Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: "Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment connected to and fueled by a repressive state, a bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media-driven pedagogy of fear that supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States." http://www.truthout.org/090209R?n