Gramsci envisioned the 'hegemonic' struggle as two-pronged - one to educate the working class from ideas that chain them to the existing order and their own exploitation, and two, to bring other 'subaltern' classes into what he called a 'bloc' with the working class.
I only see the average American remains bizarrely ignorant of US foreign policy. How many people know of Hillary Clinton's coup in Honduras? I suspect not many. The violence against the global south has not abated for sixty years (ok, for three hundred).
From AT&T to United Fruit to Dole pineapple, the business interests of corporate America has stood on the backs of the developing world (sic). What would actually happen if police were defunded? What would massive upticks in privatized security look like? Possibly something out of Robocop. And that is the danger today, that is the situation in which we find ourselves.
AC Shilton (Fatherly, 2020)
Over the last thirty years funding for domestic police has grown over 400% according to the Justice Policy Institute. And there are millions of dollars shortfall for public education. The problem there is that public education sucks bad anyway. It is almost worse than no education, frankly (and yes I know there are exceptions). And this takes us back to the shelf stockers at Tesco and TARGET.
The elite Universities and prep schools are available for the rich, and increasingly the very rich only. And which serves as yet another factor in the acute resentment that seems to fuel so much American discourse. And while private schools are better (how could they be worse) the problem is the culture at large.
It's not only a reflexive and embedded and indelible racism, it is an anti-intellectualism, and fast-eroding literacy. And then there are the screens. The pernicious effects of social media (which really is a machine for creating resentment and/or guilt) and smart phones, aps, algorithms " the entire attention economy, has produced a populace of emotional deadness, of crippling anxiety and insecurity about self, and it has done nothing to even mitigate in the slightest of ways the Imperialist project and what is called American Exceptionalism.
The cops that killed George Floyd, if prosecuted, will be exceptions that change nothing. Most cops serve with impunity. American soldiers shoot at Iraqi civilians as sport, amusement. The vicious IDF, fresh from killing teenagers, comes to the U.S. to teach domestic departments better how to instil terror and pain, nothing more. There is no secret magic Zionist martial art or mind control. Its just brute terrorizing. As it has always been for fascists. And as it has always been for plantations and chain gangs.
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John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwrighting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. Plays include The Shaper, Dream Coast, Standard of the Breed, The Thrill, Wheel of Fortune, Dogmouth, and Phantom Luck, which won the 2010 LA Award for best play. Film credits include 52 Pick-up (directed by John Frankenheimer, 1985) and Animal Factory (directed by Steve Buscemi, 1999). A collection of his plays was published in 1999 by Sun & Moon Press as Sea of Cortez and Other Plays. He lives with wife Gunnhild Skrodal Steppling; they divide their time between Norway and the high desert of southern California. He is artistic director of the theatre collective Gunfighter Nation.
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