ ate circumstances in this way, realists often embrace relativism. Because what we know derives from the here and now, realism relies on descriptions of objects and environments. Realism recognizes the importance of ordinary observations and events. It tends to reject idealistic views of the heroic and transcendental. In the early 1600s, realist philosopher Descartes asserted that knowledge derives from the senses, and that we understand abstractions by relating them to our actual experiences of the world. Writing in the latter half of the seventeenth century, John Locke likewise asserted that a perceivable world exists "out there," which has certain qualities that underlie our broader understandings and knowledge.

Realists see truth emerging from the lived experiences of human beings. As such, realists recognize that values develop differently from culture to culture and from era to era. Rules about gender rela­ tionships or family structures are not permanently fixed but need to be evaluated in the context of changing social needs. Realists are often critical of a society they believe is emphasizing greed and com­ petition rather than social justice. As a consequence, realists promote government programs to correct the inequities produced by market forces. Rather than attempting to manipulate people into adopting social norms, realists seek ways of broadening society to be more indusive--more tolerant of diversity and difference. Instead of blam­ ing people in need for their circumstances, realists are more likely to favor a fundamental redistribution of wealth through such measures

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as assistance programs, government subsidies, and progressive tax legislation. Arguments that some people might lack motivation or require forms of moral education are rejected as biased. This funda­ mentally redistributive program has made realists (who generally ascribe to liberal social politics) vulnerable to the charge that they simply want to throw resources at problems. As realist Molly Ivins jokingly stated, "This may sound simple, but the real problem with poor people is that they don't have enough money. "12 To realists, cul­ ture is found in many places from the gallery to the classroom to the street. Because culture is found in the daily encounters people have with one another, it can be used to educate citizens and improve their living conditions. Because it is tied to daily life, culture always bears political implications.

In their postures of mutual exclusion, both idealist and realist camps hold part, but not all, of the means to understand social prob­ lems. The inadequacy of such polarized thinking became apparent in the 1990s with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the evaporation of the Soviet threat. The George W. Bush years sig­ naled a return to black-and-white reasoning. Yet as the 2008 elec­ tions demonstrated, Bush's failure to acknowledge a more nuanced vision didn't dick with the voting public. Approaches to politics that would separate issues into neat categories-like the separation of economic structure from cultural behavior-no longer seemed viable.

One way to reconcile idealism and realism is through the doctrine of pluralism. William E. Connolly writes at length about this distinc­ tion, argµing that although realists reject the idea of a single doctrine that applies to all people, they eventually must make dear choices in specific situations. 13 Hence, a realist who opposes the general princi­ ple of capital punishment might accept the death penalty for an espe­ cially heinous crime such as terrorism. In contrast, pluralists always keep multiple options in play and would not necessarily practice an idealist "eye for an eye" approach to evil. Pluralism is difficult to practice because it requires the energy and restraint to maintain mul­ tiple perspectives in one's mind. Moreover, pluralism cannot eter­ nally vacillate between options. To do so would render it unable to take any action. Instead pluralism strives to maintain an awareness of options before, during, and afi:er an action takes place. As Connolly

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writes, pluralism "encourages us to embrace certain things in this particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others, and to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others."14

But not all versions of pluralism are created equal. The impetus for pluralism has historical roots in the liberal discontent with large government bureaucracies. Historically, this difficulty was exacer­ bated by the social diversification and class stratification brought on by industrialization. In the post-World War II era, theorists in Europe and the United States began to argue that forms of plural­ ism that pitted individuals against the state oversimplified the idea of citizenship. Specifically, this thinking failed to consider differ­ ences among people based on issues of gender, race, national origin, age, or sexual orientation. Perhaps more importantly, postwar plu­ ralism failed to recognize the permeability of the categories public and private.

Poststructuralist theorists of the 1990s saw this dumping of ideas into either public or private domains as a return to one-dimensional modernist thinking. Not only did postwar U.S. pluralists reinforce conventional public/private categories, but they also were incapable of recognizing the subjects of politics as anything besides members of discrete groups; Postwar pluralism marked a significant advance over unreconstructed liberalism in carving out a larger role and a more complex arena for citizens to act politically, but it did so only within existing understandings of civic roles. Ernesto Ladau and Chantal Mouffe proposed what they termed a "radical democratic" reconcep­ tualization of the citizen unencumbered by old categories of the modernist self Rather than a unified and autonomous member of a particular group, within this formulation each person belongs to numerous overlapping groups and multiple intersecting identities. As Mouffe explains, "It is not a matter of establishing a mere alliance between given interests, but of actually modifying their identity to bring about a new political identity."15 In this "poststructuralist plu­ ralism" individuality is maintained because of the relatively unique mix of associations within each person.

Although it remains to be implemented in contemporary politics, the poststructuralist approach to pluralism has become manifest in the growing influence of advocacy groups in politics-enabled in the 2000s by decentralized technologies such as the Internet. By opening

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new realms of public discourse, this networked pluralism gives fresh vitality to the impetus for democratic principles. The politicization of social spaces formerly considered neutral makes apparent the often unacknowledged power relations in everyday activities. In this way, such "off-limits" territories as popular culture, education, and the family become sites of critical investigation and emancipatory con­ test. Rather than diminishing political involvement, radical demo­ cracy helps people see political opportunities everywhere.

Obviously the task ahead is far from easy. The polarizing effects of conventional "liberal" versus "conservative" views of politics make life difficult for alternative thinking. This dualistic view is encour­ aged by an electoral process that produces a rhetoric of mandates and landslides from narrow margins of the vote similar to those put forth in recent presidential elections. Our current winner-take-all process yields little understanding of the important relationship between minority and majority stockholders in participatory government. This encourages a strange denial of oppositional possibility. Perhaps the time has come to recognize that the majoritarian visions of both major political parties ends up devaluing human diversity. In their desperate efforts to claim majorities, differences with parties are viewed as obstacles to be suppressed in favor of a broader consensus.

This is how vague appeals to populism can really represent an elit­ ism of their own. To achieve their own visions of national identity, both liberals and conservatives have assaulted-in admittedly differ­ ent ways-multiculturalism or identity politics as divisive. Ignoring historically entrenched power asymmetries, the big political parties have argued that "special interests" subvert the potential of a national accord. Promoted instead is a monolithic definition of citizenship, which dismisses the specificity of human variety as either irrelevant or selfish.

The antidemocratic implications of this pseudo populism become apparent in the way extreme political attitudes become naturalized in partisan discourses. Take education, for example. Republicans and Democrats seem incapable of reconciling their political appeal to a mainstream identity and an educational appeal to uniform "stan­ dards" of achievement. Implicit in recent school reform plans from both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush-with their programs of uni­ versal testing, their vague suggestions of a uniform curriculum, and

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their invitation to business interests to manage public education­ is the belief that the nation has spent too much time pursuing edu­ cational equity and too little time in advancing rarefied standards of excellence. These attitudes have made many young people feel powerless, alienated, and even angry.

Enacted by the Bush administration in 2002, federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation reauthorized several programs aim­ ing to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary schools by increasing standards of accountability and providing par­ ents more flexibility in choosing schools. NCLB legislation pro­ moted standards-based education reform, formerly known as "outcome-based" education, predicated on the belief that measurable goals improve student success in school. NCLB required new tests in basic skills as a requirement for federal funding. NCLB was contro­ versial for a number of reasons. As historically has been the case with many national school reform efforts, NCLB was criticized because the federal government provides such a small proportion of school funding (which mostly comes from local property taxes). While in some states more students appeared to pass standardized tests, this was often proven to have resulted from lower testing standards. Also, parents were angered by NCLB's requirement that schools provide student names and contact information to military recruiters. In 2009, President Barack Obama received criticism for his appoint­ ment of former Chicago Public School Director Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Duncan built a reputation in Chicago for his aggressive pursuit of standardized testing, surveillance, and police presence in schools-manifest in the city's "Renaissance 2010" school reform plan. Although popular in Chicago business circles for it's accountability and businesslike approach to management, Ren­ aissance 2010 was condemned by some educators as old-fashioned and, ultimately, ineffective in improving student learning and suc­ cess, especially in minority communities.16

All in the Family

Of course, controversies over schooling grow from the public con­ cerns about children. Generally speaking, discussions about children emerge from the broader discourse on families-a conversation

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fraught with cultural baggage. Officials running for office recognize that topics such as childhood, children's welfare, and the death of childhood work effectively in emotionalizing political arguments. The meanings of such terms can be quite variable, ranging from ref­ erences to innocent children that need adult protection, to menacing children who take weapons to school, to the inner child, the childlike adult, and the adultlike child. In other words, childhood is not a nat­ ural or fixed category. It is the screen upon which adults project their social anxieties and desires. The figure of the child has been used his­ torically to promote issues ranging from environmentalism ("chil­ dren inherit the earth") to tax reform ("mortgaging our children's future"). This is why the image of the child often comes attached to idealized notions of the nuclear family, happy endings, and neatly resolved stories where handsome princes always win and bad people look like ugly monsters. At its core, the image of the child is an ideo­ logical construction that gets pitted symbolically against all that white bourgeois society fears. David Buckingham writes about the "politics of substitution" that childhood enables. In a climate of social uncertainty, invoking fears about children provides a powerful means of commanding public attention and support: campaigns against homosexuality are redefined as campaigns against pedophiles; campaigns against pornography become campaigns against child predators; campaigns against atheism become campaigns against rit­ ualistic child abuse. Those who dare to question the epidemic pro­ portions of such phenomena are themselves labeled-via a politics of substitution-as hostile to children. 17

When all else fails in many public policy debates, proponents of just about anything haul out the image of the helpless and vulnerable child. While it is true that children don't have the same capabilities as adults, it also can be said that these projections at times discredit the intelligence of young people and contribute to a distorted infan­ tilization. Close examination of children's responses to violent car­ toons, for example, reveals that they more often respond to the excitement or excess of imagery than to the purposeful brutality of "retaliatory violence." When children write their own fairy tales, they tend to avoid this latter type of violence and write happy endings for all of the characters.18 Like adults, children do revel in the arousal and excitement of aggressive representation in what Michael Zucker-

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man termed the "sensation seeking" motive. 19 Parents often worry about children overidentifying with perpetuators of television or movie violence. Surprisingly, there is very little data on this. What the research has shown is that most children don't imagine them­ selves committing violence, although roughly half empathize with victims of violence.20 Even less plausible is the "forbidden fruit" the­ ory that children's desires are increased if attempts are made to restrict access to a program. A variety of studies in the 1970s dis­ proved this widely accepted belief.21

In many ways, the current discourse on children stands in for the more politicized discussions of the family, gender roles, and adult sexuality. The National Organization for Women (NOW) for a time circulated a bumper sticker that read, "One Nuclear Family Can Ruin Your Whole Life." The slogan sums up the view that traditional family structures-so often equated with a healthy society-have sometimes worked to limit women's freedom. Throughout many parts of the world, societies have or continue to be organized in patriarchal structures in which men hold primary responsibility and authority over family and community life. While such traditions seem long forgotten in the contemporary Western world, it bears his­ torical note that a privilege as fundamental as the right to vote wasn't afforded to women until 1920 in the United States, 1944 in France, 1949 in China, and 2006 in the United Arab Emirates.

One needs to examine only current women's magazines to dis­ cover that entrenched stereotypes of women as the "weaker" or "fairer" sex" perpetuate themselves in the pages of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Wlgue-where even more disturbingly women are frequently represented as child­ like and girls are often made up to exude adult female sexuality. Although women legally possess the same rights and theoretical career options as men, roles of women as homemakers and caregivers abound in the pages of such publications as Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, and \%mens Day. That these are the magazines most read by women holds significance as a reminder of latent sexism in American culture. One notable exception is 0, The Oprah Magazine, the single high­ circulation women's periodical with a pro feminist, diversity empha­ sis. Television has treated women in more progressive terms, led by

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The \%mens Television Network, Lifetime, and popular programs like Brothers and Sisters, Damages, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that feature women in careers or other roles of autonomy. The one notable throwback is Des­ perate Housewives, representing what has been termed a "postfeminist" sensibility in which purportedly liberated women voluntarily choose subordinate and objectified roles.

Simple statistics reflect continuing inequities toward women. Fair compensation for women in the workplace was written into law in the 1963 Equal Pay Restoration Act. Yet today women are still paid 23 cents per dollar less than men with equal skills and education. While women make up 51 percent of the population, only 13 per­ cent of the U.S. Senate and 14 percent of the U.S. House of Repre­ sentatives are women. Approximately 25 percent of doctors and lawyers are women, although a much smaller percentage of corporate executive positions are held by women. 22 In global terms, The United Nations has stated that "progress in bringing women into leadership and decision-making positions around the world remains far too slow. "23 The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Gen­ der Issues, Rachel Mayanja, said, "The past ten years have seen the fastest growth in the number of women in parliaments, yet even at ' this rate, parity between women and men in parliaments will not be reached until 2040."24 The term "glass ceiling" is used to describe barriers based on discrimination. In the United States, the Glass Ceiling Commission, a government-funded group, stated, "Over half of all master's degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95 percent of senior-level managers of the top Fortune 1000 industrial and 500 service companies are men. Of them, 97 percent are white."25

With such glaring evidence of a cultural divide along gender lines, one might expect uniformity in public opinion about the need to pursue equity. Yet opinion persists in some quarters that women have strayed too far from their traditional roles. Conservatives argue that America is threatened by a breakdown of the traditional tamily struc­ ture that, in their view, provides the only satisfactory way of raising children. Conservatives assert that same-sex or single parent families produce children more prone to failure. Then there is the Federal "Defense of Marriage" Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. The act says that the federal government does not recognize

70 A CULTURE DIVIDED

same-sex marriages, but that states can do as they please. In recent elections, measures to either legitimize or delegitimize same-sex mar­ riage have been put on many state ballots.

Unfounded worries persist about single-parent families. Conser­ vative commentator Ann Coulter writes, "The strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a sin­ gle parent."26 Coulter is fond of quoting Charles Murray, who wrote that "Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time-more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, wel­ fare, or homelessness because it drives everything else."27 These are serious words, considering that today nearly one-third of children are born to unmarried women. But is growing up in a nontradi­ tional family really harmful? Most social scientists do indeed believe that family environments strongly influence children's subsequent behavior in adult life. But what matters most in the family environ­ ment is the quality of attachment and care-giving. Children subject to neglect or abuse may be more likely to find themselves in the criminal justice system as young adults. 28 But even this is not to say that a "cycle of violence" necessarily results from family life, as was once theorized. Bad outcomes in adult behavior-including crimi­ nality-are a mix of upbringing, peer relationships, socioeconomic conditions, education, and circumstance. Any effort to blame a sin­ gle cause must always be examined with scrutiny. Most people spend more time with their families than in work or school. Hence, the family historically has remained one of the most potent objects of political debate--and one of the central issues that can be used to divide people--even though it is the most widely shared of human experiences.

Fundamentalism and Secularism

Much had been made in during the past decade of the divide between fundamentalism and secularism. Christian fundamentalist camps largely avoided politics through the 1970s, believing that mat­ ters of the spirit were personal concerns. For the most part, funda­ mentalists also liked the separation of church and state that kept government regulations out of church affairs. The fundamentalist label is sometimes applied to Christian evangelical practices, which

BELIEF 71

are more accurately described as a branch of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists-be they Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other religion-try to adhere to the original tenants of a faith, generally represented in classic texts such as the Bible, Torah, or Koran. Funda­ mentalists often interpret scriptural writings in a literal sense, rather than viewing them in more modern interpretations as metaphors or idealistic stories. For example, some Christian fundamentalists teach that magical events, like instances of faith healing, really do take place in the present day. In the United States the term "fundamental­ ist" came into use in the early twentieth century after publication of pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910- 1915). In part, the fundamentalist movement gained momentum in response to the growing rise of science and societal changes brought about through technology. Turn of the century fundamentalists were especially troubled by the wide acceptance of Charles Darwin's, Ori­ gin of the Species, which offered an evolutionary account of the devel­ opment of human life.29 Christian fundamentalists still protest the teaching of Darwin's ideas in schools, often asserting that children need exposure to creationist counterarguments.

Fundamentalists often use the term secularism to describe those perceived as antireligious. The term "secular" originated in England in the mid-1800s as a means of making a distinction between philo­ sophical and religious ideas. Theorized by agnostic George Holyoake, secularism promoted a social order separate from religion, without actively dismissing or criticizing religious belie£ To Holyoake, "Secu­ larism is not an argument against Christianity; it is one independent of it. It does not question the pretensions of Christianity; it advances others."30 As this phrasing suggests, from its earliest appearance, sec­ ularism was seen by many as an assault on religion. More generally, the term refers to the world of ideas outside religion. For this reason, secularism often is used in political discussions that address the sepa­ ration of church and state.

More than in most developed nations, religion figures promi­ nently in American life. In the industrial world, the United States has one of the lowest percentages of people who define themselves as having no religion: 15 percent.31 More than 75 percent of Ameri­ can's identify as Christian, two-thirds of whom are Protestants, with the remaining group primarily identified as Catholic. 32

72 A CULTURE DIVIDED

Half of the Protestant population is known as Evangelical, which well-known for the belief that people can be "born again." Protestant Evangelicals are somewhat more moderate in their beliefs than fun­ damentalists, who subscribe to literal interpretations of Biblical doc­ trine. Christian Fundamentalists appeared in the American political realm following the 1976 presidencial election of Democrat Jimmy Carter. Forming what they called a Moral Majority, Christian funda­ mentalists helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office a few years later. Republicans held the White House for twelve years and perceived the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 as a tragic loss to the forces of secu­ larism. To regain influence over the nation's politics, religious conser­ vatives decided to focus on state and local politics, organizing a mass movement known as the Christian Coalition. Conservatives took control of both houses of Congress in the mid-1990s. Building on the momentum of those efforts and the scandals of Clinton's final years in office, George W. Bush took the White House in 2000 and held it for eight years, capitalizing in part on public fears that resulted from the bombing of the World Trade Center and subse­ quent terrorist attacks around the world.

The 9/11 attacks were perpetuated by a small group of Arabic criminals who espoused beliefs in Islamic fundamentalism. To many in the United States, the actions of the al-Qaeda terrorists were seen as emblems of a global Islamic assault on the United States rather than the actions of an isolated group. But since no national govern­ ment had supported the terrorists, it was difficult for the United States to target a counterassault-or even a way to track down the attackers. In an effort to give form to this enemy, George Bush for­ mulated his Axis of Evil and began to search for a reason to attack one of its member nations. This required a substantial public rela­ tions campaign, which the Bush administration mounted with the advice of marketing consultants. On the grounds that a new attack against the United States would soon be launched from Iraq, Amer­ ica invaded that country, to find only that Iraq didn't have the weapons of mass destruction it was thought to possess. The political fullout from this mistake gave Democrats the arguments they needed to retake Congress and later the presidency.

Regrettably, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and several other inci­ dents have given rise to perceptions of a growing "war" between

BELIEF 73

Islam and the Western world. Though it is widely acknowledged that 9/ I 1 was executed by a very small minority oflslamic extremists, sus­ picions of wider Islamic aggression persist. In recent years, books have been appearing that support such fears, including Steven Emer­ son's American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us and Brigitte Gabriel's They Must Be Stopped: Why � Must Defeat Radical Mam. 33

Building on the emotionalism following 9/11, such works obscure the reality that terrorist attacks in United States have been perpetu­ ated by non-Islamics in places like Oklahoma City and Columbine High School.

Many Americans don't know that Islam is the second largest faith in the world after Christianity. Now a religion of 1.8 billion people, Islam is practiced by people known as Muslims, a word that means "One who submits to God." Muslims believe that God-also called Allah-was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the same God that Christians and Jews believe spoke to Abraham. Most of the world's Muslims live in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Southeast Asia. There are several branches oflslam, the two largest of which are Sun.ni and Shi'a, who differ in their interpretation of Muhammad's teachings. Contrary to some perceptions in the United States and elsewhere, Islam does not promote aggression or intolerance. In fact, the Muslim scripture known as the Koran (or Quran) states that "Those who believe (in the Quran), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians ... and (all) who believe in God and the last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve."34

The growing awareness of the Islamic world among people in the United States also has brought attention to the American Jewish population. At between 5 and 6 million people, America's Jewish population is roughly equivalent to that of Israel. Together the two nations are home to 80 percent of world's Jews. Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal began immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s, with a dramatic increase in the latter part of the cen­ tury of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and the Eastern European nations of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania. Initially settling primarily in the eastern United States, Jewish communities quickly developed their own support networks, which were reinvigorated following the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The influence ofJews in American

74 A CULTURE DIVIDED

business and academia has far exceeded their 2.5 percent share of the U.S. population, as has their influence on politics. Jewish Americans account for 37 percent of U.S. recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, 8 percent of the board seats of U.S. corporations, and 13 percent of the U.S. Senate. The role of Jews in U.S. leadership positions partially explains America's longstanding commitment to Israel, along with Israel's position as a bulwark of U.S. interests in the Middle East. As the United States has improved its diplomatic relationships with the region's oil-producing nations, most notably Saudi Arabia, Arab­ Israeli tensions within the U.S. population have become another aspect of America's divided culture.

Authoritarianism and Consumerism

As America grapples with its real and imagined enemies, the nation also struggles with the erosion of the very principles it seeks to pro­ tect. Part of what is dividing U.S. culture is a weakening of demo­ cracy. As America strives to regain its role as an example for the world to follow, its own people are succumbing to apathy and indiffer­ ence-even as they search for renewed purpose and "change." The most damaging impediments to American democracy can be sum­ marized in two categories: authoritarianism and consumerism.

Authoritarianism is the process often associated with modernism, structuralism, and functionalism, which imposes bureaucratic regula­ tion, surveillance, and control upon human activity. In this scheme, people submit to larger structures in the presumed interest of the social good. During the Bush years, authoritarianism got an historic boost with 9/11, which was used to spread fear and compliance throughout the nation. Suppressed in the process was any sense of autonomy or permission to challenge the prevailing order. Beyond being told that they cannot question the interest of national security, citizens are implicitly told that they should not rock the boat, cause trouble, or upset the system. This thinking suggests that disagree­ ment is a function of individual anomaly, maladjustment, inade­ quacy, or lack of will. Authoritarianism can be described as the process through which people come to be seen as passive and easily manipulated objects, rather than active and autonomous subjects. Authoritarianism perpetuates a fatalism that tells people they can do

BELi EF 75

little to alter the course of history or their own lives. This passive ide­ ology infuses mass media. Movies, television, magazines, and news­ papers suggest that the production of ideas and images is something that is always done by someone else. This message also is reinforced in the socializing processes of education that teaches children-later to become citizens-about hierarchies of knowledge, expertise, and superv1s1on.

Consumerism tells people that acquisition and consumption are the road to personal satisfaction, while it simultaneously promotes hierarchies of wealth and power. Clearly, consumerism frustrates community by encouraging competitive acquisition. Debilitating fic­ tions of "making it" and "the good life" are defined in terms of soli­ tary consumption rather than civic concern. In the late 1990s, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it this way: 'There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families."35 The first strategy for getting out of the con­ sumerist trap lies in pointing out the things that people actually value most-friends, family, and home-cannot be bought with money. Next, on a broader social level, one can raise the question of how well off the average citizen is and examine the circumstances of those who have suffered the consequences of economic failure. Given the glaring lack of equality in the United States, one can't help asking why more people aren't clamoring for radical change. Maybe it has to do with the perception that the task is so overwhelming. Or per­ haps it results from the lack of a meaningful program from either political party. At the very least, critical intellectuals can encourage the growing rage of all citizens silenced by the ideals of consumerist paradise. With each passing year, the distance between the dream and the reality widens. The reckoning that is coming holds both pos­ sibilities and potential difficulties for real social change.

Is any real progress on the horizon? The grip of authoritarianism and consumerism on the American people seems to be weakening. As the government in Washington has been handed back and forth in recent decades between the Republicans and the Democrats, there appears to be a growing desire for meaningful social transfor­ mation. For this reason, it is more important than ever for people committed to change to seize the initiative rather than wait for oth­ ers to act. This is the challenge of the Obama era. Well before the

76 A CULTURE DIVIDED

Obama administration, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe pre­ sciently argued, "If the demands of a subordinated group are pre­ sented purely as negative demands subversive of a certain order, without being linked to any viable project for the reconstruction of specific areas of society, their capacity to act hegemonically will be excluded from the outset."36 Framed in this manner, the solipsistic nihilism that had so dominated progressive politics in the early 2000s was both defensive and counterproductive. We need a posi­ tive plan.

This new initiative must combine a politics and an ethics of a sort not typically drawn upon by activists. These entail types of practice that both eschew easy answers and ambivalent relativism. The seem­ ingly paradoxical recipe needed will respect differences, oppose oppressions, and permit the contingencies of provisional spaces of experiment with new social forms. Given such a challenge, it is incumbent upon future change agents to reassert their roles in civic life. This calls for activists to assume new social roles and to pursue new forums for civic dialogue. 37 As politics in the 2000s has shown, new public spaces like the Internet have remarkable potential for invigorating political life, especially among the young and previously disenfranchised. This kind of change entails promoting notions of shared responsibility for community life along with the belief that change is indeed possible. This is a profoundly cultural endeavor in that it is an act of political education. Such a cultural program con­ vinces people that individual acts of citizenship (such as voting) can make a difference-that people themselves can command the authority to make community decisions.

At the heart of the struggle must stand a set of competencies through which cultural activists can dismantle structures that exclude people from political life and that tell people their voices are unim­ portant. At the same time, it is necessary to connect a pair of con­ cepts that authoritarian consciousness always has found itself unable to reconcile: difference and egalitarianism. In the bankrupt authori­ tarian view, differing needs or interests are to be overcome or sup­ pressed in the interests of equality. Implicit in this view is a hierarchy of opinion supporting an idealized "national" identity. While this idealized appeal to the common good can encourage citizens to look beyond their narrow self-interests, it also asks them to give up some-

BELIEF 77

thing of themselves. A genuine democracy does not make these kinds of demands but strikes a balance between differing interests and egal­ itarian society

Consumerism and authoritarianism work against this delicate bal­ ancing. For this reason, critically minded citizens need to keep democratic values at the forefront of American public debate-not the authoritarian democracy of unproblematic civic verisimilitude and flag-waving patriotism, not the consumerist democracy in which people are free to spend themselves into a happy life-a democracy defined by continual struggle, change, and critical revision. This is not to suggest a return to nostalgic origins but to propose a demo­ cratic imaginary perhaps yet unachieved in American history. The task has political and ethical dimensions. In political terms, the com­ mon shortcoming of all prevailing governments (including utopian ones) is their applications of a single set of standards for everyone. This problem becomes particularly evident within conventional lib­ eralism. Although frequently presented as a pathway to emancipa­ tion, mainstream liberalism nevertheless perpetuates distinctions between historical subjects and objects: those who act and those who are acted upon. It seeks to make surface corrections to a structurally flawed system without interrogating its underlying inequities. Regrettably, this is the pitfull of much high-minded intellectualism and academic theory, which commits the additional sin of claiming vanguard wisdom only for its own members. Such condescending logic has also been attributed to the prescriptive exhortations of "empowerment" associated with social concern.

In contrast, a genuine democracy-what Laclau and Mouffe term a "radical democracy"--defines itself on all levels in pluralistic terms. There is no single set of attitudes or social group to which all others must conform because an acknowledgment is made of the impossi­ bility of any one perspective that satisfies diverse needs. Instead, the unifying ethos is one of decentered authority. Owing to this latter principle, such a political program resists the vacuous amoralities of relativism and unexamined pluralism. For obvious reasons, such a scheme seems dangerously unstable to many conservatives who warn of the "threat" of uncontained difference. This is where the ethical dimension of radical democracy comes in. What is necessary is a way to integrate public and private realms without succumbing to a

156 NOTES

the Crossroads in the Information Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Lit­ tlefield, 2001); David Trend, Reading Digital Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001); David Trend, The Myth of Media Violence (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); David Trend, Everyday Culture: Finding and Making Meaning in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).

19. Georg W ilhelm Frederich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).

Chapter 3 1. George W. Bush, "Victory Speech," delivered at Yale Universiry,

December 20, 2000, http://everything2.com (accessed February 24, 2009).

2. Ronald Reagan, "Evil Empire Speech," March 8, 1983, http://www .teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=961 (accessed May 15, 2008).

3. Holy Bible, King James Version, "Book of Genesis," vol. 5, ch. 3 (Philadelphia, PA: National, 1978).

4. George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over Americas Most Important Idea (New York: Picador, 2006), 12.

5. Ibid. 6. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children s

Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge, 2001), 42.

7. Rene Descartes, as quoted in David E. Cooper, World Philosophies: An Historicallntroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 253.

8. Joshua Alston, "Too Much of a Bad Thing," Newsweek (January 12, 2009), http://www.newsweek.com (accessed February 2, 2009).

9. Protagoras, "Moral Relativism," http://www.wikipedia.org (accessed May 10, 2008).

10. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles ofNarnia (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

11. C. S. Lewis, quoted in Armond M. Nicholi and Theodore Dal­ rymple, "C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on Good and Evil," American Enterprise, http://www.taemag.com (accessed May 11, 2008).

12. Molly Ivins, untitled address, National Public Radio, June 22, 1995.

13. William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke Universiry Press, 2005).

NOTES 157

14. Ibid., 42. 15. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Politics Today," in Dimensions of

Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1991). 16. Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltzman, "Obama's Betrayal of

Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of School­ ing," http://www.truthout.org (accessed January 30, 2009).

17. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 11.

18. Ibid., 72. 19. Michael Zuckerman, Sensation Seeking: Beyond the Optimal Level

of Arousal (New York: Wiley, 1979). 20. Ibid., 99. 21. "Women's Gains in Politics Not Seen in Board Rooms, CEO

Offices," November 17, 2008, http://www.news.ucdavis.edu (accessed February 8, 2009).

22. UN Division for the Advancement of Women, "Women Still Struggle to Break through Glass Ceiling in Government, Business, and Academia," March 8, 2006, http://.www.un.org (accessed February 2, 2009).

23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America

(New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 37. 26. Charles Murray, cited in Coulter, Guilty, 37. 27. S. E. Holmes Jr. and J. Kashani Slaughter, "Risk Factors in Child­

hood That Lead to the Development of Conduct Disorder and Antiso­ cial Personaliry Disorder," Child Psychiatry and Human Development 31 (2001): 183-193.

28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle far Life (New York: BiblioBazaar, 2007 [1859]).

29. "Secularism," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism (accessed May 15, 2008).

30. "American Religious Identification Survey," Ciry Universiry of New York, 2001, http://www.gc.cuny.edu (accessed February 10, 2009).

31. Ibid. Other religious denominations in the United States are Mormon (1.6 percent), Muslim (0.6 percent), Buddhist (0.5 percent), and Hindu (0.4 percent).

158 NOTES

32. Steven Emerson, American jihad: The Terrorists Living among Us (New York: Free Press, 2002); Brigitte Gabriel, They Must Be Stopped· Why m Must Defeat Radical Islam (New York: St Martin's, 2008).

33. "The Cow," in Qur'an, 2:62. 34. Margaret Thatcher, "AIDS Education and the Year 2000," speech

delivered October 31, 1987, http://www.margarettharcher.org (accessed February 27, 2009).

35. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), 189.

36. See Jilrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984).

37. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmil­ lan, 1910), 321-360.

Chapter4 1. U.S. Census Bureau, The American and Alaska Native Population:

2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001). 2. Emme Lazarus, "The New Colossus," http://www.libertys­

tatepark.com/emma.htm (accessed February 24, 2009). 3. Roy Beck and Steven A. Camarots, "Elite vs. Public Opinion: An

Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration," Center for Immigra­ tion Studies, 2002, http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/backl 402.html (accessed June 19, 2008).

4. "Public Opinion Polls on Immigration," Time (January 2006), http://www.fairus.org (accessed June 19, 2008).

5. Deborah White, "Pros and Cons of the Immigration Reform Act of 2007," http:1/about.com (accessed June 18, 2008).

6. Sam Roberts, "Government Offers Look at Nation's Immigrants," New York Times, February 21, 2009.

7. Congressional Budget Office, Immigration in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Offcie, 2006).

8. "Myths and Facts about Youth Crime," Center on Juvenile Crimi­ nal Justice, 2000, http:l/www.cjcj.org/jjic/myths_facts.php (accessed June 25, 2008).

9. Slavoj Zizek, mlcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 19.

NOTES 159

10. H. Aaron Cohl, Are™- Scaring Ourselves to Death? (New York: St Martins, 1997), 9.

11. Claudine Chamberlain, "Fear of Fear Itself," June 22, 2003, http://abcnews.com (accessed January 3, 2009), 2.

12. Ibid., 1. 13. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of

the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 14. Chamberlain, "Fear of Fear Itself," 2. 15. Ibid.

16. Mike Males, Framing Youth: IO Myths about the Next Generation (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1998), 29.

17. David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 19.

18. Ibid. 19. Frederick John Desroches, Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada

(Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2002). 20. Glassner, The Culture of Fear. 21. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination

of Disaster (New York: Metropolis, 1998). 22. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Wilder,

2008). 23. David Gardiner, The Science of Fear (New York: Dutton,

2008). 24. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids

to Kill: A Call to Action against Tv, Movie, and Video Game Violence (New York: Crown, 1999), 1.

25. Glassner, The Culture of Fear, xxi. 26. Ibid. 27. Lewis Beale, "Picturing the Worst Happening," New York Times,

July 7, 2002, sec. 2, 1, 9. 28. C. S. Green and D. Bavelier, "Action Video Game Modifies

Visual Selective Attention," Nature 423 (2003): 534-537. 29. Eric Chudler, "Video Games May Improve Visual Skills,"

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/videog.html. (accessed June 19, 2003).

30. Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trixter Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society," Village Voice (December 21, 1993): 36.