摘要：What can be said about a political culture in search of 'infinite prosperity' that is dependent on a perpetual enemy who must always be fought but can never be vanquished? The United States ranks first in military power, wealth, war-making, murder rates, and incarceration rates. At the time of this writing in the summer of 2008, one in one hundred US adults was locked in a cage, and an additional two per cent were under the direct supervision of the criminal justice system. While the vast majority of people in custody did not kill or violently harm anybody, the centrality of violence to all aspects of US life helps explain the continuum from policing and prisons to war. Rather than rehearse well-known critical histories of stolen land, stolen labour, gender domination, and iron-fisted capital expansion, this essay uses them to historicise current events. It constructs a series of scenes from various periods that, in sum, are designed to demonstrate the persistence and convergence of patterns and systems. The resulting narrative arc is more cumulative than teleological, even though I believe with all my heart there's an end to violence in both senses of 'end': violence produces power, which under the grow-or-die culture of capitalism seems like a slightly erratic expression of self-interest; but violence does not produce all power, which means perhaps that its effectiveness might come to a finish.
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