JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008 Page: 429
391-836, [2] p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Susan Searls Giroux
responsibility, hers would prove an unforgivable weakness. The poor
were poor, after all, because they made bad decisions. The second union
was, of course, doomed from the very beginning. Upon challenging
centuries of violent repression and paternalistic imposition, the nation's
black citizenry were eventually expelled from the American family
romance only to be recast as a primary threat to familial hearth and home.
No longer a people victimized by the indignity and brutality of second-
class citizenship under Jim Crow, they became a predatory population to
be feared and contained at all costs. Technological advancement had
rendered a significant part of that once crucial labour force redundant, but
young black men and women were called upon once more to perform
another task for the nation, to enact yet another kind of fantasy. If by the
1980s it was clear that the American family and its vaunted middle-class
dream was in danger, so this cheap and tawdry tale told, it was because
of the ominous threat of "thugged out" young black males and "welfare
queens," abetted by a government given over to special interests and
living la dolce vita on the taxpayers' dime, when not stealing from them
directly. The avatars of individual choice, endowed with media omnipo-
tence, denounced the taxing and spending abuses of "big government."
But far from dismantling government or "drowning it in a bathtub" as
Grover Norquist once promised, the state was dramatically refashioned.
If the mid-century social welfare state was concerned, at least in theory,
with citizens' social well-being in its performance of certain caretaking
functions, for example the funding of education, healthcare and public
housing-a set of commitments the civil rights struggles of the 1960s was
meant to expand to all citizens-the neoliberal state that succeeded it
grew more intrusive and more repressive, as resources drained from
social safety nets were reallocated toward the police, military, prisons,
border patrol, intelligence agencies and an expanding homeland security
apparatus. And as fear overtook reason, personal safety trumped collec-
tive security-all the better for those who manipulated world markets and
induced volatility into every aspect of daily life, who sought to inflame
the apparently antagonistic interests of disconnected individuals, to the
detriment of the vast majority of humanity. According to the militarized
metaphysic of the new American century, the malefactors have only
increased.429
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 28, Numbers 3 & 4, 2008, periodical, 2008; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc268404/m1/41/: accessed April 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .