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: phil@philrockstroh.com Visit Phil's website Ebullient Skepticism.

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

"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.

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.

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 philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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 philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com

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.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

Article was originally published Sept. 28, 2006 at Dissident Voice

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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.

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.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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: philangie2000@yahoo.com.