Foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. The clements foundation. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. A very wise teacher once told us, if you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Then he gave us some of his favorite examples. You think of language differently, he said, if you think of words pregnant with celestial fire or words that weep and tears that speak. Of course, the heart doesnt physically separate into pieces when we lose someone we love, but a broken heart conveys the depth of loss. And if i say you are the apple of my eye, you know how special you are in my sight. In other words, metaphors cleanse the lens of perception and give us a fresh take on reality. In other words. Recently i read a book and saw a film that opened my eyes to see differently the crisis of our times, and the metaphor used by both was, believe it or not, zombies. You heard me right, zombies. More on the film later, but this is the book, zombie politics and culture in the age of casino capitalism. Talk about connecting the dots. Read this, and the headlines of the day will, i think, arrange themselves differently in your head, threading together ideas and experiences to reveal a pattern. The skillful weaver is henry giroux, a scholar, teacher and social critic with seemingly Tireless Energy and a broad range of interests. Here are just a few of his books americas education deficit and the war on youth, twilight of the social, youth in a suspect society, neoliberalisms war on higher education. Henry giroux is the son of working class parents in rhode island who now holds the Global Tv Network chair in english and Cultural Studies at Mcmaster University in canada. Henry giroux, welcome. Thank you. Its great to be here. Theres a great urgency in your recent books and in the essays youve been posting online, a fierce urgency, almost as if you are writing with the Doomsday Clock ticking. What accounts for that . Well, for me, democracy is too important to allow it to be undermined in a way in which every Vital Institution that matters, from the political process to the schools to the inequalities that to the money being put into politics, i mean, all those things that make a democracy viable are in crisis. And the problem is the crisis, while we recognize in many ways is associated increasingly with the Economic System, what we havent gotten yet is that it should be accompanied by a crisis of ideas, that the stories that are being told about democracy are really about the swindle of fulfillment. The swindle of fulfillment. The swindle of fulfillment in that what the reigning elite in all of their diversity now tell the American People if not the rest of the world is that democracy is an excess, it doesnt really matter anymore, that we dont need social provisions, we dont need the welfare state, that the survival of the fittest is all that matters, that in fact society should mimic those values in ways that suggest a new narrative. I mean, you have a consolidation of power that is so overwhelming, not just in its ability to control resources and drive the economy and redistribute wealth upward, but basically to provide the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be. I mean, the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked. I mean, this is a vicious set of assumptions. Are we close to equating democracy with capitalism . Oh, i mean, i think thats the biggest lie of all actually. The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values. Explain that. What do you mean outside of market values . I mean, you know, when Margaret Thatcher married Ronald Reagan metaphorically. Metaphorically. Two things happened. One, there was this assumption that the government was evil except when it regulated its power to benefit the rich. So it wasnt a matter of smashing the government, as reagan seemed to suggest, it was a matter of rearranging it and reconfiguring it so it served the wealthy, the elites and the corporate, of course, you know, those who run mega corporations. But thatcher said Something Else thats particularly interesting in this discussion. She said theres no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic, that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social, that discourse is really only about selfinterest. That possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own selfinterests. No society can survive under those conditions. So what is society . When you use it as an antithesis to what Margaret Thatcher said, what do you have in mind . Whats the metaphor for i have in mind a society in which the wealth is shared, in which there is a mesh of organizations that are grounded in the social contract, that takes seriously the mutual obligations that people have to each other. But more than anything else im sorry, but i want to echo something that fdr once said. When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom that comes with a lack of health care. Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is. But agency, the ability to do that, to have the capacity to basically be able to make decisions and learn how to govern and not just be governed as a citizen. As a citizen. A citizen is a moral agent of a citizen is a political and moral agent who in fact has a shared sense of hope and responsibility to others and not just to him or herself. Under this system, democracy is basically like the lotto. You know, you go in, you put a coin in, and if youre lucky you win something. If you dont, then you become Something Else. So then why when i talk about the urgency in your writing, your forthcoming book opens with this sentence, americas descending into madness. Now, dont you think many people will read that as hyperbole . Sometimes in the exaggerations there are great truths. And it seems to me that whats unfortunate here is thats not an exaggeration. Well, madness can mean several things. It can mean insanity. It can mean lunacy. But it can also mean folly, foolishness, you know, look at that craziness over there. Which do you mean . Its certainly not just about foolishness. Its about a kind of lunacy in which people lose themselves in a sense of power and greed and exceptionalism and nationalism in ways that so undercut the meaning of democracy and the meaning of justice that you have to sit back and ask yourself, how could the following, for instance, take place . How could people who allegedly believe in democracy and the American Congress cut 40 billion from a food stamp program, half of which those food stamps go to children . And you ask yourself how could that happen . I mean, how can you say no to a Medicaid Program which is far from radical but at the same time offers poor People Health benefits that could save their lives . How do you shut down Public Schools and say that Charter Schools and private schools are better because education is really not a right, its an entitlement . How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, Public Engagement is a pathology . Let me answer that from the other side. They would say to you that we cut medicaid or food stamps because they create dependency. We close Public Schools because they arent working, they arent teaching. People are coming out not ready for life. No, no, thats the answer that they give. I mean, and its a mark of their insanity. I mean, thats precisely an answer that in my mind embodies a kind of psychosis that is so divorced, is in such denial about power and how it works and is in such denial about their attempt at what i call individualize the social, in other words individualize . Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals. You are responsible. You are responsible. If youre poor, youre responsible. If youre ignorant, youre responsible. Exactly. Youre sick . Thats right, that the government, the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that you often hear this, i mean, if there i mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and theyre all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the National Media . We hear that maybe they dont know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe its about character. You know, maybe theyre just simply lazy. This line struck me, the ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American Culture like an electric current. Yeah, it sure does. I mean, to see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of americans who have worked, like my father, all their lives and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth. I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, no, this has to stop. We cant allow ourselves to be driven by those lies anymore. We cant allow those who are rich, who are privileged, who are entitled, who accumulate wealth to simply engage in a flight from social and moral and political responsibility by blaming the people who are victimized by those policies as the source of those problems. Theres a new reality, you write, emerging in america in no small part because of the media, one that enshrines a politics of disposability in which growing numbers of people are considered dispensable and a drain on the body politic and the economy, not to mention, you say, an affront on the sensibilities of the rich and the powerful. If somebody had to say to me ask me the question, what exactly is new that we havent seen before . And i think that what we havent seen before is an attack on the social contract, bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable. Theyre in debt, theyre unemployed. My friend Zygmunt Bauman calls them the zero generation. Zero jobs, zero hope, zero possibilities, zero employment. And it seems to me when a country turns its back on its young people because they figure in short Term Investments not long Term Investments, they cant be treated as simply commodities that are going to in some way provide an instant payback and extend the bottom line, they represent something more noble than that. They represent an indication of how the future is not going to mimic the present and what obligations people might have, social, political, moral and otherwise to allow that to happen, and weve defaulted on that possibility. You actually call it theres the title of the book, americas education deficit and the war on youth. Oh, this is a war. Its a war that endlessly commercializes kids, both as commodities and as commodifiable. Example . Example being that the young people cant turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You cant walk on a College Campus today and walk into the Student Union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to disneyland to local shops, all selling things. I mean, its like the school has become a mall. It imitates the mall. And if you walk into schools, as one example i mean, you look at the buses, there are advertisements on the buses. You walk into the bathroom, there are advertisements above the stalls. I mean, the curriculum is written by general electric. Were all branded. Theyre branded, theyre branded. Everything is branded . Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse thats not commodified, to be able to think about noncommodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, theyre just simply absent. Theyre not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified. What does it mean to go to school all day and just be taking tests and learning how to teach for the test . Their minds are numb. I mean the expression i get from them, they call school dead time, these kids. Say its dead time. I call it their disimagination zones. Disimagination . Yeah. They rob its a form of learning that robs the mind of any possibility of being imaginative. The arts are cut out, right, so the questions are not being raised about what it means to be creative. All of those things that speak to educating the imagination, to stretching it, the giving kids the knowledge, a sense of the traditions, the archives to take risks, to learn about the world, theyre disappearing. I heard you respond to someone who asked you at a Public Session the other evening what would you do about what youve just described . And your First Response was start debating societies in high schools all across the country. Thats right. One of the things that i learned quickly as a result of the internet is i started getting a ton of letters from students who basically are involved in these debate societies. And theyre saying like things, we use your work. We love this work. And i actually got involved with one that was working with out of Brown Universitys working with a high school in the inner cities right, and i got involved with some of the students. But then i began to learn as a result of that involvement that these were the most radical kids in the country. I mean, these were kids who embodied what a critical public sphere meant. They were going all over the country, different high schools, working class kids no less, debating major issues and getting so excited about in many ways winning these debates but doing it on the side of something they could believe in. And i thought to myself, wow, heres a space. Heres a space where youre going to have a whole generation of kids who could be actually engaging in debate and dialogue. Every working class urban school in this country should put its resources as much as possible into a debate team. My favorite of your many books is this one, zombie politics and culture in the age of casino capitalism. Why that metaphor, zombie politics . Because its a politics thats informed by the machinery of social and civil death. Death . Death. Its a death machine. Its a death machine because, in my estimation, it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no they become like the walking dead, you know. They lose their sense of they lose their sense of agency. I mean they lose their homes, they lose their jobs. And so this zombie metaphor actually operated at two levels. I mean, at one level it spoke to people who have no visions, who exercise a form of Political Leadership that extends the politics of what i call war and the machineries of death, whether those machineries are at home or abroad, whether theyre about the death of Civil Liberties or theyre about making up horrendous lies to actually invade a country like iraq. So this zombie metaphor is a way to sort of suggest that democracy is losing its oxygen, you know, its losing its vitality, that we have a politics that really is about the organization of the production of violence. Its losing its soul. Its losing its spirit. Its losing its ability to speak to itself in ways that would span the human spirit and the human possibility for justice and equality. Because we dont think of zombies as having souls . They dont have souls. Right. Theyre driven by lust. By lust . The lust for money, the lust for power. Well, thats, i guess, why you mix your metaphors because you talk about casino capitalists, zombie politics, which you say in the book shapes every aspect every aspect. Of society. Yeah, at the current moment. How so . Well, first, lets begin with an assumption. This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasnt been done before, it doesnt just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. Thats different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life, everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the Financial Services are run to the way in which people have acc