Intellectuals that Jump over the box; are now Punished

7/29/2019 Intellectuals that Jump over the box; are now Punished

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The Box

The American Constitution stimulates thinking outside the box; and this is what theAmerican republican (Nazi) party has damaged; and is internally terrorized about! Anyone dreaming offreedom to think! To date I am seeing the unannounced war against professional folks, self educatedpolymaths, Christians outside of highly organized religion, library addicts, freedom Constitutionalists

with a strong belief in the original generation/foundation of America - called Historians. All these folksare now discredited, and now simply titled as terrorists!

Governments are based upon policies and politics; however, must operate within the legal andsocial boundaries of society. Politicians believe they are geniuses when they operate outside the box,and can get away with it via prestige, instead of logic. Society (via historians) then claim they arecriminals; so power-mongering politicians then use force to shove their policies down the throat of thepublic - while disclaiming intellectual counter policies originating from the (unapproved)* public.Opposition is then discredited; or one imprisoned/institutionalized for life. Through acts of deviousattorneys at law, we have political prisons established in America; to which educated attorneys of lawhave no access to free the guiltless.

[* Approval will only go to Celebrity du jour. Attorneys at law are for Corporations; whereas,Attorneys of law are for individual civil rights, that are guaranteed by Constitutions (and thus are notprofitable and have no status for politically misapplied at law). Let us look at the way the twofamilies of attorneys think; where language itself now has zero tolerance.

1. I adore my mother. Seen by both AT and OF attorneys as a beautiful comment of respect,placing mom on a pedestal of honor.

2. I love my mother. Good grief! as viewed by an AT attorney! Confessions by a blatant'freekenstein' incestuous monster!; whereas, love is just a stronger word for adoration by a 6 thamendment attorney's view!

Artistic and autistic folks that are damaged by this paradigm, realizing the futility ofcommunication with a government that has chosen deafness for isolation; meaning the construction ofa living hell for individuals willing to contribute their talents freely; i.e. for the good of mankind. Thehaughty politicians in turn, only use finance as the gateway for audience, amplifying frustrations to thepoint logical folks see life itself, as a means to kill other life; with a death wish of personalresponsibility to actually turn this whole insane universe off! [Final escape] So we again have a towershooter that sets himself up for demonstrative criminal agitation; that in turn will fuel the haughtinessof politicians to crack down on making more of the public institutionalized; and thus stimulate moreviolence...That improves politicians prominence (financial) state of affairs! [Power]

My personal evolution is stimulated by Constitutional law, i.e. the same law the Confederacy

engaged to stop the persecution of a separated country, and have this civil law stand as the pivot pointbetween individuals and an incorporated government to implement justice; supposedly the strongestlaws to maintain the freedom that American lives were sacrificed for. The now generation iseducated that history is unimportant to control the force of the present, and thus we have the WyattEarp's in office accomplishing the acts of 6 year olds. with lots of manufactured problems; but withsimple abrupt thoughtless solutions!

With Constitutional law now converted into a spiritual state, our country of America has nowbecome the biggest terrorist of the planet i.e. without honorable empathy; so contracts of equity are just


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unfulfilled promises, unless one has the financial status to improperly seek approval, instead of justice.

I have learned acceptance of this brutal dishonesty, but still live within my bubble of time thatis over ten years ahead of social evolution; that is occurring everywhere (other than America); thatrefuses to deflate financial prominence for the necessary survival of a nation. This pigheaded governingattitude manufactures a rainbows worth of color of law to magically stupefy the ignorant into peer

pressured obedience by isolation, thus conquering anyone attempting to utilize intelligence. Justlabeling intelligence as terrorism is truly barbaric. And totally uncivil, but seems to fit the patchwork ofcrime, by just working?

The reason Hitler's horror story is reoccurring, is because the citizenry of America, and otherindustrialized nations, have been educated [brainwashed] by Academia (a overdeveloped institutionthat intentionally overrules family values, and innovation that is not supportive to Karl Marks'sinvasion of communism, that is now the prime motis operandi of American politics. This 1920paradigm has been polished up with attorney lies, and propaganda, supported by academia - that wouldmake Adolph Hitler proud. The big lies processed by an iron fist over years of development, becomesthe dogma of the present [Quoting: Alvin Sugar, Ramblings of Sanity written 1996, and published2000; through the help of Bill Newman; also supported by his second follow up book, Slavery bySyndication.]

Common sense and primary law is forbidden avenues by authorities, that now preach thelanguage of insects, and that it must be used for those that must respond to a (royal?) inquisitor'sunilateral (honey coated) demands; i.e. yes, or no, to specially prepared menus concocted by thoseauthoritarians that believe they are genius (or God). Then, to have this kind of deceit woven into thefabric of what was once America, truly is stark terrorism - known as eating out equity from withinwhile making these official criminals so isolated from the general public via sophisticatedcommunications; a very barbaric frustrating situation. This way empathy is eliminated by dedication toblindly following orders from ranking superiors - so as to be proclaimed as heroes; while defilingnatural life!

Life itself has a time limit. And this makes dalliance of organisms, who are smart enough torealize this truth, quite stupid if they waste an opportunity of survival, for an opportunity to controlindividuals through prominence. One effect is basically the regeneration of the ancient law of Romantithing that Caesar enforced upon the army; where the army was broken down to squads of ten soldiers,before a major campaign. The leader of the each squad had to select a soldier to be murdered by theremaining members. Done to enhance an emperor's respect! And for totally blind conditioning to thecommands for murdering the enemy, while invoking intense collateral damage to prove might; whilereinforcing individual rage! Today the squad size has increased to the size of a village, and murderreduced to discretization; of the selected victim, i.e. the intellectual.

Henry A Giroux of Truthout wrote the following article that graphically displays my concepts,(and saves me a lot of typing saying the same thing; differently).

* * * * *TruthoutWednesday, 11 September 2013 / TRUTH-OUT.ORGIntellectuals as Subjects and Objects of ViolenceTuesday, 10 September 2013 09:17 By Henry A Giroux, Truthout |


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Intellectuals as Objects and Subjects of Violence, Edward Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, JeremyScahill, and Julian Assange, among others, have recently made clear what it means to embody respectfor a public intellectual debate, moral witnessing and intellectual culture. They are not just whistle-blowers or disgruntled ex-employers but individuals who value ideas, think otherwise in order to actotherwise, and use the resources available to them to address important social issues with what mightbe called a fearsome sense of social responsibility and civic courage. Their anger is not treasonous or

self-serving as some critics argue, it is the indispensable sensibility and righteous fury that fuels themeaning over what it means to take a moral and political stand and to continue the struggle to live in asubstantive rather than fake democracy.

These are people who work with ideas, but are out of place in a society that only values ideas that servethe interests of the market and the powerful and rich. Their alleged wrongdoings as intellectuals andtruth tellers is that they have revealed the illegalities, military abuses, sordid diplomacy and crimescommitted by the United States government in the name of security. Moreover, as scholars, scientists,educators, artists and journalists, they represent what C. Wright Mills once called the "organizedmemory of society" and refuse "to become hired technician[s] of the military machine."[1]

There is a long tradition of such intellectuals, especially from academia and the world of the arts, butthey are members of a dying breed and their legacy is no longer celebrated as a crucial element ofpublic memory. Whether we are talking about W. E. B. Dubois, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said, JamesBaldwin, Murray Bookchin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Harrington, C. Wright Mills, PaulSweezy or Ellen Willis, these were bold intellectuals who wrote with vigor, passion and clarity andrefused the role of mere technicians or lapdogs for established power. They embraced ideas criticallyand engaged them as a fundamental element of individual agency and social action. Such intellectualsaddressed the totality of problems faced in the periods in which they lived, made their publicationsaccessible, and spoke to multiple publics while never compromising the rigorous nature of their work.They worked hard to make knowledge, and what Foucault called, dangerous memories available to thepublic because they believed that the moral and cultural sensibilities that shaped society should be opento interrogation. They paved the way for the so-called whistle-blowers of today along with manycurrent public intellectuals who refuse the seductions of power. Intellectuals of that generation who arestill alive are now largely ignored and erased from the public discourse.

Intellectuals of that older generation have become a rare breed who enriched public life. Unfortunately,they are a dying generation, and there are not too many intellectuals left who have followed in theirfootsteps. The role of such intellectuals has been chronicled brilliantly by both Russell Jacoby andIrving Howe, among others.[2] What has not been commented on with the same detail, theoreticalrigor and political precision is the emergence of the new anti-public intellectuals. Intellectuals who actin the service of power are not new, but with the rise of neoliberalism and the huge concentrations ofwealth and power that have accompanied it, a new class of intellectuals in the service of casinocapitalism has been created. These intellectuals are now housed in various cultural apparatusesconstructed by the financial elite and work to engulf the American public in a fog of ignorance andfree-market ideology. We can finds hints of this conservative cultural apparatus with its machineries ofpublic pedagogy in the Powell Memo of 1971, with its call for conservatives to create culturalapparatuses that would cancel out dissent, contain the excesses of democracy and undermine thedemands of the student free speech, anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. What hasemerged since that time is a neoliberal historical conjuncture that has given rise to a new crop of anti-public intellectuals hatched in conservative think tanks and corporate-driven universities who aredeeply wedded to a world more fitted to values and social relations of fictional monsters such as JohnGalt and Patrick Bateman.


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Unlike an older generation of conservative intellectuals such as Edward Shills, Gertrude Himmelfarb,Norman Podhoretz, William Buckley and Allen Bloom, who believed in reasoned arguments, drewupon respected intellectual traditions, affirmed the world of ideas, and engaged in serious debates, thenew anti-public intellectuals are ideologues who rant, speak in slogans, and wage a war on reason andthe most fundamental institutions of democracy extending from public schools and labor unions to the

notion of quality health care for all and the principles of the social contract. We hear and see them onFox News, the Sunday talk shows, and their writings appear in the country's most respected op-edpages.

Their legions are growing, and some of the most popular include Peggy Noonan, Thomas Freidman,Tucker Carlson, Juan Williams, S. E. Cupp and Judith Miller. Their more scurrilous hangers-on andlightweights include: Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. The anti-public intellectuals arerarely off-script, producing tirades against, among others: the less fortunate, who are seen as parasites;immigrants who threaten the identity of white Christian extremists; women who dare to argue forcontrolling their reproductive rights; and people of color, who are not American enough to deserve anyvoting rights. They deride science and evidence and embrace ideologies that place them squarely in thecamp of the first Gilded Age, when corporations ruled the government, Jim Crow was the norm,women knew their place and education was simply another form of propaganda. Much of what theseGilded Age anti-public intellectuals propose and argue for is not new. As Eric William Martin pointsout, "Many of the proposals themselves are old; not founding-fathers old, but early-20th-century old.They are the harvest of a century of rich people's movements."[3]

What the anti-public intellectuals never include in their screeds are any mention of a governmentcorrupted by the titans of finance, banks and the mega rich, or the scope and extent of the military-industrial-academic-surveillance state and its threat to the most basic principles of democracy.[4] Whatdoes arouse their anger to fever pitch are those public intellectuals who dare to question authority,expose the crimes of corrupt politicians, and call into question the carcinogenic nature of a corporatestate that has hijacked American democracy. This is most evident in the insults and patriotic goreheaped recently on Manning and Snowden, who are the latest in a group of young people whose only"crime" has been to expose the abusive powers of the national security state. Rather than being held upas exemplary public intellectuals and true patriots of democracy, they are disparaged as traitors, un-American or worse.

The role of the anti-public intellectuals in this instance is part of a much larger practice of self-deceit,self-promotion, and the shutting down of those formative cultures that give rise to intellectuals willingto take risks and fight for matters of freedom, justice, transparency and equality. For too manyintellectuals, both liberal and conservative, the flight from responsibility turns into a Faustian pact witha corrupt and commodified culture whose only allegiance is to accumulating capital and consolidatingcontrol over all aspects of the lives of the American public. Liberal anti-public intellectuals are morenuanced in their support for the status quo. They do not condemn critical intellectuals as un-American,they simply argue that there is no room for politics in the university and that academics, for instance,should save the world on their own time.[5] Such views disconnect pedagogy from any understandingof politics and in doing so make a false distinction between what Gayatri Spivak calls "the possibilityof civic engagement and democratic action and teaching in the classroom."[6] She argues that "this is auseless distinction because I think what you have to realize is that it is with the mind that one takesdemocratic action. . . . The Freedom to teach, to expand the imagination as an instrument to think"world" is thus deeply political. It operates at the root of where the ethical imagination and the politicalmingle."[7] C.W. Mills goes further and dismisses the attempt to take politics out of the classroom as


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part of the "cynical contempt of specialists."[8] He then offers a defense for what public intellectualsdo by insisting that:

I do not believe that intellectuals will inevitably 'save the world,' although I see nothing at all wrongwith 'trying to save the world'- a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and therearrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. But even

if we think the chances dim, still we must ask: If there are any ways out of the crises of our epoch bymeans of the intellect, is it not up to intellectuals to state them?[9]

Intellectuals should provide a model for connecting scholarship and public life, address importantsocial and political issues, speak to multiple audiences, help citizens come to a more critical andtruthful understanding of their own views and their relations to others and the larger society. But theyshould do more than simply raise important questions, they should also work to create those publicspheres and formative cultures in which matters of dialogue, thoughtfulness and critical exchange areboth valued and proliferate. Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that it is the moral necessity andobligation of the intellectual to take responsibility for their responsibility - for ourselves, others and thelarger world. Part of that responsibility entails becoming a moral witness, expanding the politicalimagination, and working with social movements in their efforts to advance social and economicjustice, promote policies that are just, and make meaningful the promises of a radical democracy.

What might it mean for intellectuals to assume such a role, even if in limited spheres such as public andhigher education? At the very least, it would suggest educating students as informed and criticalcitizens by providing them with a language that will extend their sense of individual and social agency,deepen and enlarge their intellectual perspectives, and broaden their ability to think critically andengage with wider audiences. Instead, we educate them to be either low-paid workers who despise thesocial wage or to become a potential workforce for the Walmart-prison-industrial complex. Collegecampuses, once a hotbed of dissent, have become prime sites in developing weapons of death. Facultyhas largely been reduced to adjuncts - out of 1.5 million faculty, more than 1 million hold temporaryjobs. Learning is being turned into a form of commerce or training. Critical thought is now viewed asan excess in a culture in which a college education is simply a credential for getting a well-paid job. Atbest, students are now trained or groomed to be ardent, unquestioning consumers - the children ofAldous Huxley's nightmares - who eventually define their intense investment in pleasure through formsof violence that provide increasingly the only thrill left in a society dominated by surveillance cameras,Reality TV, the culture of cruelty, and the mind-numbing experience of the ever-present shoppingmalls.

Against the onslaught of anti-public intellectuals, there is a more laudable role that intellectualscan develop such as working with other intellectuals and community groups in a variety of sites toaddress those important social, political and economic issues that are now destroying all vestiges of thepublic good and democracy - issues ranging from poverty, war, militarization, the war on women, theprivatization and commodification of education, and the full-fledged corporate destruction of theenvironment. Though the conditions supporting such practices are diminishing in American society,such public concerns and political interventions, which are largely educational in nature, areparticularly crucial issues for those young people, educators and engaged citizens who are struggling tomake education a central feature of politics. Instead of holding up billionaires such as Bill Gates,former trader and hedge-fund manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and celebrities such as Irish rockerBono as public intellectuals, there is a need for this generation of youth to be exposed to publicintellectuals who are working actively to develop those formative cultures in which social, cultural andeconomic conditions can be put in places that provide opportunities for young people to learn how to


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Any struggle for particular rights must be accompanied by the need to develop a larger conversationabout society and what has to be done to dismantle its underlying structures of inequality of wealth andpower so as to develop broader social movements built on a more organized and totalizing sense ofpolitics and political change. At the same time, given the dire circumstances the world currently findsitself in, the late Tony Judt was at least partly right in arguing that in this day and age one responsibletask of the intellectual may not be to imagine a better world in such narrow terms but to prevent the

existing one from getting any worse. Of course, Judt spoke from a cautious pessimism that haunted himjust before his death, but I am sure he would view that challenge as the most elemental task of thepublic intellectual and that it would represent just the beginning in a more sustained collective effort tomove beyond pessimism to hope as part of a broader effort to restructure the entirety of a corrupt andantidemocratic society.

The dominant reactions to Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA and the PRISM programshould shame us as a nation. As a result of revealing crucial information that the governmentunlawfully kept secret, he has been vilified by the media and labeled a criminal by the Obamaadministration. The real crime in this case is revealing that your government is wrongfully spying inmultiple ways on almost all Americans, regardless of whether they have committed a crime or not.Kirsten Powers is right in arguing that the "real problem is that Snowden didn't understand that his roleis to sit and be quiet while the 'best and the brightest' keep Americans in the dark about governmentsnooping on private citizens."[10] In this scenario, the crimes of an authoritarian government appear tobe off limits and beyond critique or accountability. In this Orwellian script, peace is truly war, and theacts of criminals are heroic.

Though it is a matter of public record that the US government has killed children through drone strikesin Afghanistan, lied about the reasons that led to the Iraqi war (reproducing a similar refrain forbombing Syria), refused to prosecute government officials and CIA operatives who openly admittedthey either supported or committed torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American public barely flincheswhen brave whistle-blowers are imprisoned, subjected to solitary confinement and labeled as traitorsfor exposing the crimes of their government. After 30 years of a market-driven immorality, politicalcorruption and a culture of cruelty and irresponsibility, the American public appears lifeless as it movesthrough a fog of civic illiteracy and unchecked greed and power. All the while, too many Americansappear to be on life support, drowning in a tidal wave of a celebrity-driven commodified culture thatmakes stupidity a virtue, rewards armies of quasi-intellectuals who parade through the major newschannels and talk shows while unabashedly renouncing all connections to civic courage and truthtelling, and refuses to make the titans of finance and government accountable for their crimes. As stateand corporate terrorism proliferate, the quasi-intellectuals raise their voices and deliver their scriptedslogans only to condemn those brave enough to expose the abuses of a government and corporate elitesthat undermine all vestiges of a democracy.

We have too many anti-public intellectuals or quasi-intellectuals who no longer believe in theintellectual vocation, truth telling, or the practice of freedom. What is new is not the repression ofdissent by the government, but the scope and extent to which various types of intellectuals have beenseduced by academia, corporations, the military-industrial-surveillance complex and the mass-cultureindustries. They have been absorbed into what C. Wright Mills called the power elite, and rather thancriticize governmental and corporate propaganda, they produce and normalize it.[11] All one has to dois follow the career of academics such as David Steiner, Nathan Glazer, John Campbell, GlennHubbard or Martin Feldstein. Or for that matter the number of college presidents such as RuthSimmons, one-time President of Brown University, and Debora Spar, president of Bernard College,both of whom sat on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs. There are also the examples of Susan


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Hockfoeld, the president of MIT who sat on the board of General Electric, and Carol Christ, thepresident of Smith College, who graced the board of Merrill Lynch with her presence. As CharlesFerguson points out in Predator Nation, this reads like a board of academic shame.[12] One has towonder how such powerful academics shaped or stifled the culture of questioning and dissent on theirown campuses, especially when it might have been aimed at the types of institutions from which theyderived their salaries and helped to legitimate as corporate models of leadership. Walt Disney, the

ultimate self-promoter and cheerleader for the free market would be turning over in his grave with envyin the face of this type of hubris.

At the same time, those few critical and public intellectuals who voice their concerns almost neverappear in the dominant media or are held up as heroic intellectuals. For example, Noam Chomsky,Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis and many other public intellectuals well-known in the alternativemedia are completely absent from the dominant cultural apparatuses. And while many notable publicintellectuals are simply erased from the mainstream media, there are others who are removed fromtextbooks, deleted from the intellectual archive of the country or renounced simply as traitors. A perfectexample of this type of censorship and anti-intellectualism was on full display recently when it wasrevealed by the Associated Press that former Indiana Governor and George W. Bush adviser MitchDaniels tried to remove a work of Howard Zinn (which has sold over a million copies) from the state'sschools in 2010 claiming that The People's History of the United States is a "truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page."[13] There is more thanignorance at work here. There is a willful refusal to know - a type of ideological fundamentalism thatthrives on certainty and finds its final resting place in "laboratories of totalitarian regimes."[14] Thisatrocious act of censorship and ideological rigidity did nothing to slow down Daniels' career as he wasrecently appointed to be the president of Purdue University, the second largest university in Indiana.With the likes of neoliberal CEOs and conservative warriors such as Daniels heading majoruniversities, it is understandable to find that public intellectuals are in short supply in academia - withmany faculty now retreating into impenetrable vocabularies, irrelevant specializations, or crossing overand becoming complicit in serving the interest of the military-industrial-academic complex.[15]

At a time when American society is immersed in the psychosis of war and capital accumulationregardless of the social costs, intellectuals, artists, media pundits, academics, journalists, and othercultural workers should be engaged in a critical dialogue with the American public, and if they are not,I think it is fair to say that they are not public intellectuals and function more like bureaucrats,specialists, and technicians, or even worse, become complicit with the warfare-surveillance state.Those who work in the realm of ideas and willingly retreat from the notion of intellectual work as avocation in the pursuit of truth telling and the practice of freedom have been reduced to a subalternclass of legitimation technicians who expand the culture of conformity and the machineries of war,violence and death, even when they are not aware of what the consequences of their withdrawal fromsociety implies. On the other hand, public intellectuals who do engage society critically to expose themad violence of war, mass surveillance and hyper-nationalism are on the wane, and rather thancommand attention and respect are relegated to the status of being unprofessional, un-American, oreven worse, traitors. A shameful example of this type of hyper-patriotic baiting was on full displaywhen David Gregory, the host of "Meet the Press Sunday," asked Glenn Greenwald why he should notbe charged with a crime given his dealings with Edward Snowden. Not only was Gregory impugningthe critical work that journalists should do as part of the fifth estate, but actually suggesting thatjournalists who help expose government corruption and illegality should be subject to criminalpunishment. Welcome to 1984.

Since the 1970s, public intellectuals have been under attack, especially in the United States. Dissent is


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now disparaged, repressed and subject to criminal prosecution as in the widely publicized examples ofEdward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. At the same time, the neoliberal coma of normalization andanti-intellectualism has radically undermined those public spheres and formative cultures that arecapable and crucial to the production of public intellectuals, dissent and displays of collective civiccourage. That is, higher education, the culture industry, and other crucial public spheres have largelybeen commodified, subject to the imperatives of a casino capitalism that only views intellectuals as

servants of the state, military-industrial complex, and corporations. In addition to the ideological andstructural crises facing intellectuals, there is the emergence of new electronic and screen technologiesthat, in the absence of strong public values, can dampen any vestige of critical thought and civicliteracy, making it all the more difficult for individuals to think critically, take risks, and act with asense of civic courage. It has become too easy today for intellectuals to sell their wares to the bigbanks, financial services and other corporate behemoths that control the commanding institutions ofmost societies in the West.

The problem goes deeper. Within higher education, what passes as critical pedagogy and teaching hasbeen instrumentalized, stripped of its critical vocation, and is now largely a resource for corporate andmilitary interests.[16] Higher education is increasingly dominated by specialists and data collectorswho have become largely servants of the state. The institution has lost its identity, if not relevance, as asource of scholarship serving the public good. Its mission as a democratic public sphere has beeneroded in the last 40 years. Part of this retreat from democratic values and any viable notion of thecommon good is largely due to the increasing corporatization of the university on one hand and the riseof privatized, corporate-funded foundations and the unceasing attack by right-wing cultural warriors,on the other, who mostly produce their own apparatchiks, unapologetically functioning as anti-publicintellectuals and uncritical hacks.[17] The Koch brothers for instance are not simply part of the 1%, aneconomic force that generates massive amounts of inequality in wealth, power and income, they alsocommand a wide swath of cultural apparatuses that produce a mammoth source of public pedagogywaging war against all vestiges of the public good, including public education, unions, nonprofit media,the social wage and any public sphere that does not bear the paralyzing imprint of the market. TheKoch brothers and their neoliberal allies have created multiple dead zones of the imagination, spaceswhere critical thought is hijacked and turned into a cesspool of conformity.

At the same time as higher education comes under the influence of neoliberal modes of governance,faculty are reduced to a largely contingent and part-time subaltern class of underpaid workers, modeledafter the labor practices of Walmart. Too many young faculty and students are deep in debt and theirpositions are too precarious for them to speak out critically in and out of the classroom on importantsocial issues for fear of losing their jobs. Similarly, in too many cases, the distorted and business-driven notion of professionalization that increasingly drives certain areas such as the social sciences,humanities and liberal arts sanction and reward modes of scholarship steeped in forms of jargon andspecialized languages that a very limited number of people can understand and serves largely to rendersuch work irrelevant in addressing important public issues and communicating to wider publics. Thereis more than a deskilling of academics at work here, there is also the bullying neoliberal culture ofdepoliticization.

The instrumental logic of the data collectors too often finds its counterpart in those intellectuals whoare lost in their careers and endlessly interview themselves. They do everything they can to makethemselves irrelevant while undermining the development of a healthy sense of intellectual vocationand the need for intellectuals to address human suffering, make power accountable, and interpret,question, and interrogate authority rather than simply succumb to it. The issue of how knowledge,values, and social relations are implicated in particular forms of power and legitimate existing social


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relations and a specific notion of the future is ignored. Rather than address wider publics, they scornand disdain them, all done with the kind of snobbery and stale witticism that implies how smug thisparticular class of depoliticized intellectuals have become. All too often, the only force that offsetsthem in the academy are a small but loud group of militarized sectarians who argue for a mind-numbing anti-intellectual discourse that collapses intellectual inquiry into biology or into what they callthe need for safe spaces. As if intellectual engagement should be attacked for being provocative,

unsettling, and willing to contest the common-sense assumptions that students often inhabit.

Of course, education does not merely take place in the institutions of schooling. Most of what peoplelearn today comes from the old, and new cultural apparatuses with their myriad of technologies thatraise the issue of intellectual violence to a whole new level. What seems indisputable is that thecommanding media, in all of their manifestations from newspapers, radio, television and film leavevery little room for critique, substantive dialogue, and informed judgment. These media are mostlyengaged in what Chomsky called manufactured consent, producing spectacles of violence, and pushinga celebrity culture that becomes the ultimate model of an enervating mode of consumption. Thecommanding media are undeniably controlled by a very limited number of mega corporations andmostly offer a venue for whom Pierre Bourdieu called "fast intellectuals" - often second-rate scholarsand idiotic pundits - who corner the market in slogans and trendy answers that surprise no one andwhose truth value is disregarded next to how they improve audience ratings.[18]

Loyalty to fame, money and authority is far more important to the fast intellectuals than the truth, asense of social responsibility, or a passion and commitment to a more just world. These intellectuals donot enrich public life; they degrade it. At the same time, in the age of digital and electronic media, withits expanding platforms of communication and screen cultures, public intellectuals for the first timesince the 1970s have the power to expand their audiences and engage in a level of critical engagementthat is crucial to the fate of any civilized democratic society. Public intellectuals must use whateverresources are available to question the vocabularies, institutions, ideologies and values of neoliberalismand other authoritarian forces of war, violence and privatization that are now threatening the planet.The new media offer a space and opportunity for intellectuals to engage in a new utopian discourse,one in which progressive social change becomes imaginable just as a future is viewed in terms thatrefuse to imitate the present. Public intellectuals must refuse all vestiges of sectarianism, politicalpurity and moral absolutism. They must engage in modes of self-critique, tempered with an ability tolisten to others and a willingness to display what Orwell called the rare moral and political beauty ofthe "offensiveness" of truth telling and the willingness to make power and authority accountable.Surely, this has to be the foundation for not just imagining a better world, but also collectivelystruggling for it. We live at a time when those who have the courage to hold authority accountable aretreated like criminals and those who, under the authority of the state and mega corporations, commithorrendous crimes are treated as patriots and models of leadership. The Patrick Batemens of AmericaPsycho are the new normal, and now they want to bomb Syria to make the point that only violence canplay an important mediating role in any conflict or be used as the primary resource to address majorproblems. In actuality, they have been making that point since the 1960s, and we see its legacy in theneedless death of millions of innocent people whose memory demands that intellectuals speak up andchallenge the machinery of death that now speaks in the name of empire.

1. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), pp. 124-125.

2. See, for instance, Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books, 1982) for ananalyses and description of such intellectual practices. See the excellent collection of commentary by


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Irving Howe, Selected Writings 1950-1990, especially the chapter, "The Age of Conformity," (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), pp. 26-49.

3. Eric William Martin, "The 1 percent played Tea Party for suckers," Salon (September 7, 2013).Online:

4. On the issue of surveillance and its all-embracing tentacles in regulating society, see ZygmuntBauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveilllance (London: Polity, 2013).

5. See, for instance, Stanley Fish, Save the World On Your Own Time (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2012).

6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Changing Reflexes: Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,"Works and Days, 55/56: Vol. 28, 2010, p. 3.

7. Ibid., Gayatri Spivak, pp. 2-3.

8. Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 133.

9. Ibid, Mills, The Causes of World War Three, p. 133.

10. Kirsten Powers, "The Sickening Snowden Backlash," The Daily Beast (June 14, 2013).

11. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

12. Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation (New York: Crown Business, 2013).

13. Alex Beam, "A foolish attempt to purge Howard Zinn," The Boston Globe (August 22, 2013).Online:

14. Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 5.

15. I take up this issue in detail in The University In Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007).

16. David H. Price, Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011).

17. See Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the MiddleClass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, TakeBack Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

18. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (New York: the New Press, 1999).Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.Henry A Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMasterUniversity in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorshipat Ryerson University. His most recent books include: On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011),


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Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), DisposableYouth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiminga Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013), and The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (MonthlyReview Press, 2013), America's Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education AfterNeoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board ofDirector's web site is: www.henryagiroux.com.

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Intellectuals that Jump over the box; are now Punished