ABSTRACT
History often repeats itself with a vengeance, signaling a crisis of memory, historical consciousness, and civic literacy. The normalization of violence in American society is not only about how it is lived and endured, but also about how it becomes the connective tissue for holding different modes of governance, policies, ideologies, and practices together through an assemblage of military activities. The killing of children in America has become part of a politics of willful disappearance in which a culture of cruelty, immediacy, and forgetting works in tandem with eliminating any trace of the factors behind the production of violence in the service of the unthinkable. Intolerable violence has become normalized. Disposable populations increasingly cover more and more individuals and groups and represent the waste products of society. Any attempt to resist and restructure the war culture that dominates the United States necessitates a new language for politics.
