Gaming takes up the bulk of the argument in The Military-Entertainment Complex, but Lenoir and Caldwell also highlight the ways in which the legacy media of TV and film have likewise buttressed the Pentagon’s propaganda aims in post-9/11 America. They develop an illuminating analysis, for example, of the Bush-era terror-porn franchise 24, which “gives voice to the many predictions of RMA theorists and advances the technologies of the RMA as solutions to the rampant threat of terrorism.” The show is another example of the bowdlerized aesthetic of “epic realism,” far more concerned to traffic in brutal sensory affect than in anything resembling narrative honesty or moral complexity. 24 never pauses in its breathless and sensational hyping of the terrorist threat to give viewers an opportunity to reflect on or debate anti-terror policy, nor (to understate things exponentially) does it deepen anyone’s understanding of the complexities of global geopolitics. Instead, “24 made several formal innovations designed to produce a specific affective response in viewers: a frenetic experience of tension, anxiety, and intense, fast-paced action.”

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful
for the toxic patch on the rail track.
For the craquelure
in the asphalt, seeping green—
it reroutes you, proffers with each commute a forced
adventure. Who’s to say what you’ll find
in your course of avoidance?
Ideally a willing stranger.
Maybe a glimpse of the most
expensive painting per square inch.
When you can no longer meet your needs
by working, you should feel joyous. No more daily
wear and tear on the blazer.
Now you can keep it pristine. Superlatively
inky. It’ll look smart at funerals.
Of course they’ll invite you to make some brief
remarks, and when you move to retrieve
from your pocket the paper,
out will come a whole sheath of solemn statements—
you’ve lost this year
how many? You’ll shuffle
through the pile. Where is the life
that lived in the body before you? Where is the right
one gone?

[...] we might describe civil war as the incurable autoimmune illness of global capitalism: a disease that attacks all systems of the international body from within—indeed, pitting each against the other—calling into question the function and sovereignty of every organ.

[...] post-Enlightenment literature, is his own. In the end, Pinker is merely waving a tattered banner of Enlightenment liberalism at the specter of a diverse range of thinkers he might as well have from clipped from the bibliography of an overheated Dinesh D’Souza diatribe—his featured anti-Progress apostates are Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jean-François Lyotard. His consideration of civil war, in other words, is a matter of politics, not science. And politics, as that Progress-baiting post-philosophe Foucault wrote, “is the continuation of civil war.”

The only memory of the age of fire and blood that was the first half of the twentieth century that it seems necessary today to preserve is the memory of the victims, innocent victims of an explosion of insensate violence. In the face of this memory, that of the combatants has lost any exemplary dimension, unless that of a negative model. Fascists and anti-fascists are rejected equally as representatives of a bygone age, when Europe had sunk into totalitarianism (whether Communist or Nazi). The only great cause that deserved commitment, so post-totalitarian wisdom suggests, was not political but humanitarian. So Oskar Schindler has dethroned [French Resistance leader] Missak Manouchian. The example kept in mind today is that of the businessman (a Nazi party member) who rescued his Jewish employees, rather than that of the immigrants in France (Jews and Armenians, Italians and Spaniards) who fought against Nazism in a movement linked to the Communist Party.

The example of Oskar Schindler here is instructive. Traverso is alert to the problems posed by a modern culture industry that would lionize a Nazi, by way of Steven Spielberg’s Best Picture entry Schindler’s List (1993), at the expense of a historical narrative that could accommodate a communist anti-fascist combatant such as Manouchian who had been murdered by Nazis. Such a history would, by necessity, strive to understand the World Wars as more than a series of interstate struggles, ultimately rendering them more intelligibly, and compellingly, as a series of violent civil wars between partisans and fascists.

During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, left and right shared a commitment to the value of the humanities as a crucial element of American higher education. What the antagonists then disagreed upon, often ferociously, was how to define the humanities. Conservatives contended that all American college students should read the Western canon as they defined it—limited to a core group of texts typically authored by dead white men. In contrast, academic leftists sought a more inclusive, multicultural humanities curriculum.

But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape.

When young people flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign, they responded enthusiastically to his offer to make free higher education a priority. But this ardor didn’t only stem from the ruinous impact that ballooning student debt will visit on their life prospects. They also yearn for a more human existence that transcends the soul-crushing neoliberal order. This new division, between the technocratic rulers of a deeply unequal society and the idealistic young Americans who want something better, hardly resembles the culture wars of yesteryear. It feels, rather, like a new kind of class struggle—and finds a strong echo of the Parkland survivors’ implacable dedication to a new approach to the politics of gun ownership, in defiance of the bitter fatalism of all too many of their political elders. Although the outcome of these inchoate struggles is far from certain, they furnish more than a modicum of hope to the exhausted culture-war conscientious objectors who are looking for a way out of the pinched and dispiriting trench-warfare of the American Kulturkampf.

[...] adding the category of gender harassment doesn’t cure the problem of under-inclusiveness—if anything, it underscores the basic difficulty. All workers—men, women, trans, cis, gay, straight, and bi—suffer harassment on the job constantly by virtue of their status as workers, and have absolutely no “civil right” under the law to be free of it, unless by chance it can be regarded as racially or sexually charged.

The bullying, the belittlement, the undermining, and the generally shitty, uncivil, and sometimes sadistic treatment of workers that is a part of so many workplaces goes at best unchallenged under the prevailing legal definition of harassment as discrimination. At worst, this consensus actively shores up this destructive status quo, by homing in on a civil right to be free of only some of the more egregious forms of gender harassment—and only then if it can be characterized as sexual and aimed at a victim because of sex. That some harassment at work is a civil rights violation, in other words, helps legitimate the considerable harassment that cannot be so characterized.

This is a regrettable implication of the structure of virtually all of our civil rights laws, including our law of sexual harassment. All workers should enjoy a civil right to a harassment-free workplace. All workers should enjoy a right to be treated with dignity and respect in their place of employment. Work matters, hugely, to virtually everyone; it is often our central place of civil identity. Civil rights should not only address discrimination, regardless of how we interpret sexual harassment as an elementary mode of discrimination. Civil rights and civil equality should fundamentally sustain our rights to inclusion as equals in public spaces, which most profoundly include our work spaces. We all should have a right to civil treatment: in fact, that should be our absolutely non-negotiable core civil right.

[...] Unwelcome sexual advances at work are suffered basically because of economic coercion that pertains to labor: the conditions of harassment are endured because one’s work and paycheck are conditions of survival. But unwelcome sexual advances at home or in the street are suffered because of other forms of coercion, or other forces of social life—some subtle, some not. Targeting sexual harassment at work as a civil rights violation has the unintended but predictable consequence of rendering sexual harassment everywhere else to be less understood, and perhaps even invisible, in both cultural and legal terms.

The law’s message is pretty clear: if the sexual harassment you’re suffering isn’t happening at school or work, it’s not remediable, at least as a matter of Title VII law. This looks and feels wrong. Doesn’t the sufferance of unwelcome sexual advances in other spheres also undercut women’s equality? Does all of the unwelcome sex and sexual attention women endure only injure them if and when it is coerced through the mechanisms of the paycheck? Does that mean that in all those other spheres of life—home, the street, the public square—sexual harassment, understood as the imposition and sufferance of unwelcome sex, is okay? Is harassment elsewhere normal or unobjectionable—a kind of persistent cultural white noise that’s just something women are supposed to put up with?

Maybe sexual harassment is only a civil rights violation—and therefore only a wrong—if it’s accompanied by the coercive power that comes at the end of the stick of employment. Maybe in other spheres it is what it has always been: what women put up with. Maybe in those non-work-related contexts, in other words, women’s bodies are still up for grabs.

[...] Much sex that is unwelcome is the result of coercion, and much of that coercion is the result of financial necessity. But employing financial reward or punishment as a means to obtain unwelcome sex does not meet the legal standard of rape. More generally, sex that you have because if you don’t, you might lose something you care deeply about, such as your job, or your lease agreement, or a meal, or approval from a teacher, or acceptance by your community, or your husband or boyfriend’s good graces or civility, might be or feel coerced, but it is not for that reason rape. The law doesn’t regard these forms of coercion as sufficiently immediate, or frightening, or threatening to life and limb to vitiate consent. Unless and until that changes, there is a great deal of coercive sex—sex procured through the exercise of power, by basically threatening the withholding of something necessary or strongly desired by the coerced party, that is legally regarded as consensual and therefore non-criminal. When it occurs between bosses and workers, such coerced, unwelcome sex can become, via the strictures of the Meritor ruling, sexual harassment. Coerced, unwelcome sex outside of the workplace, however, is neither criminal, if consensual, nor is it sexual harassment—because it doesn’t interfere with one’s rights to employment. Perhaps it should be criminal, or perhaps some of it should be. But it currently is not.

We got rid of the marital line as the marker between licit and illicit sex, and part of what we did when we did that was perhaps to extend ownership rights, albeit in a watered-down form, to men as an amorphous social class. The ownership that a man once had of sexual access to his wife, might now be regarded—by some—as having been granted to men generally, rather than to a particular man. Women’s bodies—for some—have in effect become not owned by husbands but rather annexed into part of the commons. The entitlement a man enjoyed to his wife’s body by virtue of marriage, to whatever degree that habits die hard, may now be felt far more broadly. We don’t restrict sex to marriage. Nor, then, do we restrict the rights of accessibility that came with it.