But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.

"When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it."-- Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

"To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."-- Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark

What "tangible" and "constructive" things can a poetic sensibility contribute to everyday existence? Here's one: The atomized denizens of neoliberal culture are in dire need of a novel yet durable sensibility, one bearing the creativity and stamina required, for example, to withstand the police state rebuffs inflicted by the ruthless authoritarian keepers of the present order...as is the case, when OWS dissidents initiate attempts to retake, inhabit, and re-imagine public space.

Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.

The crackpot realist's notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one's existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the 1%.

Resultantly, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in lofty but content-devoid Obama speechifying and the clown car demolition derby of Republican politics) spends its days in a broken tower of the mind, insulated from this reality: The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, ecocide) created by the excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to theirs foundations, and, will inevitably caused the structures to totter and collapse.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals...And I, their sexton slave!-- Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower

We have been "sexton slave" to this destructive order long enough; its lodestar is a death star.

In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.

"Often we're not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us."--Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O'Donnahey)

In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege?

Carl Jung averred, when a disconnect occurs between the inner life of the individual and the outward exigencies of daily life that "the Gods [...] become diseases." One way, this assertion can be taken is: There are multiple forces, tangible and intangible, in play in our lives and the trajectory of events e.g., the personal, in the form of the ghosts of trauma that haunt individual memory, but there exist, as well, extant and within, the collective spirit of an age. Tragically, in our own time, within the precincts of power, our national house of spirits has become a madhouse.

Yet beneath the gibbering cacophony of the insane asylums of past eras, beneath the haze of pharmacologically induced stupors of the institutions of the present, there exists much pain. This is the toll taken by a manic flight from honest suffering. At present, this is what we're given in our age of cultural and political disconnect and its attendant sense of nebulous dread.

Paradoxically, while the forces of nature are impersonal, the dilemma feels very personal. Therefore, on this journey to the end of empire, when impersonal elements are in play, one can become alienated from the dehumanizing trajectory of the times. Likewise, as exemplified by the U.S. political system, what process is more impersonal than the process of decay? Apropos, the air is permeated with a reek of putrefaction.

Yet the earth is kind, for one can use putrescent material in the process of renewal. The loam of earth is enriched by the rancid...just don't swallow it down whole...doing so, will cause you to become ill.

Importantly, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed "soul-making". Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire...is a loss of collective soul e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth's enveloping soil...to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.

As circumstances stand, at present, for the 1%, their refusal to accept the inevitable has yielded grave ramifications for the people, fauna, and flora of the planet. Although, due to their seemingly vacuum-sealed insularity, ensured by vast wealth, the economic and political elite have yet to be touched by the consequences of their actions, much less forced down to earth.

Of course, this behavior defies logic, is in breach of the law, and is an affront to any workable code of ethics--as well as, stands in defiance to the laws of nature, including the force of gravity. But you can count on this, "the unseen hand of the market" (actually the buckling backs of the (99%) can't hold up the 1% swaying tower of hubris for much longer, and when it comes down, stand clear, for there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles.

"That's just the way it is."

As exhibited by the often bland, "normal" outward appearance of a serial killer, when the apologists and operatives of an exploitive, destructive system appear to be reasonable, they can go about their business without creating general alarm. By the same token, while many present day Republicans are zealots--barnburners raving into the flames of the conflagrations created by the militarist/national security/police/prison industrial state--Barack Obama and the Democratic Party serve as normalizers of the pathologies of late empire.

In this manner, atrocious acts can be committed by the state, with increasing frequency, because, over the passage of time, such outrages will have been allowed to pass into the realm of the mundane, and are thus bestowed with a patina of acceptability.

In nineteenth century Britain, the sugar that sweetened the tea of oh-so civilized, afternoon teatime was harvested by brutalized, Caribbean slaves, who rarely lived past the age of thirty, as, for example, in our time, in our blood-wrought moments of normalcy, we trudge about in sweatshop sewn clothing, brandishing i-Phones manufactured by factory enslaved teenage girls who are forced to work 14 hour plus shifts.

"That's just the way it is" might be one of the most soul-defying phrases in the human lexicon.

Contrast this with the OSW slogan, "The beginning is near." Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

Yet Newt Gingrich's booty calls are forgivable. Stones shall not be cast. His transgressions humanize him and the balms of forgiveness of Christian believers rising from this sin-buffeted earth cause the Baby Jesus to coo into the dawn of a coming golden age.

When Bush/Cheney sat at the helm of empire and plundered foreign lands and breached the rule of law, Democratic partisans insisted that constitutional order be reestablished by having Bush et al marched in shackles from the halls of power. To do anything short of this was to risk the foundation of the republic being crushed to rubble and silt beneath the boot of tyranny.

Yet, we critics of duopoly are accused of being impractical sorts who don't dwell in this world, the world of the possible. Although, it seems that political partisans give themselves permission to dwell, simultaneously, in two worlds: This one, as well as a Bizarro World--the parallel universe limned in comic books--where all things are done in reverse, where true is false and false is true, as well as, apparently, a realm where Newt Gingrich is a shining standard bearer of moral rectitude and a defender of faith and family and President Obama is a protector of constitutional law and a friend of the downtrodden.

According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77% of the citizens of the U.S. expressed the belief that the massive power imbalance in place in the nation is a direct result of the vast wealth inequity between the 1% and the 99%. In addition, according to a poll by Time Magazine, 86% of Americans held the conviction that Wall Street and its lobbyists exert undue influence over the U.S. political class.

Still, both major U.S. political parties remain unmoved by the opinions of their constituents and unresponsive to their needs. By having the right to vote under present day, political duopoly, one is granted the right to co-sign the ongoing fraud that the nation is a democratic republic. To vote for either a Democratic or Republican candidate (i.e., the well vetted stooges of the 1%) is to cast a vote in favor of the only political party allowed in the rigged process--The Big Money, Perpetual War Party.

Believing that replacing one of these candidates with the other...is in any way propitious is analogous to believing that the hanging of new wallpaper within a house with a rotted-out foundation constitutes renovating the structure.

Memo to those who cling to the hope you can change the order of a calcified system from within e.g., the U.S. political, corporate and governmental order:

What has caused you to believe you can change the insatiable appetite of a mindless beast from within the belly of said leviathan? Seemingly, your predicament presents you with these alternatives: 1) paste up some soothing wallpaper. 2) Learn to play the xylophone on its ribcage (i.e., turn your powerlessness into the stuff of art). 3) Light a fire and have the creature vomit you to freedom. Otherwise, you're going to be digested; you will lose your mind and body to the dehumanizing system and become part of its monstrous form.

As they embody the Spiritus Mundi of empire's end, Obama builds towering monuments of verbiage into empty air while Mitt Romney bores the soul of liberty into a soporific state, causing her to sleepwalk into a bottomless abyss of bland.

Obama and Romney manage to hide the malevolent, hungry ghost of empire behind a veneer of soul-defying, daylight normalcy. But Newt Gingrich's bloated carcass displays imperium's murderous id. What has become of the diminishing resources of the world? Newt grows ever fatter and more grotesque as he greedily devours these things. What terrible fate befell the U.S. constitution? Newt dry humped it to dust.

Regarding the mindset, libido, and modus operandi of the 1%: We are confronted with types who would clearcut the last tree standing in the last forest on earth to render down to toothpicks used to pick scraps of flesh from the teeth of the members of their class who just dined on the last Bird of Paradise.

To resist, we, as individuals and en masse, are advised to mitigate our sense of powerlessness by occupying our own libido, thereby allowing oneself to be drawn into the élan vital of the world...to ride the zeitgeist, embodying the eros of resistance and renewal, and, in so doing, refusing to defer to the corrupt-beyond-redemption machinations of the U.S. political and big media classes.

Ask yourself and those around you Rainer Maria Rilke's deceptively simple question: How shall I spend my days?

To appropriate Cornell West's phrase, launch yourself into the midst of "the funk of life" by means of the gritty sublime of cultural eros...This act is a marriage of earthly complaint and winged aspiration--both a lamentation and goof take--a conversation/a collaboration/a spirited debate between what has been lost to indifference, exploitation, and cupidity--and the insistent eros of the breathing moment--a commitment to occupy life's restive pantheon of purpose and decay.

Show your face to the world. Occupy libido by acts large and small, public and private.

Conversely, in what way is it attractive, healthy, or even interesting to willingly submit to the dictates of a culture that has conjured from the zeitgeist the likes of Gingrich--a high chair tyrant of the lowest order--a grotesque man-brat banging on the sides of his elevated seat, insisting that all the things of the world he sees are, "MINE!"

Why did the zeitgeist regurgitate Gingrich into our midst? Newt embodies the misappropriated libido and attendant, oceanic sense of entitlement of the corporate consumer state i.e., modes of being conjured by the dark magicians of advertising and finance to enslave the 99%, as, all the while, the system's rapacious verities and doomed vectors serve as the lodestar and raison d'être of the 1%.

Eric Hoffer advised, "You can never get enough of what you don't really need."

William Butler Yeats, on the subject of being overwhelmed by abundance:

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.--excerpt: Sailing to Byzantium

One's character is forged amid this agon of excess and restraint e.g., of discerning the difference between the habitual excesses of consumer addiction and the callings of one's character; life lessons that are arrested by the shallow compulsions and time-sucking demands of the current neoliberal order.

As things stand, there exists no panacea to prevent this dilemma. Yet the messy, learning process known as creative resistance will suffice i.e., a type of endeavor similar to an artist's approach to his craft, involving his working with the materials at hand...At present, those materials being: you--your longings, your inspiration, your aspirations, your defeats, your mindful refusal to accept the diminished and demeaning status quo, and, of course, the found material of: the status quo itself.

As revealed by the deeds of OWS, promoting a dialog between individual and cultural forces leaves one receptive to the transformation that unfolds when enjoined in the conversation of the times. Don't allow the soul of discourse to be dominated by the half-mad, hungry ghosts possessing empire's end.

"Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, if only for a moment ... What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself ... [Resistance] lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel-therefore we exist."--Albert Camus

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

The notion of even possessing a preference as to whom should be president of this crumbling, faux republic...is a bit like asking what color uniform one would prefer that the crew tasked with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic should don as they go about their duties.

In times such as these, when escaping into one's comfort zone is no longer a viable option, one is advised to evince the audacity of hopelessness, because the act leaves one desperate enough to embrace this daunting proposition:

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32

Although, for the present and foreseeable future, the propitious aspects of the sentiment will not hold true for Bradley Manning...whose plight displays the punitive, hyper-authoritarian nature of late U.S. empire. As is the case with Manning, in a national security state, few acts will cause one to lose his freedom in a more rapid manner than to reveal the secrets of lawless, ruthless power.

Apparently, Bradley Manning guarded secrets of his own...not shameful ones--but traits that would cause him to become subject to derision if revealed.

Manning desired to practice transvestism. This U.S. Army private was privy to illusion. Innately, he grasped how being coerced into suppressing one's secrets damages one's soul. Manning merely harbored the desire to practice a bit of gender bending; in contrast, the operatives of empire demand that they be allowed to bend and twist the world itself towards their exploitative ends.

To live in empire--in the service of its imperial military or in the thrall of the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumerist compulsions--is to live a selfish lie, day in and day out.

Rupaul (Andre Charles) averred, "We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag."

We all make choices as to what form of drag we practice. Does my lie promote the truth? Is my act educational, entertaining or edifying? Does it allow me to inhabit my true self yet transcend my narcissism? Does my act and attendant actions bring balm or does it deliver more suffering than necessary to a world where it is impossible to escape suffering?

Ask yourself and those around you these questions in regard to Private Manning and the operatives and denizens of U.S. Empire.

On the subject of identity, authentic or dubious: Even after being an almost constant public presence for more than half a decade, Barack Obama's true nature and authentic identity remains elusive. After all this time, he still seems less man than marketing rollout, less of a political leader than an object lesson in product placement. The situation is like having the role of chief executive of the nation filled with a disposable razor or a heavily hyped iPhone application.

The U.S. presidency, as is the case with almost all aspects of life in the corporate consumer state, has become increasingly dominated and defined by commercial/public relations-type legerdemain. The constant commercial come-ons of the media hologram mask its hollow core; the proliferation of weightless lies serves to overwhelm the gravity of perilous times.

Obama's nebulous nature works to ensure the continued irrational ardor of his supporters, who, against all evidence, insist on clinging to fantasy and projection regarding the president's much in evidence anti-democratic tendencies; hence, progressive types seem prone to project their own redeeming qualities on the blank slate that Obama creates and deploys as his public persona--a method similar to that used by con artists who exploit the decency of their marks to achieve their criminal ends.

Apropos, this indefensible, Bush-era type of deceit connecting 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

"The war in Iraq will soon belong to history. Your service belongs to the ages. Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries -- from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you -- men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11."-- President Obama speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., December 14, 2011

In this instance, the shape-shifter Obama morphs from hollow man to Death's slick, narrow-ass, public relations representative.

I've noticed that debates with Obama's apologists have a very similar trajectory as those with Republican partisans. Because partisans are hard pressed to explain away the affronts to truthful discourse and good governance displayed by the politicians they support, any attempt to engage them in debate involving the merits (or lack thereof) of the policies of said politicians (e.g., their unwavering support of the 1% and U.S. militarist imperium)--quickly devolves into volleys of ad hominem attacks launched from the ranks of their supporters.

For example, from the right, OWS activists are labeled dirty, America-hatin' hippies who supports swarthy terrorists, yet from the liberal camp, OWSers who refuse cooperation with the Democratic Party are cast as purer-than-thou types--too above it all to sully themselves by an acceptance of the pragmatic nature of political reality.

What is the reason for this irrational response from liberals--from folks who scoff at teabaggers and religious fundamentalists for their less than sane and sanguine approach to political discourse? There is simply no reasonable way to defend the acts of our blood-sustained empire abroad and the machinations of a predatory economic elite at home; hence, the testiness evinced by the enablers of the duopolistic state.

Withal, when I post an article or FaceBook status critical of President Obama--the tone and tenure of the ensuing debate with his defenders takes on a Bush era aura. As a general rule, when the rationalizations of both Bush and Obama supporters are countered with facts regarding their dismal governance, the invectives fly. Granted, the grammar and syntax of Obama apologists is superior to that of Republican loyalists--but their fallacy arguments are every bit as dodgy.

Consequently, the policies of both parties (bulwarked by the concretized support of partisans) translate into unnecessary suffering and death--the calling card and ground level criteria of the oligarchic/imperialist state. And sorry, Obama loyalists--your man is not the lesser-of-two evils candidate: He is among his peers. In many ways, he has proven himself a more deceitful, ruthless crime boss than his predatory, Republican predecessors, in other words, the chief executive of a militarist empire.

The 1% and their advocates and operatives in the U.S. political class have thrown us to the wolves. How does one make an ally of uncertainty and keep close the verities of the heart while negotiating this howling political wilderness?

Even in this era of oversized fear and diminished imagination, there are some among us--nonconformists, creative thinkers, artists and occupiers--who welcome (rather than cower before) the metaphorical image of wolves (that are recognize as fellow outcasts). Instead of being shamed by outsider status, they have been suckled and raised by wolves--i.e., by embracing their fate of having been cast-out into the wilderness.

Nourished by the spirit of defiance, some thrive when freed from the constraints of a habitual adherence to groupthink. The dark terrain of societal abandonment becomes their natural habitat: They howl at the moon; they reject the daylight world of bland consensus; they learn to see in the dark, apprehending their own interior darkness and, as a result, gaining understanding into the hearts of darkness beating within those in power.

The wilderness of political activism, of poetry, of art becomes their home: They don't clean-up nicely for the polite company demanded by political duopoly; they don't let themselves be bred down (as a few domesticated wolves did) to yapping Toy Poodles, in exchange for a few food scraps.

When you're looking at a Toy Poodle--you're looking at a former wolf, as, for example, when your looking at corporate press members, you're looking at folks whose ancestors long ago were journalists.

One moment, you're loping through the woods, snout held high, smelling the scent of fresh game on the wind, but the next thing you know--you're being led around on a leash and collar, encrusted with tacky rhinestones, and you're salivating at the sound of an electric can-opener. One moment, you're a child, entranced in play, hardwired to eternity--next moment, you're sitting at work and your passions, hopes and yearnings have been shrunk down to Toy Poodle-sized agendas . . . You're truckling for your boss's approval; you're counting the minutes until break time. Like domesticated livestock and unfortunate animals incarcerated in zoos, you are no longer a noble animal--you have become a Thing That Waits For Lunch.

To resist, we must cast off the fear of being an outcast. The signs bode well for us: Over the last few months, in the company of the OWS pack, I have witnessed the awakening of many...have been graced with the privilege of being in their lupine company as we howled defiant into the darkness of the corporate state night.

One must remember this: We human beings are of nature as well. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, our authentic nature will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake the lost landscape of our collective humanity, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, imperium-countenancing, sick puppies.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of "big government"; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex. The "big government" narrative is a misdirection campaign--a smoke screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of everyday life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1% who own and operate it will allow it to be.

Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur. Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings--by occupations--by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.

Yet, this will be an organic process...unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.

The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised...was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide. Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st century version of company town despotism e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion.

This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state's 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are "living the dream". As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.

That's right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom...They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers. Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters.

Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire...as far as empires go.

To the contrary, the nation's post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled deathscapes abroad, corrupted the society's elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population. From the soulless, dehumanizing nothingscapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douchescapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire's legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.

And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.

Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies. In the age of corporate state dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits--elitist bully boys and gals--i.e., the bigot whispers of the right--continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments.

In turn, little bullies, out in the U.S. spleenland, rendered resentful and mean of spirit by the incessant humiliation leveled by a class-stratified, exploitive economic system take up these self-defeating talking points that serve the 1%. Accordingly, when, for example, participants in the OWS movement question the present social and economic structure, these downscale denizens of oligarchic rule personalize the critique; their identification with the system is so complete that they feel as though they have been attacked on a personal basis.

As a consequence, all too often, their defenses are raised and they return volleys of ad hominem attacks that serve to defend a status quo that demeans them. This psychological phenomenon could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)--a pathology suffered by personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who endeavor to remedy the wounding and humiliation inflicted by a brutal, degrading order by identification with their oppressors.

To wit, the lack of outrage exhibited by the general public regarding the nations trudge toward a police/national security state. For example, the lack of deference displayed by city officials and local police forces regarding the First Amendment rights of OWS participants.

First off, lets clear the pepper spray-fogged air on the matter: The vast majority of rank and file police officers do not now and, most likely, never will view themselves as part of the 99%. Simply stated, police officers identify with their fellow cops. The vocation, by its institutionalized, militaristic, tribal nature, creates a wall of separation between its insider members and outsiders i.e., the civilian population at large.

It is an act of self-deception to insist that rank and file police officers, the so-called blue shirts, might even be tacit supporters of the 99% movement.

Good luck with that. But don't be surprised if your entreaties are answered in the form of concentrated mists of pepper spray. In fact, as of late, that is exactly the reply we have received from the police, many times over.

Most police officers do not much identify with civilians. They harbor fealty to their careers and are indoctrinated to evince unquestioning loyalty to the department. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse:

"Because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same"--from Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

On a cultural basis, after years of hyper-authoritarian indoctrination by mass media sources and political influences, few, among the general public and in the political realm seem willing to demand openness and accountability from law enforcement organizations. All too often, police (and U.S. soldiers as well) are viewed by a large percent of the general public as selfless heroes, noble souls, protecting life and liberty. And no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, this image holds.

How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers--grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state sanctioned violence and oppression--are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?

How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation...deserving of the violence inflicted upon them?

Let's have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.

Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public's right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, "Don't get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don't want any people coming that close to me."

In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X influenced stance of "by any means necessary", the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody--or worse.

At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world. Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.

These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage. In general, the middle class can be counted on to detest the poor...blaming those born devoid of societal advantage and political influence for the impoverished circumstances that were in place long before the happenstance of their birth. Moreover, in a bit of noxious casuistry, as despicable as it is delusional, all too many members of the middle class have been induced by grift artists, employed by the ruling elite, to blame their own declining social status and attendant beleaguered existence on the poor.

"Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail."--John Donne

This has proven to be an effective, time-tested grift: Because as long as the animus of the middle class remains fixated on the poor, the criminal cartels known as the economic elite can continue to ply their trade. Of course, in reality, by their greed and complicity, what the middle class has gained is this: trustee status in the capitalist workhouse.

Although, there is no need to fret: The run of neoliberal capitalism is about over. Don't mourn: This late stage, rapacious, mutant economic strain has leveled destruction on community and the planet itself as well as the hearts and souls of too many of those imprisoned within its paradigm.

At this point, the situation comes down to this: paradigm shift or perish.

The hour is amenable to reevaluate, reorganize and re-occupy. Doing so will prove helpful in withstanding false narratives.

Apropos: As of late, in my hours spent at Liberty Park, I've been witness to increasing numbers of tourists wandering in and repeating derisive, rightwing distortions regarding the OWS movement and its participants. For example, they are a collection of whiny college students who want taxpayers to be responsible for picking up the tab for their student loans because they are too lazy and spoiled to work off their debt. These tales are variations of the old canards involving welfare queens, mouths gleaming with taxpayer financed gold teeth, arriving at grocery stores lounging behind the steering wheels of late model Cadillacs, and proceeding to purchase steaks and fifths of gin with food stamps.

Ronald Reagan spoke of this mythical figure often, affording her near supernatural powers: She, through indolence, guile and a welfare state-bestowed sense of limitless entitlement, was the near singular cause of the nation's economic woes; her very existence, not only depleted the U.S. Treasury of dollars, but drained the U.S. free enterprise system of vitality and the very will to compete. She was a succubus who arrived in the socialist haunted night to feed on and zap the very virility of capitalism.

Because of the wealth inequities inherent to capitalism, in order to prevent social unrest, the system is reliant on creating false narratives that foster misplaced and displaced class resentment. These tales are very potent, because they serve as palliatives for the enervating states of shame inflicted on the population at large by their enslavement to the free market. Accordingly, because the vast majority of the populace are deemed "losers", due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created and maintained to displace the rage, borne of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system's exploited underlings.

OWS is beginning to change the narrative...align it with reality--and that is an alarming development for the 1%; hence, the retooled, amped up propaganda campaign we're seeing signs of at present.

This is the reality the 1% endeavor to obscure: Capitalism is a pyramid scheme; by its very structure, only a few will ever receive its bounty...that is wrung out of the exhausted hides of the vast majority. Fact is, capitalism, the neoliberal variety or otherwise, has never worked as promised; its innate structure ensures exploitation and inequity. Therefore, time and time again, adding aspects of socialism (e.g., New Deal era programs and reforms) have saved capitalism from itself. But, after a time, the plutocrats regroup and begin anew to launch a big money-financed, slow motion coup d'état of government (e.g., the Reagan Revolution).

A vast disparity of wealth within a nation will all but ensure this societal trajectory. But that isn't going to happen, this time. The planet cannot endure the assaults wrought by a system that requires exponential growth to be maintained. The run of capitalism is nearly over. A more sustainable economic system, based on horizontal rule, is being developed, globally (e.g., the Icelandic model).

The vertical structure inherent to capitalism brings about the self-perpetuating reign of an insular elite who choose to go the route of empire and, by doing so, overreach and bring themselves down, but only after much unnecessary suffering, exploitation and death--the calling card and ground level criteria of imperium.

Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one's situation--beginning to question how one arrived at one's present station in life--will engender anxiety, anger and regret.

Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life's winners.

But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem--not the dishonest economic setup--and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can't get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.

And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned...have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs--all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I've adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.

Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.

What an unnerving task that would prove to be...an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone.

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."--Albert Camus

Accordingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-rewarded, professional dissemblers of the political right, imploring them to dissolve my doubts and dread. To escort and ensconce my troubled form back into my comfort zone by telling me the problem is not the iron boot of the corporate state upon my neck; rather, my oppression stems from the barefoot hippie lefties of OWS "who need a bath and a job"; it is their odious presence in our lives that has subdued my happy capitalist destiny by the pernicious act of laying down an effluvia (more demobilizing than pepper spray) of patchouli musk and has caused capitalism itself to weaken into an enervated swoon.

Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my oppression. Those America-hating Occupy Wall Street hippies are actually the hidden hand that controls the global order and who possess a craven desire to smelt down the gleaming steel of the humming engines of U.S. capitalism into creepy, Burning Man statuary, who want to hold 24/7 Nuremberg-style rallies in the form of annoying drum circles.

In reality, it is those dirty hippies who are actually "The Man." Withal, hippies crashed the global economy and pinned the blame on the selfless souls who ply their benign trade on Wall Street.

Now, you know why conservatives harbor such animus towards hippies. Don't claim that Fox News et al--those selfless souls--who only desire to protect the glories of the present order, and who only have your best interest in mind, didn't try to warn you.

"I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." --Mark Twain

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

To cite only a few examples, by means such as, "zero tolerance" policies in public school systems, to "no knock" warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks--daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom. In fits and starts, by law and deed, the U.S. has moved closer in the direction of a panopticon-prone, brutality-leveling, waking authoritarian nightmare than a democratic republic devoted to erring in the direction of the ideals of justice and liberty.

Granted, such ideals will never exist in pure form. Still, by the same token, the sane neither shill for utopia nor become adapted to tyranny.

The act of pepper spraying peaceful protesters by the enforcers of official power should not be viewed as an incidental occurrence. Conversely, the act is emblematic of a mode of mind gripping the nation and one that must be challenged in the streets.

Memes are ever-replicating, exponentially reproducing, collectively evolving bits of human thoughtware--while our bodies are the hardware. If their resonances remain strictly in the realm of pixels and soundbites, a meme will translate into little more than pop culture ephemera. Memes must be carried by flesh into the non-virtual world; their human carriers might even be peppered sprayed themselves and carted off to jail, if it comes to that.

Otherwise, as is the case at present, memes dissipate...dissolving amid the ever-proliferating mirages of the commercial hologram. Thus the tragedy of the consumer state: The manner the present age of media-borne illusion usurps our instinctual drives and individual longings--the appetites and imaginings--that compel our life force to its zenith--but instead will induce us to spend our lives in the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumer dreck, and, in so doing, serves to deliver our passions to a wasteland of electronic dust.

When the inhuman demands of a seemingly implacable system control the lives of a people, an aura of nebulous fear, nettling resentment and habitual passivity, alternating with impulsive aggression, will seize the spirit of a culture. This is what Walker Percy wrote of a similar internalized landscape:

"Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them."--excerpted from Percy's novel, The Second Coming

In a declining culture, the vitality available within daily experience withers and falls away, and is soon supplanted by the dismal scions of the death genes. As reflected by the architecture (e.g., bland, prefab retail strips; shoddily built subdivision housing; sterile office parks) of late capitalism, beauty and common communion holds no dominion. As a consequence, fecund dreams dry to dust and rise from the arid land as blinding squalls of displaced fear and anger.

Antithetically, as an antidote, on Thanksgiving Day, my wife and I trundled by subway train down to Zuccotti Park for a taste of liberty. Of course, this particular national holiday is the marking and celebration of an age of genocide in regard to native folk.

My father is half Comanche; he was born on a reservation in the U.S. midwest. In general, on Thanksgiving Day, at least one-fourth of my blood (and the rest of the three-fourths of my humanity, and all of my soul) finds the task of remaining a polite dinner guest a bit difficult when people insist on being toxically (at times, belligerently) ignorant on the subject.

Significantly, by their ongoing acts of aggression perpetrated against the OWS denizens in Liberty Park in lower Manhattan (which, in itself, is an indigenous name, Manna-hata, meaning, "island of many hills") the mayor of New York City and the NYPD have revealed that they regard the area as Injun' Country. From the start of the OWS occupation, the protectors of the present order surrounded the "dirty, dangerous savages" within Liberty Park by blue uniform-clad troops and by force attempted to drive them off the land--land that is as much ours to appropriate as it is their own or anyone else's.

And don't talk to me about private property...The land in question was stolen from the get-go in a shady real estate swindle. Moreover, the OWS movement is a challenge to those types of societal notions that have bestowed legitimacy on larceny.

Regarding the almost exclusive exploitation of land for commercial exploitation e.g., the practice of claiming as private property, inflating the price of, and ceaselessly turning over for profit parcels of real estate has proven an enterprise that has degraded both landscape and soulscape, and has proven to be a less than propitious practice in regard to the health of the community at large and the planet itself. Withal, this mode of mind has engendered a culture in which the brutal and ruthless thrive...has enabled the rise of psychopathic personality types to positions of unapproachable power whose creed is, "all the things of the earth are 'mine' to exploit and it is my right to bring to submission, lest I'm entitled to destroy, those things I cannot possess and control."

Conversely, my hours spent in Liberty Park have done my partial native blood good. Why? Because we are a veritable Injun' uprising. And that is why they fear us and have tried to silence our drums and our mic-check, tribal gatherings and they have torn down our Tepee-like tents. Caucasian swindlers scammed the native people of this island in the first place; hence, the scam artists of Wall Street are only the latest incarnation of that European cultural trait--and that is the true tradition of Thanksgiving. But, they are discovering that another, lost tradition is coalescing across the land--the tradition of resistance.

The actions of and reactions to the OWS movement serve to reveal the hypocritical core of the present duopolistic political system. For example, if the recent brutal, police "crackdowns" (in truth, outright abuses of constitutionally granted rights) on the OWS movement had been coordinated and perpetrated under the Bush administration, Democratic Party partisans would have been calling for hearings of impeachment to be convened against George W. Bush. The lack of outrage among liberal insiders regarding recent events is an object lesson into the invidious nature of duopolistic rule. What Democratic Party partisans warn against--the big business beholden, freedom phobic, Republican agenda--is advanced in a more efficient manner when a Democrat is installed by the 1% in the U.S. presidency. Apropos, Democratic Party apologists are as guilty of carrying the agenda of the national security/corporate state as are oligarch-duped teabagger sorts.

More and more, nationally, as well as globally, people are catching on to the machinations of the 1%, to the scams of crime syndicates such as Wall Street and the IMF, to the means by which we have been coerced, by debt enslavement to neoliberalism's global company store, into spending the fleeting days of this finite life working for the inequitable power, wealth and privilege of these ruthless few.

At present, growing numbers have taken heed of the situation and are fighting back. Within the span of a few short months, the narrative of the corporate media has, to a limited extent, been altered. Yet, at this point, the development is merely background noise: The neoliberal order is collapsing; capitalism itself is nearly at the end of its five hundred year run.

OWS is part of a global movement of resistance that is laying the groundwork for a new paradigm. Although, change will not come without struggle and suffering, without defeats, betrayals and moments of despair. But, given the unsustainable nature of the present order, a shift in both perception and practice is inevitable. Yet when there are this many variables (known and unknown) in play, gazing darkly or through rose-tinted eyewear will prove neither adequate nor helpful.

Finally, engaging in acts of resistance are often not about winning or losing a particular battle; rather, it is the propitious manner the act transforms one's character by drawing one out of isolation and into the heart of life.

By such acts, we are strengthened. Our resistance to the present order has deepened our character and strengthened our resolve, and has bestowed upon us the courage to care deeply about the lives and fates of others as well as the imperiled state of our planet's environment. We can--and we will--meet one another in reclaimed public space, and, finally, and, at long last, take up residence in a life-vivifying landscape where the death genes grip is loosened and where the wit of the world remains.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

The OWS movement is not a distraction from--but serves as an alternative to--the disingenuous theatrics staged by the political hacks of this faux republic. Conversely, movement members have grasped that it is the hollow grandstanding--the modus operandi of the present U.S. political system itself--that serves as distraction from the realities of the day.

Those drawn to the OWS movement realize this: Vast sums of money are required to get the attention of and gain influence over the entrenched class of self-serving political insiders who hustle their wares in Washington, D.C.

Year after year, election cycle after election cycle, Washington's political class has revealed whose interests it serves. Accordingly, let the 1% and their political operatives continue on their present myopic, self-serving, society-decimating course: By doing so, they will just bring more outraged people into the streets and hasten their own undoing.

Yet, because arrogant power, girded by duplicity and ruthlessly maintained, does not yield without a fight, we should expect more of the following:

Stories are circulating that Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford, a well-connected Washington lobbying firm, with ties to the financial industry, have floated a $850,000 plan to pillory Occupy Wall Street. This should not come as a surprise. Living in a society dominated by the power of massive corporations, and the inequitable wealth these self-perpetuating organizations have at their disposal, we will be relentlessly subjected to the narratives they generate.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." -- Steve Biko

Since birth, most of us have been enveloped by the consumer state's commercial hologram. Almost every daily act we perform and attitude we evince is in some measure determined by the dictates, demands and the incessant, commercial come-ons (the defacto propaganda) of the corporate state e.g. from what time you rise in the morning, to the food you eat, to what you clothe yourself in, to how you spend your days, to what time you go to sleep at night, to what stories you are audience to--the cultural myths you have internalized--by means of mass media saturation, to the manner you celebrate festivals and holidays, to how your illnesses and of those around you will play-out, even the circumstances of how you will approach and succumb to your death.

Because these are the waters in which we swim, most will accept societal and cultural circumstances as a given...believing, for example, that when they posit a political utterance that the opinion expressed has been formed exclusively of their own mind, by the exercise of free will.

Accordingly, a large percent of the populace of the U.S. believes consumerism is a form of freedom...that the exercise thereof mainly involves being at liberty to trundle to a mall and be in possession of the right to choose between a big-ass cookie or a giant Cinnabon...that freedom of choice is expressed by over-priced running shoes--or security can be found in a massive SUV.

In this manner, the propaganda campaigns of the corporate/national security state have proven effective at promoting and perpetuating the inequitable status quo in place at the present time. Do not underestimate the well-rewarded, professional con men employed in the criminal enterprise known as "public relations." Remember, these masters of deceit sell wars, fought by the poor, in which, the underclass kill and die for the profits of a ruthless few. War is a money train for the rich and connected but a death wagon for the rest of humankind.

Ready yourself to be buffeted by a barrage of virtual reality blunderbuss--volley after volley of mainstream media launched Big Lies--and the ground fire of social media small distortions. Don't walk unarmed into the line of fire.

Remember this: Most likely, the corporate state has, to some degree, colonized your mind, as it is well on its way to destroying the ecosystem of the entire planet.

Conversely, let your soul occupy you. While there might be an ongoing effort to scour Liberty Park of liberty, they cannot do likewise to your heart without your consent. Turn the tables on them: Evict the corporate occupiers from the public realm within--as all the while, you challenge propaganda whenever it crosses your path...on the streets, at your workplace, at family gatherings, and on social media-- because a lie left unchallenged begins to be accepted as truth. And worse, invades, colonizes and exploits (and often kills) a portion of the soul of the world.

Importantly, do not underestimate the ruthless nature of calcified power.

Regarding the subject: On Thursday, Nov. 17, near Foley Square, there was blood on Broadway. At the scene, I witnessed thuggish, NYPD motorcycle cops driving directly into groups of peaceful demonstrators, with the intent of antagonizing those gathered, and when people stood their ground and refused to be bullied--then phalanxes of blue shirt bastards, swinging nightsticks, waded into the crowd.

Even with my wife, tugging at the back of my jacket, attempting to tow, as we say down south, my narrow ass away from the direction of injury or jail, I could not contain my outrage; I growled at a smirking cop, gloating over the carnage, "just keep it up, you mindless thug, when you get folks angry enough, the boot just might be on the other neck...namely yours."

In hindsight, in my own defense: Being on scene and witnessing peaceful people attacked and brutalized, one is apt to become seized by rage.

But what is the mayor of New York City and his Police Commissioner's excuse?

Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelley and the ranks of NYPD have proven themselves willing to barricade and checkpoint the city into chaos...as opposed to enduring ongoing moments of freedom of assembly and free expression.

And this is why we must not retreat. Their tactics of repression are very expensive to the city budget, and money is the only thing they love.

Hence, they have, in turn, provided us with a tactic we can use; we can hit them where they feel it. (Conversely, they can take blow after blow to their dignity--because they are devoid of that character trait.)

The ground is shifting below our feet and this phenomenon involves more than the echoing footfalls of marchers and the trudging of militarized formations of riot cops on city streets worldwide.

The first vibrations, closer to tremors, transpired because the ground below us has been fracked of dreams...the void engendered seismological activity. Now, from Cairo, Egypt's Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece to Liberty Park, in New York, New York to Oscar Grant Park, in Oakland, California, we have become like tuning forks, in sympatico with the resonances of the tormented earth.

Subsequently, the walls of the neoliberal prison are cracking...We are no longer isolated, enclosed in our alienation, imprisoned by a concretized sense of powerlessness; daylight is beginning to pierce the darkness of our desolate cells.

"The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free." ~ Utah Phillips

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

U.S soldiers died protecting what and who again? These actions should make this much clear: The U.S. military and the police exist to protect the 1%. At this point, the ideal of freedom will be carried by those willing to resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who have struggled and often died for freedom--but scant few were clad in uniforms issued by governments.

Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms--so they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it crushed.

When anyone tells you that dead soldiers and veterans died for your freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at some point, gain their freedom.

I was born in Birmingham Alabama, at slightly past the mid-point of the decade of the 1950s. Many of my earliest memories involve the struggle for civil rights that was transpiring on the streets of my hometown.

My father was employed at a scrap metal yard but also worked as a freelance photojournalist who hawked his work to media photo syndicates such as Black Star who then sold his wares to the major newsmagazines of the day. A number of the iconic photographs of the era were captured by his Nikon camera e.g., of vicious police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators; of demonstrators cartwheeled down city streets by the force of fire hoses; of Dr. King and other civil rights marchers kneeled in prayer before arrays of Police Chief Bull Connor's thuggish ranks of racist cops.

In Birmingham, racist laws and racial and economic inequality were the progenitors of acts of official viciousness. The social structure in place was indefensible. Reason and common decency held no dominion in the justifications for the established order that was posited by the system's apologists and enforcers; therefore, brutality filled the void created by the absence of their humanity.

And the same situation is extant in the growing suppression of the OWS movement in various cities, nationwide, including Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan. The 1% and their paid operatives--local city officials--are striving to protect an unjust, inherently dishonest status quo. Lacking a moral mandate, they are prone to the use of police state forms of repression.

Dr. King et al faced their oppressors on the streets of my hometown. Civil Rights activists knew that they had to hold their ground to retain their dignity...that it was imperative to sit down in those Jim Crow-tyrannized streets when necessary in order to stand up against the forces of oppression.

At present, we have arrived at a similar moment. If justice is to prevail, it seems, the air of U.S. cities will hold the acrid sting of tear gas, the jails will again be filled, the brave will endure brutality--yet the corrupt system will crumble. Because the system's protectors themselves will bring it down by revealing its empty nature, and the corrupt structure will collapse from within.

Yet, when riot police attack unarmed, peacefully resisting protesters, the mainstream media often describes the events with standard boilerplate such as "police clash with demonstrators."

This is inaccurate (at best) reportage. It suggest that both parties are equal aggressors in the situation, and the motive of the police is to restore order and maintain the peace, as opposed to, inflicting pain and creating an aura of intimidation.

This is analogous to describing a mugging as simply: two parties engaging in a financial transaction.

Although mainstream media demurred from limning the upwelling of mob violence at Penn. State as involving any criteria deeper than the mindless rage of a few football-besotted students unloosed by the dismissal of beloved sport figure.

Yet there exists an element that the Penn. State belligerents and OWS activists have in common: a sense of alienation.

Penn. State students rioted because life in the corporate state is so devoid of meaning...that identification with a sports team gives an empty existence said meaning...These are young people, coming of age in a time of debt-slavery and diminished job prospects, who were born and raised in, and know of no existence other than, life as lived in U.S. nothingvilles i.e., a public realm devoid of just that--a public realm--an atomizing center-bereft culture of strip malls, office parks, fast food eateries and the electronic ghosts wafting the air of social media.

Contrived sport spectacles provisionally give an empty life meaning...Take that away, and a mindless rampage might ensue...Anything but face the emptiness and acknowledge one's complicity therein, and then direct one's fury at the creators of the stultified conditions of this culture.

It is a given, the cameras of corporate media swivel towards reckless actions not mindful commitment...are attuned to verbal contretemps not thoughtful conviction--and then move on. And we will click our TV remotes and scan the Internet...restless, hollowed out...eating empty memes...skimming the surface of the electronic sheen...

These are the areas we are induced to direct our attention--as the oceans of the earth are dying...these massive life-sustaining bodies of water have less then 50 years before they will be dead. This fact alone should knock us to our knees in lamentation...should sent us reeling into the streets in displays of public grief...

Accordingly, we should not only occupy--but inhabit our rage. No more tittering at celebrity/political class contretemps--it is time for focused fury. The machinery of the corporate/police state must be dismantled.

If the corporate boardrooms have to be emptied--for the oceans to be replenished with abundant life--then so be it. If one must go to jail for committing acts of civil disobedience to free one's heart--then it must be done.

Yet why does the act of challenging the degraded status quo provoke such a high decree of misapprehension, anxiety, and outright hostility from many, both in positions of authority and among so many of the exploited and dispossessed of the corporate/consumer state.

For example, why did the fatal shooting incident in Oakland, California, Nov. 1, that occurred near the Occupy Oakland Encampment--but, apparently, was wholly unrelated to OWS activity cause a firestorm of reckless speculation and false associations.

Because any exercise in freedom makes people in our habitually authoritarian nation damn uneasy...a sense of uncertainty brings on dread--the feeling that something terrible is to come from challenging a prevailing order, even as degraded as it is.

Tyrants always promise safety; their apologist warn of chaos if and when the soul-numbing order is challenged.

Granted, it is a given that there exists a sense of certainty in a prison routine: high walls and guards and gun mounts ensure continuity; an uncertainty-banishing schedule is enforced. Moreover, solitary confinement offers an even more orderly situation...uncertainty is circumscribed as freedom is banished.

The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom...much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.

A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission--because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don't want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains...all for our own good, they insist...for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me...that what we might need is protection from all this safety.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

As with human perception of life itself, experiencing freedom carries an ineffable quality, a wordless grandeur.

"Human language is like a cracked kettle drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity." Gustave Flaubert

Through it all, the immanent quality of and inchoate longing for freedom remains within us: Although present, it is not always in plain view. Its presence in our lives is, perhaps, best summed up by this Irish aphorism:

"Mrs. O'Kelly, do you believe in fairies?" "No, I don't -- but they're there."

Over and over again, too many well-intentioned sorts continue to insist that it is imperative that we inform the nice people of the middle class (nice people who, given the nature of imperium, willingly feed off the blood of empire like the charges of a vampire) that there are well mannered working people on site at OWS encampments -- not only spittle-launching, leftist radicals.

Excuse me, but, for many years now, so-called "crazy" leftist radicals have been damn near the only ones who have had the clarity of mind to give a cogent critique of empire...have been willing to point out the exploitive, soul-demeaning mode of existence inherent to the militarist/national security/corporate/consumer/ duopolistic state--and, as a result, we have been marginalized, entirely excluded from mainstream debate and discussion.

Let us have a little rendezvous with reality; otherwise, the operatives of the status quo will frame the narrative, once again, and will claim victory by co-option. This is the method by which the capitalist status quo has maintained its inverted totalitarian set-up since the popular uprisings of the 1960's, by means of generous economic rewards (the perks and privileges of the corporate state) for its defacto propagandists and exclusion from the official narrative for dissenters. Don't buy into the false narrative.

Personally, I refuse to eschew the designation of anti-capitalist radical. You cannot shame me for knowing where the bodies of empire are buried and who laid them in their graves. To the landfill of history with capitalism--the wasteful, cracked-brained economic system that created said landfill.

The preening liars at Fox News and other well-rewarded propagandists of state capitalism will disseminate lies, big and small, regardless of our actions...that is what they do. Be cautioned: Never tap dance for the approval of a lying, manipulative, power mad fascist. Once, you begin to do so you co-sign his narrative--thus he owns your hapless ass.

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life- 
and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." -Georgia O'Keefe

Accordingly, the lessons of the 1960s e.g., COINTELPRO operations...reveal that when street and riot police are ordered to pull back, as in Oakland, agent provocateurs will infiltrate mass political gatherings. Withal: You can bet those masked bastards shouting hate-speak and breaking windows are cops...He is there to draw the cameras of the corporate media towards the scenes of chaos and strife that he seeds in order to turn bourgeois sentiment against reform movements that might change their lives for the better...to create the false narrative that the police are the only bulwark the middle class has against destruction-sowing crazies, who, if given free reign, will leave in rubble and ashes everything they hold dear.

To avoid being falsely labeled: First, endeavor, by inward searching and outward (even failed) endeavor, to know who you are. Then lay claim to your own identity. Otherwise, garnering the clarity required to apprehend what you're up against becomes difficult.

The Greek word for one of the three figures representing The Fates is Moira--which translates into portion. And that is key to grasping what is happening from Cairo to Athens to New York City to Oakland. Ergo, people are rising up and fighting for the rightful and just portion of their lives and fates that have been increasingly commandeered and controlled by a corrupt elite whose rule has, heretofore, been sustained by a disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and power.

Across Greece, people have awaken to the knowledge that passivity is slavery--that capitalism is economic cannibalism...State capitalism, also, devours the dignity of its victims. Yet, after a time, a number of people will rise up against exploitation and will demand their portion of fate.

At this point in time, the term "general strike" holds a deep and resonate appeal. The word "general" suggests that the isolation of daily life experienced under the atomizing circumstances of globalized corporate capitalism can be upended--that there can be a sense of unity--that a movement en mass is possible (yet not a mass movement to war, but a movement en mass towards equity and fairness) by beginning, at long last, to "strike" back--to counterpunch with focused blows those who have kept the harsh, inequitable order of the present era in place by means of intimidation and bribery.

Capitalism--you are a rotting, flesh-eating zombie--there are sacred spark stippling the air around you; these sparks are borne of flames of sacred vehemence. For too long, people have been bled dry by the heart-desiccating aspirations and dehumanizing modes of economic coercion that maintain the neoliberal paradigm. Moreover, the flames of resistance are only fanned when your apologists claim that the system in place provides the best, in fact, the only way to exist in the world and attempt to smother its growing fury with police state tactics.

The stakes are great. Much has been stolen from us: essential qualities, more valuable than money. As the populace of the corporate/consumer state, we have been induced, by means of small bribes and hyper-authoritarian coercion, to sign a social contract that sells our essential nature on the cheap i.e., to be defined (hence diminished) as a consumer, a commuter, an employee, a Republican, a Democrat, a member of a demographic group, a cipher, a sucker, a bystander in one's own fate.

Don't let any system define you, narrow, then appropriate, your innate and essential self towards exploitive agendas, as does the present societal set-up, for the incommensurate profits of a self-serving few--who, in turn, insist that your objections to the situation are unreasonable, outrageous, untoward--too crazy to be uttered in decent company. In short, a system in which its operatives demand that you stay in your place and not question the motives and actions of your betters.

In contrast, a radical sensibility insists you must inhabit an inner landscape wherein no state, corporation--nor any type of extant system holds dominion over your essential self--that you inhabit a landscape that is best navigated by your own interior lode star. Therefore, you have no obligation to justify your existence to any man or system. To even attempt to do so would deliver an injustice to your heart, for this is a state of being as impossible to quantify as a flight of imagination--yet it exist within as immanent as the architecture of desire.

"The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what would you say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?" --Foucault

Who will you meet, where will you travel, what battles will be enjoined and what loves surrendered to as you write the Book of Your Being? What thoughts and feelings will be discovered therein?

Will the words you etch upon the finite moments of your time on this earth evoke deep yearning, like Wordsworth's limning of his longing to see beyond the prison walls of quotidian experience?

[...]I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
excerpt, The World Is Too Much with Us--William Wordsworth

Or will you refuse to rise, when commanded to do so, as did Rosa Parks on her fateful bus commute through the Jim Crow-demeaned streets of 1950s Montgomery, Alabama; or will you be seized by holy lamentation, like Allen Ginsberg, as he howled anguished prosody into the pity-devoid face of the devouring Moloch of the commodified empire; or will your genius be revealed like the impertinent flutter of Groucho Marx's eyebrows on the screen of Depression era movie houses; or will you reclaim your own heart by the act of telling off some son-of-a-bitch of a boss, as you quit a dead end, heart-deadening job and then resolve to join the defiant multitudes at an OWS encampment?

Mainly, are you prepared to surrender to the everyday miracle that transpires when one, fleetingly, finds the resolve to open one's being to the uncertainties of freedom--when one chooses to break the hold of those fear-bestowing, resentment-besotted demons of banality known as Easy Cynicism, Displaced Resentment, and Habitual Passivity--those disingenuous, corporate/consumer state bards of the Bardo--whose (extant and internalized) narratives have sustained late capitalism.

"Cynicism is just another mode of conformity". --Theodor W. Adorno

Don't delay: Act as if your life--if not the survival of the planet--depends on it, because, at this point, it does.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook.

Collapse

The excursion did us some good, in particular, leaving insular Manhattan, and facing the faded, crumbling Industrial Age grandeur of Pittsburgh. Walking, once again, among the plaintive rasps of the ghosts of the devastated laboring class (the social setting of our youth) provided us with a humanizing contrast to our present day circumstances stranded amid the manic chattering of the preening demons of banal self-regard possessing Manhattan careerists.

Nowadays, the island of Manhattan is tediously bright and shiny -- a sterile, oligarchic controlled dystopia. Accordingly, any sign of redemptive decay and hint of shabby ass human glory has been banished by official caveat and collective collusion.

In contrast, while in Pittsburgh, because I was born in a steel and coal town, Birmingham, Alabama, I shuffled among familiar shades. Deep in my being, I know the social setup -- once manifested in forged steel, living flesh and human longing -- now lost to the ravages of time (more accurately, the consequences of neo-liberal economic doctrine).

In Birmingham, under the statue of the Roman god of the forge, Vulcan, his mortared gaze lording over the city from atop Red Mountain, I witnessed men, hardened by years of grinding labor and demagogic political manipulation, sacrifice their bodies to (Pittsburgh plutocrat-owned) mines, foundries and smelting plants for subsistence pay.

In childhood, when I watched local men labor in the city's metal foundries, their sweat-lacquered faces, reflecting the fiery glow of smelted steel, seemed to glisten with rage, as angry blue sparks showered the heat-seared air around them.

These were hard-drinking, short-tempered men who were calloused of hand and possessed of humiliation-hardened hearts...rendered so, by a life of the strenuous labor, mandated by an exploitive economic system that bequeathed to them little but a hard scrabble existence--and the promise of a future bearing more of the same.

Little wonder, they swore into the soot-choked air, brawled among themselves, and clutched (self-defeating but politically useful to the ruling elite) racial animus, as their vitality was harnessed to build the structure and infrastructure of the industrial state and increase the wealth, privilege and political power of steel and coal plutocrats up in Pittsburgh (the absentee owners of the area's coal and iron mines, smelts, and processing plants) -- but, in so doing, we locals further diminished the steerage of the course of our lives.

I learned early the girding lie that sustains the oligarchic state i.e., the illusory promise: Work hard and you will set yourself free. In fact, as was the rigged economic setup of the Birmingham of my youth, the harder one works within the inverted totalitarian structure of the corporate state, the more one increases the wealth, hence the political power of the ruling elite...by enabling the parasitic class to consolidate yet more power. Therefore, by working harder and longer for their benefit, one further diminishes one's control over the trajectory of one's fate.

(Caveat: This is not to be confused with hard work and diligent effort -- a million acts of responsibility create freedom. The distinction being...be aware of who benefits from your efforts and mindfully choose where to apply your labors.)

At present, in cities such as Birmingham and Pittsburgh, the structures, built in the mechanized fury of the Industrial Age, stand idle...decaying around legions of the unemployed and the woefully underpaid and under-compensated. In the oxidized scream of rust, one can almost hear the wails of rage of those souls who surrendered their life force to erect and work the now abandoned factories, mills and foundries of the nation.

Outsourcing, downsizing, work speed-ups, i.e., the most recent mechanisms of capitalism's death cult of dehumanizing efficiency goes all but unchallenged in the official narrative of the corporate state. By means of intimidation and the proffering of small bribes, the work force is induced to transmute their body's vitality and soul's pothos into the profits of an advantaged, ruthless few. In this way, one's pothos (Greek: yearning plus libido) is rendered into the convenient pathos (alienation, paranoia, displaced rage, consumer addiction) of the corporate age.

Why do so many in the U.S. accept this pernicious, self-defeating setup? Perhaps, because they have been convinced by constant saturation by the commercial propaganda of the consumer state that capitalism will bestow to those who abide by its (rigged) rules and (gamed) economic arrangements everything one could possibly need and desire.

Accordingly, all an individual needs to know and experience is at his impulsive, electronic mass media-happy fingertips. He can click from virtual reality enactments of explicit porn to obscene interpretations of Christian prophecy (e.g., the present field of Republican presidential hopefuls) thus, in an instant, transmigrating from fake sin to phony salvation ... What more, in the whole of boundless creation, could one possibly want?

Yet, where does a veritable (as opposed to virtual) sense of place exist in social and economic arrangements such as these?

The present era of weightless perception serves to obscure the crushing consequences of the short-sighted cupidity of both the economic elite and underclasses alike. Reflecting this, wealth now exists as constellations of electrons; money is no longer the vaulted riches of miserly plutocrats nor payday cash of the laboring class burning in the pockets of worn work clothes.

Currency exists in precincts of pixels--a fever dream of appliances--the effluvia of the schemes of the elitist illusionists of high finance whose machinations have wrought an age of electronic razzle-dazzle and devastating real world consequences...whereby the solid architecture and durable accoutrement of the Machine Age, manifested as the sturdy structures of Industrial Era cities, such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, has been transmuted into the manic, evanescent imagery of the mass media hologram.

In the years since Katrina, I've been known to rage at the indifferent sky, why the Hell (or, at least, its earthly exurb -- Houston) did nature's impersonal fury have to descend on New Orleans, about the last outposts within this corporate simulacrum of a country where an individual pulse and collective heart beat could be found -- where the primordial songs of bone, heart and flesh -- of the arias rising from steam-caressed sidewalks and the riffing currents of rivers -- have not been forced into the Clear Channel/Disney/Time-Warner überculture blandification machine?

In order for the U.S. -- a nation whose populace possesses the collective capacity for cognitive depth and emotional resonance of a Louisiana gnat flurry in high summer -- to rise from its destructive swoon of insularity-engendered anomie, the embrace of a view of the world imbued by anima mundi, embodied in the living architecture of a city like New Orleans, is essential.

In New Orleans, interred corpses will not remain buried in the earth...the water sodden ground causes the dead to rise to the surface. Axiomatically, we must not deep-six our grief and rage. In the name of Katrina's dead and walking wounded, we must not allow the casuistry-shattering verities of the human heart to be buried and forgotten nor allow mass media schlock to drown out the lamentations of the city's restless dead from memory.

To honor her dead, displaced and deeply scarred, we must remember the mortifying sights and heart-shaking sounds of both the natural disaster that was Katrina and the official shit storm of human negligence, flat-out deceit and malevolence that rendered the Crescent City a corpse-choked drowning pool. Instead, we must gaze down into the dark water of memory, remembering the water-deluged streets of the city...awash with bloated bodies, raw sewage, industrial sludge and the floating debris and submerge detritus of peoples' lives.

Yet, to properly mourn what was lost to the storm (in the tradition of the city itself) one must allow one's grieving heart to be seduced by the soul of the world. Personally, as is the case with many who knew the city, pre-Katrina -- beautiful, disloyal, capricious creature she was (and remains) -- I retain a lover's ardor for her.

For: Being enveloped by the redolence of orange blossom and jasmine, held on her humid, late afternoon air, as I sat, swigging a Turbo Dog, on the banks of the Mississippi, as evening tilted over the Lower Ninth. For: The exquisite indifference of starlight above the Bywater, and the manner those distant, celestial bodies would stand in stark contrast to the redemptive immediacy of the sweat-soaked bodies near me, as we would lie on our backs, upon the sidewalk, watching steam (borne of the mass of humanity within) rise from the roof of Vaughan's Lounge...listening, as inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers wailed into the early morning hours.

I suspect my years in New Orleans saved/cursed me from being agenda-prone. I'm not of the reductionist school. I'm drawn to swamps...not so much the muck -- but the mindfulness needed to negotiate the terrain. Of course, swamps will bog one down; yet, I'm drawn to the cacophony and filtered light, to its minute gradations of green upon green ... One is forced to slow down in order to take in the revealed beauty and hidden dangers therein.

Moreover, the swamp exists for its own sake and feels no obligation to explain its mystery. It can be known, but its mystery is just that ... ever growing, always dying.

One must not, and this is a habitual misstep of the contemporary left, approach politics, personality and place as a strictly intellectual exercise -- as a thought experiment that will yield to logic. If the swamp of the human psyche were that simple to negotiate, then life would be a dry, blood-bereft trudge indeed.

And yet, how the world wounds us; at times, delivering an aching sorrow that one will always carry. But rejoice in your wounded condition...for the open wound harbors a mouth to kiss...a womb from which to be perennially reborn. As Octavio Paz testifies, "Love is a wound, an injury...Yes, love is a flower of blood."

As far as the struggle to be included in the present political narrative, we, on the left, remain marginalized to the point of near invisibility. But don't lose heart: The problem is the solution. Apropos, empire carries the seeds of its own demise. Therefore, in the shadow of the house of cards economy, now tottering over the ruins and detritus of the nation's shuttered factories, foreclosed upon farms, and abandoned mills, one should go about the business of working on what will replace the hollow and decayed system when it collapses from within.

Accordingly, Rainer Maria Rilke averred (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you refuse the life your heart wants to live, you don't get to read this letter before you die. An individual must risk the world, with all its attendant woundings, or he risks having a dead letter office piling up lost correspondence from his neglected heart.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] . Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com / And at FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman's undergarments and the concomitant, predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.

By finger wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.

To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals...true, but only their own problems.

How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that "the issue of character" should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.

Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy. Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such propitious misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.

A more profound "character issue" here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular -- their greed for ratings. And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories -- their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry -- but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence?

Although, it is futile to struggle against the symptoms not the source. As banal as the dreams of witless bullies, the architecture and artifice of U.S. militarist/corporate imperium not only surrounds us but has colonized our thoughts and desires. Ergo, the elite of the corporate media and the U.S. public remain untroubled by Bradley Manning's forced nudity, yet a couple a snaps of a congressmen's crotch sends their imagination reeling.

Since U.S. Empire is maintained by militarism -- a de facto strong-arm racket shaking down the people of the world to sustain the endless cupidity of its elite and proffer just enough bribes to keep its populace overweight, arrogant, and oblivious -- what "character issues" come into play involving an individual's complicity in the maintenance of blood-fueled imperium? Perhaps as a reminder, fleets of U.S. aircraft carriers should be christened with names such as, the USS Entitlement, the USS Displaced Resentment and the USS Willful Ignorance -- all armed and ready to patrol the oceans of the world, poised to attack and subdue those who would deny us our birthright to consume the world like a bag of Cheetos.

Because facing folly is difficult, both powerful and pawn have embraced the most airless of aspirations...that greed run riot is a viable means to move in the world, even the sole means of establishing a social order.

As was the case with any imperium throughout history, the present order is maintained by state-sanctified homicide. To exist in empire, one is induced to deaden ones heart. The act of having internalized (albeit inadvertently) the propaganda of the militaristic/corporate state and thereby cling to its provisional comforts...is to clutch a handful of dust. And what is the mode of being to which so many cling:

Shuffling the floors of some suburban turdbox...within a gated "community" where one rarely sees, much less speaks to one's neighbors; spending hours at a time, anxious and irritated (if not outright enraged) in soul-grinding commuter traffic, listening to the observations and pronouncements of inspired souls such as Morning Zoo Crews and deep thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio, hate merchants; then languishing all day in a cubicle...just to turn around and do it all again.

Is it any wonder so many in the U.S. consider "our way of life" non-negotiable? What kind of a miserable, bitter malcontent would wish to challenge and change such a life-enhancing, soul-vivifying mode of being? There is just no pleasing some people.

A loss of empathetic imagination is endemic to the consumerist mindset of the mechanized era. This form of pathology began, years ago, when our ancestors offered up their life's blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age.

"I attack all those persons/ who know nothing of the other half,/ the half who cannot be saved,/ who raise their cement mountains/ in which the hearts of the small/ animals no ones thinks of are beating." -- Federico García Lorca,
excerpt: New York (Office and Attack)

Henry Ford and the rest of the Industrial Age's klavern of gray ghouls measured our flesh, muscle and bone with a productivity-measuring stopwatch. Cunning practitioners of the dark art of convincing human beings they were mere cogs in a soulless machine, it was only a short trudge from that blood-bartering viewpoint of existence through history's slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann's cold, corpse-rendering, mathematical constructs.

Insulated, as he was, within his fortified tower of mortared casuistry, Eichmann proved adept at emotionally shielding himself from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he helped devised. >From individual alienation to planet-wide ecocide, Hannah Arendt's insights, regarding Eichmann's psyche in her seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, applies to our present condition: "The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else."

Accordingly, to lose the green fuse of transformation, implicit in interpersonal relationships, is to be driven by dehumanizing engines of annihilation.

In regard to the consumerist-colonized psyches of the populace of the U.S., an inner architecture is in place -- an internalized shopping mall (complete with sub-cretinous security crews trained to shut down political speechifying and pamphleteering -- but who seem unwilling or unable to subdue the impulse to buy, on credit, unnecessary items).

Conversely, for a culture to thrive, a vital agora and public square is required. Given the agora has been replaced by mall and social media's weightless pixels of narrowed apprehension (an almost all-encompassing, amateur improvisational theatre for those with short attentions spans) can there be any chance of an awaking, even an uprising, against such life-negating forces?

Using any metric, the present system, based upon a zombie-like proliferation of exponential growth is unsustainable. By the destruction leveled on nature and public space, in combination with, the usurpation of time and identity (individual and collective) -- the very structure of the present system creates alienation and anomie.

Moreover, the root of Puritan panic (including the constant upwelling of sexually related scandal) is caused by its compulsion to winnow down the human psyche and its attendant drives, actions, and enterprises to only what is deemed pure and practical; hence, panic ensues when the musk and fury of the larger world (even one's own thoughts and desires) rudely breaches the life-denuded contours of its cordon sanitaire.

The anecdote: Don't tiptoe through your life like a ninny nor become a finger-wagging scold, so mortified by your appetites and desires you would scour the messiness of the world into a sterile prison of self-deprivation. Like Emerson, we must insist: we have a life to live -- not a perpetual apology.

Poetry and music can awaken imagination and induce empathy, therefore are potent provisions that sustain one while carrying the darkness. However, first one must engage the struggle, to face the everyday monster whose name is, "That is just the way it is and must remain" -- even to risk having one's concept of self devoured by the task. To paraphrase Lorca: to know oneself by drawing near to the beating heart of the monster of the world.

"But the Duende--where is the Duende? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things." --Federico García Lorca, excerpt: The Duende: Theory and Divertissement (1930)

One cannot kill nor banish personal demons but one can give them supervised work to do (that way one can keep an eye on them).

(Knowing one's demons also provides insight when dealing with adversaries and can prevent one from being drawn into the self-serving ploys of mass media vampires of mind and spirit who retail sexually related scandals that bring glee to the bloodless.)

Personally, it could trouble me less if the sky shook, thick as seething locust, with a pixel-borne pestilence of suggestive photos of political sorts. Funny, the same crowd of fundamentalist, petty moralists who believe that global warming is the result of natural forces insist the heat of human libido is what will bring on man's doom i.e., greenhouse gasses aren't melting the polar regions; instead, Climate Change is caused by the hot breath of Satan himself tweeting pictures of his lust-scorched undergarments.

In times such as these, one is advised to embrace both mystery and logic -- both élan vital and logos. Be both apprehensive and comforted by the unknowable, ineffable quality of existence; thereby, one comes to be moved by a poetic approach to mystery, and the realization arrives...that one is vividly alive even amid dismal, alienating circumstance, and, as a result, that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization is, to a degree, mitigated.

Although one's suffering is uniquely one's own, one remains part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet. This is how Wallace Stevens delivers, in verse, the case for acquiring and maintaining a view of the world by means of empathetic imagination (that can serve as a panacea to the preening narcissism inherit in toxic innocence). I'll give him the final word:

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

--Excerpt: Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com

Collapse

Shortly thereafter, you insisted that: Dreams were as dead as dust -- and proclaimed animals are machines, neither worthy of  names nor worth consideration, other than for commodification.

Instead, can we collaborate on a dream in which we create an legacy in lasting air so that we might chronicle the world before us...its ceaseless proliferation and its ceaseless culling -- its ever-present laugh of triumph and elegy without end?

Amid this: René, we are, like you, so baffled by who we are in relationship to the world, it is difficult to meet life head on...verities buffeted, we are blown, this way, then that...upended, directionless in a landscape of veritable regret and fleeting revelry...regardless, we trudge on.

Did wielding the cutlery of glinting certitude banish trepidation, as you cut down opaque existence and evanescent identity to manageable bits?

Yet ensnared in the algorithms of the machine mind, days are denuded...night is banished.

The bee-loud grasses have been rendered mute as the buzz of Predator Drones rises.

Dualist mind, enchanted by your mastery of things you deem dead, you have bred seething clouds of black flies infesting Cartesian slaughterhouse holding pens and bequeathed to us dying oceans and endless wars waged from vast distances by bloodless technocrats within cubicles.

Because you averred that the only way to know ourselves is to mince the living and the dead into tiny bits, I was trained to rip myself asunder and serve my lifeless heart to my betters.

You -- frenzied maenads turned wine-to-blood, reductionist clinicians -- that is my head in your hands -- worse, that is the dream body of the world you have torn to tatters.

Yet  the ashes of your charnel house aspirations hang in air like musical notes...and, like all night music, will dissolve into earth at dawn.

Thus you and I must keep reminding ourselves to weep for the things of this world that suffer; otherwise, we mistake the earth's impersonal dreaming for our own.

Adjust your body back to the left, René, face forward, meet the world's gaze at eye level, and more might be revealed.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com
Collapse

Since 9/11/2001, due to the lust for revenge of the people of the U.S., hundreds of thousands of innocent Islamic people are dead. These human beings were killed in our name. Be very careful when you proclaim: "I'm glad 'we' got bin Laden. He deserved it." Be very grateful most of us don't get what we deserve.

To appropriate a classical understanding of the situation: Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, dramatized that civilization begins when (in fact, civilization is not even possible until) retribution yields to justice i.e., The Furies, goddesses adorned with serpent-seething headdresses and an abiding passion for retribution, must be transformed into the Eumenides (the kindly ones). They must cease their seeking of revenge (which engenders endless revenge cycles, inflicting a trauma-wrought callowness on the people of a culture) and become the enemies of those who bear false witness and stand against the democratic process.

In contrast, in the U.S., a state policy of genocide against its native inhabitants determined the geographical dimensions of the nation itself, and, in many ways, determined the inner dimensions of its collective mindscape, which created and maintains the death cult calculus of U.S. militarist imperium. (The U.S. military still envisages its enemies as "Red Indian savages." Witness: Osama bin Laden having been given the moniker, "Geronimo.")

Hence the isolated, alienated U.S. populace (its males in particular) clutch, to the point of fetishizing, their guns, because they feel powerless before the depravations of an exploitive system rigged to benefit a small class of privileged insiders. Much damage is done by this compensatory fantasy: Vulnerable children and teens are bullied by their troubled peers to the point of clinical depression and suicide; in domestic situations, crimes of passion take deadly turns; and episodes of mass shootings erupt across the landscape of exploitation, alienation and anomie.

The collective mode of mind of the corporate consumer/militarist empire leaves both the hoi polloi and the privileged unable to even approach the problem of their alienation...thick walls of self-protection must be breached...In the U.S., individuals have become so withdrawn into themselves, it seems as if Home Depot outlets sell ready-to-assemble, prefab bubbles of self-enclosure, with optional mounted gun turrets.

How is it possible for troubled individuals to live in a culture in which the response of their government (mirrored in its movies, television programs, and video games) to almost every problem abroad involves military force and imperialist coercion -- and not have these death-leveling policies leave their mark on the psyches of the populace?

All too frequently, in the increasingly desperate and denial-ridden nation, deranged chickens come home and reap havoc in the roost (also known as The Law Of Perpetual Poultry Return). As above with its government, so below with its populace: With troubling frequency, in shooting rampages, unhinged individuals stage freelance, military-style commando raids, defending (in the tormented perception of their besieged minds) their internal homeland.

The rigid hierarchical structure of U.S. corporate oligarchy (but veiled by the internalization of its upward class mobility hagiography) imposes a type of domination and control compulsion (and attendant low-level hysteria) in the psyches of the nation's males. Hence, the need for disproportionate amounts of control to displace their own sense of being dominated by brutal power (e. g., they feel so deeply diminished by their own submissive position in the economic order that the men and boys of the nation are driven to taunt other males by bandying demeaning invectives, such as, "You're my bitch.")

What they are expressing is the displaced anger, engendered by their helplessness before the dictates of the corporate state. An insidious order that determines the course of their day: At what hour, they will rise (at the insistence of an alarm clock) to meet the day; what they will eat (generally, processed or fast food); the roads and routes they will travel (stranded in the grinding limbo of commuter traffic); who they will be in contact with during the day (the dharma-decimating exigencies of the workspaces of the neo-liberal economic order). In short, how their day unfolds (exploited for the benefit of the oligarchs of the corporate state) and how their day ends (on edge, enervated, muck-brained, in hyper-attenuated communion with some form of the mass media hologram).

The inimical effect of this mode of being has come to be known as "the American way of life." Therein, individuals, reduced to mere assets of the economic elite, grow bereft of the means and motivation for personal transformation. Moreover, the culture -- always an organic, collaborative effort between individuals and the collective mind of an age -- withers into an economic, as well as, psychic wasteland, because the means of social engagement have been denuded due to the full-spectrum domination of both cultural real estate and individual mindscape by the corporate state.

Corporate domination of everyday life has left the soul with a scant amount of wiggle room. But it has not always been so, even in the Deep South, in the belligerent ignorance and staggering naivety, of my youth.

Homer counseled that we should straddle time with our backs to the future, our faces to the past. Thus this digression:

In the year, 1970, in the summer I turned fourteen, in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia, the Allman Brothers, among other bands, would perform free, impromptu concerts for a tie-dye clad, reefer reeking, bell bottoms-caressing-the-Georgia-red-dirt gatherings of "freaks," -- which was the preferred tribalist term, as opposed to the media-created, socially pejorative -- hippies...which, when bandied among counterculture insiders, was generally applied ironically.

Although the park was located only a few miles from my family's home, undertaking the trip presented a degree of peril. To make ones way to the park included traversing a tough, in-town, white working class neighborhood (now a gentrified into soul-sucking blandness, yuppie enclave) where, from the perspective of its denizens, their world, and all they held in reverence and reference, was under siege. And, although inchoate, their animus was instantly distilled, simply upon a glimpse of the untamed tresses of a singular, thin of wrist, dirty hippie, commie faggot -- whose mere presence was considered an affront to their pomade-crowned, muscle car-thundering parcel of redneck paradise.

Accordingly, the locals were pledged to do their part to fight the scourge...by increasing their intake of PBRs and Jack Daniels, and, upon sight of said dirty hippie interlopers, bestowing ass-stompings -- and for no-extra-charge -- involuntary haircuts upon errant longhairs caught in their midst.

Yet as the era progressed, the savage dance between hippie freak and redneck belligerent changed in tone and tempo, an extemporaneous type of metaphysical jiujitsu occurred, in which the predator was subdued and seduced by the prey...as if by cultural contact buzz, redneck fury yielded to counterculture insouciance.

"When the individual feels, the community reels" ... Aldous Huxley

Briefly, this was the anatomy of the seduction: In their pursuit of fleeing freaks into the park, the young males of the cracker tribe happened upon a few of the things of this vast and vivid world even more compelling than the possibility of ass-kicking...in the form of attractive young women.

Yet to the young men, the hippie sphinxes, sirens, waifs, and gypsy queens were baffling, unapproachable; these women were less than taken by their greasy, pompadoured forelocks and aggressive bearing. In short, and to appropriate the parlance of the era, the hippie chicks didn't get off on their "bad vibes...it, like, really harshed their high."

But these great, great grandsons of the Lost Cause proved much more malleable in countenance than the ossified in memory, now enshrined in marble statuary, of their confederate forefathers.

Consequently, a kind of cracker Lysistrata started to unfold. The pomade lacquer faded from stiff pompadours, yielding to lank, draping locks of hippie plumage. The habit of rebel bellicosity was sublimated into an avidity to "boogie." The zealots of ass-kicking became the acolytes of acid and devotees of the gospels of kicking back and getting down.

As time passed, on weekends, as the Allman Brothers preached Sunday sermons vis-a-vis guitar and drum solos, these newly minted freaks could be found in positions of repose and reflection upon the grassy hills of the park, eating Orange Sunshine and drawling, "aw mahn, Dwayne's guitar is shootin' sparks into mah brain..."

Or as Marcel Proust put it, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

Yet, in our time, the fervor of the 1960s seems, in the words of a Latin proverb: "Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus" -- The mountains have labor pains and a ridiculous little mouse is brought forth."

As the psychedelic nimbus of the early nineteen seventies transmogrified into a Nixonian shit-storm, and the long, silent war waged by Disaster Capitalists on the US working class dissipated their hopes and buffeted their sense of wellbeing, a familiar class system wrought aura of misery and meanness began to reassert itself.

The Dixieland Woodstock Nation increasingly began to resemble a southern-fried Weimar Republic, as the Corporate State Altamont grew increasingly pervasive, punitive, and imposed more and more demeaning demands upon the lives of working class Americans.

Yet the present paradigm and its dependence upon a corporate consumer/militarist mindset persists because: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."--Thomas Paine.

Osama bin Laden was taken out by a rival gang of terrorists: And, across the land, the parade of death-reveling fools prattles onward. Hence, the desperate, diminished souls of the empire are driven to contort themselves, collectively, into all manner of positions of casuistry, in a vain attempt to rationalize being complicit in the crimes of the state. Thus, in the compulsion to see ourselves as good and decent folk, we mistake the involuted course of our own dim and brutal thoughts for the darkness and evil of others.

Therefore: This is why self-knowledge is crucial: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."- Carl Jung.

Over the last few days, witnessing the blood-dimmed spectacle of witless celebrants frothing in glee at the news of the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden, I feel as though I'm having the dubious privilege of peering into an alternative universe where annoyances such as common decency whither into extinction, as all the while, vile, lurid delusions bloom like hot house flowers.

The noxious redolence of these fleur du mal can have an enervating effect on one's will to resist and fight back.

But resist one must. And remember to savor the glorious failure of even a hopeless cause. The most naive and banal response would be to propagate the tired canard of the vacuous, crackpot realist mindset that: "That's just the way it is...that's just how things work...that's the way it is, always was, and always will be."

Dead ass wrong: That is the way a particular system is being operated at a particular time. Moreover, no system operates in stasis therefore are open to systemic change and random fluxes, by a host of variables, known and unknown. Although outcomes, for better or worse, and all combinations therein, are uncertain, thus the world before us remains an extraordinary thing to behold.

"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." - Carl Jung

Even though the earthly remains of Osama bin Laden are now entombed in the sea, the U.S. empire will continue to founder, its people have been made no safer nor have we been placed in an enhanced position to prosper. What would prove helpful would be to cease engaging in this constant, tedious dance with our homicidal shadow self, because every written-in-blood name, listed on every dance card at the Empire's Ball, bears one's own name.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499"

Collapse

It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has been responsible for having erected some of the gaudiest, emptiest, architecturally dishonest structures, blotting the landscape, east of the Atlantic Ocean, west of the sands of Dubai.

Citizen Trump is a human analog of these characteristics: a man possessed of an extroverted, confident public persona that serves as cover for an interior emptiness. In fact, he is possessed of an unswerving self-regard (as extreme as it is inexplicable) that seems a form of derangement.

From Sarah Palin to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, these personality types, minted and forged within the aggressive superficiality of the current era, are going to be as good as it gets. These are the varieties of ciphers, confidence artists and quislings who will front the present day corporate order of Botox Politics, the quintessence of an era that has conjoined the shallow and the grotesque in a marriage made in the witless limbo of the media hologram.

Born into wealth and privilege, Trump -- this cross-hatched haired, reality television popinjay -- is marketed as a man of the multitudes. Perhaps, he is: On one dismal level, he is the very emblem of the callow, infantilized, highchair tyrants spawned by the Viagra Capitalism of late U.S. empire.

Strange and amusing, in a grimly ironic way, unlike Trump, it is the political left, bereft of power in the structure of corporate oligarchy, who stands accused of being out of touch elitists. In a political culture as far down the rabbit hole as the one that exists, in the U.S., the surest way to be branded an elitist is to refuse to serve the elite.

All who are reading this article are, therefore, excused if the Bilderberg Group calls while you're in mid perusal of it...Rather, on second thought...let them wait; they'll just want you all the more for it.

President Obama, on the other hand, could never be accused of failing to serve his true constituents - the moneyed elite. Accordingly, insofar as coming to the aid of oppressed, suffering working people, he could be termed the anti-Tom "I'll be there" Joad. He has not been present in body nor spirit for the less-than-privileged classes of the declining nation. Rather than serving contemporary versions of the downtrodden denizens depicted in The Grapes of Wrath -- Obama has chosen to be of service to the high-flying connoisseurs of the fermented grapes of Château Mouton-Rothschild.

On almost every dispiriting occasion, Obama and the Democrats hit the mat without so much as trading punches with the Republican practitioners of the art of sucker punches and low blows.

Could the fight be rigged? I mean they work for the same corporate oligarchic bosses. One should be wary of betting on a match where a mobster owns both fighters.

Obama rah-rahs, nice liberal apple-polishers and crackpot pragmatist of the Church of Incrementalist Salvation -- I will grant you this -- the Republicans are a cult of doom. They are the two-legged, all thumbs, character-devoid embodiments of The Second Law Of Thermodynamics that arise when empires are in a death swoon. Yet Obama and the Democrats of Congress are quislings of corporate power, and thereby function as true to form characters playing out their roles within the entropy-ridden dynamics of failed states.

Have the Democrats even lifted a finger, whether in power or out, to fight corporate oligarchy? The only finger the players of the Democratic power establishment have lifted is to give the progressive left -- The Finger. I say screw you back, you soul-dead ciphers -- and the faux reform/hidden corporate class agenda Trojan Horse you rode in on.

Moreover, how have the policies of the Obama administration departed, in any real world way, from those of the Bush administration? Hence, we arrive at the painful, depressing crux of the matter and the cause of the denial befogging the minds and enervating the will of the liberal class: The dismal fact that under the present structure of corporate oligarchy, a functioning representational democracy cannot exist.

As for everyday citizens, neither going to the polls to vote, nor manning phone banks and licking envelopes at local party headquarters, nor canvassing to register new voters will change the nature of the national security state nor reform corporate hegemony nor end US imperium abroad...It just isn't going to happen.

Acknowledging to oneself the reality that under the present arrangements between the U.S. government and the corporate order -- the aforementioned acts of citizen participation are exercises in futility, and that an individual is essentially powerless -- can give rise to profound states of cognitive dissonance. In short, all the exasperation and concomitant scorn leveled by Democratic insiders and their apologists upon members of the marginalized and alienated left.

When a mainstream liberal sort deigns to tell me, I need to acquire a more "positive attitude" -- which, in tone and intent, amounts to a kind of passive-aggressive douche-rocketry -- I reply: I (or anyone else for that matter) can evince all the winning qualities and uplifting attitudes in the human lexicon of emotive experience -- positive, upbeat, giddy, elated, ecstatic -- we can be as happy as a bliss-besotted idiot, with a love of all things shiny, who happens upon a cache of gleaning stainless steel cutlery -- We can become so aglow with positive energy that rays of sunshine will coruscate from out of our every orifice -- yet still, our attitudes and actions would have little to no effect on the status quo.

As far as reforming the hopelessly corporate money-compromised Democratic Party from within...that constitutes, merely, polishing the brass railings on the Titanic, because Democrats have shown, over the years and with increasing regularity, whose interests they serve.

Perhaps, instead, progressives should deploy a tactical retreat and allow the damage incurred by Disaster Capitalism (that now even includes the obscene manipulation of global food prices) to create so much pain by way of Republican rule that the toxic agendas of the oligarchs cannot be papered over by sham elections that bring (at best) "incremental" change, while the juggernaut of the corporate/national security state hurtles forward unchecked and unabated.

In the long run, it might prove propitious (in a "cruel to be kind" turn of affairs) if the nature of corporate state control shifted from the soft totalitarianism of the present to a more overt form of hardliner rule. This way, the self-serving authoritarian powers begot by big money interests will be drawn into the open...will have to reveal and define themselves and their agendas; they would no longer be able to hide (Koch Brothers style) within the loose-knit, yet proto-fascist in nature, structure of the corporate state.

Indications augur that regardless of the pain inflicted and protests proffered, the dismal criteria of this strategy will be made manifest: The berserker cult from the Chicago School of Economics will not quit until the reforms, from the Progressive and New Deal eras, responsible for creating the US middle class and affording dignity to the laboring classes, are burned to ash and blown from collective memory.

Incongruously, it is this criminal cartel who has the ear of the white underclass, while, concurrently having them by the throat...as, all the while, they ply them with the poisoned pills of Disaster Capitalism, managing to bamboozle them into calling the toxic concoction ingested the sweet fruit of liberty.

Yet, because of their privilege-engendered insularity, the Democratic Party elite are bereft of a credible counter-narrative. Moreover, President Obama, in deed and action, has governed like an alumnus in good standing of the Chicago School of Economics.

This is the modus operandi of present day U.S. duopoly: Democratic Party, corporate tools, faux reformers follow rightwing death cults. Hence, little of importance changes for the big money interests who own both major parties.

President Obama has proven he can give a stem-twister of a speech. But what he has displayed, time and time again, is the damning extent of his insincerity. Obama's job is to create pretty clouds of obscuring smoke -- while the right plays the role of crazed barn-burners -- as the oligarchs make off with more and more of the people's loot.

This is what is so pathetic about the present day Democratic Party whose political platform seems to be: We deliver nothing, but broken promises, and we continually betray our base -- but those other guys, those rightwing Republican bogeymen -- they keep their wicked promises. They are mean, ruthless and crazy. And did we mention, you should be afraid -- be very afraid...BOO!

This is the method by which mainstream Democrats work reluctant progressives into a dither. The ploy operates by the same devices Republican Party strategists game the base-born bigots of their political base, by raising the fearsome specters of child-recruiting gay pedophiles, in alliance with Islamic Caliphate plotters, all of whom, at the behest of dirty hippie socialists, have designs to redistribute their lawn furniture, outdoor grilling equipment, and pool toys to dark and dusky sorts.

What is amazing, since there is no formal plot in place, is how close and perfect to type almost all involved act out their roles. Ergo, we ordinary citizens can play our roles as extras as well; we can go to the polls and vote for either of these two wings of The Money Party who serve the kleptocratic class and military industrial/national security state, and thereby co-sign it all and give the fraud a patina of legitimacy.

This is the dim and diminished social and political milieu that gave rise to Donald Trump. Trump, son of inherited wealth, who had his own "reality" show (watched by folks who apparently have no notion of the concept) is the embodiment of our era; he mirrors the lamentable zeitgeist of the U.S.

The troubles of the U.S. are many and spreading. As a nation, our prospects at home and prestige abroad are thinning. Apropos, Donald Trump is the man of this empty hour -- just the manqué of the moment to give the problems that are besetting the nation a comb-over treatment.

Trump wears the gruesome visage of empire's end, and his style of blustering ignorance serves as perfect marching music for the country's ongoing, blind strut towards the abyss, now unnervingly close, yawning before us.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499"

Collapse

I arrived in Georgia by route of the US interstate system.

Traveling US interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land ... so much suppressed fear and aggression. Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon.
Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all to often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.

"Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?" Rainer Maria Rilke

Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.

The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.

When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip -- those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity -- the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.

Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.

Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel -- we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive. Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.

Even the landscape itself of the US is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night ...scouring away the stars. As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks -- the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past -- the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.

The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay -- a death-swoon operatic in scale. Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land. Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the US spread before us ... are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.

Manifested en mass, as our collective way of existing in the world -- the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame ... There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to own names ... We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.

Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?

Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, "Private, why are you running?" The soldier replied, "General, I'm running 'cause I can't fly."

The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one's rear.

Depression is what catches us.

I have been accused being a poet ... I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity -- or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.

The salesmen of the eternal, big happy ... are just that -- salesmen ... One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart ... The commercial come-ons insist that the heart's grief and a lost soul's emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, "hope and change". By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is ... suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated -- even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude -- all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.

"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."--Carl Jung.

What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical ... stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job -- until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall ... clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one's jowls. Aint that the life -- or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.

This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life ... Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.

Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase ... But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation ... to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward ... to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts ... to feel the sadness of the suffering earth ...

"I can't go on. I'll go on."
--Samuel Beckett

But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well "spill" (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world's oceans ... The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me ... Ever since, this dream image has lived within me ... I carry the fish's suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home -- this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into ... My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage ... bottomless ... Who will speak for the voiceless -- who will make amends for their suffering?

In childhood, I loved this body of water ... loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters ... Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf's living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.

Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world's oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)

Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can't wrap our minds around it ... In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.

I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste -- the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all. I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, "Stop it. God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you? Didn't anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?

This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die off.

But listening to the pronouncements of Washington's political class and the mainstream media's ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.

Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over. When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn't mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.

Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.

And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth ... singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.

Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.

Frank O'Hara suggests: "In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love."

Things are going to work out -- but not in ways we can predict.

There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.

If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement -- they would call out to us, "Don't believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.

Don't you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man's war is a virtue; don't buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth."

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Sicko."

Collapse

After each catastrophe, there ensues a scramble to contain the damage leveled, as, concurrently, the apologist of the present system explain the anomalous nature of the event. Yet, this much should be obvious: Attempting to clean up the mess, after it occurs, as oppose to altering the way of life that incurs the damage, is analogous to an addict believing a few days in detox will serve as a solution to his addiction.

In the same way drug dealers are reliant on an addict's unwillingness to reflect on the carnage created in his life, as well as, the havoc reaped in the lives of those near him, engendered by his addiction, the small group of hyper-wealthy elites who benefit from the current system rely on collective cognitive dissidence (or, as it has been termed, the fear of fear itself) to dissuade the public at large from peering deeply into the pernicious situation.

One of an addict's biggest obstacles is his optimism i.e., he is convinced he can figure out somehow, someway to use his drug of choice in a less destructive way...and, by reflex, rebels against the deepening sorrow that he must change.

When large, powerful corporations create messes beyond their ability to control the damage wrought by their institutional cupidity, those in charge spare no expense aggressively confronting the problem...that is, of course, by means of public relations blitzes aimed at the general public, while tsunami-sized waves of campaign contributions flood the coffers of elected officials.

Apropos, a school of thought has developed in which framing the perception of a catastrophe supersedes all other considerations. An after the fact casuistry, possessed of crackpot optimism, similar to the following, is affected: Dated technologies were at fault in that particular mishap, but, not to worry, in the near future, new innovations will safeguard against similar calamities.

Sure thing: The future will be bathed in the benign light of new technological wonders; our dread will be washed away by sparkling clean coal. Magical technological innovations will soon render nuclear power so safe that the only danger to the general public will be posed by the risk of being smothered by its profoundly huggable properties.

Such are the free market capitalist's versions of End Time belief systems, a variation of the type of magical thinking that induces an individual to scan the empty sky, waiting for Jesus to float earthward and redeem the ceaseless folly perpetrated by mankind.

If we are willing to accept being lulled back into our comfort zones by such fantasies (that are as craven as they are preposterous) we might as well wait around for hazmat crews of leprechauns riding flying unicorns to arrive on the scene and clean up the messes that corporate capitalist greedheads inflict on our increasingly besieged planet.

In a manner similar to how the indefatigable salesmen of the consumer state sell optimism, but, in reality, deliver anomie, the propagandist of the neo--liberal paradigm promise peace and prosperity -- yet their shock troops, comprised of the political and media elite, instead level class warfare at home and perpetual war abroad that renders landscapes blighted and mindscapes shell shocked.

Among their most pernicious contrivances has been to convince the passengers seated aboard the runaway train of the corporate state that the blur of landscape out the train's windows is caused by their own poor vision and the impending crash will be due to their negative thoughts. The implicit message imparted is: "If only you would have thought more optimistically and worked harder, you'd have been one of life's winners and you would have been cruising above the impending carnage in your private jet. How sad for you, loser. And, by the way," they lie, "did you know socialists are manning the controls of the doomed train?"

While these practitioners of the art of weasel word wizardry insist they sell hope, in reality, they sell shame.

Growing up in the deep south, being raised, as we say there -- not brought up, but raised--like corn, hogs (or Lazarus or zombies from the grave) and socialized there, shame is a subject with which I'm well acquainted; it has taken me a lifetime (and it remains an ongoing process) to sort through and shake out the shame-based sensibility acquired there.

"If you think that I am dumb, There is another universe of stupidity that I can show you!" -- comment posted on my FaceBook page when a stubborn, inconsiderate fact would not yield to his rightist umbrage.

What is the origin of such an outlandish, inadvertently self-satirizing statement?

Shame (its flip side being southern pride) arises, descends, converges and intermingles from manifold influences and multiple traumas: The bizarre-as-a-talking-serpent concept of sin passed down through Calvinistic belief systems; the legacy of degradations inflicted from being on the losing (and morally wrong) side of the Civil War; as well as, the degraded social milieu that circumscribes the lives and fates of large numbers of the permanent white underclass residing in the region.

Shame stains southern sensibilities like red clay on Sunday whites.

A large number of the blustering, willfully ignorant, southern men that I grew up around, whether they are khaki clad, country club smoothies or leather jacket-donning punk rock belligerents, were twisted inside out, kicked and stomped insensate by shaming authority figures before they shed their baby teeth. If one listens closely, one can detect the voice of shame-bearing demons hissing in their every utterance.

Yet the knowledge of the origin and source of their suffering remains buried deep within these men. To acknowledge shame (even to oneself) is considered a tacit admission of having something to be ashamed of i.e., "If you ain't got nothing to be ashamed of, you miserable peckerwood, then you wouldn't have no need to feel it." So, more or less, the line of thinking, rather train wreck of pathology, passing for thought, goes.

Accordingly, a strong impulse arises to explain it all away -- to claim the entire episode is a misunderstanding, or to dismiss their feelings as being trivial, or merely an indulgence of weak-willed, thin wrist losers, or impugn the motives of those who find grievance in the situation. This mode of mind has made multi-millionaires of the black magicians of rightwing talk shows, experts at performing emotional sleight of hand tricks that displace the shame of their listeners on a host of targets.

The cordiality of my fellow southerners is as facile as it is fragile. In southern culture, a great deal of psychic energy goes into distancing oneself from shame. Brooding beneath southern culture's superficial charm and gentility is the unspoken threat: "Be nice, now" that often translates to, "ya'll do as I say -- and there won't be any trouble."

More often than not, it is all made personal. Affronts are long remembered and resentments cultivated, and being confronted with information outside of one's realm of experience and field of reference is regarded as condescension.

Being made to feel "less than," by insults, real or imagined, can bring on a noxious cascade of shame and its concomitant host of desperate evasions and violent displacements to mitigate the feelings of unease engendered.

This is how it was explained to me on FaceBook recently by a feller named Frank who was addressing the issue of his loathing of liberal/socialist tyranny: "My facts are correct. The far left is nothing more than the new set of communists looking to take over. Just a call me a southern god fearing commie killer who cannot wait to put more notches on his weapon if the day ever arises again. I did enjoy killing them so. Your sheep I will never be. That's a fact. [R]eal Americans have better things to do that listen to your drivel. I'm out of here."

Just what kind of demented cultural circus produces these crack-brained battalions of killer clowns for Liberty? A culture with a brutal and rigidly enforced (but furiously denied) class structure that inflicts constant humiliation, yet, because of its nebulous structure, remains hidden from view.

Therein exists the allure and tenacity of neo-confederate hagiographic nonsense. Pride is held near, and clutched closely to oneself, because the corporate state has left the white underclass bereft of little else. It is painful to admit to being powerless and devoid of a means to change the trajectory of one's fate. One feels demoralized and diminished as a result.

Moreover, nationwide, under the present system, riddled with vast economic inequity, the negative repercussions for disobedience and failure are more than most people can endure, economically as well as psychologically. In a culture where success is deemed the end all/be all of all things, failure is devastating. In a corporate structure rigged to benefit a privileged few, and upward class mobility is merely a mind-fogging, cultural myth -- then failure is altogether likely.

Combine this, with the pernicious, puritanical/Calvinistic notion that failure is due to flawed character, and you have a troubled population...staggered by self-doubt, roiling in the unfocused rage of the humiliated, and primed and stoked for demagogic displacements.

While nice liberals retreat to their comfort zones, the forsaken laboring class constructs insulating walls of resentment. In the US, more and more, the criteria that forges personality and informs our condition is wrought by the calculus of enclosure: guarded gate communities; isolation in motor vehicles; the insular pixel fiefdoms of the internet; long work hours, often spent in cubicles, comprised of meaningless labor, and cut-off from both the norms of nature and resonate human contact.

These conditions create an existence as redolent of the aromas of existence as plastic covered cheese-food. In cultural terms, it is as if the people of the US have become mummified in plastic packaging wrap... have been rendered -- Body Bag People.
Of course, one yearns for the void to be filled. But with hearts and minds mortared closed, sealed off from the shock and humiliation experienced from the daily economic exploitation of a hidden, intractable class system - what penetrates these self-constructed prisons is loud, stupid, even fascistic in tone and theme e.g., violent video games; the empty spectacle of steroid-fueled professional sports hype; the exercise in Rock and Roll imperium that US militarism has become; fundamentalist sermons that long for the blood and thunder of Armageddon. In short, all the Sturm and Drang necessary to pierce protective walls, yet, at the same time, insure one remains ensconced in one's comfort zone.

Yet the sense of powerlessness is not mitigated for long, a nebulous sense of unease nettles. The world appears to bristle with threats...a low-grade hysteria is maintained and ceaseless war is both convenient and inevitable. Yet all the ramparts and fortifications of the national security state still do not create a sense of safety; instead, its siege mentality increases the interior void of the US populace, and, as a result, the vitality of life is barred entrance.

Blood sacrifices must be made to the god of the inner abyss...corpses are tossed into the void.

Over the top? Given the fact of the hundreds of thousands of corpses the US empire has lain under the native soil of nations from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia (and now North Africa) in only the past decade up to the present -- which, in combination with a government that practices and a general public that is indifferent to the use of torture -- the image limned above doesn't seem hyperbolic in the least.

At what point, does it become incumbent upon an individual to seize back his identity, to reject being defined by the exploitive, dehumanizing demands imposed (and small bribes proffered) by corporate/governmental elites?

The ongoing tragedy in Japan reveals how dangerous it can be to refuse or defer the challenge.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

My grandmother, being a shrewd judge of character, was able to accomplish this because she knew Nazis were human beings, desirous of gold and social position; most did not swoon over Nazi ideology. The majority of Nazis were careerist, simply yuppies on the make ("just looking for a better life for their children") -- and Nazi officials were giving out the jobs, so they joined the party.

Even in the aftermath of the war, after much of their country had been reduced to ruins, the people of Germany refused to face their complicity in the crimes of The Third Reich.

In post-war Germany, memory itself seemed to have been firebombed to ash and rubble. For ordinary Germans, the extent of Nazi evil was too great and their own contribution too quotidian to accept personal responsibility for crimes committed by the state. How could the flickering of such tiny desires set the vast world aflame?

Yet over time, after much internal struggle and public confrontation by the nation's artists, writers, and political activists, later generations of Germans began to accept and take responsibility for the crimes of their collective past. They rolled back the cold slab and forced themselves to gaze within the unmarked tomb bearing the remains of the mortifying history they had buried.

This stands in stark contrast to the manner that the people of the US approach, if at all, the unsavory aspects of their nation's history. From the genocidal practices inflicted on Native Americans (my father's people) to the irradiated ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the killing fields of the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, South and Central America and Central Asia, the people of the US have refused to acknowledge and take ownership of the collective sins they carry.

German soldiers were no more evil than their fellows in the US military, who, for example, man the operation systems of Cruise Missiles and navigate predator drones, and kill, detached from feeling, from thousands of miles away. After all, they are only following orders, just doing their jobs as loyal soldiers and good Americans...just like all those good Germans of my grandmother's day.

Although, on a personal level, I carry a pedigree of atavistic oppression in my bartered blood (my father, born on a so called Indian reservation; my mother rushing to these shores with the flames of the Holocaust at her back) I acknowledge my guilt in all crimes against humanity. For I am human; therefore, I cast a long shadow of instinctual, racial barbarity behind me.

Although I was nowhere in the vicinity, I am an accessory to the crime.

In the late 1940s, my grandmother ran guns to the Irgun. She embraced the desperate, nationalist delusion of Zionism. I understand why she did this. But, now, everyday, Palestinians are forced to their knees in order to make amends for the sins of Europe.

Although its origins and workings seem to us mysterious and evanescent, evil remains proliferate because our traumatized psyches see it as a force of good. Evil is a deranged angel of self-preservation, convinced his wicked machinations and destructive fury are bulwarks against outside forces aligned to bear his doom.

And that is why I don't support "our troops." They are the delivery system of US imperium (even when deployed for "humanitarian" bombing campaigns by audaciously hopeful, Democratic presidents) and should be regarded as such.

Yet, even as I make the pronouncement, I must maintain a stubborn skepticism regarding my own claims of innocence in the matter.

"A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor." -- Carl Jung: "The Philosophical Tree" (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

The myth of Eden and the fall of mankind is a metaphor for leaving the innocence of childhood. In Eden, God, the Father, is above; the very ground is Mother...where the fruits of paradise flow like mother's milk. Like children, and domesticated animals, the psyche is held suspended there, in primal grace, in a state of unconditional trust to authority.

Accordingly, the much-maligned serpent brings freedom, including freedom's regrets and sorrows. Ambiguity comes into the world, as opposed to a father-mandated, mother-ensured totality. (In the socio-political realm, for example, if this psychic passage out of ossified Eden doesn't proceed, its mode of mind can rise as a totalitarian outlook on life. Apropos, the nostalgia of the right to return to an idealized, free market guided and family values beholden, paradisiacal past that never existed and can never be.)

With the loss of one's perceived innocence, the world's freedoms, with its multiplicity of things, arises...not only animal élan -- that being, the ability to be present in the breathing moment, aroused by the scent of blood and pheromone held on the wind -- but also foresight and logos i.e., adulthood with all its regrets, responsibilities, reflections, recriminations, and equivocations.

The serpent is the hero/anti-hero of the tale. He is the co-creator of the human psyche. He should be given his due, in regard to providing us with the knowledge necessary to leave the pointless inertia of paradise and blunder into the possibility that we may know ourselves to a greater degree and thus be able to see the world before us with a bit more depth, nuance, and clarity.

"Purists are deadly, and so they know all about deadly sins." --James Hillman

I have rightwing friends who conflate freedom with predator drones; they rage against the government while swallowing the Pentagon's propaganda like mother's milk (a nourishing concoction...if your mother happens to be the Medusa).

In contrast, nice liberals, because they are cut off from their dark, angry side and their hidden, selfish motives, all too often, are boggled by, seemingly frozen in polite mortification, before rightist rage.

(When, for example, a Democratic president orders the launch of cruise missiles, they claim it is done more in sorrow than anger -- none of that crass, testosterone-redolent, smell of blood on the wind excitation evinced during military operations under Republican administrations is allowed on public display.)

Why is rage such anathema to liberal sensibilities?

Rage can be a catalyst for both sweeping social change but can provoke backlash. And both situations are unnerving to liberals of the professional classes, who are comfortable within the present system, hence, deep down, don't desire a shake up of the system that might threaten the privileged positions they hold within it.

As a consequence, liberals, oblivious of their own buried, selfish motivations, have difficulty understanding laboring class anger and resentment and how it is channeled and displaced by conservatives.

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside." --William S. Burroughs.

In the theatre of this faux republic, Republicans are effective at selling their imperialist wars of choice and their class-stratifying economic policies because they have become convinced the roles they are playing are real.

Regarding this situation, Konstantin Stanislavski, considered to be the father of modern theatrical conventions, is reported to have instructed, when an actor becomes so deeply merged with the role he is portraying that he begins to believe he is that character, it is time to escort him from the theatre.

In contrast, Democrats can't seem to find a way into their roles; therefore, they give less than convincing interpretations of the characters they are playing. As a result, their line readings are listless and lack conviction.

And what does this reveal about the rest of us, the supernumeraries in our national tragicomedy, who believe we are central to the plays outcome -- this amateur production of Marat Sade -- otherwise known as -- daily life in our corporate state/militarist imperium?

"Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that "normalcy" is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid."--James Hillmam

In May 1974, the German artist, Joseph Beuys (Born: May 12, 1921, Died: January 23, 1986) arrived in New York City to present a work he titled, "I Like America and America Likes Me."

Upon arrival at Kennedy Airport, although in good health, he disembarked the jet, secured upon a gurney, and then was transported by ambulance to a room in the René Block Gallery on East Broadway. Throughout the commute, Beuys, wrapped in a large swath of felt, remained on the gurney, keeping to his vow not to "set foot on US soil" until the US ceased its illegal, immoral war in Southeast Asia and withdrew its combatants from the region.

Once ensconced at his quarters at the gallery, for three days, Beuys shared the space with a wild coyote. At intervals, he would rise to his feet, covered in the swath of felt, and, as he steadied himself on a shepherd's staff, Beuys would induce the coyote to tear at his covering of felt, inciting the animal to rend the fabric to tatters.

Other times, he would simply lie upon a bed of straw, watching the coyote as the coyote watched him...man and beast appraising each other.

During the performance piece, Beuys would engage in ritual acts, such as playing percussion on a large triangle and playfully tossing a leather glove to the coyote.

After three days, alone in the room, with the animal, Beuys hugged his companion (who appeared to have accepted the artist's strange behavior) and bid him goodbye.

Project completed, Beuys returned to Kennedy Airport, transported, once again, by ambulance, making good on his promise of exiting the US without having set foot upon it.

As Beuys would later aver, "I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote." --Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys Die Aktionen. 1998, p. 330

Thus Beuys identified with and symbolically merged with the psyche of his coyote co-art conspirator and opened himself to the cunning, death-devouring spirit of the much-scorned animal (The coyote is an animal that lives on carrion) to gain the creative wherewithal to renounce the death-drunk spirit of US Empire.

This is art done not as portfolio building. Beuys did not shirk from his vision as an artist by avoiding what is painful (thus, the ambulance deployed as symbol) and ugly about the world and about himself; instead, he delivered himself directly to its carrion-reeking maw, but refused to have his soul devoured by it.

"A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche." --James Hillman

In the last few days, I've noticed a marked rise in the levels of anxiety and apprehension in the minds of many of the folks with whom I have contact. Images of irradiated rains and bombing campaigns have left many riddled with dread, haunted by the uncertainty of it all...gripped by the feeling that events are hurtling at an exponential rate of speed towards some ill-defined but tragic reckoning.

Once at an amusement park, when I was three years of age, I released a cherry flavored lollipop from the apex perch of the carriage of a Ferris Wheel. Entranced, I watched its speed accelerate, as it fell in a plummeting spiral, then shatter to crimson shards on the pavement below.

Enchantment broken, stricken with mortification, I recoiled into the coaster's car...aware, in a flash, of the fragile nature of life. How life and death are bonded together. An eggshell, in which, neither outer shell nor what is contain within can be revealed to each other without a violent intrusion into the other's sanctity.

Even a singular conversation, like a popular uprising or an encounter with a work of art, can be similar to this. One cannot realize the presence of another nor open oneself to real change (in contrast to, hackneyed commercial come-ons and political campaign legerdemain versions of such) without giving oneself over to a small death.

As a rule, we remain un-shattered by the presence of others because we cleave to the quotidian shell of selfhood...the habit of remaining intact superseding the eros of the other's immediacy.

Yet there have been moments when I let myself fall...have been shattered to shards...a broken soul among vast constellations of broken souls...and have forgotten, momentarily, my own aloneness...wandering in a unifying wilderness of glinting shards.

"There is a secret love hiding in each problem." -- James Hillman

I find this heartening: With the uprisings across the Islamic world being partly a result of secrets brought to light by WikiLeaks, we have a good illustration of an "unknown variable factor" in play.

Such situations bring both opportunity and peril. Power becomes brutal and ruthless when presented with a credible challenge. This is why Bradley Manning is imprisoned and Julian Assange is under house arrest awaiting extradition, and both will be made to suffer greatly for their actions.

Regardless, I'm switching my party affiliation to the Unknown Variable Party.

As illustrated by Joseph Beuys, I advocate transforming PTSD into Post Traumatic Poetic Discontent. My platform: Don't miss an opportunity to turn suffering from private shame to public incitement.

My mother escaped Nazi Germany; my father was orphaned on an Indian res., left starving, on the doorstep of a church, during the Great Depression. My earliest memories involve the Civil Rights struggles roiling my native Birmingham, Alabama. Then came the Vietnam War, Nixon, and Watergate. Next, arrived the backlash, in the form of Reaganism that since has diminished and degraded the nation.

Accordingly, I've never held any illusion that this world was not seeded with the potential of man-made tumult, stupidity, and tragedy.

But, man, oh man, those shattering moments, delivered by art, music, beauty and love, this life reveals. It just might be worth the risk of sticking around for a while longer to see what shakes out.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

On a cultural level, a great many people in the US evince a similar, media-wrought shallowness of apprehension, and therefore are prone to a contemptible callowness, when faced with tragedy and human suffering. This trait, coupled with a toxic ignorance about the larger world, is an ugly thing to behold, and does not bode well for our collective destiny as a people.

What are the origins of these less than admirable characteristics? On a cultural and political level, due to the constant saturation and an attendant internalization of "free market" platitudes, sans a counter narrative of compassion and social awareness, many in the US experience acute cognitive dissonance when confronted by the demonstrable fact that the nation's much heralded tales of equal opportunity and class mobility are little more than the self-serving propaganda of a privileged few.

National character traits, such as these, display an always present, ever-vigilant, defiant ignorance -- a pride-ridden predilection best summed up, albeit inadvertently, by that stumble-mouth poet of the American spirit, George H. W. Bush. During a press conference in August of 1988, when he was asked a question regarding the recent downing of an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians onboard, by the US warship, USS Vincennes, Bush the Elder bandied, "I won't apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

A more subtle and compelling intelligence assessed the origin of such utterances with this: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein

An additional aspect of this national obtuseness stems from a collective squeamishness, a revulsion and resultant denial, regarding the truth of the exponential rate of decay of US Empire. Of which, the knowledge is avoided for the same reason one avoids taking a stick and turning over days dead roadkill. Because it would be a mortifying sight to glimpse what is eating, from within, the putrefying remains of the carcass known as the US political system.

Apropos, for many of the progressive minded who went round-heeled for the shimmering promise of hope and change, pledged by Barack Obama, the fact of his betrayal is very painful and depressing to face. Exacerbating the situation is the mendacity and flat-out lunacy of his right wing adversaries -- including those spittle spraying prone legions of racist sub-cretins, out in the US spleenland, who refuse to accept Obama's legitimacy, as president, due to the problem they have accepting the darker shade of his skin pigment.

In this context, the siege mentality of Democratic partisans is understandable...but only to a degree. Ergo, recently, it has been revealed that the Obama administration's new Gitmo policy has a great deal of resemblance to the Bush administration's old Gitmo policy. So it seems, at last, we have found who has been concealed within that empty suit known as Barack Obama. Damn, if it isn't, George W. Bush. We should have taken Bush at his word -- never misunderestimate Dubya.

The bailout of Wall Street and the corporatist coup of the kleptocratic class in Madison, Wisconsin and the Obama administration's continuation of US foreign policy (i.e., the same, blood-soaked stupid empire tricks) as that of his predecessors, should serve as an object lesson and wakeup call to Democratic Party-promoting progressive types regarding whose interests the two parties of duopoly represent.

Moreover, the US public has been willfully ignorant, habitually self-centered, and so easily manipulated by the PR specialists of the corporate controlled state, for so long, they don't even know what a democratic republic is -- much less that they lost one.

With wages stagnant for more than thirty years now, it is maddening to hear economically besieged, debt-beholden members of the US middle and laboring classes, who, because they have had their heads up their corporate master's privileged rear ends for so long now, continue to convince themselves they're viewing the glens, glades and fruited bowers of a free market paradise.

The hand of the rightwing intellectual berserker cult of the Chicago School of Economics can be seen in this. At present, we're witnessing the entire repertoire of the neo-con clown school of misdirection and mendacity. What is unfolding is straight out of the Leo Strauss playbook for the intellectually bankrupt: First, employ a Reagan/Bush/Walker/ type manqué, and have these ambulatory Pez Dispensers shower the public at large with candied covered "noble lies" i.e., promulgating faux populist sound bites serving to conceal the machinations of a corrupt elite, thereby ensuring the retention and expansion of elitist power.

The fairness-phobic and freedom-defying tendencies of these sorts of toxic alliances are woven into the very DNA of contemporary conservatism and have left their adherents devoid of a compass of common sense and civic responsibility.

Again and again, I'm astonished to witness the manner that US citizens mistake this smoke and mirrors casuistry for a political mandate. Over the last three decades, anyone (who has been even nominally conscious) can see how destructive to the health and well-being of the general population of the nation, conservative, "market-driven" economic dominance has been. And how the cynical manipulation of factions within the Republican base, comprised of Christ fantasists and states' rights fetishists, by the neo-con and corporate wing of the so-called "conservative movement," have weaken both the civil libertarian contract of government and its social safety net obligations to its citizenry almost to the breaking point.

The Koch Brothers and their quisling, Governor Walker, are an object lesson in this personal pathology being played out as public tragedy.

The Koch Brothers were born into a family of oil-rich multi-millionaires. They have never known anything but wealth beyond any reasonable measure. Yet it is never enough. The brothers seem akin in character to a spoiled malicious brat whose greed for gifts can never be sated, a nightmare child, who not only breaks the expensive toys he demands and receives, but breaks the toys of other children, simply because they're not his.

In deranged opposition to both common sense and common decency, the actual children of the US, those who were careless enough to be born into poverty, will just have to suck it up -- and give up their school lunch programs so that the billionaires of the plundering class can continue to receive tax write-offs.

That's right, good people of the US, it is high time we nipped this problem in the bud: Those damn spoiled brats have just gotten too damn fond of eating. Fortunately, the roar of the engines of fleets of private Gulfstream jets will drone out the rumblings of those entitlement-maddened little monsters bellies.

What is equally disheartening is the public at large has internalized the narrative of the dissemblers of the ruling elite, to such a great degree, that: Even before being defeated by legislative weasel maneuvers in Wisconsin, union members were willing to give up their benefits; they only agitated to keep "the right" to go to the table and ask for their master's scraps.

This is a "rock bottom" situation. Liberals working within the system are like drunks who need to be told, just go out there and do some 'controlled drinking." Perhaps when the situation grows painful enough, then we'll talk about the problem.

"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation" Oscar Wilde

Short of a mass awakening on the part of the US public (one can have ones little fantasies, right?) and an attendant Islamic world style uprising against the soft totalitarian structure of oligarchic rule in the US, the consolidation of power by the plundering class will continue unabated.

A couple of circumstances have to be present for freedom to flourish and economic exploitation to be mitigated: (1) Have the propitious presence of an enlightened elite in place willing to contribute to the common good by curbing their cupidity and obsession with retaining power; (2) An aware, civically engaged citizenry willing to risk all to secure their dignity. Or: We can just wait around for an enlightened monarch or dictator of benighted intent to arrive on the scene.

"We do not know what is happening. And that is what is happening." - Ortega y Gasset

In numerous ways, due to a confluence of constant inundation by distracting media influences and enervating, time-decimating financial burdens, the act of discerning the agendas of veiled corporate power, and the manner by which this nebulous, yet almost implacable structure, impacts ones life becomes difficult. Still, continually, I'm startled when I hear US citizens state: "It is a free country."

At present, we are at liberty to hold and voice our opinions, as long as doing so has almost no effect on the status quo. The US corporate media has endowed us with the right to decide for ourselves and voice, unfettered, our opinions on the destructive choices made by celebrity millionaires or wax feckless before our televisions about the devastation wrought by natural disasters. In our faux republic, we are guaranteed the right to free speech, as long as it remains marginalized and ineffective.

The Gnostics had a term germane to the shallowness of thought that passes for discourse in our time, political or otherwise -- "hylicism," which means an inability to see below the surface of things. This is why, over and over, "news consumers" are diverted by news as gossip and, on a political level, fall for the demagogic ploys of Republicans and the phony populism of married-to-the-status quo Democrats. It is the mode of mind of the duopolistic state.

As a result of the contrivance of powerful mass media interests, combined with a complicity on the part of the general public, the witless indulgences and perpetual excesses of the idiot empire of celebrity news and gossip grip the popular imagination and provoke a greater degree of indignation from the populace than the tearing to tatters of the social contract, ongoing since the Reagan era, by the nation's government and business classes.

The proliferation of news as celebrity gossip serves as a kind of corporate propaganda e.g., Charlie Sheen's private contretemps being hyped to public spectacle and topping the news cycle, as opposed to, let's say, a series of investigative reports exposing the degree of wealth inequity in the US, how it was established, and is maintained. Or why large-scale news events, such as the very likely catastrophic effects of the meltdown of a nuclear power plant, are treated with all the depth of a mindless Hollywood action movie, devoid of a deepening historical context.

To paraphrase Warren Buffett, his side has won the class war. At present, we are experiencing the mopping up operation in progress. In this cultural milieu, there should be little mystery regarding which stories the ultra-wealthy owners of huge media conglomerates would prefer their underlings to investigate and expose.

Another reason, Charlie Sheen has been placed in the media's electronic stock and pillory is the manner in which a persistent strain of Puritanism in the US endures, and engenders, in the nation's collective psyche, both a compulsive curiosity about excessive behavior merged with an intolerant, punitive reaction to it. Hence, aberrant behavior seizes the cultural imagination and fosters powerful, repressed desires.

First arrives the secret desire to make a daring, perhaps violent escape from the quotidian prison of everyday obligation and restrictive social nicety, as Pablo Neruda limned in verse, "to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,/or kill a nun with a blow on the ear./It would be great/to go through the streets with a green knife/letting out yells until I died of the cold."

Next, one is seized with the compulsion to make somebody pay for evoking such untoward, vile thoughts in a good person like me...I'm still a good person...right? That spoiled celebrity should be made to pay for this, damn it.

Conveniently, this situation works out well for those who benefit from the deeply inequitable system now in place: Their agenda is served by having the public direct their animus at the hubris of dim-witted celebrities as opposed to the incompetence and criminality of the powerful.

In the city center-devoid, suburban archipelago of the US, there exists scant real estate where an immersion in the mass (for either constructive purpose or odious design) can take place and private rage can be vented as civil disobedience, or rise, in its demented shadow form, as the public psychosis of fascist pageantry.

Although, in the US, our variety of Nuremberg Rally mobs don't throng down wide boulevards, in torch lit processions, culminating with the sweat-lacquered faces of snarling Brown Shirts reflecting the flames of pyres of burning books. In contrast, the analog in the United States takes place on a hundred million, Cheetos-stained couches, as the corporate media's propaganda by distraction induces fools and tools of the class-stratified, corporate state to gibber about the latest celebrity contretemps.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon (from Gravity's Rainbow).

In this way, the so-called "culture wars" serve the ruling elite. This is a technique the operatives of corporate duopoly have down. Unloose social conservative activists to kick up dirt with divisive issues e.g., the rightwing wants to roast Big Bird on a spit and legislate that every unborn fetus be declared Jesus Christ himself. All the while, above the obscuring dirt cloud, the financial elite fly off in their private jets, elated as thieves luxuriating on a bed piled high with their loot.

I don't mean to imply one should not fight extant inanity and prevailing idiocy...fight it with a vehemence sacred in its fury. Ironically enough, one must allow oneself to be idiot enough to risk the fight against the proliferation of eternal stupid. Yes, one can win a battle, but the war is endless. But within the fury of the moment, you are fully alive.

Yet every victory is fleeting, and the eternal stupid returns...having no memory of its whipping, and ready for another round. And it will kick your ass from time to time. I have the scars to prove it.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]m. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

A Zoo Of Our Own Making: We will kill for empire and a parking space

By Phil Rockstroh

In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self. Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I- Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ... No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.

And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.

Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.

Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive. With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.

Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over- eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being. In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.

So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

--From: The Waste Land

There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.

Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul- suffused landscape of the sublime.

A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy. Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?

Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?

Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture

[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

--From: The Journey of the Magi,

One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture. Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it. Its logos inhabits the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.

Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies. There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.

So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"

Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.

Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

--Wendell Berry

In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Sicko."

Collapse

In hindsight, one realizes, when the Obama administration promised transparency and accountability in government, National Security State enabler that Barack Obama has proven himself to be, that his administration's definition of transparency would entail the countenancing of said body scans at the nation's airports, revealing the private bits of the hoi polloi, as, all the while, his administration was engaged in stonewalling the hidden agendas and felonies of the corporate and governing elite. Recent events should remove any doubt regarding who stands exposed and who will remain cloaked by official aegis.

Unlike Julian Assange at Wikileaks, when the Democratic Congress had the opportunity to create an atmosphere of openness and transparency, they demurred. Once granted positions of authority, the Democrats didn't exercise their constitutionally granted powers to initiate investigations, hold hearings, nor issue subpoenas. This failure of will and integrity amounts to complicity by omission. Withal, Democrats gave their tacit support and approval to the last administration's (as well as to the present one's continuation of more of the same) constitution-shredding, morally repugnant policies.

On most occasions, existing within the tacit repression and the benumbing, virtual reality carnival of the corporate/National Security State leaves an individual with a sense of being stranded in anonymity ... cast into circumstances wherein one feels the necessity to follow the unspoken dictates of a nebulous form of authority that remains hidden, both by physical distance and organizational insularity. In contrast, when one is introduced to the apparatus of the National Security State, by means of a full body search, this unnerving intrusion upon the body can bring clarity to the mind as to how the elite and apparatchik of the US government regard that mass annoyance known as its citizenry and any quaint notions those wretches clutch pertaining to their constitutional granted rights and liberties.

These present outrages will flair up and spiral through the news cycle. Yet, the practices will remain in place, and, after a time, become normalized. This has proven to be the case with other previously revealed excesses of the so-call War on Terror and the attendant assaults against civil liberties and breaches of international law incurred in the name of this ongoing, seemingly endless, national psychotic episode e.g., the existence of the "detention camp" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the illegal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and those operations concomitant litany of war crimes and affronts to human dignity, such as the acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison -- as well as -- the whole blood-sodden laundry list of outrages and excesses of present day US imperium.

If there is any hope for the US to ever function as a democratic republic, the revelations, unearthed by Wikileaks, should constitute the beginning of a long, painful process of grim discovery.

First, one must ask: Why is it the corporate media is so deeply invested in promulgating distracting and miss-the-point narratives, hyper-adrenaline arguments of narrowed context and little consequence -- and, in general, trafficking in piffle packaged as news and public debate -- rather than showing even a passing interest, much less an avidity, for the pursuit of stories that confront power and might present a challenge to the present order?

As with any criminal enterprise, the essential question to ask is: who benefits from the crime (and the subsequent coverup) and who gets the payoff? Although most of human existence is constituted by ambiguity, this situation is not. The evidence of war crimes and fiscal malfeasance committed by the nation's political and financial elite are so pervasive that it cannot be missed, and that is precisely the reason the corporate media, as well as a large percentage of the general public, works so hard to ignore the situation.

Lord Northcliffe's aphorism provides a clue:

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising." ~ Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922

Accordingly, at present, there arrives a paucity of news, but, hour after hour, comes a drowning deluge of advertising. Enveloped in this commercially dominated hologram, on a cultural basis, it has proven difficult to arrive at a common lexicon to tell the tale of truths buried and freedoms imperiled.

The weightless, insubstantial quality of the consumer age engenders a state of mind wherein consequences cannot be grasped then processed. As a result, a sense of drift prevails. Yet below the surface churns a nebulous dread -- a feeling of being propelled towards a time of unbearable reckoning.

But such enervating thoughts must be banished from the mind; hence, amnesia, as a way of life, becomes the prevailing mindset of psyches minted in the media age hologram i.e., a manner of perceiving the world in which official accountability becomes as evanescent as last season's advertising campaign roll-out.

Voting for "change" becomes as meaningless and inconsequential as the introduction of Coke "Classic" and "Be all you can be." The US might as well have election campaigns in which the Michelin Man runs against the Energizer Bunny.

By means of its inherently self-narrowing context, the lingua franca of the media hologram reduces complex and conflicted human aspirations into consumer choices -- and the vastness of life to retail experience, as, simultaneously, its proliferate narratives envelop, saturate and bind to the architecture of our psyches becoming the quanta of our thoughts and the shared lexicon of our utterances.

Living in this milieu, that is as manic as it is mind-grinding, decisions must be made rapidly, with little time allowed for reflection (decision-making carrying no more depth and lasting meaning than a text message vote by cell phone involving some contrived Reality TV competition) because the proliferation of empty, non-choices just keeps being proffered and the rate of arrival keeps accelerating.

Tragically, in this environment, the recent Wikileaks revelations will be marginalized in the electronic image-crowded air and quickly dissipate like any other media age phantom.

Yet the US consumer state's infantilized inhabitants will never transfigure the raging Furies of truth-deferred into cooing Teletubbies of endless, imagined innocence (albeit, as terrifying as those homunculi of hell-bound cuteness are). The childishness of US Uberculture seems the voice of Orwellian Newspeak as it might have been composed by Dr. Seuss, in a fever delirium, dreaming he is Glen Beck.

Often, it is not the content of what a cartoonish demagogue, such as Beck, is saying; rather, it is the way they say it -- the emotional tonality of the line reading that resonates with their audience. Apropos, the US is a depressing place nowadays. Viewed in the context of emotional catharsis, Glen Beck's crying jags and feigned emotional disclosures resonate with his audience because there is much reason to weep regarding the degraded state of their lives.

In an era where policies of official secrecy and corporatist predation meet little resistance, dread and feelings of dislocation will be present just below the surface. If one listens to the subliminal criteria playing out beneath Beck's bathos, one can hear inadvertent arias intimating the end of empire -- a cheese-bag death-swoon -- operatic in scale.

What is lamentable is -- the emotional and intellectually dishonest, demagogic displacements he attributes to the cause of his audience's discontent and the sleight of hand employed to create the illusion of truths revealed.

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life."
--Eric Hoffer

This is the price paid when one affords scant deference to self-awareness, but, in contrast, possesses an unflagging fealty to the pursuit of shallow diversions and self-limiting delusion ... All maintained by the crackpot casuistry, elevated to an art form, if not holy writ, in the US, that willful ignorance is a form of freedom of choice, that normalcy is maintained by official cover-ups and personal denial.

The system is rigged, from top to bottom; it is only through an astonishing (almost credulity-defying) degree of self-deception on the part of the general public of the US, in collaboration with the mendacity of its political and economic elite, this dim, brutal, unwieldy and wounded system continues to stagger onward.

Lamentably, the US Empire, as was the case with any imperium throughout history, has grown into a bloated abomination kept provisionally alive by self-deluded apparatchik and ignorant killers. What can one do about the situation, other than try to get out of the way of this wounded giant and stand clear upon its inevitable collapse? Unfortunately, damn little.

The structure of the revolving door dynamic of the governmental/corporate exploiter class has allowed the elite therein to escape any sense of accountability. In addition, their vastly inflated salaries, with attendant perks and privileges, have separated them even further from the general population; hence, providing them with immunity from consequences, as well as, insularity from commonplace experience; thus, allowing them to embrace the most airless of aspirations -- that greed, grotesquely out of proportion privilege, and unchecked power run riot constitutes a viable means to move in the world and establish a social order.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made [...]" F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Pg. 180-181)

Among the political elite of both major parties come few calls for the kind of disclosure and official accountability that could stem the decline of the nation. Facing the fact that, in the US, there is not a true opposition party causes many people in the general population to become understandably angry, anxious, and depressed, thereby primed for pronouncements of demagogues and the diversions of commercial media palliatives.

"What WikiLeaks is doing is to short-circuit this entire democratic process -- claiming for itself the exclusive, unilateral, and unchecked power to decide what should and shouldn't be made public. This is therefore not only an attack on our national security, but an offense against our democracy and the principle of transparency."
--Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee

If one could cut through the thicket of false premises, logical fallacies, false dichotomies, arrays of strawmen, general flutter-headed palaver, and out and out paranoid fantasy marshaled by the caretakers and apologists of the present system, I would ask this question -- why is it you are driven with such vehemence to defend and attempt to preserve the current order? As it is, it seems the nation is being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, payday loans, Tyvek®, particleboard, and the provisional binding of homespun bigotry and official duplicity.

And what remains? How does one rise to meet the day confronted by such diminished prospects and prevailing degradations? Is there solace to be found in the following?

"It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams

Sadly, in the provinces beyond the Washington/New York government/corporate state nexus, it may well be impossible to start an authentic populist brushfire when the political landscape is covered in flame-retardant, corporate-laid Astroturf.

Still: It would be entertaining, in the very least, to rock the foundation of the US House of Empire with the repeated force of numerous Wikileaks type revelations, until its closet doors are flung open wide, causing the skeletons within to dance.

***********************
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

There is truth in the one-liner that Democrats bandy: Anyone from the working or middle class who votes Republican is suffering from Battered Wife Syndrome. Although one is tempted to retort, anyone who votes for either one of the corporate/National Security State parties is closer to a half-senile spinster who still believes her prince will come.
For decades, middle and laboring class conservatives have been hoarding their resentments against phantom enemies, foreign and domestic, as the time-yellowed, eroded social contract, once, offering a better life for themselves and for their children, has crumbled to dust in their hands. By the financial machinations of elitist kleptocrats and the Pentagon's multi-billion dollar money pit, they have been endowed with little else but this stash of toxic baubles they store against reality.

"The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens." -- Leo Tolstoy

Amid the casual brutalities and nettling banalities of the US's perpetual militarism and its entrenched culture of corporate oligarchy, two pernicious modes of being, seemingly unrelated, arise, converge and cross-pollinate: the collective compulsion to displace fear and rage intertwined with an aura of personal dislocation and collective anomie.

This has been the legacy wrought by the nation's collective will to beat its civic plowshares into the Pentagon's war machine (as well as those much needed accouterments of the commonweal such as the fleets of the tax-exempt, Gulf-Stream jets appropriated by corporate oligarchs).

As the people of a fading empire, our self-absorbed victim-swoon is only exceeded by our paranoia: We cower from phantoms and rage at realms of invisibles: Within this empire of Paxil, Palin and paranoia, collective fear of all the wrong things has made the US and her people analogous to a car alarm that issues a shrill, electronic warning to an empty parking lot. In reality, no intruder has attempted to invade its envelope of steel, aluminum, and glass. A sudden gust of wind was the culprit. Yet it disturbs all within earshot, announcing the presence of imaginary marauders.

Attempting to cope with the degradations of a violence-prone, exploitive system and its attendant degraded social milieu, an individual can become susceptible to demagogic narratives that serve to displace overwhelming feelings of rage, shame, and mortification. Thus, around the clock, right-wing media haters -- human, hair-trigger car alarms -- admonish empty air.

Overextended empires, and the distracted and harried individuals within, will stand, bristling in a paranoid posture, with feet planted in stubborn defiance of changing circumstances, snarling at invisible threats and imagined affronts, as life moves on with indifferent grace.

A nebulous sense of anger, co-existing with free-floating ennui, has become normalized, leveling a sense of desolation and inflicting a hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom upon the psyches of U.S. conservatives of modest economic means. What remains: brittle pride, paranoia, belligerence, and empty braggadocio -- each serving to occlude from their conscious awareness the reality of the nation's plummeting quality of life.

By any metric, other than military spending and armament production, the US is nowhere close to occupying the top dog position it once held among nations ... maybe global junkyard dog. In the US, it is astonishing to hear middle and laboring class conservatives defend their degradation by the present corporate order i.e., how they refer to the leash, held by their corporate masters around their necks, as their wings of freedom.

Thus corporatism, by its diffuse nature, avoids direct critique, as, all the while, it atomizes community. The money generated doesn't remain in neighborhoods; instead, profits flow back to corporate headquarters. These practices of the corporate state (that go nearly unquestioned) have rendered US culture bland and inflicted alienation in their wake.

The culture has been reduced to a center-devoid archipelago disconnected to community commerce and communal engagement. This is revealed, in microcosm, in the nature of the bland, uniform food proffered at corporate chain restaurants which is produced for quick profits in order to provisionally assuage the disproportionally large appetites of the denizens of the consumer state.

Hopes and dreams have been crowded out and marginalized by oversized, empty cravings ... My heart is bereft -- but I can fill my belly with giant burgers and endless varieties of donuts ... Buddhists term this state of being: existing as a hungry ghost.

As corporate chains conquer every block, waistlines expand and civic engagement shrinks ... Shuffling, bereft, through the consumer state's soul-denuded architecture of anonymity, we, in turn, have internalized the illusory image-scape of the mass media hologram. The human being as consumer is not only clad in corporate chain clothes but wears its labels within.

Due to the banality, blandness and flat out ugliness of the strip mall/big box store/fast food outlet, prefab nothingvilles of the US landscape, life under corporatism is as seductive as the glare of florescent tube lighting in a convenience store. Our suburban architecture looks as though Socialist Realist architects of the old Soviet Union grew bored of the worker's paradise of Hell, rose to earth, and went into the prefab structure design business.

The difference between the Soviet Union during its last few decades and the US Empire in its death swoon is the people of the Soviet Union knew it was all a fraud. In contrast, our corporate masters are too wily to display their corrupt carcasses on the reviewing stand on May Day as the fraudulent parade trundles past.

At present, the only reason voting is still permitted is to provide a wall of camouflage for corporate oligarchs. Their power remains hidden ... provided the public believes, by voting, they are afforded any significant degree of mastery regarding the condition of their lives and the trajectory of their fates.

Extreme totalitarian policies such as Stalin's engineered famines aren't required under the hidden (loose knit) authoritarianism of the present system: Our corporate commissars have more cunning, albeit less dramatic, methods of keeping people in their place: keep the workforce off balance with downsizing, arbitrary staff reductions, and outsourcing; inflict a famine of the mind by means of a class-stratified system of education, in combination with a constant and enveloping bombardment of inane mass media content; and provide food, plentiful amounts of it, but manufacture food products as high caloric, high fat, high sugar, growth hormone-injected, antibiotic-sodden, empty calorie delivery systems e.g., corporate chain death burgers and donuts of doom.

Although, in a traditional sense, the swag the privileged class mountebanks have made off with isn't actually money; in reality, they are in possession of a cache of weightless pixels funneling through a matrix of computer systems. There is simply the illusion of money in the vaults of the nation's colossal banking entities. The only thing the financial elite didn't steal for themselves was any sense of self-awareness, because if there was ever an honest audit of their ill-gotten assets the illusion would be exposed and the house of electronic cards would fly asunder.

And that time is approaching. Soon enough, the next black swan will glide into the picture. And this presents peril: Prolonged hopelessness breeds rage. When that rage is unloosed, the fabric of civilization unravels and is soon cobbled together as a death shroud.

Accordingly, right-wing hatred is a many-headed hydra that feeds on fear and desperation. It cannot be fought by attacking its spindling heads, each of its hissing mouths dripping black poison. Instead, one must thrust at the noxious heart of the raging beast. But one cannot know where the heart of an external monster beats without gazing upon one's own ugliness. One's ugliness, with apologies to Emily Dickinson, must be public like a frog.

Apropos: How can it be, on a level of collective awareness, the populace of the US can persist in avoiding blundering in to this steaming pile of the obvious: How can we have a modicum of empathy for the people of Iraq when we refuse to even glimpse our own degraded condition and our complicity therein? What does it speak of a people who can be indifferent, inured, or ignorant regarding the following?

‎"The Battalion commander walked into the weight room where 3rd platoon was at, yelled out 'Listen up, new battalion SOP (standard operating procedure) from now on: Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every motherfucker in the street'" -- former US soldier, who served in Iraq, Ethan McCord.

The Military Industrial Complex/National Security State serves no one but the God of Death, munitions manufacturers and those politicians they bribe. War is a money train for the rich and connected and a death wagon for everyone else.

Regardless, the people of the United States owe the Iraqi people an amends. If we demure, we will remain caged by our ignorance. That will be our punishment: our fates, analogous to a mistreated dog that licks the hand of his cruel master and exists, restless and vicious, behind a fence, snarling at the passing world.

There are many worlds, many heavens and many hells -- and they are all in this one. Without a public accounting of, as well as, restitution made for our crimes, we, in the US, will remain in our own tiny, fenced-in hell, straining against the tether of our tiny view of the world ... barking and snapping at empty air in futile rage.

Because our sense of entitlement here in the US engenders so much death and suffering overseas, at times, I feel like shouting in frustration: "I don't give the hind quarters of a small rodent about the beliefs, feelings, consumer preferences nor fates of the somnambulant herds of big box store waddling, overgrown adult infants of this empire of the arrogant and the empty. Millions have been murdered worldwide so that these entitlement-maddened monsters can keep their SUVs topped-off with gas, and their fat brats' greedy gobs stuffed with Hot Pockets & Juicy Juice."

Yet as Hannah Arendt observed: "Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."

Years ago, I had a friend, a struggling artist, who purchased an old, dilapidated, Victorian era house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the structure, its floors, walls, and ceilings would seethe with agitated cockroaches.

Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the infestation, he began zapping individual insects with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. After many months of this endeavor, when friends dropped by after dark, and, subsequently, a train rumbled down the tracks adjacent to the house, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by his creation -- a moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored, living art.

At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light up the ugliness and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art.

Darkness must and will descend upon us. The absence of light must grow so unbearable that we're willing to ask how is it we arrived in this place and begin to illuminate the darkness by revealing the scuttling, creepy crawlers of empire.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

The US mass media is rife with imagery of vampires, werewolves, zombies and other symbols of suppressed rage, insatiable craving and submerged terror. These narratives, resonate with the warnings implicit in nightmares, reveal the culture's tormented soul. By foisting imagery so arresting that it cannot be ignored, nightmares break through the ego's wall of denial; their disturbing imagery can be read as a wakeup call from the psyche that augurs warning and insists upon change.

On a cultural level, a profusion of nightmare imagery warns: paradigm shift or perish. Accordingly, the hack-scripted B-movie of the current political system could be titled: Duopoly Of The Dead: The Democratic/Republican Zombie Apocalypse. By their almost exclusive devotion to maintaining the status quo, these hulking, putrefying parties of the undead shamble through public life ... risen from the mouldering grave to tear the flesh from the present and eat the brains of the living. Neither party questions the zombie values of empire. Hence, in a soul-defying attempt to reanimate, by imperial might, the decomposing corpse of US power and influence, both parties are culpable for the senseless deaths of multitudes worldwide.

This zombie empire and its planet-decimating, neo-liberal death cult are marching toward the boneyard of history. What an empire contributes to the world is equivalent to the carnage an army of zombies inflicts upon the scenery of B-movies. Zombies (neither living nor dead creatures that create exponentially larger numbers of themselves) are an apt metaphor for the entropy inherent to closed systems -- the exponentially destructive force of The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

That is why I'm not a member of either party extant in our current duopoly: I'm betting on the emergence of the Entropy Party. It is the only party with a plausible platform; the only party that will keep its promises.

The US Empire is dead meat. We should lose the imagery of a noble and lofty bald eagle: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our official national animal.

When I hear people respond to a request or brush off a small affront with the popular rejoinder, "no worries, " I think, you have no worries, how is that even possible? Are they now selling nitrous oxide balloons at Starbucks?

Empire inflicts a warped and hyper-attenuated state of being upon its citizens: all the distortions of national character present in privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.

The metaphor of monsters can be appropriated to illustrate selfish drives and unexamined impulses. Withal, a common trait of monsters is to take and destroy while giving back nothing in return. Accordingly, what do the big monsters of the corporate and political elite take from us -- the little monsters? To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. Corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on the time lost -- languishing in office cubicles, in commuter traffic -- or simply numbed-out and exhausted from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state. The corporate state not only devours our time, but demands, as is the case with the charges of a vampire, one grow dependent and slavish in return. Afflicted by this bloodless state, one begins to lose the vitality gained from participation in the abiding resonances of human life.

Life in the US is becoming creepier and creepier. From the cuisine, mummified in preservatives, served to insatiable shades at an off-the-interstate Cracker Barrel Restaurant to the cracked-brain casuistry marshaled to preserve the mummified empire itself, Milton, Dante, and other chthonic travel writers who chronicled the empty rage, endless craving, and other deprivations of the human spirit evinced by the damned of the underworld might recognize the psychic terrain of the present hellscape. This stanza from Milton rises to mind:

Farewell, happy fields, Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors! hail, Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor! One who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven

John Milton, Paradise Lost - Book I

The damned, as imagined by Dante, are creatures of grotesquely narrowed perception who are locked into endless feedback loops of obsessive, self-imprisoning thoughts and actions that the poet metaphorically limned as the circles of hell.

"In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. -- Ivan Illich

In contrast, we, the living, are beckoned to exist in a world of dappled light, and myriad shades of color, of a million gradations and combinations of sight and sound ... It is complex, nuanced, multi-faced, haunted by many gods ... It is anything but monomaniacal and one-sided. That is why the reductionist, materialistic obsessions of the corporate/consumer state drive its adherents flapping bat-wing crazy (like Dante's description of Satan, in the inner most, frozen circle of the Inferno).

The neoliberal corporate paradigm is based on the fallacy of exponential growth. In cybernetic theory, this is akin to "systemic runaway" i.e., analogous to a runaway steam locomotive, careening, at an exponentially faster rate of speed down the tracks because its governor function is stuck. Empire is a monster of systemic runaway; its collective mind doesn't contain an operable governor's function (that also could be termed the stuck-on-stupid override switch).

In a similar manner, a vampire is seized by a singular hunger for blood and a zombie for living flesh, our context-narrowed, consumer consciousness allows too many of the US populace to deny, diminish, or remain toxically innocent of the whole of contemporary scientific evidence regarding the gargantuan rampage of environmental destruction we have inflicted on our planet. This monster-sized denial allows us to collectively knock aside the verities of exponential mathematics, chaos, cybernetic and systems theory, and oceanographic and meteorological science like Godzilla knocks over the architecture of downtown Tokyo.

Ruthlessness, exploitation and insatiable craving define the corporate/consumer vampire's mode of being: When we dream of only money to purchase disposable things, the collective mind of the corporate state dreams we are disposable as well. Ernest Becker counseled: "Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing."

Conquest and murder abroad, anomie at home: This is the way empires bring themselves down. Sadly, anyone and anything it meets on its way down stands a good chance of coming down with it.

A monstrous emptiness gnaws at the core of the US empire; this emptiness is the progenitor of its destructive nature. Its rapacious, insatiable appetite devours all in its path: coastal wetlands, Arctic glaciers, the lives of the people of occupied lands, the hours of an individual's life, as well as one's hopes and longings.

"The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it."
--Eric Fromme

Although tacitly, the monster confronts us with this imperative: the hour has come round where we must face the abyss. In doings so, one will see one's image framed in the void. Inevitably, empires will stand at the edge of the abyss, yet its leaders and ordinary citizens alike refuse to gaze into the howling darkness.

Mark Twain had this to say on the subject: "Man cannot tell the whole truth about himself, even if convinced that what he wrote would never be seen by others. I have personally satisfied myself of that and have got others to test it also. You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting."

It has long been apparent: Those benefiting from the present system have become so ruthlessly driven that they have become bereft of the ability to reflect on their own actions. Apropos, we've witnessed the rise of the telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to these aggregations of preening narcissists to report the truth of our condition: After all, a mirror cannot reflect the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect. Regarding this contemporary class of vampiric careerists who haunt the electronic mass media, there is no one there beneath the coiffure of immaculate hair.

In an era as fraught with peril as ours, it is imperative we act with mindful urgency. Yet, we, to our detriment, have been conditioned to ignore the up-welling of our inner visions and instead allow ourselves to be drawn by mass media nixies into a holographic sea of electronic imagery ... We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever ... mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

Instead, we might scan the waters of the abyss for the gliding form of a black swan.

"True sanity entails, in one way or another, the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: [...] and through the death a rebirth, [...] the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer." - R. D. Laing (excerpt from The Politics of Experience)

How does one begin to reclaim one's soul from the usurpers of one's true self? Start with this: Embrace an exuberant fatalism in regard to the dark side of human nature -- the very essence of the forgotten symbolism of Halloween.

Of course, this world can never be made perfect ... How dull would that be? No errors committed to tease wisdom out of obdurate will. But change only comes through renunciation of the old order, and a commitment to walking into the yawning breach of the unknown. The mapmakers of antiquity stated the principle with the concision of poetry when they scribed on the edges of their maps indicating the demarcation point of the known world: "Beyond this place there be dragons."

To transform the situation: drag the deceptions that allow one to rationalize one's place in this house of horrors into the sunlight where they will burn to ash. Only by apprehending the monster within does an individual stand the chance of holding on to his humanity. A confrontation with the monstrous compels one to face mortality and human limits. This is why Gothic, even B-movie, metaphors are not an overwrought description of our present condition.

As a late friend of mine use to quip when folks were waxing grim, "It is always darkest, right before it goes completely black."

And as Henry Miller counseled: "There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy."

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/, and at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

The print and media images transmitted from Birmingham shocked and baffled the nation as well. But there was a hidden calculus underpinning the architecture of institutionalized hatred of the Jim Crow south. The viciousness of Birmingham's white underclass served the purpose of the ruling order. The city was controlled, in de facto colonial manner, by coal and steel barons whose seat of power was located up the Appalachian mountain chain in Pittsburgh, PA. The locals dubbed them the Big Mules. They resided in the lofty air up on Red Mountain; most everyone else dwelled down in the industrial smog. These social and economic inequities, perpetuated by exploitive labor practices, roiled Birmingham's white men with resentment. If they asked for higher wages, they were told: "I can hire any n*gg*r off the street for half of what I pay you." In the colonial model, all the big dollars flowed back to Pennsylvania, and economic rivalry and state-codified delusions of racial entitlement vis-à-vis Jim Crow Laws was used to insure the working class white majority rage at the ruling elite remained displaced -- their animus fixed on those with even less power and economic security than themselves. This was the poisoned cultural milieu, wherein George Wallace's "segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever" demagogic dirt kicking caused the embedded rage of the white working class to pour forth like fire ants from a trampled bed.

In a similar manner, manufactured controversies such as the gay marriage and gays in the military dust-ups of the present time have little to do with gays nor marriage nor the military. These issues are served as red meat to arouse the passions -- and loosen the purse strings -- of the fear-driven, status quo-enabling, confused souls residing at the center of the black spleen of the Republican ideological base.

Although, as a rule, the right's lies and displacements are most effective when liberals offer working people only bromides, platitudes, and lectures on propriety and good taste. Obama and the Democrats, time and time again, present demagogues with an opening the size of the cracks in Glen Beck's gray matter. Hence, the bigot-whisperers of the right are provided with a void that they can seed with false narratives; wherein, they are given free reign to cloud the air and clog the airwaves with palaver about fifth columnist threats from terrorist-toady mosque builders and gays in uniform undermining moral in the ranks by belting out show tunes in foxholes and impromptu shower stall instruction on the art of hand to hand sodomy.

Cultures are organic in nature. Combine the elements of the scorched earth policies of neoliberal capitalism, its austerity cuts and downsizing, plus the hybrid seeds of the consumer age -- and what alien foliage will rise from the degraded soil -- fields of right-wing astroturf. Add: industrial strength fertilizer. And see how our garden grows, with: Glen Beck and Sarah Palin -- the mutant seed sprouted Chia Pets of corporate oligarchy.

Yet the idea of Beck and Palin leading a populist, pitchforks and torches style uprising in the US is sheer fantasy. Most Americans wouldn't rally en mass unless they could bring their couches with them. It would look like The Prague Spring but held in a Rooms to Go showroom.

The recent demonstrations, in Washington, DC, attended by the ranks of the chronically discontent right, are about as populist as a vintage Soviet-era May Day parade was a celebration of the proletarian masses. By the informal design of our present oligarchs and the self-referential nature of the corporate owned media, US citizens have the right to say almost anything that is on their minds, as long as it has little to no effect on the status quo. If there was ever a mass movement that effectively challenged the nation's massive class inequity and threatened to reign in the excesses of the National Security State, it would be shut down faster than an open air, live sex show in the middle of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Moreover, the mid-life snit-fest engendered by the fading political power of the country's white, middle class majority, as was the case with the racial resentment of the white underclass of my native Birmingham, serves the agenda of the moneyed elite. And its goals (which its rank and file seem ill-equipped to define i.e., vague resentments and inarticulate rage hardly constitutes an agenda for societal transformation and governmental reform) are equally as self-defeating in their ramifications for debt-beleaguered, economic security-bereft working people as were the racist displacement of rage embraced and perpetuated by the exploited, working class, white majority of the Jim Crow south. Working and middle class Republicans agitating for lower taxes for the wealthy is as silly as gaunt peasants, clutching torches and welding pitchforks, besieging Louis XVI's palace at Versailles, demanding their bread rations be cut so that the royal court could enjoy larger and more lavish feasts.

Part of the irrational fear arising from economically forsaken members of the white laboring class toward President Obama is informed by race. Another aspect of it is more inchoate, as evanescent as the nature of the man himself.

Obama seems no more real, nor connected with the concerns of their lives than any other ghost in the media hologram. But Glen Beck's flutterhead histrionics reflect their desperation. This is the seduction of any garden-variety demagogue: Although their narrative is fictive, even malevolent in its deception, the emotional tone resonates with the deep-seated, helpless rage and nebulous night terrors of their audience. Beck's community theatre actor's ability to cry on cue and work himself into a lather of outrage and anguish reflects the inner desperation of his audience's experiences regarding their powerlessness before the crushing, impersonal complexity of events.

My childhood, in Birmingham, bestowed the knowledge: do not underestimate the danger of ignorant, angry people in large groups.

The feelings of drift of contemporary life in the US: its media empires -- with content as weightless in meaning and resonance as the electrons that transport the images, and the internet's pixel fiefdoms, in combination with the ad hoc, fast-buck-driven architecture of suburban nothingvilles gives present day life in the US a flimsy, provisional quality. President Obama's aura of weightlessness, his quality of emotional remoteness, only exacerbates the nebulous sense of unease on the irrational right who think with their guts not their minds. Conversely, guns feel real to these adrift denizens of the nation's spleenland. The weapon's weight in their hands wards off their unfocused sense of dread; its heft, momentarily, mitigates the unease inherent in feelings of being helplessly unmoored ... Looking down the precise beauty of its barrel distills hazy hatreds into identifiable targets. Momentarily, the ground feels solid beneath their feet. Hence, guns must be stockpiled; massive amounts of ammunition stored for ballast. The mystifying events of the era ... so muffled by the white noise of uncertainty, must yield to something as clear and decisive as the crack of a rifle shot.

Human beings will never transcend being capable of dwelling in madness on a collective level. David Hare quotes Rebecca West, in the introduction to his play, The Secret Rapture:

"Only half of us is sane: only part of us loves ... [desires] happiness, wants to die in peace ... in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable ... and wants to die in a catastrophe ... and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, chose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half can live out the latter on a collective basis. Empires gather their élan vital from such bacchanals of blood. Individually, the atomized populace of empire attempts to mitigate alienation by a vicarious revelry in violence; collectively, in the manner of any mob, from the road rage and carnage enacted on soul-devoid US interstate to the phosphorous-poisoned flesh of the people of Fallujah, the mob finds its collective comfort zone in catastrophe. Beck, Palin, and their followers are the empire's human delivery system of The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Used as tools, by corporatists, to preserve the status quo, their hidden half might well serve as its wrecking crew.

The paranoid, domestic douchescape works in the service of the US created deathscapes overseas and vice versa in a self-resonating feedback loop. Therefore, whenever the neoliberal economic policies of corporate oligarchy and the empire's ever expanding military industrial/national security/surveillance/prison complex are questioned, many conservatives personalize the critique. In their gut, they feel as if their identity is under attack. Consequently, the limbic system ascends to the throne of consciousness, as palace guards of casuistry defend the status quo. This could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) -- a pathology manifested in personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who seek to assuage the hurt and humiliation by identification with their victimizer.

This phenomenon is what is at the root of the rage rising from the faux populist right: the ground level realities of life in the corporate state are vastly incommensurate with the capitalist hagiography they hold in their heads. Moreover, when one's mental imprinting and social conditioning is challenged, one can find oneself in a bewildering place. Though the state is emotional in nature, it feels akin to being physically lost ... same disorientation, same sense of panic. Many people were never given and/or didn't develop a compass of logic by which to navigate the novel landscape that one is cast into when one's sacred beliefs are challenged. This is why change is a long time coming, and when it arrives it will not be greeted fondly.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

If a person had traveled forward in time, arriving from even the recent past, of say, twenty-five to thirty-years ago, and looked upon the present day United States -- he would have thought he had entered some alternative universe inhabited by deranged grotesques. Resembling a dadist reality television program, a sizable portion of the populace of the US (save our ugly, contemporary, sweatshop-assembled clothing) could pass for George Grosz or Max Beckmann caricatures from Weimar Republic Germany.

In the few public spaces remaining, the time traveler would encounter an over-weight, ill-informed citizenry, staring, compulsively, at hand-held electronic appliances, as if the actual world, on the other side of the small, glowing screen, held no interest for them. He would bear witness to an age when mass media imagery has crowded out and colonized almost every area of life, both public and private, and is peopled with caricatures of willful ignorance and brainless self-regard such as Sarah Palin.

As is the case with individuals, every era is endowed with a distinct character, something near a personality, all its own. If that personality could, over time, gain a sense of self-awareness, our own would blush in embarrassment viewing Palin ... Preening, sputtering her word salad palaver, resembling an aging prom queen turned infomercial spokesmodel and speaking as though she acquired the english language from shredded scraps of speeches by Ronald Reagan and random bits of Bazooka Joe bubble gum comix, she is possessed of such an extreme degree of incomprehensible self-regard it seems a form of derangement.

In little danger of gaining self-awareness, Palin both characterizes and is a caricature of the era: obsession with power and celebrity, mindless memes, and the endless, contrived drama and meaningless denouement on display in the short attention span theatre of corporate and social media -- all its devices and collective derangement -- that are reactionary in the shunning of substance and the determination to remain devoid of the deepening implications of human interaction. Ergo, these traits and characteristics are reflected in Palin and vice versa, then back again, ad infinitum, like distortions in carnival funhouse mirrors.

Does one get the feeling that the more powerless we feel, collectively, about the rising levels of economic exploitation exacted upon us and the accelerating rate of ecocide committed on the planet by corporate oligarchs, the more celebrity "news" and other tropes of empty distraction and denial will froth forth from the idiot imaginings of the pop culture douche-scape?

In our time, the understanding of the intrinsic value of almost every endeavor is reduced to the crackpot realism of its commodified and practical worth. In the popular imagination, manic commercial come-ons dominate the day, in which, images of beauty, as well as the force and foibles of human character, has been hijacked and appropriated for strictly commercial exploitation. Naturally, those who long for beauty in human or divine form turn away in mortification, and, more and more become possessed of compensatory prayers for the destruction of this empire of commercial vacuity. As the mind is ground to spittle in the gears of the corporate wheelhouse, one may begin to dream of, even yearn for, apocalypse -- a longing for a Götterdämmerung of kitsch.

For many years now, we have been witness to cultural fantasies(both of the religious and secular variety) of decline, decay, of even the end of civilization itself ... that are, perhaps, a collective wish for the taut bindings that modernity places on the psyche to be loosened. The modernist towers must fall; then our insular, nature-denuded mode of mind will be pulled down from its lofty precincts into the élan vital of primal dirt ... There, the sterility of the collective, corporatized mind will meet its end, and reborn passion and vital imaginings will bloom like wild flowers in a post-apocalyptic strip mall parking lot ... This is what, I suspect, lies beneath our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios. In these contemporary deluge myths, the hyper-commercialized and commodified psyche, befogged by its own convoluted libido, once destroyed, is now free to start life anew.

Concurrently, in the fundamentalist Christian imagination, narratives of consumerism and End Time Mythology interweave and meld, becoming a gospel of instant gratification and imminent destruction ... This is a religious cosmology resonating from a junk food paradigm: The Gospels of The Drive Thru Jesus; when The Rapture comes, our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.
But be warned, by eating of all that high caloric food, all of you Jesus-hungry Lard Asses of The Lord: If your clothes were to fall from you (as your prophecies claim) as you rise skyward, the sight of all your fat, sagging bodies, floating in air, will resemble anything but the dawning of eternal paradise -- instead the event will more likely resemble an endless tape loop of a porno video for fat fetishists shot in a zero gravity chamber.
The narrative of fundamentalist Christianity has become so encumbered with kitsch imagery that its followers hope for the destruction of the planet itself so that they can escape the soul-defying imprisonment of its creepy dogma.

Hence, the modernist conundrum is: how does one retain the depth and resonance of myth, without concretizing it into a pernicious, fundamentalist death cult? Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- the myths of the jealous, desert god -- present a problem, because they place the answer in heaven i.e., far away in a sterile paradise ... The gods of the earth have been cast-out as sinful. Hence, those religions become so obsessed with a fantasy of purity that earth-dwelling and subterranean drives and desires -- that were symbolized, for example, by the Greeks as the gods Hermes, Pan, and Hades -- appear to Christian believers as Satanic.

In other words, Christians, Jews and Muslims, with their gaze fixed on heaven, view their earthly, human half as demonic. Moreover, by becoming split-off from their human half, followers of monotheistic belief systems are prone to suffer all the ills they attribute to the devil. Satan does have a "wide stance" after all.

This is a view of the world devoid of nuance: it is a cosmology inhabited by angels of light or musky demons of darkness ... In the fantasy, there exists no Orpheus to fuse the two worlds in entrancing song ... no Hermes to guide the hero into the realm of keening and kvetching shades ... no Persephone -- her lips lacquered in pomegranate juice -- metaphorically ending the stasis of collective human childhood with the implications of all life's seasons.

In its monotheistic view of the world, these fundamentalist fantasies are comparable to logic-clutching, dry as dust, modernist narratives, because both perspectives are so confining, so stultifying to the heart and mind of an individual, that their adherents grow obsessed with fantasies of the world's demise as a way of escaping the confining nature of the belief system itself.

Accordingly, we, as a culture, may just get our wish. Beauty and mortification are the language of the soul. If one ignores beauty, then the mind will begin to dwell on beauty's hidden half: horror. One will see it everywhere. Hamlet laments:

O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
--Hamlet: Act 1, Scene 2.
William Shakespeare

There is an abiding bleakness present in the hidden half of the hyper-commercialized psyche -- a darkness visible; therein, one must gain a willingness to walk through, even pause, for a time in its stark and repellent landscape ... In order not to crackup, one must crack-wise ... to hang a hammock there, between death and the abyss. Apropos: in polar contrast to the froth, faux urgency, and con artist flattery of mass media imagery, one must be willing to accept the deepening effect of being powerless before the trajectory of history and the proliferation of human folly. Most of the time, there are no solutions, only revealing questions and clear-headed responses. For example:

Upon hearing Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, bray, "putting limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error."

Bill McKibben replied: "Summers is the perfect exemplar of that attitude: an incredibly smart guy whose context is so narrow it ends up making him very dumb indeed."

In my opinion, what caused Summer's level of intelligence to plummet at a Niagara Falls' grade incline can be traced to his unwavering fealty to the tenets of marketplace fundamentalism. The crackpot realist's notion that nature has no value in and of itself, and is only worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume.

This amounts to dharma for dimwits: A bio defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered ... commodified things that were once living beings.

What Summers' view of existence refuses to acknowledge is: The unsettling truth that what we inflict upon the world we will eventually inflict upon ourselves. When we internalize a self-destructive notion such as a rain forest is expendable -- only fit for commercial exploitation -- then this is the demeaning manner in which we regard fellow human beings. Moreover, it is an absurd and dangerous fantasy to believe our species can have autonomy from nature, and we, for any extended length of time, can have mastery over it.

Federico García Lorca imagined this delusion of psychological separation from and mechanistic dominance over nature and fellow human beings as follows.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
--Excerpt from: City That Does Not Sleep

Sadly, from evidence extant, both elite and hoi polloi of our era labor under this deranged perception. I reside on the island of Manhattan and I'm baffled that so many of my fellow New Yorkers (once a feisty, even belligerent breed) don't seem to care or even notice that they are being gamed. Our billionaire mayor protects his class; we pay for their follies, and they continue to grow richer. The game is so throughly rigged, even when they contrive to immolate the global economy, we get "austerity cuts," and they get on their Gulfstream jets and fly to Dubai.

As things stand at present, for the corporate class, their actions seem to yield no consequences. All this defies logic as well as gravity ... the invisible hand of the marketplace (actually the buckling backs of the middle and laboring classes) can't hold up their swaying tower of hubris much longer. But when it comes down, stand clear, there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles. Despite Larry Summer's pronouncements to the contrary.

Since poetic vision has no place in Summer's view of the world nor offers a solution for its ills, he may never seek counsel in what James Hillman has termed: the thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Hillman's view of the world offers a shift in perspective that could help restore our sense of beauty and tragedy, and, in doing so, bestow us with respect for our own humanity and a greater reverence for living things.

John Keats called earthly existence and the suffering therein a "vale of soul-making." In other words, we must descend into the human condition and into our own humanity in order to grow humble enough to learn and adapt to change. For our winged spirits must be forced out of their revelry of self-regard -- the intoxication of their sky-shackled swoon of impersonal flight (privileged passengers of corporate jets included) -- and be wounded by the conflicts and contretemps of this world and thus become more human.

This development means the end of grandiosity and the beginning of an appreciation of life's grandeur. Sarah Palin, Larry Summers, Mayor Bloomberg, and all the rest of the divas and supernumeraries contributing to the opera-scale cognitive dissidence of the age, will continue to belt out their crackpot realist arias, but, backstage, The Second Law of Thermodynamics has just begun to clear its throat.

I'll give the final word to Lorca:

No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
--Federico García Lorca
Excerpt from: New York (Office and Attack)

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ... No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.

And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.

Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.

Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive. With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.

Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over-eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being. In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.

So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
--From: The Waste Land

There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.

Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.

A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy. Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?

Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?

Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture:

[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
--From: The Journey of the Magi,

One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture. Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it. Its logos inhabits the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.

Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies. There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.

So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"

Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.

Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry

In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Collapse

Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth's warnings rising like musical notes ... swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico ... literally falling to earth as chemical rain.

I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me ... It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.

Some mornings, I don't think I can compose myself to face it.

But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind ... take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me ... attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread ... console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed ... torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing ... in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire's manifest death-urge revelry.

Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:

The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words -- mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels -- texted and twittered into meaningless air.

So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects ... giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk -- as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge -- and the earth's entropic furies gather.

We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever ... mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

I thought of Lorca; in truth, preposterously, I attempted to pray to Lorca who advised that one should listen for the heart of god beating within the monster of the world.

But I am losing heart searching for the monster's heart. Thus far: finding only my own spleen. For this reason: our collectives striving and private equivocations seem the thanotopic dream of destroyer gods: The nightmare manifested before us as strip malls and shopping plazas ... constructed of bones of extinct species; interiors of suburban subdivisions shuffling with resentful phantoms ... estranged from the libido of culture and communion; dead zone freeways ... the air shaken and riven by the roar of its death-enamered fury.

Before me: Atlanta Georgia, USA ... glazed in asphalt inferno of late-June.

Yet, held in the heat-pummeled air above, I saw fuchsia mimosa blossoms hoisting defiant flags above the misery of traffic.

The effrontery of those spindly blooms of fuchsia, its colors as raw as my own nettled heart. It hurt deep within my chest even to gaze upon such a shade of unconquerable pink.

I want to shake branches of flowering mimosa in the faces of the ministers and minions of junk ... to see ... if they become stricken as I was -- as tickled pink as I am.

Later, will I hear reports on the evening news of a million human beings in their offices and cubicles afflicted with seemingly out-of-context desires ... suffering from spontaneous longings for the caress of blossom-scented winds ... suddenly struck by an ungovernable need to emerge unto city streets and genuflect before the spindling glory of these seditious flowers?

So, in short, the ministrations of the mimosa convinced me to keep on living. But I had little appetite for the endeavor.

The meals prepared from this harvest of junk turned my stomach. I clamped my teeth tight against it. I kept searching for hope's greenhouse -- where blooms of human understanding open and breathe -- but I kept wandering into the empire's slaughtering barn.

I began to mutter, "awful."

"Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then I chanted it aloud, "Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then and there, I decided I would make "awful" my morning and evening prayer.

"He's awful, She's awful -- This food is awful -- The news is awful -- Our leaders are awful. You awful people have created such an awful mess by living out the awful implications of your awful lives that all mirrors should be renamed awful frames.

I ask you, Rilke: What awful angels swim through the poisoned sky?

Anticipating the question, Rilke, a century prior, answered:

" I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you."

So I riffed on it and rasp it, snarled it and sobbed it, whispered it to myself and posited it in public places. I warbled it and choked on it, laughed about it and wept over it.

I returned home laughing and sobbing. I could no longer keep the floodgates closed: The things of the world, massive and minuscule, tragic and preposterous, came coursing into my consciousness: giant squids and chihuahuas arrived, death camps and Dollywood arose, diamonds and Skiddles were proffered, world-destroying comets and blue snow cones hurdled through deep space, while killing sprees and hand jobs, inspired exchanges and insipid palaver, grace and goofiness transpired on earth as always.

My wife found me in this state, both yearning and mortified, hungry and queasy, desperate for solitude and yet longing to be touched.

She reached for me as the two fronts within me met, merging the moist breeze of the tropics and the cold wind of the Arctic ... creating pelting hail and huge, warm raindrops ... engendering weeping and caressing -- as inundating sorrow mingled with torrents of desire.

All the while, I was stammering, "awful, awful, awful," but the pleasure struck me momentarily monosyllabic and only an ecstatic "A-W-E" issued from me.

Shuddering ... awestruck, awfully grateful, I collapsed onto her -- awed by the sublime of our simpatico breathing -- awed by the soft light of scented candles lambent upon her skin --awed by her generosity in faking her own orgasm concurrent with my own (sometimes there is surpassing grace in such small, selfless lies).

And of equal importance: awed by all the awful things that waited outside of our room that I resolved I would try to endure and transmute into song.

As I drifted towards sleep, I said Kaddish for my convictions. I dreamed my lips left impressions traced in ash. Braille sheet-music caressed me from the breeze of an electric fan. All of my points of reference floated away from me like transmigrating galaxies. Everything was adrift: mind, sorrows, heart and heavens.

Upon awakening in bed with my wife of many years, I turned to her and asked, "Pardon me, but have we met?"

I fumbled for conversation ... wanting to make a good first impression.

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky." --Rainer Maria Rilke

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/

Collapse

My father was born on a Reservation in the American mid-west. His people, like the Palestinians, resisted invaders of European ancestry and were crushed. At present, both peoples remain exiled and caged in their native land.

The Jewish side of myself understands the historical traumas that gave rise to the yearning for a tribal Homeland. Atavistically, I suffer the Jewish state's collective night terrors and reel in its daylight rationalizations for its brutalities. But the Native American in me knows the rage of those crushed by the heartless force of an invading people.

Neither my father's peoples' bows and arrows nor the "threat" of metal rods, clutched by a few activists aboard the illegally seized Gaza-bound Peace Flotilla, nor Hamas' small rockets will change the tragic trajectory wrought by a tribalist land grab. History reveals a conquered and caged people will starve, in both body and soul, as they watch their hopes wither to dust. But I will not condemn them for their struggle, and even their "provocations" -- dangerous and outrageous provocations ... such as the desire not to live out their lives behind ghetto walls, and the actions they take accordingly. (Even though, a provocation will never soften the banal mind of a bully to end his reign of brutality.)

To this day, within me, there are traits of cultural Judaism that have not been washed away in the deluge of shame I experience when confronted by the actions of the state of Israel and the casuistry of her apologists. Deep in my genetic structure, I carry tribal memories of Diaspora and its concomitant feelings of alienation from majoritarian culture. Most often, I still apprehend human existence from the perspective of an alien and interloper, believing my survival is dependent upon knowing where I stand in hostile terrain. By rote, I play the role of the outsider, wary and savvy in my dealings with a hostile gentile world.

In this, I understand the paranoid nature of the Jewish state and the reasons underlying her supporters' rationalizations of her many crimes. Self-deception is at the root of habitual deceit. Sadly, the true believers of the Zionist cause have become case studies in that tragic trait.

The archetype of the eternal outsider and his involuntary wandering still resonates within me. In this manner, I feel kinship with my urban Ashkenazi/Sephardim ancestors ... those who knew a just society, structured on social justice and civil equity, was the Jewish minority's best hope for living in safety among a gentile majority -- not this narrative of grandiosity and exceptionalism one hears muttered by bearded boneheads (and other Bronze Age cultural throwbacks) at the Wailing Wall and posited on the editorial pages of the Jerusalem Post.

By stealing those parcels of arid acreage in the Middle East, Zionists will match generations of hostile Goyim in the harm they level upon future Jewry: By having chosen mindless might over justice and fairness, they have bestowed a wasteland upon the human hearts of their descendants.

Every human being is born, powerless and vulnerable, into a world they did not create. Ergo, for the awakening heart of the young, it can be a barren land, a dreamscape of ghosts, built by the bony hands of the dead ... their mouldering myths carrying the cold of the grave not the eros of the breathing moment. Ghosts such as these curse at the present with the imprecatory psalms implicit in the foundation of the Zionist state -- and, as the nation's history unfurled, became explicit in her policies. Israel's collective brutalities are the blind thrashings of traumatized souls who, in their agonies, wound all near them.

Such forces of toxic, displaced vehemence can uncouple us from our humanity, warping libido into murderous intent, reducing meaningful endeavor to selfish striving, and twisting our exuberance into zealotry, thereby achieving a form of ass-backward alchemy by transforming living human beings into resentful shades -- those seemingly no longer here ... reacting rather than responding, reciting propaganda as opposed to seeking meaning, squandering the golden, eternal moment before us by transmuting it into leaden habituations of the mind. For all appearances becoming a ghost, haunting the moments of one's own life -- non-responsive, sans retrograde resentment, to the élan vital of the world -- dead, but for the redundancy of one's breathing.

In this way, the spirit of a culture can become a mob of resentful, vicious ghosts. With ghosts, the context of their suffering is misplaced. They cannot haunt those who gave them injury. Their tormentors are long dead as well. The raging spirits of the Zionist state can no longer locate the historical oppressors of the Jewish people, for they have long since been conscripted to dust. Hence, the adherents of Zionism reap vengeance against those living souls who misfortune has placed near them.

The Jewish state demands its neighbors make amends for crimes they did not commit -- to cower before the steel-toe might of its military and make perpetual penitence for the sins of Europe.

Even if they did so: Such an act would not restore my mother's childhood ... would not return to flesh the ashen remains of the millions who made their graves in the winds of twentieth century Europe.

For the Jewish people, as is the case with all humanity, survival in the present age is not dependent on military prowess nor the blessing of an imaginary father in the sky. Awakening to new realities restores meaning and resonance to our lives. Felicity to the putrid, Bronze Age admonitions of a savage sky spirit involving the ownership of desert real-estate only entombs the heart and mummifies the mind.

Accordingly, the most putrefied and pernicious of these fallacies -- the delusion that there exists a "Chosen People" -- must be the first to be toppled.

God's Chosen People? Chosen for what reason: First, divinely bestowed entitlement to a parcel of parched landscape, then exile, persecution, extermination? And now for what purpose: Simply to join the brutal ranks of history's bullies?

When the ashes of the Holocaust cleared, this is the world my mother's tribe built: A right-wing state that believes its godly mission is to lord over and oppress a militarily weaker people. Moreover, if they resist -- starve them, murder them in their homes, drive them into exile. The Israelis seem to be demanding this of the Palestinian people: Why don't you simply accept your lot as being compliant lessors and stay confined to your ghettos?

Furthermore, if you object, then leave -- go into exile -- wander the earth without a home. It would seem, over the course of the lives of the last few generations of Jewish believers, the ancient myth has morphed: The desert god has become more of an earthly ironist than wrathful sky-daddy.

In fact, mirroring the ways of their invented father in heaven, some of my blood relatives have become such inadvertent ironists, as they, at this moment, squat in Palestine, bristling with misplaced rage, manic with delusional entitlement, and, on the whole, casting a curse upon future generations that will poison their hearts and cascade through the generations with a terrible symmetry.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website Ebullient Skepticism.

Collapse

These revelations should not come as a shock. Torture, official secrecy, and other sundry apparatus and accouterments of the national security state are about the only viable enterprises remaining in this declining nation. Moreover, one of the defining traits of the insecure (both among men and nations) is to stand, bristling in a paranoid posture, with feet planted in stubborn defiance of changing circumstances, snarling at invisible threats and imagined affronts, as life moves on with indifferent grace.

Recently, in the latest in a series of setbacks and self-inflicted wounds, the national identity of the United States sustained another humiliating blow when General Motors was driven into a ditch, declared totaled, and then stripped and sold for spare parts. This event throws a rod into the smoking engine block of the nation's dream machine: The automobiles manufactured in Detroit were once symbols of American power, freedom of mobility, even sexual allure. But the world has sped ahead, leaving the US wheezing dust in its wake: The era of high horsepower and American ascendancy, with its glinting chrome conceit and reenforced steel illusions of unassailable power, now sits upon concrete blocks rusting in the automobile graveyard of history.

At present, and for many years now, the American automobile culture has meant little more than feckless commuters stalled in traffic, alternatively sullen and seething in their powerlessness. Yet, this is not the time to throw a populist pity party: The people of the nation face a future circumscribed by their own lack of self-awareness and their refusal of civic engagement. Year after year, they have displayed avidity for little more than the rigged, roadside attractions of the corporate carnival; hence, traffic is heavy on this lost highway, all lanes are jammed on the superhighway to Clowntown, U.S.A.

Seemingly, the nation's hopes are only being kept flickering by caffeine, antidepressants, and the naive belief that they -- accepting, as Americans have, since birth, the narcissistic mythos of the consumer state -- are a special breed whose God-kissed destiny would forever fall outside the failures and contretemps of earthly life. Therefore, Americans cling to the core conviction that there should not be any consequences for their own oceanic apathy, child-like credulity, and small time cupidity in regard to their relationship to the elitist power brokers whose financial chicanery and political scheming determined their hapless fate.

Both prole and plutocrat set the wheel in motion, and both wait for some kind of deux ex machina, whereby Fortuna will smile once again on the hobbled nation, and restore it and all its special children to their rightful place -- up above the world of regret, reflection, and amends -- back upon their highchairs of infantile entitlement. And while the populace waits in vain for the Goddess of Luck to rise from the wreckage of their vanity, they still have a glut of junk food, guns, and porn (some of the last remaining goods produced by the nation) to act as palliatives ... miserable substitutes -- that they are -- for sustenance, feelings of empowerment, and eros.

At present, the citizens of the US moan "poor us" as they stagger through this "time of crisis." The American people seem as helpless as pitiful puppies whimpering before the multiple and multiplying perils of the present. Yet, they are not wronged innocents, made blameless victims because of their hapless but well-meaning credulity. Nonsense. US consumers have been the beneficiaries of the mad dog policies of the American corporate/national security state nexus. Greedily, they devoured the scraps dropped from the tables of the oligarchs. This PitifulPup/Mad Dog Syndrome defines the era, and is the collective mode of being of citizens of the American Empire (regardless of the public relations makeover the Obama Administration is attempting to pull off worldwide).

For meaningful change to occur, Americans must look deeper into themselves and into the collective soul of the nation. Not far beneath the bristling ego structure of the torturer (and his enablers in the general population) is a quaking pup possessed of a monstrous need for absolute control. Incongruously, the torturer is terrified by his victim. The torturer, like the empire itself, cannot control the vastness of life (he sees the world's uncontrollability as a ticking time bomb somewhere near him he cannot locate) -- but his victim, the human fragment of the world quivering before him, can be (must be!) totally dominated. Or so it seems within the fear frothing mind of the Mad Dog torturer. But this does not suffice: The absolute domination of one solitary human being cannot bridle the uncertainty inherent in life. The torturer's dread cannot be assuaged. In the same manner an alcoholic cannot dominate a bottle of booze by will power, a power drunk
nation cannot subdue its terror by practicing torture.

And what is it that invokes such fear in the people of America? Deep down, Americans are stricken with abject fear by the fact that it is impossible to continue being the dominate power on the planet and being indulged, like spoiled children, with all the benefits and privileges such a position affords. The United States tortures to maintain the global status quo. Remember: "Our way of life is non-negotiable." We'll torture or kill anyone (even ecologically, the planet) for a tank of gas and a bag of Cheetos (or any of an assortment of tasty, salt-rich snack foods).

If this preposterous way of life was a classic, Madison Avenue ad campaign, its catchphrase might be: "Bet you can't torture just one." Or: "Go for it!" Or the latest offering of glistening snake oil that has been marketed to the nation: "Yes, we can."

But, as far as investigating US governmental policies of torture and then prosecuting its architects and operatives goes, the Obama administration's mantra has degenerated from, "yes, we can," to "no, can-do." Unless President Obama reverses course, he will prove himself not to be an agent of change, but another water-board carrier for the psychopaths of the status quo.

Such a high level of denial only increases the intensity of the murderous libido that flows beneath the surface of American life -- that chthonic river of repressed rage surging within the psyches of the besieged laboring class, who, despite being burdened by debt slavery and chafed by ever diminishing prospects, still clutch the kitschy iconography of the god of the consumer state. Although that god has fallen, it will not go solemnly to the boneyard of dead myths.

In the contemporary US, debt slavery, a lack of future prospects, the constant threat of bankruptcy and homelessness, and the danger of gun violence are all very real; yet, day and night, alluring media mirages beckon Americans into a blinding wasteland of false hope. Daily existence feels unreal -- a constant, hollow communion with electronic phantoms. A chasm of alienation opens between the polarity of unreal expectations and degraded real life situations. Toxic shlock syndrome sets in.

The sense of alienation is so profound that many citizens on the political right believe that President Obama cannot in reality be a citizen of this country; his name is too foreign, his skin possesses a hue too different from their own. His birth certificate must be as bogus as an IOU from Bernie Madoff. He can't be a real American; he seems no more real, nor connected with the concerns of their lives, than any other ghost in the media hologram.

But guns feel real to these troubled folks. The weapon's weight in their hands wards off an unfocused sense of dread; its heft, momentarily, mitigates feelings of being helplessly adrift ... Looking down the precise beauty of its barrel distills down hazy hatreds into identifiable targets. Within their fog-shrouded minds, the very presence of that "slick-ass usurper" in the White House causes the ground to feel less than solid beneath their feet. Ergo, guns must be stockpiled; massive amounts of ammunition stored for ballast. These treacherous days, that are so muffled by the white noise of uncertainty, must yield to something as clear and decisive as the crack of a rifle shot.

A collective tantrum rages on the right, as their ranks hold their breath and hoard bullets. In the enveloping darkness of political powerlessness, they are sleeping with their Sarah Palin night-light on, then tossing fitfully awake attempting to mollify themselves by gazing mindlessly at Fox News crib mobiles, then scanning the heavens craving a Happy Meal apocalypse.

"I won't share my toys; they're mine! I want my tax cut lolly! Now!" Their sippy cups runneth over with rage. Overweight, evincing a junk food engendered, toddler-like waddle, and blubbering in their snit fit of thwarted id, they resemble heavily armed Teletubbies in the throes of an angel dust-induced psychosis.

The nation seethes with cranky, overgrown babies who kill. How could it not come to this, when the nation tortures like little boys plucking the wings from hapless flies? But the Empire of Perpetual Id cannot be sustained. What Obama apprehends, and was the underlying theme of his Cairo stem-winder: The people of the world have grown weary of our brattiness. They wish to rouse us from our long nappytime of exceptionalism. The world has moved on, while too many Americans sit bawling in their toxic innocence.

Meanwhile, the most special children whose privileged faces were ever touched by the golden light of the sun, the elite of Wall Street, bang their silver spoons on their skyscraper highchairs, whining, "We want more bonus candy, We want to go for a ride in my Gulfstream Jet stroller, We want to go play in our Dubai sandbox -- Gimme, gimme! -- Now!"

Every four to eight years, presidential elections are held in the United States of Infantile Omnipotence in which we attempt to personify the nation with an adult face. Usually we fail: Bush with his crankiness and his tantrums of mass destruction; Clinton with his oceanic overreach and his inability to delay gratification; Reagan with his senile, regressed-to-childhood naps ... He even called his wife, "mommy."

Barrack Obama appears to be an adult. Yet, in our childish national psyche, panicked and paralyzed because its arrested development has left it bereft of the ability to navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world, having Obama as the face of the nation is like The Portrait of Dorian Gray -- but played out in reverse -- and produced as a pop-up book.

Worse, it appears the nation's collective mode of being might proceed straight from infancy to decrepitude, only briefly stopping in puberty for a session of online porno-induced masturbation.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected] Visit Phil's website Ebullient Skepticism.

Collapse

On a collective basis, we as a nation are living through such a time. At present, we are witnessing the descending spiral of Icarusian Capitalism; our sacred delusion of the perpetual ascendancy of a god-like market place lies broken in the dust. Malls and Mcmansions stand abandoned, desolate as the edifices of forgotten gods, as the come-ons of the salesmen of deregulated capitalism are churned to spittle amid a cacophony of collapsing market platitudes.

And not an uptick in public optimism, nor a surge of euphoria on Wall Street, nor the "invisible hand of the marketplace" sprinkling pixie dust will bring back the Olympian days of 2005, when the wise men of Washington and Wall Street knew the force of gravity was just a myth believed in by those embittered prophets of doom whose only joy in life is fantasizing the fall of their wealthy betters. It does not matter a damn how many dollars our present day believers of neoliberal tall tales, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, pour into the hole in the ground where the crash occurred, a bean stalk, twining skyward towards a golden, debt-negating goose, will not flower forth.

Fortunately, when false convictions fall, it is possible for a leveling of sanity to prevail. But there can be no more hubristic flights borne on waxen wings. No more multibillion dollar confidence scams from Wall Street. No more smash and grab imperial wars. No more tea parties for the dim and deranged. There is the banality of evil, and then there is the evil of banality. Both, the present era has produced in abundance. From about the late nineteen-seventies to the present, The United States all but ceased manufacturing products and went into the business of manufacturing marketplace hype, baseless fears, and illusionary enemies. Due to this economic and cultural derangement, a dark tower of self-imprisoning delusions has circumscribed our nation's fate. Is it any wonder the quintessential dark lord of the darkest tower, Dick Cheney, will not exit the scene?

And what will foster real change? Not pleasing sound bites and rousing oratory from President Obama, then a continuance of many of the pernicious policies of his criminal predecessors. Conversely, the iron gates of Hell must crash closed behind us. The absence of light must grow so unbearable to us that we're willing to ask how is it we arrived in this place and become willing to challenge our most cherished concepts about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. That is the sort of "indefinite detention" the nation could use. What is needed is the audacity of hopelessness.

President Obama and the Democratic Congress could have ridden a wave of public discontent towards meaningful reform, but instead they have hugged the shore. And they seem to be surveying the property, scouting locations to build beach house retreats for their elitist benefactors and the militarist fantasists whose tsunami-sized arrogance wrought the present destruction in the first place.

Meanwhile, right-wing radio haters, like penned dogs, bark into the empty air of their meaningless day. Daily, we negotiate our way through the encompassing banalities and casual brutalities of soft oligarchy, as beneath it all churns the nebulous rage of the powerless that creates an audience for the likes of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

It is high season for those virtuosos of displaced anger, because not only the nation's treasure, but its élan vital, has been squandered inflating the bubble-borne vanities of the ultra-wealthy up to the point of economic immolation. The elite have perpetrated an act of catastrophic clownishness so massive that it has left the rest of us stunned, and left to pick amid the debris of our exploded hopes. Bur hopes do not die pretty. Once dead, they do not rise like the redeemer gods of myth; instead, they stagger about, rotting and snarling like B-movie mummies. They leave us with our mouths tasting of ash. Our hearts choked by dry thistle.

Yet the buffoons of Wall Street and the killer clowns of our militarized Disneyland strut and swagger past the smoking ruins they left behind after their high-end looting spree. In their plundering, the only thing they didn't steal for themselves was any sense of self-awareness. Or is self-awareness necessary when you're obscenely rewarded for your narcissistic follies? What motivation would a high-chair tyrant have to modify his self-centeredness when he is shielded from the consequences of his bratty machinations? Why become an honest actor in the realm of human events when one can strut through life with a con artist's inexplicable sense of entitlement?

And what about the rest of us? The financial elite, by means of their bagman in the Executive Branch and Congress, continue to plunder our hopes for a meaningful future byway of that legal larceny popularly known as the bailout, i.e., the latest transfer of wealth from the bottom upward. This is why the buffoonish tea-bagger types hoard their resentments. All they've been left with is a heap of fragmented hatreds. Those toxic baubles they shore against reality.

Tragically, when not addressed, fear and resentment will increase in intensity and can become an exponentially growing feedback loop of paranoid rage. At present, such a process has created that haunted forest of the airwaves known as right-wing talk radio. It is the voice of anger feeding off of itself, and it seems dangerously close to reaching the point of hypertrophic breakdown. It is the audio analog of a belief system in exponential decay ... The more the rot increases in the system the more Glen Beck babbles and weeps. It is physically manifested in the cataclysmic ecosystem of Rush Limbaugh's repulsive bulk ... his corpulent carcass is the morbid bloat of unregulated capitalism.

Heracles and the Lernean hydra
image from flickr.com by Eva the Weaver

Right-wing hatred is a many headed hydra that feeds on fear and desperation. It cannot be fought by attacking its spindling heads, each of its hissing mouths dripping with black poison. Instead, one must make thrusts at the noxious heart of the raging beast. But one cannot know where the heart of an external monster beats without suffering the agonies of one's own. Accordingly, one must allow one's heart to be broken. And don't look to Barack Obama's bland charm to mend it. Because the honest grief of the heart provides a point of reference, a foundation of knowledge, as to why the monster is inconsolable in its wounded fury; hence, this provides a strategic starting point as to how to fight it.

And that is why we must release the photographs of torture. Moreover, we must bring public ignominy upon the respectable psychopaths in high places who mandated these policies, plus bring a leveling of shame upon the high-flying, highchair tyrants of high finance who exploded the global economy. Our ugliness must be public like a frog. The nasty secrets must be revealed; the mortifying pictures gazed upon. Our stomachs should seize up in revulsion. The ordeal must exact such a degree of revulsion within us that we will never again allow these despicable practices to transpire on our watch.

There is a stench of putrefaction rising from beneath our feet. We must uncover the corpses laid under by empire. Being placated by Barrack Obama's bland charm -- in the same manner we were cowed by George W. Bush's infantile petulance, amused by Bill Clinton's brilliant, bad boy seductions, and drugged by Ronald Reagan's stupefying 1940's Hollywood bromides -- will only defer the reckoning and render us ignorant stooges in the impersonal sweep of history. As a people, we have a choice: We can be strengthened by embracing uncomfortable truths, or we can grow enervated and enfeebled by pushing them away.

But sadly, Obama is attempting the tried and tested political trick -- used effectively by Washington hacks from Watergate ("Our long national nightmare is over") to Iran-Contra ("We cannot have another failed presidency") -- of inducing the uniquely American trait of Instant Amnesia that has, in the past, allowed the empire to stagger on, repeatedly committing variations of the same crimes, then coddling and protecting the same variety of corrupt elitists responsible, and thereby, reducing the Constitution to tatters and rendering the rule of law rubble.

But this time, the rot is too deep, the pathology too systemic. Obama's placebo presidency will not stem the hypertrophic decay. Granted, it was good to evict the previous, psychotic tenants from the property (Although Dick Cheney seems to be stalking the place with his obsessive, media drive-bys.) but that does nothing to repair the collapsing foundation of the structure, its core eaten away by an infestation of anti-democratic termites. Rather than addressing the core issue, the deterioration of the rights and liberties granted by the U.S. Constitution, President Obama is wallpapering over the rot wrought by the national security state's termite hive mind of authoritarian appetites, that has been, silently, and hidden by darkness, gnawing the house of state to sawdust.

Again our choice: Either open up the decay within the system to the light of day and start the process of rebuilding and renewal, or allow the republic-ravening pestilence to continue unchallenged, hence unabated, and let the nation go bughouse crazy as the house comes down around us to the strains of the insect-brain stridulations of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000 @ yahoo.com or visit his site at http://www.philrockstroh.com

Collapse

"Show your wounds," exhorted the late 20th Century artist Joseph Boyce. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us. Out of painful truth, beauty is born. But, antithetical to the orthodoxies of consumer capitalism, there are no shortcuts. According to legend, Faust sold his soul for a glimpse of eternal beauty and the hidden knowledge of the world. Sadly, we've done likewise (but worse, pathetically) for a glimpse of Paris Hilton's privileged (but hardly gated and guarded) cooter.

Here, now, sprawled upon the detritus of our dignity, we are confronted by the exponential dynamics of decay known as the US Presidential Election cycle. In this, all three corporate candidates are of little use to us. Although all three have done very well for themselves by the present and prevailing arrangement known as Disaster Capitalism.

What motivation do they have to change the system by which they've thrived? McCain, Clinton, and Obama must serve the interests of the corrupt corporate class -- or else they would be marginalized. Paradoxically, as we have witnessed, as of late, if they make even the most minute rumblings to the contrary -- as for example, blundering into a steaming pile of the obvious such as the observation that the battered laboring class of the nation might be embittered by their lot --- they risk political immolation by being labeled an elitist.

Of course, Obama is an elitist. (As are Clinton and McCain.) And he has been put on notice by the Powers That Be that they have no problem with him being among their ranks, as long as he doesn't go rattling off at the mouth about those the rigged system benefits and those it kicks daily in the gut. Because in a political culture as far down the rabbit hole as is this one, the surest way to be branded an elitist is to refuse to serve the elite. (Not that Obama threatened any such thing.) This is the modus operandi of the lacquered, autoerotic dudes and dolls of the
corporate media and the K Street cash-flushed phonies of the American political classes: Pose as protecters of the beer-bleary multitudes, as, all the while, carrying vintage Cabernet for a privileged few.

This is not a situation fraught with layers of ambiguity in which any deeper meaning can be mined: Below the corporate media's electronic cloud of nebulous phoniness lies a dense core of calcified phoniness. Thus it is difficult not to harbor contempt for this cartel of narcissistic strivers who have networked the nation into a perpetual state of cataclysmic ignorance. Seemingly, their creed is: Let the ignorant multitudes languish on the low nutrient, junk news we serve them from the drive thru windows of our corporate media outlets, while the political and business elite cannibalize what is left of the republic.

The ongoing tragedy in Iraq and the ecological and economic turmoil roiling the globe are consequences of the domination-driven mindset that the mainstream media protects. Ergo, increasingly violent responses from outside forces, both of the human and natural variety, are rising across the planet. America, many shocks and sorrows are coming soon (probably sooner
than you think) to that vacuous bubble known as "your way of life."

It should be increasingly clear to see that the corporate media's job has never been to be unbiased chroniclers of the events and circumstances of a free republic. Rather, they are active agents serving to protect and promulgate the pernicious myths of free market capitalism. And they are a highly partisan lot. Moreover, they have been highly successful in their mission. Hence, our lives, both inner and outer, have been conquered and colonized by the corporate empire, and a resultant forced occupation dominates our days determining the trajectory of our brief lives upon this earth.

"[S]ick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity." -- W.B. Yeats

Yet, we, against all evidence, believe we are free actors in a spontaneous, unfolding democratic drama. When, in reality, we have been cast as dehumanized supernumeraries in a lethal farce that renders all concerned both oppressor and oppressed. This is the central paradox that binds us. And it is why the average American cannot see our imperial occupation of Iraq and our increasingly dangerous belligerence towards Iran for what it is. How can we have a modicum
of empathy for the people of Iraq when we refuse to even glimpse our own degraded condition and our complicity therein?

"God Damn America," the people of Sadr City must rage, as the bombs shake their homes and tear the flesh from their friends and family. "God Damn, America," I mutter, echoing the good Reverend Wright, as I witness the indifference of the American people to the war crimes committed by our nation's leaders.

By the insidious technique of propaganda by omission, the public has been manipulated into a state approaching criminal obliviousness. "What is this crazy talk about the calamity of class stratification that defines and divides the nation, and what sort of demented, leftist loser would even raise the topic among decent company?" our present mandarins of media scoff when the topic of class inequity is broached. Add to that, the ongoing ruse of the ceaseless dissemination of fear perfected by the right-wing media noise machine and then parroted in the
mainstream media that goes something like the following: "There are evil entities afoot in the
nation known as radical liberals who scheme to take away your guns and give them to slamofascist terrorists so that those agents of Satan over at Planned Parenthood will be free to rip fetuses from their mothers wombs in order to expose the unborn to porn."

This is the reason for the cacophony of inanity that dominates the coverage of the political events of our time: It serves as white noise that drowns out unpleasant truths. It is the mood music piped into our national bubble. Accordingly, trivial and specious narratives drive and dominate our national political debate and it has, as a consequence, rendered the nation's public too shallow to even apprehend the extent of the damage inflicted by official treachery, professional cupidity, and the degree of their own degradation therein.

Otherwise, the collective psyche of the nation would be shaken to the core. Tragically, there is no longer any core to be found. There is merely the surface sheen of the American bubblescape ... its surface taut with inner tension as it is stretched to its limits, as, all the while, reality bristles ever closer to its over-stretched skin.

Collapse

Over the last three decades, the authoritarian right has risen to create the nation they have been longing for since their humbling by the Watergate scandal. After being subdued and humiliated by the mechanisms of a free republic, the right has turned the tables -- and subdued and humiliated the republic. If the trend continues, all but unchallenged and unabated, we might as well replace the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty with a taser.

How could it come to this? How did so many US citizens grow so apathetic, oblivious, if not flat-out hostile to the tenets of a free republic?

The authoritarianism inherent to the structure of multi-conglomerate corporatism is antithetical to the concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. Most individuals -- bound by a corporation's secrecy-prone, hierarchical values -- will, over time, lose the ability to display free thinking, engage in civic discourse, and even be able to envisage the notion of freedom.

This is true, from the florescent light-flooded aisles of Wal*Mart to the insular executive offices of Haliburton to the sound stages of CNN and Fox News. Under the prevailing order, reality, for the laboring class of the corporate state, has become debt slavery; in contrast, the simulacrum of reality, in which, the striver class exists, is a milieu defined by obsessive careerism. Under the hegemony of corporatism, freedom might as well be fairy dust. It only exists in an imaginary land, not the places one arrives by way of one's morning and evening commute.

In addition, economically, by way of decades of financial chicanery, perpetrated by the nation's business and political elite, we are eating our seed crop, and the consequences of this harvest of deceit have left the people of the US, intellectually and spiritually malnourished.

As a result, many attempt to sate the keening emptiness and mitigate the chronic unease by gorging themselves on the Junk Food Jesus of End Time mythology, which is a belief system wherein corporeal events and actions (personal and collective) have no lasting consequence because even the human body is to be cast aside, like a junk food wrapper, when the cosmic CEO decides to make the earth a part of his heavenly franchise.

Accordingly, the corporate state requires modes of being that evince obliviousness and obedience (the defining traits of the US consumer) on the part of the majority of the populace. Ergo, the rise of both Christian consumerists and the vast apparatus of the right-wing propaganda matrix that dominates news cycles via the electronic mass media.

All coming to pass, as George W. Bush -- the reigning mascot of this fantasyland of infantile omnipotence and instant gratification -- is rocked to sleep by his handlers cooing preposterous tales of how history will place him in the pantheon of those men whose greatness was unrecognized by the shallow and petty minds of their own era.

When, in fact, Bush, whose ruinous wars of aggression, deficit-ballooning tax breaks for the wealthy, and policies of crony capitalism (that enabled the economy-decimating, easy credit banking scams of the present) displays the character traits of a man ridden with severe psychological trauma; his attempts to tamp down immense inner turmoil, by means of his grandiose bearing, his absolute certitude regarding his own infallibility, and his bullying behavior, have resulted in an exteriorizing of his pathologies on a global scale, and this is playing out ugly, for all concerned.

Why do the people of the nation (for the most part) slouch, slack-jawed and passive, before this assault upon their collective integrity and personal dignity?

For generations, the ephemeral dazzle of pop culture paternalism and tabloid Manichaeism, as confabulated by advertising and public relations hacks and corporate news courtesans, has overwhelmed gravitas, history, even self-awareness. As all the while, shallow opportunists have been elevated to the status of pundits, experts and sages. Withal, the present system generously rewards those individuals who have mastered the art of impersonating human traits and responses in utterly contrived environments. As a whole, the majority of the populi have come to garner information about the world at large, and, worse, their own self-image, from a medium where phoniness is a treasured commodity, while authentic human traits and responses are banished to a beggar's road.

Is it any wonder that the media types who thrive in these artificial settings have come to define authenticity as being only those attributes that appear authentic on television? Apropos, if you ask these "media personalities" about the shortcomings and corruption of the present system, they will plead the careerist's Nuremberg Defense ... of only being a stormtrooper obeisant to the "bottom line."

Fantasy alert: One would hope that if one were to descend down a ladder constructed of these layers upon layers of bottom lines, one would arrive in a Hell reserved for those possessed with such shameless cupidity.

Reality redux: Yet as much as the human heart might yearn for such outcomes, there will never arrive the terrible majesty and bitter reckoning of anything resembling Judgement Day, heralded by celestial trumpets and legions of naked and cowering sinners; instead, in human affairs, there arises dire exigencies that can no longer be ignored nor explained away. The arrival of such a moment for the US is nearly at hand.

When a nation manifests a mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, in combination with uncheck power emanating from an insular and arrogant elite, a golden age of peace and plenty is as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami. As sure as a village of desperate fools who devour their seed crop, a nation that refuses universal health care to its children -- yet rushes to the aid of its parasitic class of wealthy "speculators" and "investors" from the consequences of their own greed-besotted, fiscal debacles -- is doomed.

This is the classic pattern of collective immolation experienced by a nation when power and privilege is increasingly consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. In essence, this is the key to the conundrum paralyzing the leadership of the Democratic Party: In a culture in which an individual's worth is determined by the degree one can be exploited by the corrupt interests that control both the private and public sector, the public at large has little value to the political establishment ... That is: other than, every few years, being bamboozled for their votes in the sham spectacles known as the US electoral process, a scam mostly financed, hence controlled, by the aforementioned big money interests.

In sum, this is the reason the Democratic Party feels little allegiance to their base. In turn, the political classes themselves are only of value to the big money corporate elite, because, by their delivery of staggering amounts of pork, massive tax cuts, and the passage of desired anti-regulatory legislation, they serve as their errand boys.

Moreover, the corporate control of congress is a microcosm of US society as a whole. Accordingly, the increasingly corporatized, ever more submissive people of the US should be termed, the Whose-Your-Daddy Nation.

Yet, since life does not exist in stasis, within this hierarchy of deceivers and dupes, we will gnaw at one another's ankles until the whole pathetic pyramid collapses.

All around us, we can feel the shoddy structure starting to sway and buckle. Axiomatically, the value of the dollar is collapsing like the smooth facade of a con man called-out by a group of wised-up marks. At present, in the wake of the bust in the housing market, repo men are retracing the tracks of real estate grifters who fleeced legions of wishful thinkers who brought the American dream and now only possess the misery of debt slavery.

One would think the time for insurrection has arrived -- that, at long last, an awakened and enraged public would rise up and foreclose on these reprobates and ne'er-do-wells squatting in the White House and skulking through Congress. The power and privilege of the corporately controlled elite of Washington should be repossessed like the Lexises of Atlanta real estate agents and the oversized pickup trucks of Tucson contractors, confiscated in the wake of the collapse of the housing market. Foreclosure signs and repossession notices should festoon the whole of official Washington.

Turn about would be fair play. Since, the rise of Reaganism, the financial sector has been engaged in selling off the assets of the nation's public sector to the highest bidders. It is amazing that, at this point, this klavern of kleptocrats haven't yet torn from the walls and absconded with all the copper plumbing fixtures and fittings on Capitol Hill.

Is a turnaround possible?

If we wake-up and smell the jackboot. From the miasma of right-wing media propaganda, to the proliferation of predatory capitalism, to the corruption and cupidity of the prison industrial complex, to the pandemic of police brutality and the trampling of the rights of the accused, to perennial civilian shooting sprees, to the muzzling of descent, to the rise of the national surveillance state, to the use and acceptance of torture as state policy, to the adoption of an unlawful, immoral foreign policy doctrine that promotes policies of perpetual war, one is forced to conclude that bullying, and deferring to bullies, has become the dominate mode of being in the US.

Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy and engagement. The gaining of empathy alleviates the pathological need to be a bully, while social and political engagement mitigates feelings of powerlessness that authoritarian bully-boys, such as Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, et al., exploit.

In short, remedial human lessons for the US population, in general, and for the corporate and political classes, in particular.

Let us start the process by having a period of grief and repentance for the death and suffering that our government, in our name, has inflicted on the people of Iraq. This should be done as the US begins the process of a complete military withdrawal from their decimated nation, and the bestowing of economic reparations upon the millions of Iraqis who have suffered under the brutal machinations and murderous mayhem unloosed by our country's contemptible invasion and occupation.

To do so, might save the people of our next target, Iran (as well as ourselves) a world of grief.

Collapse

The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.

Concurrently, a sense of unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times, and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism. (In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)

In this way, liberal paternalism is insufferable; worse, it is dangerous. This has been the right's craftiest accomplishment: inducing "reasonable" liberals and "sensible" centrists to enable their crimes, from stolen elections to their present preparation for a massive bombing campaign of Iran, by intimidating them with the fear that any protest on their part will cast them among the ranks of America-hating, lefty moonbats, who wish to see the terrorist win, dumpsters piled high with discarded fetuses and metro-sexuality made the official state religion.

Moreover, these assaults upon both reason and the republic (what's left of it) will persist until progressives begin to effectively counter the narratives of the predatory right. Some call it shameful demagoguery; although, conservatives call it career advancement. This is not a novel situation. Throughout history, these kinds of pernicious mindsets have always been with us; it is our tragedy that they have been allowed to prevail.

Conservatives are eager to embrace false narratives: The surge is working; the terrorists hate us for our freedom; Fred Thompson is Ronald Reagan incarnate, but with a touch of Jed Clampett "folksiness." Accordingly, when the times are roiled with uncertainty, when thoughts of the future are tinged with dread, conservatives, like a character in Southern Gothic literature, will fall into a swoon, longing for the return of an imagined, purer past that never was. One can picture these rightwing sorts wandering the streets, wearing a faded prom dress and a broken, prom queen tiara, twittering and cooing, while repeating over and over again, "the surge is working; Anbar Province is now a beacon of freedom unto the world...") in an imaginary dialog with the ghost of their long lost beau, Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, an ungifted actor, by means of playing the role of a "resolute" Cold Warrior, was able to gain the approbation and wealth that had alluded him as a contract player in Hollywood. In truth, Reagan's greatest accomplishment was convincing himself of his own sincerity.

Constantin Stanislavsky, who is considered the father of modern acting technique, is reputed to have said that when an actor starts to believe he is the character he's portraying it is time to escort him from the theatre. Withal, Fred, Rudy, Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al., can you find the exits on your own or will you need to be medicated, strapped to a gurney, and wheeled from the public arena? Rather than being candidates for President of the United States, most of the Republican field seems to be vying for the title of National Crazy Uncle -- the kind of guy who corners you at a family gathering and rants that the PTA is a terrorist front group and gangs of illegal aliens are engaged in a vast conspiracy to steal single socks from his washer-dryer.

The Republican candidates for president and their fantasy-prone constituents wish to set the Way Back Machine to the golden days of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was impersonating a man just arrived via the 1940s. This phenomenon is known as the Law of Republican Special Relativity, which states: When events begin to accelerate forward, the conservative mind will be cast, at an equal rate of speed, backwards in time. But the paradox is: they arrive in a parallel universe, an alternative past that never existed on this earth -- a low probability dimension, comprised of platitudes and false pieties, where white male privilege is sacrosanct, only for the reason (according to their reality-proof perspective) that it serves to provide all mankind with all things good and holy.

This law can be tested by performing the following simple exercise: Engage a conservative true believer in a dialog regarding the manner by which "state's rights" was misused in the Jim Crowe dominated Deep South of the pre-Civil Rights Era in order to propagate and maintain segregation, and your conservative-minded test subject will respond as if those realities transpired long ago and far away on a planet that he has never visited.

Yet, paradoxically, rightists have manage to create a Time Retrieval Device, a device that has summoned from the past wonders, such as the following: a reversal of many of the rights of working people; the return of unsafe and unsanitary practices in the food industry; widening gaps of wealth, health and privilege between social, racial and economic classes; in short, many the excesses of plutocratic rule inherent to unfettered capitalism.

As a result, a generation has inherited power who are devoid of the concept of causation and consequence. Ergo, we have developed a political class who rule by narratives of denial and shallow self-justification. An example of this is the blaming of the people of Iraq for the blood-drenched debacle that has resulted from the illegal and immoral invasion of their nation. As well as, an enabling cadre of media elitists who served as cheerleaders for the invasion, because they deemed it to be good for business, and, to this day, are unwilling to admit their complicity.

All of the above leads to the question: What are present day conservatives striving to conserve? Historically, conservatives gave their utmost to conserve institutions such as slavery, Jim Crowe, child labor -- and, of course, the use of leeches for medical purposes. (Perhaps, they simply couldn't stand the thought of a fellow blood-sucker being deemed dangerous, and they feared the start of a trend.) At present, the central paradox of contemporary conservatism is this: How does one practice conservatism within an all-encompassing economy based on disposability? This is analogous to establishing a brothel devoted to the goal of abstinence.

When engaged in a dialog with many conservatives, the question becomes: Are their reactions and responses evoked therein simply borne of plain ignorance, willful ignorance, or outright lying? Or are their responses the result of a group hallucination? All progressives have experienced the following nonsensical encounter of the conservative kind. Present a reasoned argument to a conservative -- and, all at once, completely ignoring the tenet, tone and thrust of the point, they begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted with reality.

Accordingly, the time has come for a study of political zoology and to posit who are the true moonbats now making their habitat in the United States. Case study: Unregulated, wish-fulfillment-based conservative economic policy has created those suburban arrays of mold-incubating petri dishes known as products of the housing boom. Moreover, the bursting of the whole bubble-prone Ponzi scheme has sent shock waves throughout international economies and is surging the economy of the US towards recession. Furthermore, conservative anti-regulatory policies have rendered us babes in a cheap, plastic Toyland.

What has an era of conservatism wrought? Answer: a culture that has all the value, integrity, sustainability and safety as a toy manufactured in China. Apropos, contemporary life, as conceived and manufactured by conservative "values", is shoddily made, toxic and not a lot of fun.

In addition, it has spawned a culture ridden with public relations fabulists and media-savvy confidence artists who tell us that the taste of corporate ass-suck is the ambrosia of the gods. The locked-down, stultifying mindset and ideological barbarianism of present day conservatism is directly linked to the steep decline of the quality of life in the United States.

The recent revelations regarding the I'm-not-gay-I-simply-engage-in-same-sex-encounters-in-puplic-restrooms" wing of the Republican Party are instructive in understanding the rightist's worldview and its effect on our times. Covert sex in a public bathroom stall is an apt metaphor for how contemporary conservatism limits and restricts the possibilities of human life. In the same way that a closet-case gay conservative stunts the possibilities of his love life, the conservative mindset limits the scope of a culture's possibilities. Accordingly, economic life must be ruled by ruthless, unregulated competition, and the nation's meaning can only be found in war. Hence, under the Bush Junta, we are told, as far as international relations go, that the nation has few options other than its present policy of predatory capitalism and "wide-stance" militarism.

Regarding perma-fools such as these, Ernest Becker wrote: "Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing." Accordingly, the republic is dead; it's ghost howls online only in pixelated protests such as this one. This grim reality will remain, until we rise up and repudiate the false narratives that have created and continue to comprise these tragic times.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at [email protected]

Collapse

To survive as a republic, a great many American idols will have to topple, and not only those inane, fame-obsessed clowns and crooners sharp-elbowing each other on the Fox Network's televised exercises in Pop Stardom for Dummies. As far as idolatry goes, by far the most pervasive, ruinous, and in need of toppling is the position of unquestioning worship the US military holds in American life. One would think that after the Götterdämmerung of macho folly we've witnessed over the past half-decade that the country would have had its fill of self-proclaimed alpha male posturing and adolescent-minded, military hagiography.

The media is rife with right-wing fantasist nonsense about the "feminized" American male, when, in fact, the country has grown outright psychotic from testosterone-induced toxicity (TIT). In the 1960s, hippies were ridiculed for their naive assumptions that life on earth could be magically transformed into an egalitarian paradise of free love, good dope, waterbeds and Lava Lamps for all, if "the straights" could simply be induced to "raise their consciousness" by the engagement in and the utilization of the erotic acts, illicit substances and goofy, counterculture accouterment mentioned above. Accordingly, the current fantasy -- that all US soldiers are good, righteous and brave, standing ever vigilant against all threats to the Homeland -- could be regarded as a kind of
Woodstock Militarism.

Thus, this puerile glorification of American servicemen and women is a view of human nature that is every bit as naive as the hash-pipe dreams of Sixties idealists involving peace, love and flower power -- and one that can't be blamed on a communal use of L.S.D. Excuse me, but why should the military establishment and its foot soldiers hold a position of being beyond scrutiny or even reproach? The last I looked "our troops" were being used as mindless instruments of our country's imperialist aggression. Moreover, the perpetually pimp-slapped and habitually on-their-knees before Bush's macho-narcissistic bluster, congressional Democrats, who gained a legislative majority on the strength of the anti-war vote, are up to their lickspittle lips in the legalized mass murder being perpetrated in the name of our nation. It is time to see through and reject the right-wing propaganda and liberal paternalism of viewing the soldiers of the US military as victims ... Oh cry me a river of Iraqi blood ... When the truth is: We are a nation of people possessed of Bronze Age minds, who are armed with 21st Century weapons. Ergo, our soldiers are the delivery system of said weaponry.

This is the reason the American military machine exists on such a massive scale: Our leaders wish to establish, by force, if necessary, global hegemony. Accordingly, what do platitudes such as, "I support the troops" translate to when those troops are engaged in an illegal and immoral occupation of a foreign land, invaded under false pretenses? Where is the line to be drawn between having empathy for an army comprised to a large degree of economic conscripts and giving tacit approval to the war crimes they commit? Since the enacting of the Nuremberg Laws, the claim of "I was only following orders" has been ruled an inadmissible defense. Shouldn't the plea of "I couldn't get a good job after high school, so I joined the military, was shipped off to Iraq, where I grew so scared, frustrated and angry, that, every once in a while, I lit-up a few Haji civilians, with my M16, turning them into twitching jellyfish" be regarded as equally inadmissible?

To bestow unquestioning and unilateral support for the soldiers of a ruthless empire's immoral invasion of a sovereign nation is a recipe for war crimes and atrocities. Soldiers represent a cross-section of a nation's population, evincing a mix of human traits and characteristics, some admirable and worthy of support and others reprehensible and deserving of condemnation and contempt. Accordingly, many soldiers are not heroes and all heroes need not be soldiers.

Resistance and the refusal to fight immoral wars constitutes bravery as well.

This most recent version of the proto-fascist glorification of the military has its origins in the rightist revisionist history of the Vietnam War. Over the decades, the right has deftly and dishonestly framed the narrative and succeeded in foisting its mythos of unquestioning loyalty to all things military upon the history-bereft, reality-resistant American populace.

At its dark and deceitful heart, this is a fantasy that is as fact free as it is invidious. Accordingly, the public of the United States was bilked into believing conservative propaganda such as the preposterous urban legend involving hippies spitting on returning Vietnam vets. Yep, that sounds plausible: scrawny hippies, afflicted with pot-induced cotton mouth, expectorating on trained killers, just returned from the killing zones of Southeast Asia. If you believe that nonsense, I'll sell you, on Ebay, the Stairway To Heaven -- the very one that inspired the Led Zeppelin song.

Almost every utterance on the subject by conservatives is either bullshit or an outright lie. The biggest of the Big Lies was and remains roughly as follows: The Vietnam War was lost, not during the battles and skirmishes fought in that country's emerald jungles and muddy rice paddies, but in the privileged confines of college campuses and in the sun-drenched enclaves of Hollywood liberals. To hear conservatives tell it, the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong guerillas were all but on their knees, beaten, on the verge of surrender, when Jane Fonda flew to their side, rallying their flagging spirits with the succor of her American troop-hating, commie-suckling sedition, hence rallying them on to final victory.

Next, under the influence of that cultural laughing gas known as Reaganism, Hollywood created a Vietnam mythos even more preposterous than the one chronicled above. Whereby, in the nineteen eighties, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone refought the Vietnam War and won. In these epics of testosterone-poisoned kitsch, Norris and Stallone, freed of government restraint and hippie bad mojo, reaped revenge on the godless, yellow hordes, by deploying the terrible weaponry of their male pheromonal musk defoliates and hairstyling jell napalm. It would seem, from the POV of these movies, that the Vietnamese communists were brought to heel with prop automatic assault weapons and blow dryers. On the screen of suburban cineplexes, Asian extras, costumed as Vietnamese soldiers, fell before Norris' and Stallone's barrage of blanks like Hollywood Indians of old.

Once again, the world had been set right; those runty, upstart, Southeast Asian bastards had been put in their place. The United States was victorious. Of course, not in historical truth -- but in the only place that mattered to us -- in our Cold War fevered minds, a place where Americans believed that the "Evil Empire" plotted to invade our post-war, consumer paradise, because the commie hordes lusted to collectivize our Buicks, our blondes, our pool furniture and our lawn statuary. All in the same insane way, we hallucinate, at present, that "Islamo-Fascists" scheme to invade us and put Lindsey Lohan in a Burka.

In truth, the only place the people of Vietnam ever constituted a threat to the United States was within the toxic mindscapes of paranoid cold warriors. This death-enamored realm -- where the most psychotic is king -- is the place (and only place) where Iraq's weapons of mass destruction existed, and is where, at present, Iran's threat to the United States looms. Resultantly, we have erected this walled and fortified domain of delusion, this heavily armed Disneyland of militant ignorance, with all its attendant, noxious myths of the sacrifices of its noble warriors, for a less than noble reason and purpose. The purpose of this jingoistic blarney is to shield the general public from the ugly reality of how and why an empire's armies exist; because an empire's armies are mustered -- not to protect the Homeland -- but to secure plunder for its ruling elite and provide mollifying bribes for its hoi polloi.

By necessity, the fantasy must be large and all pervasive. Within it, a frightened citizenry must believe that all its potential leaders must embody the traits of a bona-fide, baptized in blood, warrior king. Ergo, the gun-caressing, bible-clutching, dog-baiting, "the-ruling-class-took-everything-leaving-me-with-nothing-but-my-masculine-pride" crowd is never going to accept the junior senator from the state of New York, currently vying for the throne -- even if she has re-branded herself as Hillary W. Bush.

At this point, it is imperative that we let the world in on a dirty, little secret that many naive liberals have managed to lockout of their minds: (Bill) Clintonism was a continuation of Reaganism, sans the Grecian Formula and pomade. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was the diametric opposite of FDR, not in personal style -- but in his administration's domestic policies and social priorities. While Roosevelt was accused of being a "traitor to his class," for betraying his aristocratic ilk, by the enacting of The New Deal, Bill Clinton, also, proved to be a traitor to his class, by betraying those who shared his laboring class beginnings, by means of his ruinous neo-liberal trade policies and his anything-for-the-boys-on-Wall-Street economics. As far as his relationship with the nation's military/industrial complex, Clinton, because he had avoided military service during the Vietnam War, had to prove he wasn't a patchouli-reeking peacenik by constantly kowtowing to the Pentagon establishment. Withal, the situation will be worse with Hillary, who, time and time again, will have to establish her macho credentials by bombing somebody, anybody, anytime and anywhere.

In this way, due to his charm, intelligence and his almost preternatural talent to feign empathy -- Bill Clinton was more dangerous than George W. Bush -- because Bush, at least, reveals to the world the true face of empire. Although, at present, most Americans are unwilling or unable to face our true face. Accordingly, the crack-brained narrative of the present moment goes: to be viable as commander-in-chief, Hillary must prove her toughness, preferably, in some he-man display of resolute stupidity. Since the flight-suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier gambit has been played-out, perhaps her handlers could set-up a photo-op involving the masculine iconography of the World Wrestling Federation. It should be arranged that she wrestle and then body slam two midget wrestlers portraying Dennis Kusinich and Ron Paul. Such an act of political stagecraft could prove to be Hillary Clinton's so-called "Sister Souljah moment."

Sarcasm, you say? Barely. Our collective mindset regarding the nation's pernicious militarism rises to about the level of thoughtful insight and searching introspection that is on display in the realm of professional wrestling. Furthermore, at least, the wrestlers themselves (and most of their audience) know the violence of the sport is staged. Unfortunately -- while the political theatre of US politics is fake as well -- in Iraq, the blood isn't.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Collapse

Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess -- the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism -- have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don't look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation's streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one's individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea.

After the catastrophes spawned by the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, a number of brilliant, original thinkers (including Hannah Arendt, Roberto Freire, Wilhelm Reich, and R. D. Laing) set out to study the phenomenon in order to learn how future calamities might be prevented. Although the methodologies and conclusions of these thinkers varied, each noted that alienation and dehumanization festered at the core of the death urge of fascism.

Nowadays, in contrast, the elites of the corporate media have proven themselves useless in this regard, believing, as they do, they constitute the thin line between the rabble at large (me and you) and the chaos begot by freedom. At present, mega-churches attract alienated suburbanites. Right wing talk show hosts misdirect their listeners alienation towards so-called illegal "aliens" and exploit their audience's sense of powerlessness (created by the rigged system of corporate capitalism) against elitist liberals (who themselves, ironically, benefit from the present system and who only want to change it to the degree that their own privilege will not be affected. In other words, not at all).

Combine the above with the American character trait of being hostile towards introspection and it becomes evident that the present disaster has been building for quite a while now. And it can (and most likely will) get worse -- far worse.

Most Americans alive today have been trained since birth to adapt to and serve the corrupt corporate structure by means of the shunning of critical thinking and have been conditioned to be in constant (empty) motion or in the thrall of mass media distraction. We have been taught that passivity is for losers, yet we find ourselves nearly powerless before the corporate/consumer/military/police/entertainment state. In this way, we serve our corporate masters; it serves the corpocracy that the lower orders refuse meaningful self-awareness. If one were to glimpse one's own illusions, then it follows one might begin to question collective delusions -- and this would upset the social order.

Those who have studied the dangers of authoritarian rule have advised us to be wary of people who carry an inner emptiness. Of course, these unfortunates yearn for the void to be filled. But with their hearts and minds mortared closed -- what makes it through the self-constructed prison is loud, stupid, and fascistic. At present, what penetrates is: Fundamentalist Sermons on Armageddon; violent video games; the empty spectacle of steroid-induced professional sports hype; the lethal fantasies of American exceptionalism; the exercise in Rock and Roll imperialism that U.S. foreign policy has become. In short, all the banal Sturm and Drang necessary to pierce those protective walls and penetrate the pervasive inner emptiness.

When the people of a culture have been conditioned to worship power -- but feel powerless -- there's trouble ahead. The elites must displace the public's rage by a demagogic sleight-of-hand such as the demonization of marginalized groups. In the US, we've been inundated by years of state and commercial propaganda that has degraded and demonized the country's permanent underclass by the labeling of them as welfare parasites and career criminals.

It has been noted that the mindset, methods, and procedures of America's punitive, profit-driven prison-industrial complex was a prototype for the systemic cruelty of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; furthermore, it is a given that those institutional affronts to human decency will have served as prototypes for the methods and procedures that will be practiced upon those who are swept-up in the purges and detainment mania following the declaration of martial law in the United States.

We push this knowledge away from us, fearing we will be paralyzed by its crushing implications. Worse, what is nearly impossible to admit is, most likely, the system crushed us long ago. Apropos, R. D. Laing averred that being able to adapt and function within an insane, authoritarian system renders one for all practical purposes insane -- only insane in a manner acceptable to a power mad ruling elite.

This is the knowledge we push down, every hour of everyday. Otherwise, we would be driven to admit outright that the system has crushed our individual hopes, aspirations and yearnings. We must, at all costs, keep these feelings concealed; otherwise, we might be compelled to contemplate what we have forsaken, what passions and truths we have traded away for the false sense of security that the corporate order offered us when we tacitly agreed to surrender what was most sacred, vital and alive within us. One psychological manifestation of this phenomenon is the incessant chanting of that mantra of the American corporate workforce: "I'm not my job. I'm not what I do all day long."

For a moment, meditate on the calamity implicit in such a sentiment. Because If we cannot locate and engage our true selves during our waking hours -- then who the hell are we anyway? This is a profoundly troubling circumstance. Moreover, if we've condemned our daylight selves to a void of non-being, what then remains of us?

We experience this dislocation of the life force as a sense of nebulous dread. Everything, these days, the architecture and accouterment of our lives seems so fragile and unreal; it feels as if everything could just fly apart, at any given moment. The world and our place in it seems so flimsy: an empire built of eggshells; it could all shatter in an instant.

Living on credit, the house of cards of the real estate market, jobs evaporating, most of us languishing only a couple of paychecks away from ruin: The empire is coming undone. As it is, it seems the nation is only being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, over-extended credit and particle board. Ergo, there is one law the lawless Bush administration and their keepers from the plundering class cannot flout: the second law of thermodynamics. They won't be able to claim executive privilege to avoid the consequences of negative entropy.

In a similar vein, we, the underlings of empire, stand helpless before the prevailing madness. Individual reason rarely acts as a countervailing force to stem a drowning tide of cultural cognitive dissonance. Because the more epic and all-compassing the mistake, the more epic and all-encompassing come the rationalizations, the scapegoating and the compulsion for do-overs. If the surge isn't working as fantasized, then we'll double-dog surge you and then bomb Iran. If police state tactics fail to alleviate a sense of anxiety, then we must construct more detainment camps, more maximum security prisons, enact more federal death penalty statutes. "Bring back the electric chair; being put to sleep, like stray pets, is too good for the traitors," the mob will rage. That's the solution, but (cognitive dissonance being what it is) we need to go bigger -- we need an electric sofa -- yet, bigger still -- an electric dining room set! "Aahh ... the smell of deep-fried dissidents in the morning."

And over the smoking corpses, let us pray. We need to pray for ... what? ... more prayer. These prayers would work, the homicidally faithful will insist -- if every single doubter was induced to drop to their knees and pray. Hence, we need prayer in the public schools. We need prayer on public transportation. We need prayer in public restrooms!

Animus, ignorance, and magical thinking are a tragic mix -- and I'm afraid that vintage of mind is the hideous wine of our times. The social criteria that gives rise to fascism is in place in the U.S. and those in positions of power have a strong interest in seeing things remain that way. All we can do is what folks (a minority) have always done ... exile or resistance.

In my opinion, both are honorable. The other options are varying degrees of "little Eichmann[ism]" -- Ward Churchill's much scorned, career purge-inducing -- but never-the-less accurate phrase. If one does the "soul work," to appropriate archetypal psychologist James Hillman's term, it is still possible to resist complicity. Training yourself to avoid lying for provisional gain is a time honored means of prevented alliances with exploitive assholes. They will avoid you, fire you, curse your name from the darkness of their inner abyss -- but this will solve the problem of dependance on them -- and you'll be forced to live by other means. Generally, one is more adaptable than one believes.

Keep yourself as healthy and as sane as possible: we're going to need you around after the inevitable collapse of the present system. Also, beware of those reductionist demons of the mind who diminish the soul-making possibilities of "mere" words. The acts of writing and reading are seen as passive; to crackpot realists, these activities seem useless, unproductive -- the feckless indulgences of a class of the thin-wristed effete.

Accordingly, Americans have all but ceased reading. Worse, they displace their feelings of self-loathing borne of their own corporately induced passivity upon writers and thinkers. If the tenets of democratic discourse are to survive, it is imperative that writers and thinkers begin to engage in a passionate defense of themselves against the kvetching armies of crackpot realists that have encircled and laid siege to our collective hearts and minds.

But don't expect to be lauded with praise for the effort. It's doubtful our adversaries will be moved by our entreaties: There cannot be a rapprochement with reality for those who have never had a relationship with it in the first place. Yet verbal imagery and depth-inducing insights are the DNA of compassionate engagement. It is not a coincidence that George W. Bush is an inarticulate oaf. Conversely, there are many things in this world that require being touched by words, for there are occasions when words alone can suffice to take us deep and lift us up and serve to ameliorate our alienation.

It is in this spirit that I offer the words above to you; I'm traveling light; they're all I'm carrying with me, at this late hour, in these dark and dangerous times.

Collapse

How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?

I'm afraid it's come to that: We are a people who psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won't rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)

The corporate culture of exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography and displaced rage -- all the distortions of national character inherent to privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.

A narcissist's actions are monstrous because his only love is the image of himself wielding control and power. (Does this remind you of anyone, perhaps someone who struts about in a flightsuit -- someone prone to proclaiming himself "the decider" -- someone who grows intoxicated to the point becoming insensate from a whiff of his own pheromones as he swoons in macho-narcissistic self-worship?)

And what about the everyday monsters, those who feel nothing -- not outrage, not remorse, nor sorrow -- by the conscience-devoid attempt made by our vampiric leaders to sustain "our way of life" on Iraqi blood? Are you not a monster as well when you feel nothing before immense human suffering? If you are impervious to, grown inured of, or have chosen to remain ignorant of the agony of the Iraqi people, then you might as well join the ranks of the undead -- because the distant landscape of corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan matches your internal deathscape.

In short, our empire's dependence on the resources (the life's blood) of others renders us a nation of vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character) is defined by the vampire's trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly, what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?

To name one: our time, the precious hours of our finite lives. The corporatists are Time Vampires: For a moment, reflect on all the hours of life you've wasted away -- in office cubicles, in commuter traffic jams, in the addictive pursuit of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out and exhausted, rendered inert from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state.

The corporacracy devours our time and, like the charges of a vampire, has made us dependent and slavish in return. In our bloodless enslavement, we lose the vitality borne of existing within life's inherent mysteries and grow estranged from the deep resonances of participation mystique.

How does one begin to take back one's soul from these elitist usurpers? Start with this: The ebullient skepticism engendered from calling out soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian lies.

In an era as perilous as ours, it's imperative we act with utmost urgency. Yet, tragically, the exigencies of our age are being played out against a panorama of longer, more stressful work hours, superficially ameliorated by a mass media culture comprised of ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.

This pathology began years ago when our ancestors offered up their life's blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age. Henry Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out our flesh with his productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning practitioner of the black art of convincing human beings they're mere cogs in an inhuman machine. It was only a short trudge from there through history's slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire's coffin of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.

The corporate vampire's creed is defined by ruthless efficiency; the fear of a "loss of productivity" is the driving force of the death machine. The system is so ruthless and inhuman that it must conceal its true face, hence the rise of the telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to them to report the facts of our condition: After all, a mirror can't reflect the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there is nothing to reflect.

Furthermore, his emptiness is the progenitor of his destructive nature. Rather than face himself, his appetite for death will devour all in its path: rain forests, Arctic glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of your life, as well as your inner being.

It is the force that holds Democratic politicians in the thrall of their own fecklessness, because they answer to the same blood-sucking, corporate masters as the rest of us. Quite simply, they're afraid of their bosses too. The Washington Beltway is a version, in miniature, of the entire soul-dead, American corporacracy. The careerist politicians within the Beltway are afflicted with the same diminution of choice -- the same hyper-attenuation of the will to freedom -- as the rest of us.

And what remains for us: an existence (or lack thereof) within this hierarchical hellscape of narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of being is this, a life shackled to the service of a monstrous system wherein one must evince the obsequies of a vampire's bloodless lackeys?

To reverse this situation: Now is the time to drag the lies of the corporate state into the sunshine where they will writher to dust. We are not powerless: We live in a world where our collective, hidden intentions are made manifest by our outward actions. This is why Gothic -- even b-movie -- metaphors are not an overwrought description of our present condition. Ergo, by the vehicle of cultural collaboration, we are a nation of world-destroying, b-movie monsters -- we are a hack-scripted, second-billed feature at the drive-in movie of existence -- a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the cosmos, box-office poison of a people.

We are soul-sucking creatures of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of conformity. Road-rage werewolves. Right-wing, talk show demons whose wrathful voices rage into empty air. Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles of supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurant chains and the food courts of shopping malls. We are: The Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the Planet.

To survive, first, we must find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Collapse

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as macmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.

How could they not be? They've seized upon a fantasy that allows them to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating belief system. Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of their corporately circumscribed lives, they wish for the destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their escapist fantasy, by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous -- apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The believer's emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological giantism -- a phenomenon that arises when one's worldview is too small to explain the larger world. Therefore, a story must be created that contains violence and terror on such a massive scale that its unfolding would kill off the entire, problematic world. "That's right world, there's not enough room on this planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go."

Upon the nation's roadways and interstate highways, the overgrown clown cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and oversized pickup trucks also evince hugeness to compensate for the feelings of those folks inside the grotesque vehicles of being crushed down by alienation and isolation -- not only while on the road -- but by the realities of an existence within a hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against the changing realities of the larger world.

In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs separate them further from the general population of the consumer state (that they take every opportunity to bamboozle) as the American public itself grows fatter and fatter in body mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner emptiness borne of their perceived helplessness before the predation of corporate culture.

Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when completed, will be the largest "diplomatic" compound on the planet is, in fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless colossus the U.S.A. has become. The structure is as accurate as the art of architecture can be in its depiction of the spirit of a nation's people. As big and bloated as our national sense of exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within it -- not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly fortified walls -- but from reality itself. A massive emblem of the arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the noxious vapors of cultural self-deception can be made manifest in reenforced concrete, armed watchtowers and razor wire.

Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we Americans dream these things into existence. Far from blameless, we continue to allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we enable and sustain their titanic sense of entitlement. In turn, we accept their paltry bribes and, as a result, our banal, selfish dreams have conjured forth George Bush from the zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism is so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in Baghdad.

In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Macmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to be president -- with the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney's head.

In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light torment the night, scouring away the stars, estranging us from imagination, empathy, and eros, and leaving us only with the insatiable appetites of consumerism. Thus, around the clock, inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft workers ply their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle trailer, diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to sepulchral supermarkets and charnel house restaurant chains. Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies are provided with all the water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially farmed, pesticide-laquered vegetables and starches -- The Cuisines Of The Living Dead -- we could ever crave ... uum, uum, it's the Thanatotic yumminess of empire's end. Try our convenient drive through window. Would you like us to super-size your order of commodified death?

Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love with death.

Let's see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well over half a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the continuing Iraqi resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as well. Yet still, most of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage over the din created by the parade of killer clowns that we have mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.

How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these acts of murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale? Truth is, we might not be able to stop it, because this is what lies beneath our unlimited sense of entitlement and self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that manifests itself as exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by means of imperial overreach -- which is, of course, the time-established method by which empires dispose of themselves.

Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the narcissistic insularity of our media elite. At the end of the day, it's their tumescent egos that are distorting our societal discourse; their vanities and attendant self-serving pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses -- jackasses endowed with the singular skill of being able to read a teleprompter ... Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You have an important call from Washington, DC.

Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the system's structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of media imagery will grow - and the more trivial its content will become. The closer we come to systemic collapse the more we will hear about celebrity contretemps. Cretinous heiresses and shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of self-restraint, people the public imagination, because they carry our infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn, suffer public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to displace, upon them, the humiliation of our own daily existence within the oppressive authoritarianism of the corporate state.

Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to look) link between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the two terms were interchangeable. According to rumor, we defeated fascism, during the first half of the 20th century. Yet, at present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing, soul-enervating corpocracy. To live under corporatism is, in ways large and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday, hour by hour, the exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work devours more and more of our lives. As a consequence, the true self within is crushed to dust and what remains rises as cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant need for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly; in short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.

Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by living in the midst of life -- a mode of being that apprehends and is transformed by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world. Conversely, authoritarian societies are collectives of accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers, where one must conceal one's essential self at all costs and the soul falls into atrophy.

To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the individual and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and witness the keening wasteland our nation has become. Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be filled by any amount of wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene amounts of mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never -- can never be -- enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is boundless. In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a psychopath's emptiness. Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to the boneyard, hoping he can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountainous pile of corpses he's responsible for placing there.

In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.

The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political classes have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones, enclosed her in an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous output of eggs. Yet, nothing satisfies them.

Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk Insurgency, hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly trivial as mere beans -- our postings, exchanges and periodic meet-ups -- the fall of tyrannical giants might begin.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]

Collapse

Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they're entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they're better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.

Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they're better than you. When they lie and flout the rules and assert that the rule of law doesn't apply to them or refuse to impeach fellow members of their political and social class who break the law -- it is because they have convinced themselves it is best for society as a whole.

How did they come by such self-serving convictions? The massive extent of their privilege has convinced them that they're the quintessence of human virtue, that they're the most gifted of all golden children ever kissed by the radiant light of the sun. In other words, they're the worst sort of emotionally arrested brats -- spoiled children inhabiting adult bodies who mistake their feelings of infantile omnipotence for the benediction of superior ability: "I'm so special that what's good for me is good for the world," amounts to the sum total of their childish creed. In the case of narcissists such as these, over time, self-interest and systems of belief grow intertwined. Hence, within their warped, self-justifying belief systems, their actions, however mercenary, become acts of altruism.

The elites don't exactly believe their own lies; rather, they proceed from the neo-con guru, Leo Strauss' dictum (the modus operandi of the ruling classes) that it is necessary to promulgate "noble lies" to society's lower orders. This sort of virtuous mendacity must be practiced, because those varieties of upright apes (you and I) must be spared the complexities of the truth; otherwise, it will cause us to grow dangerously agitated -- will cause us to rattle the bars of our cages and fling poop at our betters. They believe it's better to ply us with lies because it's less trouble then having to hose us down in our filthy cages. In this way, they believe, all naked apes will have a more agreeable existence within the hierarchy-bound monkeyhouse of capitalism.

This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they've disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest -- he's their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it's damn entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.

By engaging in a mode of being so careless it amounts to public immolation, these corrupt elitists are bringing the empire down. There is nothing new in this: Such recklessness is the method by which cunning strivers commit suicide.

Those who take the trouble to look will apprehend the disastrous results of the ruling elites' pathology: wars of choice sold to a credulous citizenry by public relations confidence artists; a predatory economy that benefits one percent of the population; a demoralized, deeply ignorant populace who are either unaware of or indifferent to the difference between the virtues and vicissitudes of the electoral processes of a democratic republic, in contrast to the schlock circus, financed by big money corporatist, being inflicted upon us, at present.

Moreover, the elitist's barriers of isolation and exclusion play out among the classes below as an idiot's mimicry of soulless gated "communities" and the pernicious craving for a vast border wall -- all an imitation of the ruling classes' paranoia-driven compulsion for isolation and their narcissistic obsession with exclusivity.

Perhaps, we should cover the country in an enormous sheet of cellophane and place a zip-lock seal at its southern border, or, better yet -- in the interest of being more metaphorically accurate -- let's simply zip the entire land mass of the U.S. into a body bag and be done with it.

What will be at the root of the empire's demise? It seems the elite of the nation will succumb to "Small World Syndrome" -- that malady borne of incurable careerism, a form of self-induced cretinism that reduces the vast and intricate world to only those things that advance the goals of its egoist sufferers. It is an degenerative disease that winnows down the consciousness of those afflicted to a banal nub of awareness, engendering the shallowness of character on display in the corporate media and the arrogance and cluelessness of the empire's business and political classes. It possesses a love of little but mammon; it is the myth of Midas, manifested in the hoarding of hedge funds; it is the tale of an idiot gibbering over his collection of used string.

What can be done? In these dangerous times, credulousness to party dogma is as dangerous as a fundamentalist Christian's literal interpretation of The Bible: There is no need to squander the hours searching for an "intelligent design" within the architecture of denial and duplicity built into this claptrap system -- a system that we have collaborated in constructing by our loyalty to political parties that are, in return, neither loyal to us nor any idea, policy nor principle that doesn't maintain the corporate status quo.

Accordingly, we must make the elites of the Democratic Party accountable for their betrayal -- or we ourselves will become complicit. The faith of Democratic partisans in their degraded party is analogous to Bush and his loyalist still believing they can achieve victory in Iraq and the delusion-based wing of the Republican Party who, a few years ago, clung to the belief, regardless of facts, that Terri Schiavo's brain was not irreparably damaged and she would someday rise from her hospital bed and bless the heavens for them and their unwavering devotion to her cause.

Faith-based Democrats are equally as delusional. Only their fantasies don't flow from the belief in a mythical father figure, existing somewhere in the boundless sky, who scripture proclaims has a deep concern for the fate of all things, from fallen sparrows to medically manipulated stem cells; rather, their beliefs are based on the bughouse crazy notion that the elites of the Democratic Party could give a fallen sparrow's ass about the circumstances of their lives.

In the same manner, I could never reconcile myself with the Judea/Christian/Islamic conception of god -- some strange, invisible, "who's-your-daddy-in-the-sky," sadist -- who wants me on my knees (as if I'm a performer in some kind of cosmic porno movie) to show my belief in and devotion to him -- I can't delude myself into feeling any sense of devotion to the present day Democratic Party.

Long ago, reason and common sense caused me to renounce the toxic tenets of organized religion. At present, I feel compelled to apply the same principles to the Democratic Party, leading me to conclude, as did Voltaire regarding the unchecked power of The Church in his day, that we must, "crush the infamous thing."

Freedom begins when we free ourselves from as many illusions as possible -- including dogma, clichés, cant, magical thinking, as well as blind devotion to a corrupt political class.

I wrote the following, before the 2006 mid-term election: "[...] I believe, at this late hour, the second best thing that could come to pass in our crumbling republic is for the total destruction of the Democratic Party -- and then from its ashes to rise a party of true progressives.

"[...] I believe the best thing that could happen for our country would be for the leaders of The Republican Party -- out of a deep sense of shame (as if they even possessed the capacity for such a thing) regarding the manner they have disgrace their country and themselves -- to commit seppuku (the act of ritual suicide practiced by disgraced leaders in feudalist Japan) on national television.

"Because there's no chance of that event coming to pass, I believe the dismantling of the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in order. It is our moribund republic's last, best hope -- if any is still possible."

I received quite a bit of flack from party loyalist and netroots activists that my pronouncement was premature and we should wait and see.

We've waited and we've seen. Consequently, since the Republican leadership have not taken ceremonial swords in hand and disemboweled themselves on nationwide TV, it's time we pulled the plug on the Democratic Party, an entity that has only been kept alive by a corporately inserted food-tube. In my opinion, this remains the last, best hope for the living ideals of progressive governance to become part of the body politic.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]

Collapse

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration -- by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it." Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don't give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We've all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called "crib babies," those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society -- or even envisage one.

Such is the extent of our alienation and it is reflected in the media clowns and confidence artists who comprise our (misnomer alert) leadership. We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters -- i.e. Thompson and Obama -- but we can't rebuilt New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.

Creating mass media is not tantamount to creating society. When we live in an era wherein image trumps reality, it follows that an infantilized populace will be transfixed by the shiny objects of media culture -- that the tiny dramas of shallow celebrities will work like crib mobiles to distract us from the deep anguish of being a species standing before the crumbling edifice of paradigm collapse.

If media culture seems so unreal, it is because it is a reflection of our chronic alienation -- our systemic disengagement from communal involvement; so profound is our alienation -- not only from our environment -- but also from our inner lives that we pose a danger to ourselves and others -- which is, of course, the clinical criteria describing those unfortunate souls whose sanity has deteriorated to the point in which they require institutionalization.

Conversely, a populace being in possession of an inner life would prove a dangerous development to the one percent who hold ninety percent of the nation's wealth -- those who prosper from our alienation and its attendant apathy. It is a given these corrupt elitists will try to maintain our estrangement from our inner realities -- because if we were to be roused to awareness insurrection would result.

Being internally colonized by consumerism, we have lost the ability to imagine meaningful change, because our inner lives are no longer our own. Benumbed by our complicity in corporate blanding, by means of ceaseless branding, our inner beings, rather than resembling a teeming, vital polis of meaningful engagement, now seem closer in resemblance to the cold florescent light-flooded shelves of off-the-interstate convenience stores. Impulse and shallow need -- in other words -- utter desperation -- has usurped the deepening eros of communal engagement.

Hence, the thronging avenues of imagination, personal and collective, have been replaced by a soul-numbing proliferation of Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets that serve palliative remedies masking the pain of our powerlessness to alter the tragic trajectory of the times. All transpiring as the sky burns and Arctic glaciers melt into rising seas -- and we're driven to distract ourselves from descending dread by means of another latte buzz, shopping excursion, the unreality of Reality TV, and the pathetic pandering of a political class of shallow hacks who are themselves powerless before their Thanatotic addiction to power.

Such are the colic nightmares of us cultural crib babies. What comes of this degree of alienation? Violence (from shooting sprees to perpetual war). Addiction (from mindless consumerism to prisons overcrowded with drug users). Magical thinking (from neo-con fantasies of global dominance to Christian End Time hallucinations). Paranoia (The abiding delusion that little brown people cross our borders in order to take our jobs, force us to speak their language, and blow up our malls ... after, of course, they've swept the floors and scrubbed the toilets). Depression (from wide-spread use of anti-depressants to the massive demoralization that reveals itself in pandemic levels of social apathy).

What if the media were to begin to chronicle this collective nervous breakdown? What if we became unable to avert our gaze from the tragedies of our time? What if we were induced to not only stare into the abyss -- but were grabbed by the lapels by it?

Then, I suspect, our apathy would grow unpalatable. We'd choke on our fetid self-justifications; swallowing our rationalizations would prove about as appetizing as eating a foot-long hotdog inside a slaughterhouse.

At some point, try driving out into the American countryside (as I've spent the last six months doing). See for yourself the drought-desiccated Everglades and Okefanokee swamps ablaze, where clouds of smoke are enswathing the states of the Deep South like a death shroud. Walk through the splintered, toxic rubble of New Orleans. Although do not go to gawk, but to grieve -- and rage --and then meditate on how we came, as a people, to abandon an entire American city. Then continue, as I did, down Interstate 10, onward through the concrete-encased, "heat dome" of the stripmall archipelago that is Houston; its ugly, ad hoc architecture glazed in the Greenhouse Gas-trapped infernos known as weather in Sun Belt cities. Then proceed out into the West Texas prairielands and approach the areas where enormous, industrial livestock holding pens and slaughterhouses are located. Places, where exploded-from-high-speed-impact carcasses of swarms of black flies stipple your windshield, where the reek of death cannot be masked, even if you possess a car-deodorizer the size of Arkansas.

In these places, you'll find the reek of empire; as well as, the reason the people of the world have turned their faces away from us in revulsion. This stench permeates the air of our nation and clings to the fabric of our lives. Moreover, although George Bush is a veritable idiot savant in the art of creating the stench of death, our Little Prince of Putrefaction is not taking the reek back to Texas with him when we're finally rid of him. No, it is our own essence now. Iconography-wise: Let's lose the imagery of noble and lofty bald eagles: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our national animal.

Yes, we're powerless before the enormity of the age -- but we cross the line into complicity when we're oblivious to our own individual stake in it. At this point, we can no longer afford the luxury of retreating to our comfort zones. Tears must scald our eyes; horrific visions should haunt our nights. The hour has come when we must wrestle with the demon of our own indifference who gains his sustenance and strength from the bribes, large and small, we accept from this death-sustained system.

Worse yet, our pathologies are embodied in our infant/tyrant leadership who throw global-wide tantrums of mass destruction because as a people we have forgotten how to give ourselves over to the eros of engaging the world by social and political involvement.

How do we begin to restore ourselves and reclaim our nation? -- First, by remembering we're alive -- and that life is finite. The awareness of the urgency of the situation at hand will quicken one's pulse and the demon will lessen its grip as one's blood rises in mortification and outrage.

How will we know we are turning the tide? -- When our listless sleepwalking gives way to participation mystique -- to vivid, waking dreams of living flesh.

How will we know if we're losing? -- Simple: We will remain as we are, at present: bloodless, wane spirits imprisoned within our own clammy skin.

This is the archetypal criteria at the root of the mythic imagery of raising the dead: The simple realization that one is alive within life; that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization has ended; and that one's individual dreams and longings -- and even one's flesh -- are not exclusively our own, but are part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet.

Accordingly, there is neither an omnipresent, ever-watchful Sky Daddy divinity above nor a Risen Son savior proffering redemption, yet there is engagement (action and inspiration) within the vastness of the world -- a redemption borne of risk that serves to re-animate a necrotic heart. In short, we so love the world we give ourselves to it.

To do so, it is imperative we begin unshackling ourselves from the noxious orthodoxies of church, state, political party, and corporation, as well as from our own narcissistic strivings within those hierarchies of vampires and wean ourselves from the petty perks we garner from group approval and institutional bribes.

Accordingly, the first step is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to reveal it in all its shabby-ass human glory -- even if the implications of doing so are ugly -- even if to do so will be to risk scorn in one's personal life and reversals in one's professional standing.

Years ago, I heard the tale of a fellow, a struggling artist, who had bought an old, dilapidated house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the house, its floors, walls, and ceilings literally seethed with agitated cockroaches.

Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the massive infestation, the artist began zapping the bugs with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Later, when friends dropped by in the evening and a train rumbled down the adjacent tracks, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by the moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored lights he created.

At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light the ugliness up and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art.

What will we gain?

Only this: the enduring beauty of ugly truth -- one of the few balms available within the agonies of a dark and ugly age.

Collapse

Ronnie Laing's profound dictum leaves us confronting many poignant questions regarding the true nature of the psychic lives of us so-called ordinary citizens of The United States of America and our ability to function within this corrupt and crumbling empire. In short, is it sane to be able to adapt to an insane culture?

Moreover, it begs the following question. If an individual's conformity to group, cultural, and national pathology is rewarded -- thereby encouraging the formation of the "False Self" -- how might one, stranded within the dysfunctional dynamic, resist it all and begin to work towards an awareness of their own essential nature, then perhaps arriving at an individual reckoning involving how to live, flourish, and subvert the life-defying demands of the present era.

First off, what engenders the formation of the False Self? Laing grasped: When we were children, authority, in the form of parents, educators, clergy, loomed before us. Alternatively menacing and comforting, these powerful figures could just as easily have crushed us as comforted us.

Tragically, all too often, they perpetrated the primary. Hence, to accommodate the overwhelming demands of authority, we learned how to curry favor from these baffling, seemingly implacable forces by the creation of a cipher persona, a False Self, a tricky and/or obsequious, tap-dancing, little apple polisher, who strives to garner approval and acceptance, thereby avoiding punishment, rejection and scorn by means of the reflexive subjugation of his true nature.

The victims of False Self adaptation are the quintessence of the corporate/consumer citizen. Although, their presence is far from benign: While they are compelled to show an agreeable face towards unyielding authority, this trope merely serves to mask a mind seething with misplaced resentments and shallow subterfuge. Doesn't this read like a personality profile of Condoleezza Rice or any other member of that present day Executive Office cast of Lord of the Flies known as the Bush administration?

This process of metaphysical identity theft begins in childhood. Then, as now, the presence of individuality-decimating authority can create irreconcilable anxieties within us, because the actions and activities of authority figures seem as overwhelming and unpredictable as nature itself.

Now add this to the already haunted landscape of childhood -- our present day government's campaigns of perpetual fearmongering, plus the dominate corporate culture's modus operandi of commercial exploitation -- and we're left with one freaked out populace, one comprised of both children and alleged adults.

Consequently, this fear-ridden existence has rendered us a society of grotesques: In the present day United States, children have grown as fat as steroid-fed, corporate-farmed livestock; this has transpired because we overfeed them a diet consisting of steroid-fed, corporate-farmed livestock, as well as myriad other variations of nutrient-devoid, calorie-laden faux food dispensed at a mall's food court, through a drive-thru window, or out of a cardboard box delivered by a franchised junk food chain.

Our motives for doing this shouldn't be a mystery to us: We habitually shovel high fat, high carbohydrate, high sugar-content junk into their grousing gobs, in a desperate, futile attempt to stuff down the boredom, the anxiety, the lassitude they suffer due to their confinement inside the commercially branded, repressed, empty, holographic facsimile of childhood we have created for them.

This is the reason why our children overeat like neurotic domestic pets. As is the case with housebound, bored, anxious domestic animals, what do they have to look forward to -- but dinner? Accordingly, the corporate food industry provides plenty (at a bloated profit, of course) of junk food -- the table scraps fallen from the table of the ruling elite of our fat-ass empire - in order to keep them (and all the rest of us) obese, obedient, and anxiously waiting by our master's table for more.

And these proto-fascist behavioral control tricks are not just for kids. Corporate Capitalism has left us Americans psychologically arrested in a pathetic simulacrum of childhood where our inchoate fears of being preyed upon by our (so-called) protectors (who we internally and accurately recognize as monsters) and are displaced into compulsive consumerism (including overeating) and a reflexive fear of outsiders.

If we were to awaken to this subterfuge, we would apprehend: Our individual uniqueness is being robbed from us on a daily basis due to our enslavement to a mindless system that lives for no other reason than it lives. A system that eats its fatted young (giving new meaning to the term consumer economy) and exists only to perpetuate itself -- a system that has become a soul-devouring monster, the embodiment of Alan Ginsburg's Moloch.

Why do we accept this soul-defying situation? For most of us, the price we would have to pay for confronting authority would be far too prohibitive; hence, we learn it is acceptable (as well as politically useful to our power mad leaders) to displace our anger and fear upon outsiders. Ergo, the so-called Clash of Civilizations is unloosed and slouches, by way of the Washington Beltway, to Iraq, Iran and beyond to be born.

This is the manner that we as a society came to believe we can "compromise" on acts of torture committed in our name and not fear the loss of our souls as a result of our complicity. Although, the loss of our national soul would only prove redundant: Years ago, we decided our souls, both individual and national, were somewhat less than useful to us -- and not nearly as compelling as a new widescreen, plasma TV and the like -- hence they were discarded into the reeking landfills of this toxic country like an old appliance.

These actions are what the corporate/military/consumer empire demands of us: For it does not take long for us to learn which aspects of our personalities are accepted and rewarded, and, conversely, which ones will be punished and scorned. In essence, the roles we're expected to play in exchange for being loved, fed, clothed and sheltered.

This exchange insures us that we're given a "safe" place within the community -- not cast out into the wilderness and fed to the wolves. This fear is not an outrageous fantasy: it is, in fact, a primal memory. Due to the fact, numerous forms of infanticide were once common practices in nearly all cultures, including the act of abandoning outcast children to die in the wilderness.

Moreover, this knowledge still lingers within our psyches, where the memories of such terrors still howl just beyond the tree line of our waking awareness, instilling within us the terror of ridicule, of failure, of being ostracized. Far too many of us succumb to these fears and begin playing the roles circumscribed by their families, communities, and cultures. Tragically, their true selves, for all practical purposes, were smothered in their cribs.

In itself, the False Self, as well as other varieties of habitual self-centeredness, is a variety of imprisonment. The world is spread before the cell of the self, yet we prisoners cannot leave the confines of our small, self-involved anxieties; therein, mind, heart and imagination become atrophied by a lack of experience, empathy and spontaneity. The bars of the cage might be invisible, yet the sense of confinement is palpable across our corporatized culture. Ergo, a collective numbness and apathy levels upon the land -- and ultimately our desensitization to genocide and torture.

To begin to free oneself from the bondage of the False Self, one must become aware of one's own fraudulence. That being: the awareness of one's desperate machinations before exploitive authority.

Self-knowledge can provide us with a point of entry to the act of empathy. Yes, even extending it towards one as loathsome as George W. Bush. Years ago, the sorry ass son of bitch put on a mask (its contours, both menacing and ridiculous) in a vain attempt to shield himself from being crushed by power. Imagine having his parents: that soulless cipher of a father and blood-freezing Medusa of a mother. Try to imagine the psychological carnage involved. It's the same trauma we experience daily due to our own powerlessness against the dictates of the corporate state and its threats, both implied and overt, to cast us into the howling wilderness of financial ruin, poverty, and homelessness.

(A caveat: The proffering of empathy to Dick Cheney would be pushing the parameters of empathy to the breaking point: Upon being subjected to Cheney's glowering, reptilian aura, even Mahatma Gandhi would be reaching for a pair of brass knuckles.)

Even in this fear-ridden era, there are some among us -- types such as non-conformists, creative thinkers, and artists -- who welcome (rather than cower before) the metaphorical wolves (that are recognized, each to each, as fellow outcasts). Instead of being eaten by the wolves, they are suckled and raised by them.

Nourished by their outsider status, the creative spirit thrives when freed from the constraints of a mindless adherence to groupthink. The dark terrain of societal abandonment becomes their natural habitat: they howl at the moon; they reject the daylight world of bland consensus; they learn to see in the dark, apprehending their own interior darkness and, as a result, gain an understanding into the hearts of darkness beating within those in power.

The wilderness of political activism, of poetry, of art becomes their home: they don't clean up nicely for polite company; they don't let themselves be bred down (as a few domesticated wolves did) to yapping Toy Poodles, in exchange for a few food scraps.

Yes, when you're looking at a Toy Poodle you're looking at a former wolf, as when you're looking at the corporate press corps, you're looking at folks whose ancestors long ago were journalists.

One moment, you're loping through the woods, snout held high, smelling the scent of fresh game on the wind, then the next thing you know -- you're being led around on a leash and collar, encrusted with tacky rhinestones and you're salivating at the sound of an electric can opener. One moment, you're a child, entranced in play, hardwired to eternity -- the next thing you know, you're sitting at work and your passions, hopes, and yearnings have been shrunk down to Toy Poodle-sized agendas. You're truckling for your boss's approval; you're counting the minutes until break time, when you can devour some junk food. Like a domesticated pet, or an unfortunate animal incarcerated in a zoo, you are no longer a noble animal -- you're a Thing That Waits For Lunch.

To resist, we must cast off the fear of being an outcast. I remain hopeful: There is yet a molecule or two of the wild wolf left within us cringing, cloying Toy Poodles.

One must always remember this: We human beings are of nature too. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, it will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake our own essential natures, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, torture-countenancing sick puppies.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Article was originally published Sept. 28, 2006 at Dissident Voice

Collapse

There's a well-know witticism from the 1980s about Ronald Reagan that played-off a ubiquitous television commercial of the time that went, "Ronald Reagan is not the president: He just plays one on TV." A similar trope can be said of the present day United States. We're no longer an empire: We just resemble one on TV.

How did it come to be that our ability to apprehend reality is in such short supply, at a time when the consequences of such dangerous folly will prove so tragic and lasting?

At times, in equal degree to the enormity of a given situation, there will come to exist an equal degree of denial. If you ever have the desire for a bit of solitude, when attending a social function, try this. Drop the small talk and utter something along the lines of: "Our actions are causing ongoing and exponentially increasing upheaval in the earth's ecosystem, due to the effects of global warming." Or: "Did you know that the earth's oceans and seas will be all but devoid of life in fifty years?" Then there's the always reliable: "Because of our national dependency on the crack-house economics of a system based on a need for an ever-increasing squandering of our planets finite resources (maintained by a cross addiction to a global marketplace sustained by petroleum) -- all of which has been inflicted on the planet by a class of hyper-rich, psychotic death monkeys -- you have no more control over your fate than some scrawny, brown-skinned feller strapped to a torture table at Guantanamo."

As stated, if you give it a go, you'll be afforded an abundance of personal space. Such utterances have the terrible disadvantage of being the truth; as such, they're guaranteed room-clearers. The largest social faux pas of all, in the contemporary US, might be to remind a person of their powerlessness.

Understandably, we avoid the knowledge of those things that inflict upon us the feelings of powerlessness we experience when secured in a dentist's chair. In such circumstances, the only question we're concerned with is: Will there be enough anesthetizing agents available to numb out the anxiety and pain? Perhaps, this is what underpins the reason we have become a people who've grown incurious of the larger world around us to point of becoming all but insensate: We need the equivalent of a root canal on a global-wide basis. Worse, the drilling must start at the epicenter of the decay, right here in The United States.

Accordingly, there are a few facts it is imperative we face, immediately and unmedicated. Among them: The changes to the earth ecosystem wrought by global warming are neither a political opinion nor are the acts of a wrathful god in heaven, but are a dynamic of nature set in motion by our actions -- and are wholly indifferent to the fate of mankind.

The capitalist's drive for endless abundance has allowed us to ascend the fast food chain, yet we blink uncomprehendingly at the catastrophic algorithms of global climate change. We -- the progeny of global corporatism -- in regard to our acknowledgment of the dire events and pressing issues of our time, our sense of collective narrative is, for all practical purposes, about as keen as that of the creatures of the Cretaceous Period in regard to their understanding of the earth-altering implications of planetary collisions with comets. The size of our denial is as enormous as the body of a brachiosaurus and our response to the dire situation has been about as adequate as if we were using its walnut-sized brain.

Furthermore, we are the comet. We are both the threatened, dominate species -- as well as the comet of destruction that will end this Empire of Endless Burgers and Ceaseless Bullshit. Our delusions of the sustainability of ever-expanding market-based economies, wholly dependent upon a never wavering abundance of resources, has rendered us as inflexible as the dinosaurs were before a global wide, sky-occluding dust cloud. We're devouring the life-sustaining resources of the earth as if it were a bag of Doritos. Our empty appetites, engendered by global corporatism and its reliance on fossil fuels, is leveling an effect upon our world tantamount to a slow motion collision with a comet ... To survive, we must curb our appetite for this everyday menu of death -- for these Valueless Meals comprised of the empty calories of comforting lies proffered by the corporate state.

The present paradigm must (and will) collapse: Rising gross national products, imaginative ad campaigns and faith in some mythological being returning from the sky will not cause the earth's rising oceans to recede nor its melting Polar ice caps to reconstitute. Our advertising and public relations evangelists here in the Empire of Endless Burgers cannot convert the forces of extinction to marketplace pieties with new advertising slogans. Our redeemer gods of product placement cannot provide our dying culture with longer shelf life. Belief in these gods of the mall and empyrean may have banished doubt and diffidence -- yet these myths cannot shelter us from the anonymous fury of the exponential mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic runaway.

All in all, our belief in economic providence has proven our undoing -- our insistence on its very existence left us mistaking a full stomach for a leveling portion of divine grace. Our gods of commerce offered drive-thru-window epiphanies. We believed our prayers would always be answered: Instantly -- came the high priests of the consumer state's homilies of perpetual gratification -- their voices crackling like a burning bush from the drive-thru order-box.

But now: Overcooked in arrogance and oil: The Empire of Endless Burgers is char: Stick a fork in it -- it's overdone.

As our delusions bake to ash, what shall we cry into the gathering darkness? Can our pleas be heard over the thunderous machinery of the encompassing void?

What if the realization came that our most sacrosanct beliefs -- both economic and epistemological -- were but a musky collection of antiquated myths? To survive, our blind faith-based suppositions must not be flattered by political opportunists (I'm looking at you, Hillary and Obama) -- but allowed to rot into compost then be buried. Because deep down, we already realize our allegiances to the imaginary gods and saviors of long dead, desert tribalists not only blind us to the dangers at hand but in large measure helped to contribute to our troubles in the first place. Ergo, It's a fact: Jesus will not descend and heal the earth's dying seas. We might as well hold out for Little Folk, adorned with gossamer wings, to appear from the gnome-haunted air and sprinkle Fairy Dust upon it.

Furthermore, there are no Chosen People -- nor does there exist an Omnipotent Sky Daddy above who could give a rodent's rectum about the oil-soaked real estate of the Middle East nor any other plot of disputed ground on this cosmological backwater of a planet.

It's time to wake up and smell the mythology. God has no will. God has no more of a plan than a tree has a financial portfolio. God does not say God bless you: Your life is not an eternal sneeze in need of a perpetual gesundheit. And there never was a character who rose from this sin-sullied earth and took up residence in the starry filament named Jesus Christ -- who will love you no matter how big of an asshole you are: That's the job of your dog.

Perhaps such shocks to the system might rouse us from that narcissistic swoon called "my faith", might shatter our perennial delusions that God desires for us to conquer and kill in his name, and might deliver us to the true Promised Land -- the one that exists just beyond the limited sight-line of our systems of belief.

And might banish the empty mythos of instant gratification -- the guiding god of global capitalism -- which is the force (in a toxic, paradoxical mixture with sexual repression) that begot the fantasies of contemporary Christian Fundamentalism. In essence, what is the Christian fundamentalist belief in the so-called End Time, but a worldview that reduces mythic reality to channel surfing? One moment you're watching the Armageddon Channel, then you click the remote and you're in eternal RaptureLand. Then you click over to the Fundie Porn Channel to view fantasies involving the instantaneous shedding of your clothes, next you're being ejaculated from your body to engage in a celestial orgy with Jesus -- whereas all of life on earth climaxes with a cosmic money shot involving you and your fellow Christian's immortal souls being splattered upon the face of God.

If it were possible for their myths to be made manifest and Christ did return, not only would he make a War on Christmas -- but on the death-lusting delusions of Christianity itself.

What can lead people to such belief systems? To understand, one must look at the poetic metaphors that are literalized into religious faith.

Place, landscape, situation, and the mythos of its people are inextricably bound. When I was a child, growing up in the Deep South, on the occasion of fishing expeditions and such, I would have contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century. We would sit on wooden porches, snapping string beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture. Like their life-sustaining crops, the figure of Christ was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed to sustain their lives, then, like the figure of Christ, resurrected as next year's seed crop. These tales held resonance for them because they were suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria that they lived everyday; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. Hence, Jesus was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.

And this is why megachurch Christians and present day conservatives long for the release of death. When passion, intimacy and hope are thwarted by pervasive feelings of powerlessness, people will long for release into paradise. Life lived under corporate hegemony is a cage: one that distorts the human animal's instinctual longing for love, communal acceptance and freedom by providing commercial facsimiles of those things -- and, as a result, delivers the human animal to economic imprisonment. The bars of the cage might be invisible -- yet the sense of confinement is palpable across our utterly commodified culture, where, like convicts in the cell, longing for release, Christian fundies long for the aforementioned carnal video game of RaptureLand -- while consumers, confined in their work stations and shackled by debt, long for vacations, enormous motor vehicles, porn, and, paradoxically, yet more imprisoning consumer goods ... as George W. Bush longs for his own idealized reflection to be mirrored by the judgment of history.

And we, to paraphrase a Bob Dylan song, shall be released -- just not in the manner in which we pine. As recent history has shown, insularity is a chaos generator; closed systems decay at exponentially increasing rates ... Hubris brings the fall ... Sometimes, as a means of escaping the confinement of one's own life-diminishing, self-proclaimed "morality", an individual (or even a culture) will court destruction. (You may insert the name of the disgraced, hypocritical Christian moralist of the moment here.)

Carl Jung asked the question: Why would the story line of the Christian myth of Christ place the birth of the savior of the vast cosmos in the remote hinterlands of the ruling Roman empire, plus have that divine birth take place in the hinterlands of those hinterlands, plus have the birth take place on the floor of a barn, no less, amid the animal shit? Jung answered that the human ego, as is the case with an overgrown, corrupt empire, will cast out what it cannot exploit and subdue.

This is why every age presents us with an imperial occupation of the mind. Yet, in our era, the stakes could not be higher. From the deathscape we've made of the city of Baghdad, to the dying oceans of the earth -- beneath our arrogance and carelessness lies a culture in suicidal despair. Contemporary Christians may call it faith, neocons may call it freedom, and corporatist might call it market values -- but it smells like death.

There are occasions when all other means have failed and circumstances have grown so desperate that one, against all habit and will, is driven to face the truth. Where I was raised such a situation is called a "come-to-Jesus moment." Paradoxically, the come-to-Jesus moment we must embrace is: There is no Jesus to come to -- only a host of unnerving facts we have banished to the hinterlands of our minds. There will be no star blazing in the eastern sky to guide us; no divine child vouchsafed in a boondocks manger to genuflect before. All we can hope to gain is the opportunity for renewal that flickers to life from ending the long, forced exile of truth.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Collapse

A decade and half ago, we watched smugly as The Kremlin came undone. Yet, somehow we believe ourselves to be immune from the rot that causes empires to collapse from within.

The Social Realist poets of the former Soviet Union made themselves the objects of much (deserved) derision, when, in the service of the dogmatic dictates of state communism, they penned poetic odes to crop yields, tractors and other farm implements.

When a Russian attempts to convey his passions, his soul is prone to reach inward seeking poetic depths. In contrast, nowadays, in situations of crucial importance, such as the anxious waiting in long lines involved when attempting to procure PlayStation 3s among the throngs of their fellow Home Entertainment Unit-lusting Fred C. Dobbs types, Americans express their ardor -- by reaching for a gun. For we all know that The Baby Jesus would find the sound of Yuletide gunfire to be as soothing as a celestial lullaby.

Back down here on earth, while it was damn silly for Soviet aesthetes to go into a poetic swoon over farm equipment, somehow, the act of going collectively round-heeled over electronic appliances (including jealous rages that lead to homicidal outbursts) doesn't seem like the sort of communal practices that will allow an empire to endure for long.

The former Soviet Union had the risible excesses of her Social Realists -- but what is one to make of our culture of Wal*Mart Nihilists. Although, these acts are revelatory: These are the kinds of "crimes of passion" that contemporary Americans perpetrate. Such actions reveal what it is we truly care about, deep down. And, sadly, our concerns have little to do with being the keepers of Liberty's flame -- or even being good stewards of our children's future.

The frustrations of a life defined by the narrow confines of corporatism produces these lethal states of mind, whereby the homicidal urges that are encoded into the genetic makeup of all human beings become magnified into impulses both monstrous and preposterous: Resultantly, many Americans view life and death issues as having the weightless consequences of a thrill-kill video game.

Yet, most citizens of our moribund republic, because they've internalized the system, remain in denial regarding the authoritarian deathscape the nation has become. Moreover, they have nothing to contrast it with ... What they feel is a sense of underlying unease which the consumer state (palliatively) remedies with meds and media distractions. What else could drive people insane enough to shoot each other over consumer goods? Not to mention the emptiness and desperation involved with the compulsion to line up lusting after electronic junk in the first place. I just want to shout out to such folks -- I'm so sorry your life has come to this.

And don't bandy back at me inane platitudes such as, "these are the necessary risks and excesses inherent to 'the free market' system" -- and other such manifestations of willful ignorance and flat-out deceit. Your so-called free market has caused our nation to become imprisoned in debt, including our collectively becoming obeisant to China, who now owns our shabby asses and dwindling assets, like some global village pawn broker, by the purchase of our national debt.

(And we know those in positions of power in China lie awake at night ruminating on the well being of the citizens of The United States. Yes, probably about to the same degree Dick Cheney lies awake at night agonizing over the effect of a blast of buckshot delivered to the face of an elderly hunting companion.)

To escape the knowledge of our enslavement and its concomitant sense of powerlessness, emptiness and hopelessness, we have become obsessed with the pursuit of piffle. Yet we cannot consume away the pervasive sense of unease. Moreover -- following Eric Hoffer's dire dictum -- "You can never get enough of what you really don't want" -- we're driven to "develop" more soulless subdivisions, open more lifeless Big Box stores and compulsively throw ourselves in to the thrall of even more mindless consumerism.

Ivan Illich averred: "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Hence, like all hopeless addicts, in reality, what we're seeking is the serenity of the grave.

Look at the evidence: We're engaged in an ongoing act of murder/suicide by our engagement in a state of perpetual war termed the War on Terror. In this way, our unconscious wishes are being granted in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and we're, most likely, not done yet. Accordingly, our need to relieve our sense of emptiness and powerlessness has grown so insatiable that we roam the world, relentlessly, in search of the means of mollification: But where we go, we leave a wasteland in our wake, including the manner we have fouled our own nest.

Furthermore, I'm willing to hazard a guess that neither industry, nor thrift, nor a PlayStation 3's razzle dazzle, nor another round of lowered interest rates nor a surge of consumer spending, nor a miracle military victory in Iraq, nor a sleepless fleet of terrorist-spotting spy satellites in space, nor a billion surveillance cameras trained on every person, place and thing on the planet could keep the oceanic vicissitudes of earthly existence from rising, nor the gales of contretemps from blowing, nor the casuistry-sundering storms of uncertainty from making landfall -- and could, at this late date, keep the American Empire from collapsing from the rot festering within its spoiled rotten populace.

This is due to the sad fact that, thus far, all our attempts to defeat our feelings of powerlessness and sate our emptiness have been vain, shallow, self-serving and authoritarian; hence, our acts have only managed to defeat and suppress the life-vivifying forces of freedom and imagination within us. We may give lip service to Jesus, but we outright worship the spurious Eros of the corporatist advertising/entertainment/consumer paradigm -- and it has risen before us as manifest Thanatos.

In spirit-desiccating accommodation to this punitive and petty age, we have merely managed to submerge our fires of authentic human passion. This is a gambit fraught with hidden danger. I've heard stories of fires that burned unseen in sealed-off, abandoned mines -- wherein years later, miles from the original location of the blaze, dead trees burst into flames...the fire having traveled underground the length of the mine and up the dry kindling of the tree's root system to explode in open air. We witness these sorts of sudden conflagrations, constantly: road rage, workplace and school shooting sprees, spittle-spraying right-wing pundits, George Bush's oscillations between dead-eyed blankness and prickly anger (I don't know which state is more terrifying) and a culture that willingly accepts the outright murder of civilians, for no discernible reason. As if there exists a good one.
If the fires of passion burn, unseen and untended, in subterranean denial -- how can an individual or a culture learn to temper those raging fires of passion into warmth and compassion? Hence: the coldness of the corporate culture and the lifelessness of existence in contemporary America, resulting in chronic dissatisfaction (the feeling something is missing) and the attempts to ameliorate the discomfort with the dark Eros of perpetual war and enslavement to the shallow distractions of the consumer state.

The fire, next time -- indeed.

The corporate media is never going to level with you on the subject: It would put them out of business. Such a development is about as likely as the arising of a mass social movement, led by pimps, called, "The Pimp's Crusade For The Promotion of Universal Abstinence."

Accordingly, in our shallow and self-defeating era, a million lies are told; a million promises are broken. The poor starve; the rest of us rot from within. As everything we hold precious is imperiled, as we engage in a planet-destroying struggle for the attainment of junk.

Yet, it need not play out this way: For our minds are honeycombed by multiple universes of possibilities, ideas, and imaginings. Accordingly, we sense that the "information" we receive from the commercial media, official Washington, and the business sector is far from complete -- that it is merely a few, meretricious fragments of a subjective account, splintered from a small shard of a hasty conclusion, broken from a vast mosaic of a larger prevarication.

But like the dimwit protagonists of a Country and Western song, too many of us plead to be plied with sweet lies. Pervasive corporatism creates the illusion we have little choice in the matter. Freedom is no more available to us than finding undying love in a Honky Tonk.

Moreover, the ideas contained in The Bill of Rights and the tenets of The Enlightenment are quaint notions to corporatists. Within our empire of mammon, cant and incommensurate privilege, concepts such as freedom and liberty lie forgotten, languishing like the statues of forsaken gods within the crumbling temples of some dead religion.

I often receive emails from readers who ask, in essence:

And what of those of us -- those who remember and grieve our republic's passing. Is there some place of sanctuary where we could rally our spirits; a place where we might gather our strength -- where we might have a rapprochement with our own hopeful hearts, where we might rise in the cool air of morning in some location no longer haunted by the malicious and manipulative spirits who have usurped our names and stolen our country. Is there any place on earth where we might dodge the mind-grinding, soul-killing, death-worshipping legacy of the militarist/corporatist/consumerist state?

Don't you see, Phil, these readers implore and admonish me: We're besieged and outnumbered by the mindless worshippers of Death around us -- and, by the way, fella, your incantatory prose will not move, nor even interest them.

I'll answer these entreaties by quoting from a documentary, "Punk: Attitude," I viewed, recently, in which independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch posited that art movements (and political ones as well) don't need the masses, they just need a committed 5 percent ... the masses will follow. There is no need to inform the mob; a mob, by its very nature, is uninformed -- and unteachable. The belief in the existence of an informed mob is like believing in the existence of that chimera called compassionate conservatism -- and we've seen where credulity to that sort of crazy talk leads.

As was the case with Punk, which Jarmusch termed, "do it yourself art" -- one needs passion, commitment, conviction -- tempered by an ability to apprehend and uniquely interpret changing realities and circumstances -- plus an inner reservoir of courage and follow through. These things can't be bought retail: And that is exactly the advantage we hold.

Hence, it might be instructive to look at the mode of being evinced by the pioneers of Punk Rock ... Tired of endless guitar solos and of Arena Rock and Roll's egomaniacal inanities, they learned to play three cords -- real fast -- and would play for little or no money in shot-out downtown clubs -- thereby reintroducing the danger and allure of the subversive intimacy of early Rock and Roll to a new generation -- and forever establishing the enduring principle that being an imbecilic Rock and Roll egoist should be a democratic process -- not limited to only corporate, guitar technocrats (or even those individuals possessed of the tyranny of talent).

Point of clarification: I'm not speaking here of literally becoming a punk rocker. (Although, a convincing argument can be made that: independent websites and blogs are the new Punk Rock.) I'm talking about the initial passion of the progenitors -- not the conformist banalities displayed by their mindless followers ... I'm speaking of the mode of being of the folks who created the art form -- not the hollow mimicry of those who mummify it into dogma.

The do-it-your-self-art idea being the key that unlocks the barred door of the commodified prison of a corporatist state of mind and allows one's life to be created -- not by narrow careerist agendas -- but by the surrender to all it takes to be free.

To do this, sometimes, you must follow your inspiration so far off the path -- you have to blaze your own path to make your way back.

It's not the outcome of your endeavors, but the life lived. If you live with such ardor -- who knows who and what you'll effect. We must be like the monks of The Dark Ages, copying books for generations yet unborn, preserving what we can of our humanity and passing it on.

I believe hope arises in organic ways before it makes its way into political platforms, is implemented into policy, and, finally, imprisons us in dogma -- thus allowing a new generation to engage in the soul-making of sedition against its ossified order.

Let's get to it.

Or else, pack your firearm of choice and line-up for a PlayStation 3. Although, it's all good: Because, someday, an era may arrive when sanity prevails and future generations will have a nice laugh at your expense -- a generation of clowns who would kill (even destroy the world) for an appliance.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Collapse

But we must not let ourselves -- the true beneficiaries of empire -- off so easily: Our national tragedies (from all the corpses amassed, buried and forgotten in our imperial wars -- to our intransigence and denial regarding Global Warming) are a collaborative effort with our leaders: A joint and living lie of the mind -- made manifest by collective desire and remorseless pursuit.

Upon the occasion of our cultural confabulation of colonial hagiography dubbed "Thanksgiving," a tradition when we stuff our overweight bellies by devouring big, growth hormone-injected, flightless birds in order to celebrate, what in truth was, a Thanks-taking of this land by our ancestors from its original inhabitants -- (but a hearty salutation of "Happy Genocide Day" doesn't exactly stimulate the appetite, does it?) -- I will address the following missive to you -- my fellow unindicted (perhaps even unconscious) co-conspirators in the crimes of our country.

Let's begin with the things nearest to us: The structures and objects we see before us, everyday. And it's not a beautiful sight to behold.

Due to the banality, blandness, and flat-out ugliness of the stripmall/big box store/fast food outlet, prefab nowhereland of our contemporary landscape, life in the US under corporatism is as seductive as the glare of florescent tube lighting in a convenience store.

The architecture of the US looks as if Aldophe Eichmann grew bored endlessly calculating the human weigh capacity of death camp bound boxcars -- rose from Hell -- and went into the prefab structure design business.

Now, don't get ugly, you admonish.

Tell me: What is truly ugly -- the composition and dissemination of a heartfelt, political jeremiad (or even an angry rant) - or the squandering of the passing hours of our finite lives within ugly suburban subdivisions, oversized, ugly-ass motor vehicles, soulless stripmalls and sterile office parks.

Man, have we let ourselves go: and its not only the sprawl around our middle: it's the phony way we comport ourselves in manner and deed. Our shallowness - our hollowness - our lack of conscience, self-awareness and conviction ... all of which, the architecture and accoutrement of our commodified nowhereland merely reflects.

Worse yet, we no longer even see it. We are inseparable from our environment in the same manner e-coli bacteria are inseparable from feces ... The nowhere-scape before us exists in equal measure to the nowhere-scape within ...

It seems as though: Our landscape has become so vapid and banal, it can't even rise to the level of being tacky ... Whatever the case -- even an attempt at tawdriness would show some kind of low-grade involvement. Instead, there is an overall feeling of flimsiness -- a sense of a world devoid of substance. And the pervasive unsubstantiality creates an underlying aura of anxiety -- the feeling that all of it can and will be leveled and scattered in some approaching cataclysm ... In this way, we hear the death rattle attendant to a closed system in entropic runaway ... The system is still replicating itself, exponentially -- yet, in equal measure, it bears and spreads the seeds of its demise.

This is why I have come to squat in your comfort zone, until you take notice.

Because the manner we're living is as salubrious as a tsunami.

And is about as sustainable, body and soul, as Elvis Presley's final binge.

Our emptiness is compensated for by the gigantism we see everywhere around us: from an epidemic of obese children to bloated McMansions. But whether its wooly mammoths or SUVs -- or Elvis, stuffed into a sequined jumpsuit -- or the fate of unwieldy armies of over-extended empires, bogged down by local insurgencies -- gigantism is a precursor to extinction. Worse, at present, this phenomenon is transpiring on a global basis.

Corporatism has rendered us analogous to the last days of Elvis ... Puffy, bloated -- we wheeze our way through our set ... Guarded gate communities are our own private Graceland where we die in excess and isolation. The electric lights sequined across the entire planet, now glow from space like one of Elvis's Las Vegas costumes. But does no one see the dying man beneath the jeweled jumpsuit? The land and The King are one.

America has left the building.

Because, like any disorder of the psyche, being the organic system a culture is -- pathology will increase, exponentially. Inevitably, a collapse will come ... Then it can and will get even uglier: Homegrown Brownshirts emerge, brandishing bibles and automatic weapons (convinced when Jesus returns the first thing he'll do is apply for membership to the NRA and then saddle-up and ride a Cruise Missile, Slim Pickens-style, aimed at the false god idolizing hordes of the Muslem world). Then will come detention camps, built by Halliburton and guarded by Blackwater rent-a-thugs ... In time, the sky will be darkened from the floating ash of the furnace-devoured flesh of those pushed into the flames lit by collective psychosis.

Hyperbolic, you say. No, it's an understatement. Remember we're speaking about the country that committed the most sustained, large-scale holocaust in human history, right here on our own soil -- the genocidal destruction of the Native American Nations. Happy Thanks-taking, America. Holocaust museums should be as prevalent as shopping malls, upon the blood-sodden soil of this land. In addition, while we're chronicling the carnage, let us not forget that we're the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons as an act of war (the most massive terrorist attack of all time) wherein we killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians for no other reason than to put Stalin on notice that we were to be the lone colossus bestriding the war decimated post-war world.

As the years have passed, we Americans now stand before a contemptuous world: bloated in our subdivisions, waddling through Big Box retail stores, languishing in ignorance and anomie -- living caricatures of the grotesques of doomed empires. Therefore, we must take a long, revealing look at ourselves: Our breath stinks of carbon monoxide -- it's like we've been French kissing the tailpipe of a Humvee. Sometimes, I wish, America, you'd just wrap your lips around that tailpipe and commit suicide by internal combustion engine fellatio. (I mean it's coming to that anyway ... But must we take the rest of the world with us when we go?)

Or: the process of awakening and renewal can begin. It's our choice, collectively; It's our responsibility, personally -- to be aware of and then widely proclaim the stakes involved.
First and foremost, it's up to political activists, artists, online pamphleteers, et al to agitate against the neo-feudalist order of corporatism.
The present order is anathema to the soul-making of creative endeavor.

Art movements, from Paris in the 1920s, to the Beats and hippies, to the flannel-clad, guitar-poet wretches of the Northwest in the late 1980s and early 90's had one common factor, in all those flowerings of life-vivifying creativity -- cheap rent.

Rilke once said something along the lines of: Everybody has a letter written inside their heart and if you don't live the life your heart yearns to live, you won't be allowed to read this letter before you die ... Hence, we might infer: There exist, across the land, dead-letter offices, vast and cavernous, where our mail awaits, unopened and unread.

Ergo, one of the prevailing miseries of our era is: Most of us are to busy earning a living to live. As rents go down, levels of risk and inspiration rise. Moreover, we need the reflective power of art to end this impasse. It is imperative that we awaken to the realities of this death-dreaming empire.

Apropos, forgive me (or don't) for the angry tone of this missive -- for I am overwhelmed by the immensity of our nation's collective capacity for denial, casuistry and flat-out lying in regard to the death and destruction that has been inflicted in our names.

We must begin to grasp the unsettling knowledge that the things we, as a nation, inflict upon the world -- we will eventually inflict upon ourselves. It is imperative that we start to ask ourselves this question: When so many external and internal forces work to thwart, degrade, and destroy our essential selves -- hence the world -- what can help to restore us?

Therefore, I'm calling you out -- the hidden side of our national character -- right here, right now. Show us who you are: reveal to us your blank face, in all its banal symmetry - and finally, and at long last -- give us an accounting of yourself.

I'm not naive. I realize you feel you're under no obligation to do so. You feel no more need to explain your actions than does Death itself.
Although you have many faces, deep down, we know who you are: You're a clean-shaven lobbyist, a sharp-elbow careerist, a public relations expert, a land-decimating real estate developer, a rent-inflating landlord, a cunning advertising executive, a weapons designing technocrat, a pentagon planner -- you're the bastard driving the SUV who is perpetually tailing my ass in traffic, you're my blank-faced, next-door neighbor, lacquering his hybrid lawn in insoluble pesticides. -- In short, you're all the quotidian and respectable -- therefore -- highly deceptive faces of Death. You're our own face, personal and private, individual and collective: yours/ours is the murder's countenance of empire.

Even though we all know the truth about you and our own complicity in your crimes, we push the knowledge from our minds, as we trudge though our days. And this is the reason: You promise us safety -- even as, you deliver us, incrementally and ineluctably, to destruction.

How do I reach you - how do I beseeched you to cease the madness?

You name the place where I can confront you: On a thronging sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, during evening rush, as we're brushed and buffeted by the squalid grace of crowds. Perhaps, you might take the barstool next to mine and speak too loudly in my ear, jabbing my chest with your bony index finger to punctuate the pointless palaver of your self-justifying lies. How about: Let's take a cross-country drive, you and I, and see the fever dream of our sick nation unfurl before us through the dusty windshield of a grasshopper green, 1975, AMC Gremlin ... so that we might have time to talk this all through.

Because, I want you to realized this: There are hidden reservoirs of hope within us: reservoirs as boundless as the reach of your ruthlessness. These waters are as deep and potent as you are, at present, shallow and shameless. Yet, they're inaccessible to you -- as long as you insist your drink of choice will continue to be oil and blood, mixed with the runoff of melting Arctic glaciers.

What you do not know is this: From these inner reservoirs emerge rivers of renewal that run between all of those who turn away from the dry, dead landscape of your lies.

These streams of inspiration and renewal silently flow between those who have glimpsed this: That each generation must struggle against the soulless seekers of absolute power, that each era is a wasteland, that every person learns life is unfair, yet must seek to drink from the waters of hope -- so that our tongues will not wither to cynical dust.

Empires rise and fall, but hope remains, flowing through time and place, bearing all things to the sea and back again, perpetually returning, bringing new life to the dry, dead land, slaking our thirst, cleansing our wounds, delivering to us the strength to make and remake the world anew, and, at day's end, lulling us to restful sleep to the timeless cadences of its ceaseless currents.

Collapse

For those who haven't noticed: While we were busy with other concerns, many of our rights and liberties went missing. Moreover, along with them, have went or are going fast: our planet's polar ice caps; accountability of the corporate sector (our nation's true power brokers); as well as, a sense of place, history, and even a cursory understanding, among a large percent of the populace of the US, of the precepts of civilization and of democratic discourse.

These circumstances, like the melting of the polar ice caps, have transpired, incrementally, and have been going on for longer than that Reign of Terror in Tiny Town known as the Bush presidency. For example, regarding the increasingly authoritarian terrain we negotiate our way through daily: In American work places, bosses routinely snoop into underlings' personal e-mails and monitor our web-surfing practices. How did it come about that so many Americans have grown to accept such demeaning intrusions into our privacy?

In such a repressive societal milieu, there is no need to threaten would-be dissidents with old school totalitarian measures such as forced deportment to Siberian labor camps. Threats, overt and covert, to one's economic security and social standing serve to dissuade most of us from political and social dissent. In the class stratified structure of the US work force, where the personal consequences borne of financial upheaval are swift, punitive and severe, the implicit threat of being deported to America's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness renders most of us compliant to the exploitive dictates of corporate oligarchy.

Where did this all begin? How did it all get away from us? Furthermore -- why do we stand for it -- when these practices are antithetical to everything we claim to believe in as a nation?

In part, the proto-fascistic transgressions of corporate rule have made these circumstances all but inevitable, because our concept of what it means to be a human being has been incrementally defined downward. There has been much discussion of the dumbing down of American life. And these assessments are accurate and unnerving. (How else does one explain that 37% of those Connecticut voters who cast ballots for Joe Lieberman did so believing he was the peace candidate?) But there has been little discourse given to the pervasive corporate blandification of American life -- the manner in which its criteria both numbs out the personality of an individual and renders the nation's landscape monotonous and ugly.

The effects of corporatism are insidious. In such an environment, there is no need for mass rallies replete with bon fires blazing against the totalitarian darkness: Corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become fearful and cautious -- and, after a time, flattens out one's inner drives and longings. As a result, a Triumph of the Bland comes to pass, internally and externally.

Ergo, the oligarchs atop the present order have no need for reeducation camps nor the ever-vigilant gaze of neighborhood block captains. We have become our own, ever-vigilant minders; within us, we have in place vast networks of secret police informers -- our own personal bully boy enforcers of blandness who leave us as passionless and empty as the architecture of the corporate nothingscape that surrounds us.

In addition, corporatism demands employees render themselves fecklessly pleasant. One doesn't want to be caught being "negative" nor be accused of the treachery of not being "a team player." Such accusations bring to an individual a similar decree of ignominy as being denounced as a counterrevolutionary under the fallen regime of the former Soviet Union.

Accordingly, despite their midterm election victory, this problem remains mirrored in the leadership of the Democratic party -- most of whom are the bought and sold products of corporatist rule and, therefore, have been trained to act with the kind of ersatz public congeniality demanded of all underlings in the corporate state. Apropos, the odd combination of fecklessness and smugness they delude themselves into believing is conducive to steering a course of "sensible centrism." From refusing to fight stolen elections -- right up to the present Democratic leadership of congress stating they will not press for the impeachment of the most corrupt president in the history of the republic -- we bear constant witness to it.

In this regard, it's very considerate of congressional Republicans who, in synergy with the Bush cartel, perpetrated one of the most vicious, vindictive and exclusionary reigns in congressional history to now want to play nice and "reconcile." It's very magnanimous of them to forgive us leftists for being right on all fronts -- and generous of them to forgive the majority of their Democratic peers in congress for cowering before them, day in and day out, for the past four years of one party rule.

Moreover, it was we leftist outsiders -- not reasonable, accommodating liberals -- who were right about the disastrous consequences that would befall an invasion of Iraq; as we were and remain right in our revulsion to the fascistic fraud that is the Patriot Act and the War on Terror.

This is the reason we're not let into the closed club of mainstream punditry. Although, to avoid being cruel, such an event might prove to be unfair to the slow children therein. We'd be hurling our ninety mile-an-hour, progressive fast balls past them -- while they're playing tee-ball ... Only the insularity inherent to a life of privilege can render folks as outright slow to the realities of the outside world as evinced by our present day pundit class. Is it any wonder they've enabled Duyba for so long. He's on their tee-ball team. The little Beltway Oligarchs.

In short, mainstream Democrats and self-proclaimed centrist pundits have adapted the mandatory mode of being that is demanded of corporate underlings: self-annihilation by habitual amiability. It remains to be seen whether this habit can be broken or modified. I have my doubts.

Yet, one aspect of election day 2006 was indisputably salubrious for us -- the powerless rabble crushed beneath the corporate class: Owing to the fact, that, at least, for one day, the act of voting served to pry our sagging asses off our sofas and out of our office cubicles -- and into the soul-reviving vastness of life.

And this point gets to the heartless center of the tragedy of corporate hegemony: The manner in which the system's monomaniacal drive for excessive profits and the habitual consumerism mandatory to sustain it serves to usurp our essential longings and passions. The absence, in contemporary life, of (non virtual) public space, wherein human to human discourse can flourish has created the social conditions inherent to the rise and pernicious influence of anti-democratic institutions such as so-called megachurches. This loss of communal connection, in confluence with consumerism and the influences of American Puritanism and Calvinism, has wrought, within the US populace, a desperate longing for group involvement -- even for those ecstatic states involving the immersion of one's rational mind found within the excesses of a totalitarian mob.

Likewise, the phenomenon plays into the pernicious sin/shame continuum, psychologically, at the root of the present genus of Protestant fundamentalism arising from the toxic soil of the corporate state.

Huge, corrupt and bloated out, like Elvis in his final years, this is how religions die. As was the case with Elvis, Christian Fundamentalists believe they're bigger than ever, but the course they've taken begets self-destructive behavior: Given the fact that being a consummate consumer/religious zealot implicitly demands one be prone to excess (from their enormous, Graceland-gaudy churches to their over-the-top myths of world-wide, time-ending wars) -- a scenario plays out, time and time again -- whereby a Saved*Mart devotee breaches the rigid moral code of the group, then, overwhelmed by shame must submit and surrender to public confession and other exhibitionistic displays of phony redemption.

Within this paradoxical dynamic, the corporate/consumer/quasi-theocratic state compels one to live excessively, yet, simultaneously, dictates one suppress one's lusts and passions, hence creating an unbridgeable psychological splitting process. As a consequence, many are bound to stray into the realm of the forbidden (because almost everything is forbidden) and with this comes the aforementioned need for a come-to-Jesus repentance. Conveniently, the whole sick symmetry serves as a means by which the individual can be controlled by the unscrupulous personalities at the head of fundamentalist organizations -- who play Colonel Tom Parker to the hapless flock's Elvis.

These ruthless phonies, in combination with the cunning apparatchik of the UberCulture, have become adroit at controlling any untidy outbursts of freedom of expression that might threaten their cultural hegemony. They have far too much at stake -- too much money and power might be lost, if freedom's voice were to be heard unfettered; hence, they serve up the spurious ecstatic states proffered by both pop culture and megachurch hucksterism.

These are the regions of the national soul we on the left must reclaim. Traditionally, music has aided progressives in the struggle. Accordingly, Woody Guthrie believed all songs are political. Songs take up residence in our hearts and in the non-verbal areas of our minds where we harbor our deepest longings. There, they inform our perceptions of the world. It is this sublime terrain, existing beyond the material, that progressives have abandoned to the frauds and flimflammers.

Lost, in our retreat, has been our affinity with the spirit of defiant longing for release from hard labor beneath the unforgiving Mississippi sun that found voice in the late night, crossroads barroom freedom of Delta Blues -- or the likes of our finding refuge from the dehumanizing, daylight demands of mid-twentieth century, industrial, urban existence in the midnight transcendence of Bebop and Free Jazz. Also missing has been an atmosphere (cultural and personal) of creative risk and abandon, whereby Jimi Hendrix would conjure and fuse the urban and rural spirits of Robert Johnson and John Coltrane, plus toss some Malcolm X into the mix -- and, a short time later and further down a southbound road, Duane Allman would resurrect a redneck hippie, guitar Jesus who fed the post-honkey tonk multitudes Orange Sunshine as he delivered an electric guitar Sermon On The Georgia Red Dirt Mount fusing the spirits of Tim Leary, Martin Luther King, and the Carter Family. Then, a few years later, across the gray Atlantic, the Sex Pistols would howl like Post-Industrial Age demons, trapped within the detritus of the crumbling British Empire ... much like, nearly a decade and a half later, Kurt Cobain would have his short, Icarian flight across the flaming-out sun of the American Empire.

In addition, the realm of sexuality has been claimed and exploited by moralizing hypocrites and opportunists. Hence, it's high time, we progressives ceased to be such priggish ninnies -- and challenged the Puritan/Calvinistic delusion that the worst aspects of sinfulness can be traced to the fleshy themeparks of the human genitals. It's time we addressed and confronted the (mundane but far more deadly) sin of obliviousness to the larger world existing beyond one's immediate shallow, self-serving needs, concerns, and compulsions -- the outright careless disregard of anything on this living earth that does not serve the cravings of a culture overrun by overgrown infant tyrants dropped from the poisonous womb of corporatism. Possibly, in this light, the words sin and sinners are too loaded with cretinous religious connotations and, accordingly, their meanings should be reinterpreted more along the lines of "self-centered fuck-ups."

In order to bring freedom and its full range of ecstasies and excesses back to American life, we must not only wrest back ecstatic states from the bible-brandishing, brown shirt-prone class -- but the very definition of what constitutes spirituality, passion and sin as well. We're not talking about so-called blue states or red states here -- but states of inspiration. Very few folks are ever moved to change their lives by the promulgating of wonky statistics or even well reasoned arguments. That's not how human beings are made up -- Praise be! -- to the happenstance of evolutionary grace.

In conclusion, we must strive to live with the same degree of passion and fervor as fundamentalist Christian preachers do -- when they're seeking out converts and hookers.

Collapse

Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatists States of America have experienced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping-off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee's retirement accounts ... Sans conscience above -- sans conscience below.

Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around them. It would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now includes Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for anti-depressants, urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to enter its inner most circles.

As stated, human beings have always possessed an immense capacity for self-deception -- but, at present, we Americans can no longer afford stupid, naked monkey business as usual: The stakes are too damn high. When we, as a people, cannot or will not connect the needless deaths of well over half-a-million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our driveways, the situation has grown dire indeed.

How can we go on this way? At this point, a guilt-induced, collective nervous breakdown in the middle of our morning commute would seem to be in order.

By existing in this degree of denial, what have we conjured? What sort of a society do we call forth when our lives are as isolated, benumbed, inauthentic and devoid of conscience as they are at present? The answer is: We're living in the midst of it -- this hideous era of pervasive flimflam and permanent war. Call it: The Haliburtonization of everyday life. Again, as above -- so below.

We live in a nation dominated by salesmanship (commercial, political, religious). Accordingly, the salesman's credo is: a facile mendacity trumps a stubborn truth -- because an honest mode of being would cause the buyer to become wary of the giddy lie of the pitch. Hence, complicity in its duplicity is what the corporate/consumer state demands of us.

The salesman's counterfeit smile is, of course, camouflage. Beneath it is hidden a face more closely resembling that quintessential corporatist and Haliburton-allumni-in-good-standing: Dick Cheney; his joyless, thin-lipped, psychopath's half grin is the true countenance of our death-enamored empire.

A salesman's repertoire of manipulative enthusiasm and sham amiability fronts the whole criminal enterprise. Is it any coincidence that Las Vegas and prisons are the fastest growing population centers in the United States? -- We've become a country comprised of clip-joints and jails -- a land of suckers and criminals -- with a cultural landscape peopled by corporate scam artists, congressional bagmen, and war criminals (hiding in plain sight in the highest offices of the land). It's a natural progression, due to the fact that capitalism has always depended on a predatory class of sociopaths, has always relied upon thievery and murder, and, therefore, needs an endless supply of suckers and victims.

Yet, most of us Americans are no one's victims. Any con artist worth his smarmy smile is aware of this fact: As a rule, a mark is made the victim of his own greed. Moreover -- by means of our complicity in allowing our identities to be molded by a culture dominated by proliferate propaganda, empty salesmanship, and our own lies of omission -- the fate of a hapless mark, bamboozled by self-inflicted selfishness, is the criteria we live out daily. Apropos, we're now condemned to shuffle through our lives as somnambulating ciphers, dim denizens of a world made manifest by mountebanks.

We should be cautioned. History reveals: What a nation inflicts upon the world -- its own people will, sooner or later, inflict upon each other. There is no need to warily scan the horizon line for its arrival, because we're already living in the midst of the angst and emptiness we have wrought. Ergo, when dreams mean nothing -- when words and images are rendered meaningless -- our lives reflect these dismal states.

Words, images, and dreams are our internal analog of the vast, manifold, and incomprehensible sublime of the cosmos. When we dream: We are spiraling supernovas and spindling stalks of slime mold. We are schools of silent fish and we are the fulmination of thunder. We are uniquely ourselves; yet, we also contain all of existence. To lose our dreams is to lose our soul. Hence: To have the verities of our inner selves twisted and distorted towards the selfish ends of corporate capitalism and the dishonest agendas of mass media-driven political discourse is to become estranged from passion, empathy, and imagination; thereby, we grow inured to phrases such as preemptive war, collateral damage and acceptable losses -- expressions that we should find repellent, if not, flat-out mortifying.

If not, then it should follow: We should change the names of the civilian casualties of war, inscribed upon their respective tombstones, to simply read "Collateral Damage." Moreover, narratives of bereavement should sound something like this: "You see, when the bombs of the Preemptive Warriors fell on our home -- our child, now named, 'Collateral Damage,' was asleep in her crib, and she became 'our little Acceptable Loss.'" Now try this: See how the statement above sounds when you substitute the names of your loved-ones -- or even the names of your pets.

In opposition to empathy, the corporatist mode of being instructs us that human life, like material objects, exists merely to be used, used-up, then discarded; nature is to be subdued, exploited, and decimated; trees -- toppled; rivers -- dammed up; mountains -- ground down to silt; words -- degraded, attenuated, and stripped of meaning. Finally, they will come for us.

Instead, what if we were seized and shook by shamanic visions sent to us from an ensouled earth that had grown enraged by our ignorance and indifference towards its plight? What if these fantastic and terrifying narratives warned of dire events and augured destruction, in which, oceans rose, hurricanes churned, glaciers melted, the very young and the very old perished from extreme heat and cold, as clouds of pestilence descended upon the land?

Are these visions crackpot ravings -- or last summer's news and weather reports? What difference would it make whether these dire and dreadful circumstances are wrought by wrathful gods or Global Warming? The structure, plot, theme, and dénouement are essentially the same: Hubris and ignorance transform nature (human and otherwise) into a force of blind destruction, thereby rendering arrogant folly rending tragedy. Whether engendered by gods, or memes, or molecules -- suffering is suffering; untimely death is untimely death, regardless of the cause.

We Americans have numbed ourselves in order to be able to live with our complicity in the crimes of empire. We have carpet bombed our rational minds into oblivion by the belief in chimeras such as "smart bombs." Reason tells us: a truly smart bomb would be able to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. Therefore, for a smart bomb to exist, it would have to be a Frankenstein Monster Bomb, because, in order to exterminate the truly guilty, it would first have to kill its creators. Then it would go after the soulless bastards who ordered its use. Accordingly, smart bombs would be flying into Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's front doors as thick and fast as moths toward a glowing porch light on a warm summer night.

Only a society of numbed-out, reality-adverse imbeciles could believe in the existence of smart bombs. In a related matter, recent public opinion surveys have revealed close to seventy percent of the population of the United States does not believe in the Theory of Evolution, yet believes that a mythological character called Satan is a literal entity.

How did this epic ignorance come to be? How did we leave the 21st Century and blunder back to the 14th? Maybe this type of hocus-pocus, hoodoo, and religious legerdemain is necessary to keep an increasingly angst-ridden, over-worked populace from rising from our enclosures in Hell (also known as cubicles and work stations) and demanding a system that offers greater depth, meaning and resonance than the one presently afforded under corporate hegemony.

Is this how we became so passive and benumbed -- because the life we're offered and have accepted within the corporate/consumer paradigm is so limiting in its possibilities: it being a system that occludes and eventually destroys the natural world (both external and internal)? Is this the reason we have grown so dim -- because our imaginations have been so deeply suppressed that its imaginings now rise as a living nightmare of literalization? Perhaps, Americans don't believe in evolution -- due to the fact we no longer believe that meaningful change can occur. And, perhaps, we believe in the literal existence of a soul-collecting Devil -- because we know that we have lost our essential selves to a mysterious force that seems beyond our control. Having been seduced by the illusions of corporate capitalism (a false mythos that tantalizes us with promises of freedom but instead shackles us to exploitive labor and mind-numbing consumerism) we know we have made an ill-advised bargain with some dark force that has robbed us of our humanity. We know (maybe ineffably) that, here within the empire, our lives have lost an essential, soul-enhancing element.

It is possible we fear our souls are imperiled by the Devil, because, on some level of awareness, we grasp we have forsaken our ability to experience a life imbued by meaning, depth and resonance, due to our systematic suppression of those vital aspects of our character that are capable of imagining then creating a future containing greater possibilities than the shriveled pickings of the present.

We fear the licking flames of hell, I suspect, because we realize we have sold our souls at fire sale prices.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Collapse

America now grows: paranoid delusions and wishful thinking. These are our national plant and staple crop, respectively.

A strange genus of the former has overgrown the land. It began as a small hybrid, a member of the Bush family, growing mostly in southern and western states. Some theories hold that its origins were in Connecticut; although, when it was transplanted to Texas, it spread, unchecked, due to the fact that there are few herbivores in the region to limit its pernicious growth. There, in the dry Texas soil, it grew dense and thorny, and thrived when watered with blood and oil.

Left unpruned and unregulated, it grew thicker than an ancient oak, larger than a redwood: It became a Paranoia Sequoia, growing ever larger in the hot greenhouse gases of global climate change; its massive branches spread across the world, casting a shadow of fear and revulsion beneath it.

And it has bore strange and terrible fruit, indeed - as well as proliferate assorted nuts.

Unfortunately, its oily wood limits its use as timber that might be used to built anything constructive: Its wood is mostly suitable for crucifixes and coffins ... Yet, due to its aforementioned oily base, it can be used to build a bonfire large enough to set the world ablaze.

At present, the people of the United States are lost in a dark woods overgrown by these sun-occluding trees. Some among us have taken to ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms (the aforementioned staple crop) sprouting from the forest floor. Upon ingestion, they tell of having strange visions involving a covey of Democratic dwarfs who will fell the dark forest with their K Street provided axes.

In addition, borne of our desperation, many of us dream, two years hence, Prince Biden the Bland or St. Hillary, mounted upon her triangulating donkey of war, will come to our rescue and lead us from this dark and terrible place.

Such foolishness is understandable within the context of American culture: Our decaying empire has become an over-the-counter culture for legally medicated Lotus Eaters. Yet the effects of the meds are palliative. Prozac poops-out. Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin certainties transmogrify into detox deliriums. The Republican Woodstock of the so-called "Clash of Civilizations" becomes the Altamont of Guantanamo.

Moreover, the comedown is going to be a real bitch ... Heads will throb; stomachs will churn, when the realization arrives: we've become addicted to a corrupt system, rigged for the benefit of a few, ruthless corporatists -- and maintained and enabled by both our political parties; accordingly, the lives of us ordinary Americans (who are dependent on this system because we have no choice in the matter) are no longer in our control ... Somewhere along the way, our freedom to chose went missing -- was waylaid -- as we were pimped into wage slavery for the profits of the corporate class.

I must confess: I wish there existed drugs that provided an effect powerful enough to allow me to hallucinate visions of hope.

Instead, I will proffer this stark fantasy: I believe, at this late hour, the second best thing that could come to pass in our crumbling republic is for the total destruction of the Democratic Party -- and then from its ashes to rise a party of true progressives.

Now, I believe the best thing that could happen for our country would be for the leaders of The Republican Party -- out of a deep sense of shame (as if they even possessed the capacity for such a thing) regarding the manner they have disgrace their country and themselves -- to commit seppuku (the act of ritual suicide practiced by disgraced leaders in feudalist Japan) on national television.

Because there's no chance of that event coming to pass, I believe the dismantling of the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in order. It is our moribund republic's last, best hope -- if any is still possible.

Regarding this, I hope I'm proven to be dead-ass, Flat Earth Theory, Warren Commission wrong.

How have I come to this despairing conclusion?

First a caveat: While I harbor little affection for nor feel any affinity with the corrupt establishment of the Democratic Party, I don't believe, as is the case with the present leadership of the Republican party, they're a klavern of insane, death-smitten apocalypticists. However, I do believe that a craven desire for power and privilege has transformed them into morally bankrupt, lickspittle, corporate stooges.

For this, I believe, they have disgraced themselves as well. Does anyone believe that the denizens of K Street have, as of late, begun enriching the coffers of the Democratic Party because the lobbyist class now harbors a secret desire to create a system where a greater diversity of views can be promulgated? Yes, and Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of East London because he wanted to draw attention to the wretched plight of underclass women in class-stratified Victorian England.

Ergo, regardless of which political party controls congress, the empire will continue to unravel. Corporate "leaders," like feudal lords, will continue to ruthlessly wield power and have dominion over our lives no matter the outcome of the midterm elections of 2006.

The mind-shredding propaganda of the so called "free market" will continue to be our culture's defining mythos; its corrupt priesthood will continue to fleece their dazed and hapless flock.

American roadways and so called freeways will remain as clogged as the arteries of the junk food bloated commuters, sitting stalled and stupefied in traffic, within their grotesque motor vehicles, in the time-grinding limbo created by the international petroleum state.

Wealth, power, and privilege will continue to be consolidated by the already wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Public schools will continue to fail to educate. The over-fished, pollution-afflicted, global warming-decimated oceans and seas will continue to die.

Official lies will still proliferate like swarming locust. As a result, the public will grow outraged and demand more of their own rights and civil liberties be curtailed. The poor will disproportionately suffer while the rich will sleep the untroubled sleep of the kleptocratic class.

As, all the while, our fabled Shining City on the Hill will suffer ongoing brownouts and power outages.

Amid all of this disorder and dissolution what possible difference could it make to vote for either a corporatist Republican or a corporatist Democratic candidate? -- The runaway entropic decay of the present system cannot be reversed by political cant.

Ergo, this year, the voting public is being offered a choice between imbibing the Empire Lite of the Democratic Party or the Republicans' Empire Mad Dog 20/20. Accordingly, we've been provided with choice number one: stick with the Republicans and continue on with our planet-destroying bender (that will end in either the detox hotel named the Limits of Imperial Power or our being fitted with a toe tag in the Morgue of History reading, "Deceased. Cause of death: expired after succumbing to Acute Empire Intoxication Poisoning"). Or choice number two: the Democrats' covert flask-sipping, internal organ-rotting, problem drinking of the heady drafts of corporate corruption. In short, both of the two major political parties have been privy to the bacchanal of bribery that passes for business as usual in the present political/economic system.

A vivid illustration of the hopeless mindset of chronically diffident Democrats is their failure to demand the use of traceable paper ballots this election cycle. In this way, they're analogous to a timid, denial-ridden spouse whose mate returns home, with smeared lipstick and disheveled clothing, sans undergarments, reeking of Jack Daniels, all the while, defensively asserting her fidelity -- after an impromptu road trip with an outlaw motorcycle gang -- and her credulous spouse believing the whole episode has strengthened the relationship by building trust between them.

Yet dread gnaws beneath the surface of the collective awareness of liberals and progressives. What belies Democrats inability to agitate for meaningful change is: At a deeper level, they, as is the case with most of us Americans, realize that, in order to live in the manner to which we have become accustomed, we must continue our complicity in the crimes of empire. Hence, they realize they would be politically burned at the stake if they ever ventured to utter such heresy aloud.

For, deep down, we know that our actions are not only unethical, but unsustainable as well. Our minds have difficultly grasping this fact; its ramifications are too overwhelming ... The knowledge -- that we maintain "our way of life" on the bartered blood of the innocent -- is too unnerving. Its implications are too damning; therefore, we banish such thoughts to the darkest regions of our unconscious.

It would seem: We can't see the forest through ourselves.

We whimper into the abyss for reassurance.

The abyss replies: "It's always darkest, right before ... it goes completely black."

In this manner, we unwittingly carry the darkness of empire. Perhaps, if we Americans were to unburden ourselves of the illusion of our exceptionalism, our load would lighten. It would be easier to support the load, if we relieved ourselves of the weight of so many lies, self-deceptions and rationalizations, as well as the other onerous byproducts of our denial.

At this point, given the abysmal levels of mass ignorance, self-deception and delusion at large, are we Americans even up to the task? Or has our pervasive disconnect from civic life deteriorated to such an extent that a majority of us are even capable of apprehending the dire circumstances confronting the nation? (It would seem that not only have we chosen to ignore an elephant standing in the living room of our collective awareness, but we have chosen to cover him over with nondescript upholstery and now regard him as part of the furniture.)

My motive for bringing this up is not to be merely provocative; I'm asking because I'm chilled to the core of my being afraid. Regarding it all, I'm in the thrall of a sitting bolt upright in bed, quaking with night sweats terror.

Nor am I coming from a lofty moral plane on this one: I'm coming from a pounding upon the ground despair -- a scanning the line of the horizon searching for any signs of hope desperation -- a shaking my fist at the indifferent sky rage.

As you may have surmised: I'm outright mortified as to where we as a nation are headed, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's midterm elections. Given the bender of destruction we've been on, our nation needs far more help than a simple changing of the party affiliation of our corporate enablers -- it needs an intervention.

But that line of thinking would probably lead to a seizing of power by an Oprah/Doctor Phil junta -- and the empire would still collapse, beneath the weight of self-help platitudes and positive affirmations.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected].

Collapse