December 8, 2011
With the season being fall — perhaps I should let some illusions fall away like dead leaves.
Outside my apartment window, across a wind-blown courtyard, the crimson leaves of a white oak are falling into a swirling breeze, revealing the gnarled limbs and stark branches of the time-battered tree beneath. Nature is enacting fall’s blazing spectacle…the landscape is dying in Technicolor, like our flaming-out empire.
At dusk, the mid-December sky is a cool flame of vivid contrasting colors; as the horizon rises up to occlude the dimming sun…we drift in crisp fall air…we turn away from summer…and its lies of boundless bounty, with its delusions of the exceptionalism of empires.
Winter requires clarity. The delusions of fools need abundance to germinate. Winter’s scarcity can clarify the mind.
Wallace Stevens reminds us:
“For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
(Excerpt from “The Snow Man.”)
Rising like the north wind — an accusatory voice: We live in an empire bent on murder/suicide. Our nation has become a global-wide spree killer…unrepentant…apparently devoid of a conscience…Where next will the killer turn his remorseless gaze?
What to do?
I shuffle across the room and switch on of the CD player. The machine whirls to life, shuffles the discs, and begins playing a random mix of mid 20th century jazz — bebop and Free Jazz.
Listening to bebop seems right for this mood: Jazz can transmute anxiety and sorrow into a fear-defying intensity; it can alchemize within state of being that lives within and beyond sorrow simultaneously.
“Crazyology” by Thelonius Monk, the genius jester-king of surprise syncopation, strides from the speakers. Monk’s music — composed while the irradiated ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still swirled in the psychotic air of the early cold war years — will tease and tickle the clinched, anxious moment, bombarding it with abrupt changes in tempo, spacing, and breaks — as it perpetrates upon the melody, tone, and scale of a song an analogue of what the knowledge of The Bomb did to mechanized minds of the early Atomic Age, abruptly thrusting them into an unexpected world, thereby decimating their sacred verities — until, for those who allow themselves to be receptive to the outlandish grace of Monk’s music, the haunted mind will be released from its reflexive self-reference to an ossified past and float free as blue smoke into the freedom of midnight air.
Next track: Mingus steps up with “Fables of Faubus” and he will not let us off so easy. With his propulsive tempos, he demands that we cease to lie to ourselves, as he pushes us towards the undying soul of the rising moment — then, by enveloping us with pulsing textures and explosive layering, he reveals to us what numbed-out banalities we become when our lives are based upon comfortable lies. The vitality of his genius shows us what our life could be — if we weren’t such complacent cowards, of how we could throb to life — if we were to admit our complicity in the quotidian crime of accepting the world the way it is. There, Mingus admonishes us, in that dingy, hidden, hollow place where we habitually hide ourselves breeds the obscenity of racism, greed, and war.
Next: The music switches tracks to Charlie Parker blowing “Back Home.” For an instant, time and sorrow dissipate, as I become lost in a quixotic reverie, attempting to find a way to play behind the downbeat of this anguished age.
Then Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” soars into the room in a flight of swooping asymmetry and the disconcerting humor of his atonal chordal harmonies mocks my pale presumptions — and just about everybody else’s for that matter.
Providentially, Coltrane’s “Pursuance” movement from “A Love Supreme” rises into the room like a Rilkean angel. But this does not provide me any kitschy deus ex machina moment: For Trane’s angels, like Rilke’s, are not of the sexless, Victorian variety, with downy wings, clad in pure white, celestial linen — but instead, they are ego-shredding messengers who do not flinch from the sorrows of the world; while they are merciful — they are neither mawkish nor sentimental — for they herald the exquisite news that Divinity resides in the world of the senses.
Wallace Steven apprehends the imperative:
“The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps, After death, the non-physical people, in paradise, Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe The green corn gleaming and experience The minor of what we feel.”
(Excerpt from Of Esthetique du Mal)
This parcel of sensate eternity where I find myself at this moment has been given the name, Thursday evening, and I’m sitting at my desk thrumming my fingers to the melody of cultural oblivion.
By the time the play list arrives at Monk’s “Straight No Chaser,” thoughts of the inevitability of my country’s spiral into inexorable tragedy begin to mix, merge, and dance with Monk’s incantatory melody line.
O.K. God Damn it, I rage at the wind-pummeled windowpane and my native land beyond the barren treetop:
Let’s take it straight with no chaser. Let’s throw back shot after shot of the rotgut truth.
Let’s state the unadorned facts of our condition — stark as the branches of a white oak tree in late fall.
So, forgive me, because this calls for an abrupt change of tempo.
It’s long past time we got drunk — drunk on reality.
Bartender, set up a round.
Let’s throw back a shot: Our empire—any empire—is besotted on blood.
Throw back another: …Post Industrial empires get mean drunk on the power to level mechanized death…
One more round, for the road…to extinction: We’re stupid drunk on mindless consumerism that is numbing out authentic experience and destroying the earth to boot.
We’re stinking drunk on militarism, mass media escapism and consumerism — I recommend we should get drunk on Coltrane.
For the culture of the United State has become the antithesis of its native form of jazz. The corporate hologram is like a deadly addiction that serves to destroy the creative spirit: Consumerism, a form of addiction…usurping the experience of ecstatic novelty as it sells the falsehood that it delivers one to its sublime precincts.
Conversely, bebop and free jazz are ecstatic novelty writ large in sonic waves.
John Coltrane reported that the conception and creation of his timeless masterpiece, “A Love Supreme” ended his addiction to drugs and alcohol. This soul-reviving suite should be made the suggested soundtrack of every drug and alcohol rehab unit in the United States — if not played on a repeating loop at every gas station, convenience store, and shopping mall on the planet.
The CD player shuffles and Monk’s “Epistrophy” arrives, this version in the company of Coltrane. My rage is spent…for now. Of course, the tenor of the times will replenish it in abundance. But, at this moment, Monk and ‘Trane shout encouragement from the real world, the only world there is — the realm of the endless now.
Rouse yourself, they insist. — Let the impossibility of your situation free you from pretense and presumption. As is the case with a bebop jam session, you don’t know where you’re going next…but, in reality, neither does anyone else — no matter what they claim to the contrary. For this reason — all of existence is Coltranesque.
We are free.
We only delude ourselves into believing that we know what’s coming next. Bebop informs us the unexpected is what’s coming next; that, in life, what moves us most is often unplanned, and sorrow can drop away like a falling leaf and be whirled down the avenue in an improvisational dance with the rifting wind.
We are free.
All is Coltrane.
The tyrants will topple.
Coltrane will remain.
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December 8, 2011
Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit.
Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.
These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage. In general, the middle class can be counted on to detest the poor…blaming those born devoid of societal advantage and political influence for the impoverished circumstances that were in place long before the happenstance of their birth. Moreover, in a bit of noxious casuistry, as despicable as it is delusional, all too many members of the middle class have been induced by grift artists, employed by the ruling elite, to blame their own declining social status and attendant beleaguered existence on the poor. [ Gary Denham] photo: Gary Denham
“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” –John Donne
This has proven to be an effective, time-tested grift: Because as long as the animus of the middle class remains fixated on the poor, the criminal cartels known as the economic elite can continue to ply their trade. Of course, in reality, by their greed and complicity, what the middle class has gained is this: trustee status in the capitalist workhouse.
Although, there is no need to fret: The run of neoliberal capitalism is about over. Don’t mourn: This late stage, rapacious, mutant economic strain has leveled destruction on community and the planet itself as well as the hearts and souls of too many of those imprisoned within its paradigm.
At this point, the situation comes down to this: paradigm shift or perish.
The hour is amenable to reevaluate, reorganize and re-occupy. Doing so will prove helpful in withstanding false narratives.
Apropos: As of late, in my hours spent at Liberty Park, I’ve been witness to increasing numbers of tourists wandering in and repeating derisive, rightwing distortions regarding the OWS movement and its participants. For example, they are a collection of whiny college students who want taxpayers to be responsible for picking up the tab for their student loans because they are too lazy and spoiled to work off their debt. These tales are variations of the old canards involving welfare queens, mouths gleaming with taxpayer financed gold teeth, arriving at grocery stores lounging behind the steering wheels of late model Cadillacs, and proceeding to purchase steaks and fifths of gin with food stamps.
Ronald Reagan spoke of this mythical figure often, affording her near supernatural powers: She, through indolence, guile and a welfare state-bestowed sense of limitless entitlement, was the near singular cause of the nation’s economic woes; her very existence, not only depleted the U.S. Treasury of dollars, but drained the U.S. free enterprise system of vitality and the very will to compete. She was a succubus who arrived in the socialist haunted night to feed on and zap the very virility of capitalism.
Because of the wealth inequities inherent to capitalism, in order to prevent social unrest, the system is reliant on creating false narratives that foster misplaced and displaced class resentment. These tales are very potent, because they serve as palliatives for the enervating states of shame inflicted on the population at large by their enslavement to the free market. Accordingly, because the vast majority of the populace are deemed “losers”, due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created and maintained to displace the rage, borne of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system’s exploited underlings.
OWS is beginning to change the narrative…align it with reality–and that is an alarming development for the 1%; hence, the retooled, amped up propaganda campaign we’re seeing signs of at present.
This is the reality the 1% endeavor to obscure: Capitalism is a pyramid scheme; by its very structure, only a few will ever receive its bounty…that is wrung out of the exhausted hides of the vast majority. Fact is, capitalism, the neoliberal variety or otherwise, has never worked as promised; its innate structure ensures exploitation and inequity. Therefore, time and time again, adding aspects of socialism (e.g., New Deal era programs and reforms) have saved capitalism from itself. But, after a time, the plutocrats regroup and begin anew to launch a big money-financed, slow motion coup d’état of government (e.g., the Reagan Revolution).
A vast disparity of wealth within a nation will all but ensure this societal trajectory. But that isn’t going to happen, this time. The planet cannot endure the assaults wrought by a system that requires exponential growth to be maintained. The run of capitalism is nearly over. A more sustainable economic system, based on horizontal rule, is being developed, globally (e.g., the Icelandic model).
The vertical structure inherent to capitalism brings about the self-perpetuating reign of an insular elite who choose to go the route of empire and, by doing so, overreach and bring themselves down, but only after much unnecessary suffering, exploitation and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of imperium.
Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one’s situation–beginning to question how one arrived at one’s present station in life–will engender anxiety, anger and regret.
Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life’s winners.
But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem–not the dishonest economic setup–and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can’t get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.
And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned…have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs–all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I’ve adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.
Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.
What an unnerving task that would prove to be…an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone.
“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” –Albert Camus
Accordingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-rewarded, professional dissemblers of the political right, imploring them to dissolve my doubts and dread. To escort and ensconce my troubled form back into my comfort zone by telling me the problem is not the iron boot of the corporate state upon my neck; rather, my oppression stems from the barefoot hippie lefties of OWS “who need a bath and a job”; it is their odious presence in our lives that has subdued my happy capitalist destiny by the pernicious act of laying down an effluvia (more demobilizing than pepper spray) of patchouli musk and has caused capitalism itself to weaken into an enervated swoon.
Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my oppression. Those America-hating Occupy Wall Street hippies are actually the hidden hand that controls the global order and who possess a craven desire to smelt down the gleaming steel of the humming engines of U.S. capitalism into creepy, Burning Man statuary, who want to hold 24/7 Nuremberg-style rallies in the form of annoying drum circles.
In reality, it is those dirty hippies who are actually “The Man.” Withal, hippies crashed the global economy and pinned the blame on the selfless souls who ply their benign trade on Wall Street.
Now, you know why conservatives harbor such animus towards hippies. Don’t claim that Fox News et al–those selfless souls–who only desire to protect the glories of the present order, and who only have your best interest in mind, didn’t try to warn you.
“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” –Mark Twain
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook
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December 8, 2011
The recent pepper spraying “incident” at the University of California at Davis represents more than an opportunity to create a cleverly photoshopped, viral meme. The act is part and parcel of a larger collective mindset–a proclivity towards authoritarian overreaction now deeply internalized in daily life in the U.S.
To cite only a few examples, by means such as, “zero tolerance” policies in public school systems, to “no knock” warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks–daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom. In fits and starts, by law and deed, the U.S. has moved closer in the direction of a panopticon-prone, brutality-leveling, waking authoritarian nightmare than a democratic republic devoted to erring in the direction of the ideals of justice and liberty.
Granted, such ideals will never exist in pure form. Still, by the same token, the sane neither shill for utopia nor become adapted to tyranny.
The act of pepper spraying peaceful protesters by the enforcers of official power should not be viewed as an incidental occurrence. Conversely, the act is emblematic of a mode of mind gripping the nation and one that must be challenged in the streets.
Memes are ever-replicating, exponentially reproducing, collectively evolving bits of human thoughtware–while our bodies are the hardware. If their resonances remain strictly in the realm of pixels and soundbites, a meme will translate into little more than pop culture ephemera. Memes must be carried by flesh into the non-virtual world; their human carriers might even be peppered sprayed themselves and carted off to jail, if it comes to that.
Otherwise, as is the case at present, memes dissipate…dissolving amid the ever-proliferating mirages of the commercial hologram. Thus the tragedy of the consumer state: The manner the present age of media-borne illusion usurps our instinctual drives and individual longings–the appetites and imaginings–that compel our life force to its zenith–but instead will induce us to spend our lives in the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumer dreck, and, in so doing, serves to deliver our passions to a wasteland of electronic dust.
When the inhuman demands of a seemingly implacable system control the lives of a people, an aura of nebulous fear, nettling resentment and habitual passivity, alternating with impulsive aggression, will seize the spirit of a culture. This is what Walker Percy wrote of a similar internalized landscape:
“Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.”–excerpted from Percy’s novel, The Second Coming
In a declining culture, the vitality available within daily experience withers and falls away, and is soon supplanted by the dismal scions of the death genes. As reflected by the architecture (e.g., bland, prefab retail strips; shoddily built subdivision housing; sterile office parks) of late capitalism, beauty and common communion holds no dominion. As a consequence, fecund dreams dry to dust and rise from the arid land as blinding squalls of displaced fear and anger.
Antithetically, as an antidote, on Thanksgiving Day, my wife and I trundled by subway train down to Zuccotti Park for a taste of liberty. Of course, this particular national holiday is the marking and celebration of an age of genocide in regard to native folk.
My father is half Comanche; he was born on a reservation in the U.S. midwest. In general, on Thanksgiving Day, at least one-fourth of my blood (and the rest of the three-fourths of my humanity, and all of my soul) finds the task of remaining a polite dinner guest a bit difficult when people insist on being toxically (at times, belligerently) ignorant on the subject.
Significantly, by their ongoing acts of aggression perpetrated against the OWS denizens in Liberty Park in lower Manhattan (which, in itself, is an indigenous name, Manna-hata, meaning, “island of many hills”) the mayor of New York City and the NYPD have revealed that they regard the area as Injun’ Country. From the start of the OWS occupation, the protectors of the present order surrounded the “dirty, dangerous savages” within Liberty Park by blue uniform-clad troops and by force attempted to drive them off the land–land that is as much ours to appropriate as it is their own or anyone else’s.
And don’t talk to me about private property…The land in question was stolen from the get-go in a shady real estate swindle. Moreover, the OWS movement is a challenge to those types of societal notions that have bestowed legitimacy on larceny.
Regarding the almost exclusive exploitation of land for commercial exploitation e.g., the practice of claiming as private property, inflating the price of, and ceaselessly turning over for profit parcels of real estate has proven an enterprise that has degraded both landscape and soulscape, and has proven to be a less than propitious practice in regard to the health of the community at large and the planet itself. Withal, this mode of mind has engendered a culture in which the brutal and ruthless thrive…has enabled the rise of psychopathic personality types to positions of unapproachable power whose creed is, “all the things of the earth are ‘mine’ to exploit and it is my right to bring to submission, lest I’m entitled to destroy, those things I cannot possess and control.”
Conversely, my hours spent in Liberty Park have done my partial native blood good. Why? Because we are a veritable Injun’ uprising. And that is why they fear us and have tried to silence our drums and our mic-check, tribal gatherings and they have torn down our Tepee-like tents. Caucasian swindlers scammed the native people of this island in the first place; hence, the scam artists of Wall Street are only the latest incarnation of that European cultural trait–and that is the true tradition of Thanksgiving. But, they are discovering that another, lost tradition is coalescing across the land–the tradition of resistance.
The actions of and reactions to the OWS movement serve to reveal the hypocritical core of the present duopolistic political system. For example, if the recent brutal, police “crackdowns” (in truth, outright abuses of constitutionally granted rights) on the OWS movement had been coordinated and perpetrated under the Bush administration, Democratic Party partisans would have been calling for hearings of impeachment to be convened against George W. Bush. The lack of outrage among liberal insiders regarding recent events is an object lesson into the invidious nature of duopolistic rule. What Democratic Party partisans warn against–the big business beholden, freedom phobic, Republican agenda–is advanced in a more efficient manner when a Democrat is installed by the 1% in the U.S. presidency. Apropos, Democratic Party apologists are as guilty of carrying the agenda of the national security/corporate state as are oligarch-duped teabagger sorts.
More and more, nationally, as well as globally, people are catching on to the machinations of the 1%, to the scams of crime syndicates such as Wall Street and the IMF, to the means by which we have been coerced, by debt enslavement to neoliberalism’s global company store, into spending the fleeting days of this finite life working for the inequitable power, wealth and privilege of these ruthless few.
At present, growing numbers have taken heed of the situation and are fighting back. Within the span of a few short months, the narrative of the corporate media has, to a limited extent, been altered. Yet, at this point, the development is merely background noise: The neoliberal order is collapsing; capitalism itself is nearly at the end of its five hundred year run.
OWS is part of a global movement of resistance that is laying the groundwork for a new paradigm. Although, change will not come without struggle and suffering, without defeats, betrayals and moments of despair. But, given the unsustainable nature of the present order, a shift in both perception and practice is inevitable. Yet when there are this many variables (known and unknown) in play, gazing darkly or through rose-tinted eyewear will prove neither adequate nor helpful.
Finally, engaging in acts of resistance are often not about winning or losing a particular battle; rather, it is the propitious manner the act transforms one’s character by drawing one out of isolation and into the heart of life.
By such acts, we are strengthened. Our resistance to the present order has deepened our character and strengthened our resolve, and has bestowed upon us the courage to care deeply about the lives and fates of others as well as the imperiled state of our planet’s environment. We can–and we will–meet one another in reclaimed public space, and, finally, and, at long last, take up residence in a life-vivifying landscape where the death genes grip is loosened and where the wit of the world remains.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
I’ve noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to “distract” the citizenry from the wicked machinations of Republicans of the legislative class.
Nonsense.
The OWS movement is not a distraction from—but serves as an alternative to—the disingenuous theatrics staged by the political hacks of this faux republic. Conversely, movement members have grasped that it is the hollow grandstanding–the modus operandi of the present U.S. political system itself–that serves as distraction from the realities of the day.
Those drawn to the OWS movement realize this: Vast sums of money are required to get the attention of and gain influence over the entrenched class of self-serving political insiders who hustle their wares in Washington, D.C.
Year after year, election cycle after election cycle, Washington’s political class has revealed whose interests it serves. Accordingly, let the 1% and their political operatives continue on their present myopic, self-serving, society-decimating course: By doing so, they will just bring more outraged people into the streets and hasten their own undoing.
Yet, because arrogant power, girded by duplicity and ruthlessly maintained, does not yield without a fight, we should expect more of the following:
Stories are circulating that Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford, a well-connected Washington lobbying firm, with ties to the financial industry, have floated a $850,000 plan to pillory Occupy Wall Street. This should not come as a surprise. Living in a society dominated by the power of massive corporations, and the inequitable wealth these self-perpetuating organizations have at their disposal, we will be relentlessly subjected to the narratives they generate.
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko
Since birth, most of us have been enveloped by the consumer state’s commercial hologram. Almost every daily act we perform and attitude we evince is in some measure determined by the dictates, demands and the incessant, commercial come-ons (the defacto propaganda) of the corporate state e.g. from what time you rise in the morning, to the food you eat, to what you clothe yourself in, to how you spend your days, to what time you go to sleep at night, to what stories you are audience to–the cultural myths you have internalized–by means of mass media saturation, to the manner you celebrate festivals and holidays, to how your illnesses and of those around you will play-out, even the circumstances of how you will approach and succumb to your death.
Because these are the waters in which we swim, most will accept societal and cultural circumstances as a given…believing, for example, that when they posit a political utterance that the opinion expressed has been formed exclusively of their own mind, by the exercise of free will.
Accordingly, a large percent of the populace of the U.S. believes consumerism is a form of freedom…that the exercise thereof mainly involves being at liberty to trundle to a mall and be in possession of the right to choose between a big-ass cookie or a giant Cinnabon…that freedom of choice is expressed by over-priced running shoes–or security can be found in a massive SUV.
In this manner, the propaganda campaigns of the corporate/national security state have proven effective at promoting and perpetuating the inequitable status quo in place at the present time. Do not underestimate the well-rewarded, professional con men employed in the criminal enterprise known as “public relations.” Remember, these masters of deceit sell wars, fought by the poor, in which, the underclass kill and die for the profits of a ruthless few. War is a money train for the rich and connected but a death wagon for the rest of humankind.
Ready yourself to be buffeted by a barrage of virtual reality blunderbuss–volley after volley of mainstream media launched Big Lies–and the ground fire of social media small distortions. Don’t walk unarmed into the line of fire.
Remember this: Most likely, the corporate state has, to some degree, colonized your mind, as it is well on its way to destroying the ecosystem of the entire planet.
Conversely, let your soul occupy you. While there might be an ongoing effort to scour Liberty Park of liberty, they cannot do likewise to your heart without your consent. Turn the tables on them: Evict the corporate occupiers from the public realm within–as all the while, you challenge propaganda whenever it crosses your path…on the streets, at your workplace, at family gatherings, and on social media– because a lie left unchallenged begins to be accepted as truth. And worse, invades, colonizes and exploits (and often kills) a portion of the soul of the world.
Importantly, do not underestimate the ruthless nature of calcified power.
Regarding the subject: On Thursday, Nov. 17, near Foley Square, there was blood on Broadway. At the scene, I witnessed thuggish, NYPD motorcycle cops driving directly into groups of peaceful demonstrators, with the intent of antagonizing those gathered, and when people stood their ground and refused to be bullied–then phalanxes of blue shirt bastards, swinging nightsticks, waded into the crowd.
Even with my wife, tugging at the back of my jacket, attempting to tow, as we say down south, my narrow ass away from the direction of injury or jail, I could not contain my outrage; I growled at a smirking cop, gloating over the carnage, “just keep it up, you mindless thug, when you get folks angry enough, the boot just might be on the other neck…namely yours.”
In hindsight, in my own defense: Being on scene and witnessing peaceful people attacked and brutalized, one is apt to become seized by rage.
But what is the mayor of New York City and his Police Commissioner’s excuse?
Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelley and the ranks of NYPD have proven themselves willing to barricade and checkpoint the city into chaos…as opposed to enduring ongoing moments of freedom of assembly and free expression.
And this is why we must not retreat. Their tactics of repression are very expensive to the city budget, and money is the only thing they love.
Hence, they have, in turn, provided us with a tactic we can use; we can hit them where they feel it. (Conversely, they can take blow after blow to their dignity–because they are devoid of that character trait.)
The ground is shifting below our feet and this phenomenon involves more than the echoing footfalls of marchers and the trudging of militarized formations of riot cops on city streets worldwide.
The first vibrations, closer to tremors, transpired because the ground below us has been fracked of dreams…the void engendered seismological activity. Now, from Cairo, Egypt’s Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece to Liberty Park, in New York, New York to Oscar Grant Park, in Oakland, California, we have become like tuning forks, in sympatico with the resonances of the tormented earth.
Subsequently, the walls of the neoliberal prison are cracking…We are no longer isolated, enclosed in our alienation, imprisoned by a concretized sense of powerlessness; daylight is beginning to pierce the darkness of our desolate cells.
“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.” ~ Utah Phillips
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
For days now, we have endured demonstrably false propaganda that the fallen soldiers of U.S. wars sacrificed their lives for “our freedoms.” Yet, as that noxious nonsense still lingers in the air, militarized police have invaded OWS sites in numerous cities, including Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, and, in the boilerplate description of the witless courtesans of the corporate media, with the mission to “evict the occupiers”.
[Hundreds of NYC riot police forcibly evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park early on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011. ] Hundreds of NYC riot police forcibly evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park early on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011. U.S soldiers died protecting what and who again? These actions should make this much clear: The U.S. military and the police exist to protect the 1%. At this point, the ideal of freedom will be carried by those willing to resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who have struggled and often died for freedom–but scant few were clad in uniforms issued by governments.
Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms–so they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it crushed.
When anyone tells you that dead soldiers and veterans died for your freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at some point, gain their freedom.
I was born in Birmingham Alabama, at slightly past the mid-point of the decade of the 1950s. Many of my earliest memories involve the struggle for civil rights that was transpiring on the streets of my hometown.
My father was employed at a scrap metal yard but also worked as a freelance photojournalist who hawked his work to media photo syndicates such as Black Star who then sold his wares to the major newsmagazines of the day. A number of the iconic photographs of the era were captured by his Nikon camera e.g., of vicious police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators; of demonstrators cartwheeled down city streets by the force of fire hoses; of Dr. King and other civil rights marchers kneeled in prayer before arrays of Police Chief Bull Connor’s thuggish ranks of racist cops.
In Birmingham, racist laws and racial and economic inequality were the progenitors of acts of official viciousness. The social structure in place was indefensible. Reason and common decency held no dominion in the justifications for the established order that was posited by the system’s apologists and enforcers; therefore, brutality filled the void created by the absence of their humanity.
And the same situation is extant in the growing suppression of the OWS movement in various cities, nationwide, including Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan. The 1% and their paid operatives–local city officials–are striving to protect an unjust, inherently dishonest status quo. Lacking a moral mandate, they are prone to the use of police state forms of repression.
Dr. King et al faced their oppressors on the streets of my hometown. Civil Rights activists knew that they had to hold their ground to retain their dignity…that it was imperative to sit down in those Jim Crow-tyrannized streets when necessary in order to stand up against the forces of oppression.
At present, we have arrived at a similar moment. If justice is to prevail, it seems, the air of U.S. cities will hold the acrid sting of tear gas, the jails will again be filled, the brave will endure brutality–yet the corrupt system will crumble. Because the system’s protectors themselves will bring it down by revealing its empty nature, and the corrupt structure will collapse from within.
Yet, when riot police attack unarmed, peacefully resisting protesters, the mainstream media often describes the events with standard boilerplate such as “police clash with demonstrators.”
This is inaccurate (at best) reportage. It suggest that both parties are equal aggressors in the situation, and the motive of the police is to restore order and maintain the peace, as opposed to, inflicting pain and creating an aura of intimidation.
This is analogous to describing a mugging as simply: two parties engaging in a financial transaction.
Although mainstream media demurred from limning the upwelling of mob violence at Penn. State as involving any criteria deeper than the mindless rage of a few football-besotted students unloosed by the dismissal of beloved sport figure.
Yet there exists an element that the Penn. State belligerents and OWS activists have in common: a sense of alienation.
Penn. State students rioted because life in the corporate state is so devoid of meaning…that identification with a sports team gives an empty existence said meaning…These are young people, coming of age in a time of debt-slavery and diminished job prospects, who were born and raised in, and know of no existence other than, life as lived in U.S. nothingvilles i.e., a public realm devoid of just that–a public realm–an atomizing center-bereft culture of strip malls, office parks, fast food eateries and the electronic ghosts wafting the air of social media.
Contrived sport spectacles provisionally give an empty life meaning…Take that away, and a mindless rampage might ensue…Anything but face the emptiness and acknowledge one’s complicity therein, and then direct one’s fury at the creators of the stultified conditions of this culture.
It is a given, the cameras of corporate media swivel towards reckless actions not mindful commitment…are attuned to verbal contretemps not thoughtful conviction–and then move on. And we will click our TV remotes and scan the Internet…restless, hollowed out…eating empty memes…skimming the surface of the electronic sheen…
These are the areas we are induced to direct our attention–as the oceans of the earth are dying…these massive life-sustaining bodies of water have less then 50 years before they will be dead. This fact alone should knock us to our knees in lamentation…should sent us reeling into the streets in displays of public grief…
Accordingly, we should not only occupy–but inhabit our rage. No more tittering at celebrity/political class contretemps–it is time for focused fury. The machinery of the corporate/police state must be dismantled.
If the corporate boardrooms have to be emptied–for the oceans to be replenished with abundant life–then so be it. If one must go to jail for committing acts of civil disobedience to free one’s heart–then it must be done.
Yet why does the act of challenging the degraded status quo provoke such a high decree of misapprehension, anxiety, and outright hostility from many, both in positions of authority and among so many of the exploited and dispossessed of the corporate/consumer state.
For example, why did the fatal shooting incident in Oakland, California, Nov. 1, that occurred near the Occupy Oakland Encampment–but, apparently, was wholly unrelated to OWS activity cause a firestorm of reckless speculation and false associations.
Because any exercise in freedom makes people in our habitually authoritarian nation damn uneasy…a sense of uncertainty brings on dread–the feeling that something terrible is to come from challenging a prevailing order, even as degraded as it is.
Tyrants always promise safety; their apologist warn of chaos if and when the soul-numbing order is challenged.
Granted, it is a given that there exists a sense of certainty in a prison routine: high walls and guards and gun mounts ensure continuity; an uncertainty-banishing schedule is enforced. Moreover, solitary confinement offers an even more orderly situation…uncertainty is circumscribed as freedom is banished.
The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.
A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.
Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) — and similar protests — don’t fit into the trite frames of America’s mainstream news, but rather represent a collective message of people laying their bodies down against the depredations of modern-day capitalism, as poet Phil Rockstroh explains.
In my opinion, when people opine that the OWS movement is about — or should be about — the airing of this particular grievance or that it must bandy this or that particular demand — they have missed the point.
Of course, collectively, OWS evinces a force of resistance against corporate greed and a critique of the failings of the present political system. … Yet, as is the case with any living thing, to reduce its essential nature to facile descriptions diminishes it.
As with human perception of life itself, experiencing freedom carries an ineffable quality, a wordless grandeur.
“Human language is like a cracked kettle drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.” Gustave Flaubert
Through it all, the immanent quality of and inchoate longing for freedom remains within us: Although present, it is not always in plain view. Its presence in our lives is, perhaps, best summed up by this Irish aphorism: ”Mrs. O’Kelly, do you believe in fairies?” “No, I don’t — but they’re there.”
Over and over again, too many well-intentioned sorts continue to insist that it is imperative that we inform the nice people of the middle-class (nice people who, given the nature of imperium, willingly feed off the blood of empire like the charges of a vampire) that there are well-mannered working people on site at OWS encampments — not only spittle-launching, leftist radicals.
Excuse me, but, for many years now, so-called “crazy” leftist radicals have been damn near the only ones who have had the clarity of mind to give a cogent critique of empire … have been willing to point out the exploitive, soul-demeaning mode of existence inherent to the militarist/national security/corporate/consumer/ duopolistic state–and, as a result, we have been marginalized, entirely excluded from mainstream debate and discussion.
Let us have a little rendezvous with reality; otherwise, the operatives of the status quo will frame the narrative, once again, and will claim victory by co-option.
This is the method by which the capitalist status quo has maintained its inverted totalitarian set-up since the popular uprisings of the 1960s, by means of generous economic rewards (the perks and privileges of the corporate state) for its de facto propagandists and exclusion from the official narrative for dissenters. Don’t buy into the false narrative.
Personally, I refuse to eschew the designation of anti-capitalist radical. You cannot shame me for knowing where the bodies of empire are buried and who laid them in their graves. To the landfill of history with capitalism — the wasteful, cracked-brained economic system that created said landfill.
The preening liars at Fox News and other well-rewarded propagandists of state capitalism will disseminate lies, big and small, regardless of our actions … that is what they do. Be cautioned: Never tap dance for the approval of a lying, manipulative, power-mad fascist. Once, you begin to do so you co-sign his narrative — thus he owns your hapless ass.
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – ?and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” -Georgia O’Keefe
Accordingly, the lessons of the 1960s e.g., COINTELPRO operations … reveal that when street and riot police are ordered to pull back, as in Oakland, agent provocateurs will infiltrate mass political gatherings. Withal: You can bet those masked bastards shouting hate-speak and breaking windows are cops. …
He is there to draw the cameras of the corporate media towards the scenes of chaos and strife that he seeds in order to turn bourgeois sentiment against reform movements that might change their lives for the better … to create the false narrative that the police are the only bulwark the middle-class has against destruction-sowing crazies, who, if given free reign, will leave in rubble and ashes everything the middle-class holds dear.
To avoid being falsely labeled: First, endeavor, by inward searching and outward (even failed) endeavor, to know who you are. Then lay claim to your own identity. Otherwise, garnering the clarity required to apprehend what you’re up against becomes difficult.
The Greek word for one of the three figures representing The Fates is Moira — which translates into portion. And that is key to grasping what is happening from Cairo to Athens to New York City to Oakland. Ergo, people are rising up and fighting for the rightful and just portion of their lives and fates that have been increasingly commandeered and controlled by a corrupt elite whose rule has, heretofore, been sustained by a disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and power.
Across Greece, people have awaken to the knowledge that passivity is slavery — that capitalism is economic cannibalism. … State capitalism, also, devours the dignity of its victims. Yet, after a time, a number of people will rise up against exploitation and will demand their portion of fate.
At this point in time, the term “general strike” holds a deep and resonate appeal. The word “general” suggests that the isolation of daily life experienced under the atomizing circumstances of globalized corporate capitalism can be upended — that there can be a sense of unity — that a movement en masse is possible (yet not a mass movement to war, but a movement en masse towards equity and fairness) by beginning, at long last, to “strike” back — to counterpunch with focused blows those who have kept the harsh, inequitable order of the present era in place by means of intimidation and bribery.
Capitalism — you are a rotting, flesh-eating zombie — there are sacred spark stippling the air around you; these sparks are borne of flames of sacred vehemence. For too long, people have been bled dry by the heart-desiccating aspirations and dehumanizing modes of economic coercion that maintain the neoliberal paradigm.
Moreover, the flames of resistance are only fanned when your apologists claim that the system in place provides the best, in fact, the only way to exist in the world and attempt to smother the world’s growing fury with police-state tactics.
The stakes are great. Much has been stolen from us: essential qualities, more valuable than money. As the populace of the corporate/consumer state, we have been induced, by means of small bribes and hyper-authoritarian coercion, to sign a social contract that sells our essential nature on the cheap, i.e., to be defined (hence diminished) as a consumer, a commuter, an employee, a Republican, a Democrat, a member of a demographic group, a cipher, a sucker, a bystander in one’s own fate.
Don’t let any system define you, narrow, then appropriate, your innate and essential self towards exploitive agendas, as does the present societal set-up, for the incommensurate profits of a self-serving few — who, in turn, insist that your objections to the situation are unreasonable, outrageous, untoward — too crazy to be uttered in decent company.
In short, a system in which its operatives demand that you stay in your place and not question the motives and actions of your betters.
In contrast, a radical sensibility insists you must inhabit an inner landscape wherein no state, corporation — nor any type of extant system holds dominion over your essential self — that you inhabit a landscape that is best navigated by your own interior lode star.
Therefore, you have no obligation to justify your existence to any man or system. To even attempt to do so would deliver an injustice to your heart, for this is a state of being as impossible to quantify as a flight of imagination — yet it exists within as immanent as the architecture of desire.
“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what would you say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?” –Foucault
Who will you meet, where will you travel, what battles will be enjoined and what loves surrendered to as you write the Book of Your Being? What thoughts and feelings will be discovered therein?
Will the words you etch upon the finite moments of your time on this earth evoke deep yearning, like Wordsworth’s limning of his longing to see beyond the prison walls of quotidian experience?
[…]I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
excerpt, The World Is Too Much with Us–William Wordsworth
Or will you refuse to rise, when commanded to do so, as did Rosa Parks on her fateful bus commute through the Jim Crow-demeaned streets of 1950s Montgomery, Alabama; or will you be seized by holy lamentation, like Allen Ginsberg, as he howled anguished prosody into the pity-devoid face of the devouring Moloch of the commodified empire; or will your genius be revealed like the impertinent flutter of Groucho Marx’s eyebrows on the screen of Depression-era movie houses; or will you reclaim your own heart by the act of telling off some son-of-a-bitch of a boss, as you quit a dead-end, heart-deadening job and then resolve to join the defiant multitudes at an OWS encampment?
Mainly, are you prepared to surrender to the everyday miracle that transpires when one, fleetingly, finds the resolve to open one’s being to the uncertainties of freedom — when one chooses to break the hold of those fear-bestowing, resentment-besotted demons of banality known as Easy Cynicism, Displaced Resentment, and Habitual Passivity — those disingenuous, corporate/consumer state bards of the Bardo — whose (extant and internalized) narratives have sustained late capitalism.
“Cynicism is just another mode of conformity”. –Theodor W. Adorno
Don’t delay: Act as if your life — if not the survival of the planet — depends on it, because, at this point, it does.
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December 8, 2011
Until recent events proved otherwise, the hyper-commercialized surface of the corporate state gave the appearance of being too diffuse–too devoid of a center to pose a threat of totalitarian excess. Accordingly, as of late, due to the violent response to OWS protesters by local police departments in Oakland, Atlanta, Chicago, and in other U.S. cities, the repressive nature of the faux republic is beginning to be revealed.
Behind the bland face of the political establishment (purchased by the bloated profits of the plundering class) are riot cops, outfitted and armed with the accoutrements of oppression, who are ready and willing to enforce the dictates of the elitist beneficiaries of the degraded status quo. In deed and action, as of late, the police state embedded within neo-liberal economic oligarchy is showing its hyper-authoritarian proclivities to the world.
In general, existence within the present societal structure inflicts on the individual a sense of atomization and its concomitant feelings of alienation, vague unease, free floating anxiety and anomie. The coercion is implicit and internalized. [ Doctor Popular] photo: Doctor Popular
Because of its mundane, ubiquitous nature, the system is reliant on an individual’s sense of isolation (even ignorance of the existence of the structure itself) to remain in place. In short, the exploitive system continues to exist because its denizens are bereft of other models of comparison.
The public commons inherent in the OWS movement provides a model of comparison. Apropos, that is why we are beginning to receive reports such as the following:
On Tuesday Oct. 25, 2011, the Oakland Tribune reported that police raided and demolished the local OWS encampment after declaring the area a “crime scene”. This is revelatory regarding the character of the enforcers of the present order: Those in positions of power within a police state view freedom of assembly and freedom of expression as a punishable offense.
It is a given that: Authoritarian personality types take particular umbrage when citizens are expressing their displeasure with official abuses of power and begin to do so in an effective manner.
Too many in the U.S. have bought the fiction that the nation was, is and will remain a democratic republic. Therefore, by drawing its brutal operatives and mendacious apologist into the open, the state will reveal itself in all its ugliness. As a result, all concerned will be able to observe the true nature of the police/national security/oligarchic state in place in the U.S.
Ideally, few illusions will remain intact regarding the ruthless, brutal forces against which we struggle.
Moreover, the actions of the police in regard to public protest are premeditated tactics aimed at the suppression of the right to public assembly. The goal of the power brokers, their political operatives and police enforcers is to render one’s (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed right to dissent too prohibitive to be practiced.
The economically dispossessed and members of minority communities have known for many years what OWSers are suffering, presently, at the hands of official power and its enforcers.
In turn, individual police officers are well aware of whom they are sworn to protect (and it isn’t those who desire to exercise their rights to free assembly and free speech). In most cases, if an individual police officer ever refused an order to make an unconstitutional arrest, he/she would be committing an act of careercide; their chance of advancement within the department would have to be scraped off the sidewalk on the spot and transported to the city morgue.
Are you willing to leave the confines of your comfort zone and go to jail for justice?
Rarely, does reform arrive without the arrest of frontline agitators. Power does not yield without a fight, without attempting to silence dissent by brutality and forced detention. The powerful demand that those of us who notice their excesses and crimes be placed out of sight and out of mind.
Hence, in Oakland, the local corporate news affiliates, to their shame, turned off their cameras when the violent attacks and mass arrest of protesters began.
Are you willing to risk injury to body and reputation to bear witness? The survival of the OWS movement depends on having bodies on the ground and eyes (as well as cameras) on the thugs in uniform.
True to form, a servile corporate media will proclaim how unsightly dissenters are, inferring that sensible folk, simply as a matter of good taste and public propriety should disregard the protesters’ entreaties and that these malcontents and cranks should be denied entrance into the realm of legitimate discourse, that these disheveled interlopers be barred by walls of silence.
To be in the world is to be confronted with walls. How we respond to these barriers is called character and art.
Many brave souls have confronted walls such as these.
Often, as I gaze upon the blue wall of mindless repression surrounding Zuccotti Park and reflect on other OWS sites nationwide, I am induced to feel the sadness and longing of the repressed souls of the earth, of those throughout time who have met walls of blind hatred, of economic exploitation, of institutional repression….
I empathize with all of those who faced walls of smug indifference, walls of internalized shame and walls of official lies–those who stood powerless before the stark reality of seemingly implacable circumstances. I reflect upon the lives and work of itinerate blues musicians of the U.S. Deep South and the manner they met walls of both official repression and collective blind, ignorant fear and hatred, and how they transformed those prison walls into the numinous architecture of The Blues…How they alchemicalized the barriers into guitar technique.
Musical instruments, like word meeting meter to a poet, serve as both barrier and salvation; the limits of the self are tested, explored, and by effort, failure and moments of elation are transformed by confrontation and union with the instrument, personal circumstance and audience.
As is the case with those on the front lines of OWS encampments, millions of people throughout history have met seemingly implacable barriers in the form of walls of human brutality e.g., Jim Crow laws, union busting management goon squads, the Zionist apartheid wall, various secret police and public bullies–but they weren’t going to let the bastards “turn them ’round…”
If you choose to resist entrenched power, when confronted by mindless authority, your heart will know the drill; it will guide you–its natural trajectory is towards freedom. Hence, you will know what to do when the moment arrives–and will gain the knowledge that your predecessors discovered in their struggle for justice…that the cry arose forth from deep in their souls, “We shall not be moved.”
The practitioners of the Delta Blues came upon walls of oppression…walls of raging hatred, and responded by passing through those walls…to inhabit a landscape more alive, more resonant, more ensouled than their oppressors will ever know possible. They occupied their own hearts and draw us still into the immediacy of the world by their victory over their degraded circumstances by their appropriating the very barriers that were placed in their path by their oppressors and transforming the criteria of their oppression into the living architecture of the soul.
Those who know this–have already won…have already overcome.
Lorca limned the situation (one extant as well in the enfolding OWS movement) in his theory of “the duende”. His concept of the duende reveals why people, when faced by the ossified order of an inhuman system, either become caught up–even compelled–by the challenge to begin to make the world anew–while others are seized with mortification, indifference, resignation and hostility.
In which direction does your soul wend? “The arrival of the duende always presupposes a transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly created rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” — from The Havana Lectures, Federico Garcia Lorca.
When I witness police harassing, arresting and brutalizing those exercising their rights to free assembly, I find myself gripped by a surge of rage…The rage rises in me in an animalistic fury–an urge to fight tooth and nail, to tear at the throats of these vicious intruders into the territory of authentic social discourse.
As of late, instead of pushing down the fury rising from within me or acting upon it, I let it inundate my being. As a result, the coursing rage transforms into a penetrating, powerful force–enveloping and demarcating the geography of my convictions…arriving to bring acceptance and to define and defend the contours of my true self.
Rage can appear as an angel of self-definition, the protector of one’s authentic nature and a source of personal power…”ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me ’round …”
One’s anger is vital to one’s existence; it is a valuable gift; therefore, it should not be squandered…no need to waste it on fools and idiots.
When rage arrives, invite him in; his presence will fill the room with alacrity, and his surging vitality will allow you to push farther and deeper into the unexplored regions of your soul.
In contrast, the world of the neoliberal oligarchs, the duopolistic political class and of the cops has been called into question. They have grown accustomed to having their way, of having a compliant and complicit peasantry. In this they are not unique; what they are experiencing is universal: The world we know (or at least believe we do) and struggle to maintain, from time to time, is apt to reveal an aspect of itself that seems alien and unmanageable e.g., the growing dissent across the nation, perhaps too vast and potent to be kettled, penned, tear gassed, cuffed and detained. The otherness of the world seems too large…has become an army of aggrieved angels
I once saw a Great Dane on Second Avenue attempt to engage in canine communion with his fellows. In order to display his intentions were benign, friendly, he crouched down on the sidewalk, making his massive frame as small as possible, even placing his large head on the concrete…doing all he could to produce the artifice of submission, to even the smallest dog that approached him. In other words, to enlarge his world he created the illusion of smallness. He did not reduce his essence; he created the artifice of smallness so he could grow larger than himself by his union with the otherness of the world.
We are not requestingthat cops crouch before us. They just need not bristle so. To grow in each other’s presence, we are required to meet the other at eye level, even if one has to descend a bit from a habitual position of power and authority.
Officers, your guns, rubber bullets, nightsticks, pepper spray–the looming wall of blue intimidation that you brandish merely creates the illusion of strength. If you truly want to grow strong, meet us on these sidewalks, sans the display of empty power.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
The global designs of the neo-liberal agenda have met the living architecture of a larger order — a portion of which has taken the form of a still coalescing, yet potent, countervailing consciousness, a global-wide Liberty Plaza of the mind — an order that is not informed by corporate era public relations legerdemain, hyper-adrenaline media sound bites, rightwing emotional displacements, or “sensible” centrist platitudes — but the type of order that begins to jell when the structures of an existing system lose touch with the realities of daily life.
A ground-level, global-wide movement is afoot and has announced to the economic, media and political elite that they are on to their schemes. Accordingly, the plundering class and their protectors will no longer be afforded the luxury of insulating themselves (almost absent confrontation) within bubbles of privilege, bubbles of denial, bubbles of insularity.
Late capitalism has proven to be wholly reliant upon, in fact, addicted to, the creation of bubbles: market and media bubbles, respectively, serving to create inflated wealth and the manufacturing of closed narratives that shield the privileged players within from being held accountable for the consequences of their schemes.
The system is analogous to a rigged game in a tawdry, traveling carnival. The carnival barker’s success hinges on whether or not his audience is seduced by his unctuous pitch, in this case being the dubious claim that, under late capitalism, illusionary economic success is attainable by pluck and perseverance. (“Step right up, folks, all can play”– but the house will win.) Of course, the game has been rigged from the get-go, has been designed to fleece credulous rubes who have never glimpsed the larger world, and, when any prize at all is won, it is a piece of cheap, disposable consumer junk.
As Autumn stands before us, it will be helpful to allow illusions to fall away like dying leaves. Summer is kind to fools, but winter insists on clarity. Let the old delusions blaze out in Autumnal splendor, and then be mindful of winter’s stark perfection…its demarcations…rendering bare branches against a bleak sky.
Know this: The illusions of the corporate empire can no longer provide shelter; the elite and operatives of economic imperium can no longer raid and plunder the easy pickings of summer…hoard and squander its bounty. Therefore, to quote the poet, at present, “One must have a mind of winter” to navigate the white-out winds of new realities.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind […]
– Wallace Stevens, excerpt from The Snow Man
Yet, with the rise of that wing of the privileged class known as the corporate media, we receive the opposite; instead, we are enveloped within a hothouse bloom of hype, surface-level, adrenaline-activating content bearing misleadingly narrowed context.
On January 17 1991, at the start of the U.S.’s formal military hostilities against Iraq in the first Gulf War, the “folk rapper”/performance poet Chris Chandler and I were in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Chris pounded and thrashed at his battered guitar and recited talking blues protest ditties that we composed on the spot.
We were among a crowd of well over a couple of thousand demonstrators, plus scores of homeless people shared the surroundings as well. Shortly after the bombing of Iraq began, many in the park joined in an impromptu march around the metro D.C. area where thousands more protesters joined our ranks.
As we wended our way back to Pennsylvania Avenue, we were met, a block from the White House, by a phalanx of police i.e., full riot gear-clad storm troopers and mounted sons-of-bitches on horseback who charged the crowd.
The following is a close approximation of the account of the events as reported in the next day’s Washington Post:
“A few dozen ragged protesters hobbled up Pennsylvania Ave. throwing rocks and taunting the police…”
Bearing that in mind, here is the opening graph of the account of the events on the Brooklyn Bridge, where on Sunday, Oct 2, 2011, demonstrators were herded, kettled and arrested by police:
“NEW YORK (AP) — More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.”
Buyer beware: If the corporate press reports a breaking story with any degree of accuracy, the act is to be viewed as a fluke and certainly not as an act of honest intention by the reporters, producers and editors involved. On a personal basis, I have yet to be part of an unfolding news story in which the version of events created by these courtesans to power do not seem simply cut out of whole cloth, as they truckled to create an inoffensive narrative for the ruling elite.
“Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that are alive — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.”–Rainer Maria Rilke
Living in New York City, as I do, brings into stark relief the fact that the city operates as a defacto banana republic/police state. In the same manner that the mission of the police force is to protect the power and privilege of the moneyed classes, mainstream journalists work within the boundaries of its acceptable narratives for the purpose of job security and a bit of privilege.
The general population, buffeted by economic insecurity, at least, up to this point, has remained docile, and, to mitigate the anxiety and depression caused by feelings of powerlessness, many have become addicted to the small perks and bribes and endless distractions of the corporate/consumer state. [ Harrie van Veen] photo: Harrie van Veen
Furthermore, these bubble-enclosed states of being constitute addiction in a literal sense: Ergo, the compulsive mechanisms of addictive behavior are an attempt to ease an individual’s abiding sense of powerlessness and the attendant feelings of anxiety and despair experienced in the midst of uncontrollable circumstances and to quell troubling, obsessive thoughts and feelings of acute emotional discomfort by an habitual reliance on mood altering substances such as alcohol, food, gambling, work, hoarding, lust for power, wealth and privilege.
Addictive actions arise from the drive of libido, but its energy is usurped and exploited by the relentless will of a rigid, turned in on itself ego…”Self will run riot,” as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous poetically puts it.
Addiction is a pathology of the mechanistic mind; an addict’s disregard for his own body and his exploitative attitude towards the world at large is a microcosmic version of the economic designs of the global economic elite. Apropos, the world is mine to abuse, not to engage…to exploit from within a protective bubble of privilege and entitlement, not to be enjoined with in common communion.
The demands of the addicted mind are analogous to that of a bratty child, a high chair tyrant, “his majesty the baby,” who is convinced that his wants are the end all be all of all things. Therefore, a childish addict must grow up and ask himself this question: How do I transform my obsessive wants into the rage of my dharma, my un-reflective compulsions into the steady work of my soul.
In our time, when nearly all the apparatus of the corporate/consumer state exist and are maintained by the demeaning, soul-defying dynamics of addiction, as an act of defiance, one should attempt to get drunk on clarity–which is a different matter than a priggish, “dry drunk’s” hyper-moralistic refusal of excess, for the primary option does not constitute a puritanical refusal of the world–but, instead, is an embrace of the sacred quality of life, a respect for the finite quality of our fleeting passage through this life.
The voice of addiction (both internal and extant in the consumer state) will say anything and will go to craven lengths to continue on. Withal, its narrative will insist its path is the only passage possible…that its doomed trajectory must be maintained. And when its flimsy, desperate arrangements do collapse, it will insist that it must be propped back up so it can topple once again (or as this destructive act of enabling was called, a few years back, “The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008″).
Let the stock market hit bottom and allow “consumer confidence” to plummet…allow the psyches’ of consumers, addicted to distraction, to spiral into the abyss. Because, in so doing, one may be compelled to find and grasp onto one’s essential self, as the persona of one’s false self, addicted to the present order, disappears into the void.
To truly embrace the possibility of change, it is essential to allow putrefied habits to compost into the rich loam that will nourish reborn understandings. Apropos:
I felt a Funeral in my Brain
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading–treading-till it
seemed That Sense was breaking through”
–Emily Dickinson, opening stanza from, I Felt A Funeral In My Brain
Yes, this is a grievous event…a time of tears, confusion and lamination. Yet:
Let the young tears come
Let the calm hand of grief come
It is not as evil as you think.
–Rolf Jacobsen, excerpt from Sunflower
Within the present societal structure of the corporate state, “learned helplessness” is encouraged (as opposed to embracing reflective sorrow and deploying focused rage). Because it sustains itself by exploiting an individual’s instinctual drives and human longings, the present order of late capitalism is depended upon allowing an individual to possess just enough libido to vampirize–but not to retain enough élan vital to be roused to rebellion against the corporate state’s relentless practices of economic coercion.
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy” –Ivan Illich
I have noticed that often what is (unconsciously) beneath paranoia is envy. Envy…that others are taking up one’s space in the world and are plotting to maintain the arrangement. Solution: Punch a hole in bubbles of denial and addiction and take a look for yourself. Insist on your portion of life — your portion of fate.
Many situations in this life are rigged e.g., the gamed system of the corporate state. But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be rigged; it is truly too big to fail. Now: To the streets, glistening with renewing rain…to the flaming barricades…its flames caress the future. Come out of self-exile; you are the change you can believe in.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
The ongoing exercise in democracy transpiring in and around the Occupy Wall Street site in Lower Manhattan imbues one’s heart with resonances of the real. Many reasons factor into the phenomenon: Here, for example, one does not feel scammed and demeaned…gripped by the sense of futility, even embarrassment, experienced at even the thought of participating in the big money-skewed, sham elections staged in the corporate oligarchic state.
In our era, in which our mind’s are distracted and circumscribed by relentless, manic formations of instant information and evanescent imagery, we too often dwell in domains devoid of musk and fury, of the implications carried by mind meeting flesh; therefore, one is often nettled by an abiding hollowness resultant from voluntary exile in these weightless realms of electronic ghosts.
The events unfolding in this place bear little resemblance to contrived reality TV tawdriness or pro sports/corporate rock, empty spectacle. Although some of the event transpiring here have been broadcast, webcast and tweeted in “real time” — in vivid contrast — events are unfolding in time that is real.
In Liberty Plaza, both the winged spirit of commitment and the rag and bone shop of the heart abide. Acting upon the human yearning not to live in chains, those assembled here are attempting to navigate their way out of the wasteland of isolation and alienation inflicted by the inverted totalitarianism of the corporate/consumer/national security state.
“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” ~ Wendell Berry
This photo (of Occupy Wall Street protesters entrapped on the Brooklyn Bridge by the NYPD) is emblematic of existence within the constraints of inverted totalitarianism. The image is evocative of how the present order works to contain and narrow (if you will, kettle and cage) our conception of both the right to free expression in the public sphere and, by implication, within the psyche of an individual.
For instance: Notice, under “normal circumstances,” how even the thought of pamphleteering or making an attempt at public oration in those areas of hyper-commercialized commerce – e.g., malls, big box retail stores and sports arenas — squatting upon most of the landscape of the U.S. is summarily dismissed. An individual who attempts to exercise his right to free speech and free assembly in those locations is expelled on sight by private security types maintaining that the reach of one’s rights to free expression ends where private property begins.
In general, in daily life, living under the inverted totalitarian nature of the corporate state, the walls that imprison an individual are invisible to the eye, even as they create bleak barriers within. For example, if you are arrested while exercising your (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed rights during an act of public protest, future employers will be privy to the information and chances are that such information will not be exactly helpful in your attempt to gain employment; hence, many are dissuaded from protest.
Wall of Blue: Yet, the New York City power elite can be thanked for the following: By actions such as these, captured in photos like this one, they reveal to us the true nature of the society that they have created, both extant and internalized within.
And this is what the implicit oppression of the corporate oligarchic state transforms into when challenged. Take a good look, then, ask yourself, as the song goes, which side are you on?
The agenda of the parasitic corporate and criminal Wall Street elite (whose financial power and political influence has increased unchecked for more than thirty years) has been: to attain maximum profits by maximum exploitation of labor and resources. To ensure the labor pool remains submissive, the corporate class tyrannizes the workforce with threats to their job security and other Shock Doctrine strategies designed to beat an individual down, as all the while, their PR flacks promulgate the Orwellian doublethink at the empty core of corporate/consumer state propaganda i.e., submission to exploitation will, one day, yield to financial freedom…that the economic shackles that yoke an individual to a life of “free” market-enforced submission are, in fact, his wings of liberty.
And that is something one should bear in mind when considering the subject of the attitudes and actions of the NYPD regarding popular uprisings such as the one ongoing in Lower Manhattan.
In the first few days of the occupation of Liberty Plaza, I stopped by and spoke with protesters and police. (The latter only agreed to speak to me, with much hesitation, and, in a few cases outright contempt, if I promised not to record them or reveal their badge numbers.) I told them that I understand and experience the sort of fear that such dictates, issued from above, level upon a person. I averred the fear instilled in rank and file officers by their “superiors” in the department is similar to the fear that folks in the park possess for police in general.
And the fear is identical to that OWS protesters hold in regard to the power Wall Street exerts over their lives.
In this, we, the beleaguered “99 percenters,” share a common plight–an affinity of fear instilled within us by economic coercion.
One cop told me it was nothing personal: He appreciated the protest because of the overtime pay he was pulling as a result of it. I asked him if he feared that Wall Street might squander his pension fund, and that, “if you come down with a case of ‘billy club elbow’ from beating on the folks here…that the crooks on Wall Street might make off with your medical benefits.”
Moreover, that if he saw a man trying to rob the pizza restaurant on the end of the block, he had the power to make an arrest, and, by that token, would it be possible for he and his crew – who it appeared didn’t have a lot to do at Liberty Plaza – could see fit to move down the street a bit…to where the real criminal activity comes down – billion dollar heists, in fact – and make a few arrests when the banksters open for business tomorrow? He said he couldn’t comment on the subject…but I could tell he found the fantasy appealing.
But, bear this in mind, when considering the uncivil attitudes and unconstitutional actions of the NYPD regarding street protest such as the Occupy Wall Street activities ongoing in Lower Manhattan, in particular, and the lack of deference to the rights of the public, in general, displayed by police agencies, at both the local and federal level: Police forces, by and large, are bureaucratic organizations, comprised of authoritarian personalities who evince a topdown, militarized organizational structure. Most of the individuals therein harbor a hierarchical concept regarding the exercise of power and possess an unquestioning fealty to the maintenance of order.
Therefore, the police will serve as a defacto private security force for the corporate oligarchs and Wall Street elite, as well as the structure of the National Security State. Accordingly, the safeguarding of individual rights and providing security for those groups and individuals bereft of power means little to them. Even if an individual officer harbors sympathy for those who dissent, his mission is not to protect the powerless; conversely, the mission of police organizations is to maintain the status quo; and the status quo of the present order translates into vast wealth inequity created by an entrenched system in place to protect the powerful (in this case Wall Street Banksters) from the consequences of their criminal activities.
(Apropos, the 4.6 million dollars with which J.P. Morgan Chase, last week, greased the palm of the NYPD.)
Thus Freedom will be pepper sprayed and thrown face first upon the pavement, while Wall Street Banksters’ Gulf Stream Jets lift off from the ground and slice the clear, thin air.
There is a sign in Liberty Plaza proclaiming, “occupy everything” and its sentiment arrives at the essence of the situation. Yes, occupy everything, starting with your own heart. Otherwise, it will be commandeered by the forces of the church, the state, the corporation, the bully on your block, the passive-aggressive friend who is “just here to help”, even the demands of your own egoist agendas that bore to indifference the heart of the world and soul of the age. If you don’t recognize your humanity, who will? Who is more qualified to occupy your life than you? Who is closer to the situation? Who else is qualified to arrive at an original take of the question at hand?
And you might find the place to make a stand in the struggle to retake your essential self is in public space, among throngs of others engaged in likeminded struggle…among others who have heeded a similar call and thus have arrived in those equally troubled locations — the U.S. public arena and the American heart.
Occupy your own heart; the soul of the world longs for your companionship.
“The question is not what am I doing in here, but what are you doing out there?”
- Henry David Thoreau
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
Why is it that self-termed progressives are in full retreat (and have been for decades) from the witless army of angry clowns and hack illusionists of the U.S. rightwing?
One contributing factor involves the sterile cultivation of the persona of the “reasonable liberal,” a type favored and rewarded by the status quo-protective power brokers of the Democratic Party and by corporate media organizations that find useful his trait of rendering himself feckless (e.g., the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) by the passion-annihilating (but self-serving) device of his preening amiability?
But in so doing, the self-gelded liberal has sacrificed libido and discarded sacred vehemence for careerist privilege. Worse, the rest of us are advised to follow suit…that, in order to gain credibility, one must slouch towards center-hugging irrelevance.
We are counseled that in order to navigate this age of corporate dominance that one’s irascible apprehensions and unruly aspirations must be suppressed, for such passions are deemed too radical for mainstream sensibilities, and are therefore regarded as impractical as they are untoward by the crackpot realists of the corporate bottom line whose dictates dominate the political discourse and economic arrangements of our time.
“Prune down [a human being’s] extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”
–William James
Yet these self-termed “realists,” by means of their ad hoc machinations and hidden-in-plain-sight schemes, are responsible for the creation, promotion and maintenance of a financial system (and its attendant economic, political and ecological consequences) that is as sound as the flight plan of Icarus.
When a nation displays this degree of a noxious mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, an age of peace and plenty becomes as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami.
Yet facing folly is difficult. Stunned by the implications of one’s mistakes and misapprehensions, initially, one will reel in the direction of a familiar road–or be seized by an impulse to retreat from the casuistry-sundering fury of the larger world. Yet, as Thomas Paine averred, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” And as Albert Camus counseled, “Freedom is the right not to lie.”
With this in mind, shall we blunder off-road into the landscape of unquestioned narratives?
For example, the following is a topic, when broached, that rarely fails to incur the manipulative rage of the perpetually adrenaline intoxicated right and causes liberals to drop to their knees in penance for sins never committed: The questioning of this culture’s reverential, unflagging “support of our troops” blunderbuss and attendant comic book hero-level palaver, such as, “all good Americans stand firm in our support of our troops and our war against the forces of international terrorism.”
A bit of personal perspective as to why I demur: Forty-eight years ago, this month, four young girls were murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Ala. At the time of the tragedy, I was a child living in Birmingham. I remember the event to this day. My father, freelancing as a photojournalist at the time, arrived on the scene not long after the blast. I remember him coming home shaken and pale. The event is seared into my memory…how the blind hatred of the vicious can erupt into daily life and inflict irreparable harm and abiding sorrow.
Accordingly, this is why I can not abide U.S. wars of imperium e.g., its Shock and Awe bombing campaigns…the same modus operandi of those despicable, redneck bombers .
The dead of Iraq, Central Asia and Libya were no more responsible for committing acts of terrorism against the people of the U.S. than those little girls, readying for a choir performance in the basement of that church in Alabama, were guilty of any crime perpetrated against the “white race.”
Moreover, the attacks staged on 9/11/2001 did not “change everything.” The event merely sped up the trajectory of the national security state/military industrial complex towards the landfill of history.
For more than a century, whether the propagandists of U.S. Empire promulgate the subterfuge…of fighting “to make the world safe for democracy” or defending against “the evil empire,” or waging a “war on terror”–the objective remains, to secure resources for the U.S. homeland. And that is what we, the populace of empire, can “thank a veteran” for providing.
From the Blue Coats at Wounded Knee to the baby-faced tools of imperium at My Lai and Fallujah to the predator drones scouring Central Asia, the U.S. is the single largest perpetrator of terrorism worldwide. As all the while, guilty by their complicity citizens of the U.S. sit on their sofas, oblivious or unmoved by any event transpiring beyond their self-circumscribed field of reference. There should be a monument erected to the tragic legacy wrought by the acts of terrorism at “Ground Zero” — and it should be a statue representing a willfully ignorant fat-ass sitting on his couch, TV remote in hand, Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of his mouth.
Granted, Lower Manhattan took a tragic hit, a decade ago, and many people suffered as a result (I know I live a couple of neighborhoods upwind) but none worse than the people of Iraq and Central Asia. Somehow, I suspected (and was proven sadly correct) that their experiences would not be evoked, as part of the 9/11 hagiography foisted and verbal monuments cast to sacred victimhood, as part of the official ceremony commemorating the event.
Moreover, not long after 9/11, an attack was launched from Lower Manhattan that collapsed the global economy. I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about that.
By parroting the self-serving hagiography of 9/11/01, as well as, “I support the warrior, but not the war” type fallacies, liberals continue to play right into the sustaining narratives of the national security state.
Case in point, the empty, oft-heard, liberal pundit assertion, “My idea for a 9/11 tribute would involve bringing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan home, with proper benefits.” Nonsense. Worse than nonsense: Precious, cloying, self-congratulatory piffle. The statement is axiomatic of the feckless calls and specious cries common to that species of walking cliché known as “troop-supporting” liberals.
As far as I’m concerned, “our troops”—human delivery systems of U.S. government sanctified terrorism–can walk home…that way, maybe, they might learn something about the larger world, other than their mission to kill the people they happen upon without question, and then share with their fellow belligerently ignorant countrymen what they learned about life (its sacred quality) on their long, Odysseusian journey home.
Apropos, reasonable liberals counsel such declarations serve as “bad public relation” tactics. “Don’t you realize that you risk alienating Middle America? Remember, the reactionary fallout created by the radicalism of the 1960s?”
The fact is: The passionate questioning of the entire war effort in Southeast Asia, the role of soldiers included, helped to bring an end to the war and factored into the soldiers’ rebellion at the later stages of the protracted conflict. In increasing numbers, the conscripts began to refuse to kill and die for a dubious cause…they went hippie on the ass of the military state.
The activist left ended the war; self-serving liberals blew the peace.
The “bad PR” involving “spitting on the troops” was after the fact, rightwing confabulation…promulgated to intimidate liberals into shamed silence, and, of course, liberals being liberals, it worked. True to form, they “distanced” themselves from the “troop-demoralizing radicals of the irrational left.” In reality, they fled in fear from arrays of rightwing created strawmen.
PR itself is the dubious craft of professional lying–corporate era legerdemain. In fact, the craft is the opposite of the resonate truth carried by deepening poetry, poignant prose and challenging political speech–the near exclusive domain of the left in the 1960s.
You ask what makes me sigh, old friend
What makes me shudder so
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.
–William Bulter Yeats, except from Mad As The Mist And Snow
The inspired, enduring (very threatening to some) art, music and political action of the era were not the result of liberal accommodation and compromise. Antithetically, the cause of peace and justice (briefly) made some headway despite liberals not because of them.
As a famous literary drunk once quipped, “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.” Change will not come with a victim-centered view of the world…including viewing the nation’s toxically innocent, economic conscripts as mere victims of circumstance. Yes, young people make stupid choices–but treating them as victims does not serve them or the nation well.
“Liberal compassion” should not be extended to countenancing acts of mass murderer. Time and time again, liberals play into rightist propaganda, by allowing the discussion of U.S. militarism to be framed as exclusively pertaining to the sacrifices of individual soldiers, whose fates, in the larger context of events, have been appropriated a device of imperial plunder. By truckling to this narrative, liberals play into the propaganda of those who prosper by the homicidal designs of the present day U.S. military state.
Instead, let us endeavor to disabuse the culture of the delusion that there exists noble sacrifice in the act of killing and dying for the agendas of empire. When an individual U.S. soldier begins to stagger in the direction of his own humanity (renouncing his complicity in the death-sustained system, as many did during the Vietnam era) then we should open our arms and embrace him with a fierce compassion.
On a personal basis, my family had little money. And I made many self-destructive choices, but I also had tenacious mentors who challenged me…called me on my destructive nonsense…pointing out the bulwark of denial and hubris that sustained its shabby, ad hoc structure. Making a home in being lost, I took up residence in the enduring structure of poetry, literature and music…Whitman, Kerouac, Rilke, Dylan, the Allman Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and others too numerous to name taught me to question, as the expression went, “everything.”
This is not rocket science; this is far more important; this is the essential subject matter that informs the propulsion and guidance systems of the human heart. Withal, instruct the young how to build and inhabit the structure of a cogent argument and to navigate a soul-suffused landscape of poignant verse, lyric, and insight.
To do so, one must not shy away from confrontation. During the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War era, before the left was manipulated into fearing the libido borne of sacred vehemence, stupid opinions were not coddled; they were challenged.
Feelings were hurt. Egos were bruised. But an illegal war was shortened and a number of (long over due) rights were granted.
[…]Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
–Wendel Berry, excerpt from “Ripening”
At present, among the things we can ill afford are fantasy prone kids, duped into believing modern soldiering bestows nobility and involves heroic sacrifice. Instead, the times call for brave misfits, encouraged to embrace rejection by a dysfunctional society and primed to endure the inherent bumps and buffeting inflicted from a culture that has gathered into the formation of a flying wedge of self-destructive, crash-fated crazy.
Phil Rockstroh
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
As Hurricane Irene made her way up the Eastern Seaboard, my wife and I packed a few changes of clothes and trundled westward out of her path to spend the storm’s duration in Pittsburgh, PA.
The excursion did us some good, in particular, leaving insular Manhattan, and facing the faded, crumbling Industrial Age grandeur of Pittsburgh. Walking, once again, among the plaintive rasps of the ghosts of the devastated laboring class (the social setting of our youth) provided us with a humanizing contrast to our present day circumstances stranded amid the manic chattering of the preening demons of banal self-regard possessing Manhattan careerists.
Nowadays, the island of Manhattan is tediously bright and shiny — a sterile, oligarchic controlled dystopia. Accordingly, any sign of redemptive decay and hint of shabby ass human glory has been banished by official caveat and collective collusion.
In contrast, while in Pittsburgh, because I was born in a steel and coal town, Birmingham, Alabama, I shuffled among familiar shades. Deep in my being, I know the social setup — once manifested in forged steel, living flesh and human longing — now lost to the ravages of time (more accurately, the consequences of neo-liberal economic doctrine).
In Birmingham, under the statue of the Roman god of the forge, Vulcan, his mortared gaze lording over the city from atop Red Mountain, I witnessed men, hardened by years of grinding labor and demagogic political manipulation, sacrifice their bodies to (Pittsburgh plutocrat-owned) mines, foundries and smelting plants for subsistence pay.
In childhood, when I watched local men labor in the city’s metal foundries, their sweat-lacquered faces, reflecting the fiery glow of smelted steel, seemed to glisten with rage, as angry blue sparks showered the heat-seared air around them.
These were hard-drinking, short-tempered men who were calloused of hand and possessed of humiliation-hardened hearts…rendered so, by a life of the strenuous labor, mandated by an exploitive economic system that bequeathed to them little but a hard scrabble existence–and the promise of a future bearing more of the same.
Little wonder, they swore into the soot-choked air, brawled among themselves, and clutched (self-defeating but politically useful to the ruling elite) racial animus, as their vitality was harnessed to build the structure and infrastructure of the industrial state and increase the wealth, privilege and political power of steel and coal plutocrats up in Pittsburgh (the absentee owners of the area’s coal and iron mines, smelts, and processing plants) — but, in so doing, we locals further diminished the steerage of the course of our lives.
I learned early the girding lie that sustains the oligarchic state i.e., the illusory promise: Work hard and you will set yourself free. In fact, as was the rigged economic setup of the Birmingham of my youth, the harder one works within the inverted totalitarian structure of the corporate state, the more one increases the wealth, hence the political power of the ruling elite…by enabling the parasitic class to consolidate yet more power. Therefore, by working harder and longer for their benefit, one further diminishes one’s control over the trajectory of one’s fate.
(Caveat: This is not to be confused with hard work and diligent effort — a million acts of responsibility create freedom. The distinction being…be aware of who benefits from your efforts and mindfully choose where to apply your labors.)
At present, in cities such as Birmingham and Pittsburgh, the structures, built in the mechanized fury of the Industrial Age, stand idle…decaying around legions of the unemployed and the woefully underpaid and under-compensated. In the oxidized scream of rust, one can almost hear the wails of rage of those souls who surrendered their life force to erect and work the now abandoned factories, mills and foundries of the nation.
Outsourcing, downsizing, work speed-ups, i.e., the most recent mechanisms of capitalism’s death cult of dehumanizing efficiency goes all but unchallenged in the official narrative of the corporate state. By means of intimidation and the proffering of small bribes, the work force is induced to transmute their body’s vitality and soul’s pothos into the profits of an advantaged, ruthless few. In this way, one’s pothos (Greek: yearning plus libido) is rendered into the convenient pathos (alienation, paranoia, displaced rage, consumer addiction) of the corporate age.
Why do so many in the U.S. accept this pernicious, self-defeating setup? Perhaps, because they have been convinced by constant saturation by the commercial propaganda of the consumer state that capitalism will bestow to those who abide by its (rigged) rules and (gamed) economic arrangements everything one could possibly need and desire.
Accordingly, all an individual needs to know and experience is at his impulsive, electronic mass media-happy fingertips. He can click from virtual reality enactments of explicit porn to obscene interpretations of Christian prophecy (e.g., the present field of Republican presidential hopefuls) thus, in an instant, transmigrating from fake sin to phony salvation … What more, in the whole of boundless creation, could one possibly want?
Yet, where does a veritable (as opposed to virtual) sense of place exist in social and economic arrangements such as these?
The present era of weightless perception serves to obscure the crushing consequences of the short-sighted cupidity of both the economic elite and underclasses alike. Reflecting this, wealth now exists as constellations of electrons; money is no longer the vaulted riches of miserly plutocrats nor payday cash of the laboring class burning in the pockets of worn work clothes.
Currency exists in precincts of pixels–a fever dream of appliances–the effluvia of the schemes of the elitist illusionists of high finance whose machinations have wrought an age of electronic razzle-dazzle and devastating real world consequences…whereby the solid architecture and durable accoutrement of the Machine Age, manifested as the sturdy structures of Industrial Era cities, such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, has been transmuted into the manic, evanescent imagery of the mass media hologram.
In the years since Katrina, I’ve been known to rage at the indifferent sky, why the Hell (or, at least, its earthly exurb — Houston) did nature’s impersonal fury have to descend on New Orleans, about the last outposts within this corporate simulacrum of a country where an individual pulse and collective heart beat could be found — where the primordial songs of bone, heart and flesh — of the arias rising from steam-caressed sidewalks and the riffing currents of rivers — have not been forced into the Clear Channel/Disney/Time-Warner überculture blandification machine?
In order for the U.S. — a nation whose populace possesses the collective capacity for cognitive depth and emotional resonance of a Louisiana gnat flurry in high summer — to rise from its destructive swoon of insularity-engendered anomie, the embrace of a view of the world imbued by anima mundi, embodied in the living architecture of a city like New Orleans, is essential.
In New Orleans, interred corpses will not remain buried in the earth…the water sodden ground causes the dead to rise to the surface. Axiomatically, we must not deep-six our grief and rage. In the name of Katrina’s dead and walking wounded, we must not allow the casuistry-shattering verities of the human heart to be buried and forgotten nor allow mass media schlock to drown out the lamentations of the city’s restless dead from memory.
To honor her dead, displaced and deeply scarred, we must remember the mortifying sights and heart-shaking sounds of both the natural disaster that was Katrina and the official shit storm of human negligence, flat-out deceit and malevolence that rendered the Crescent City a corpse-choked drowning pool. Instead, we must gaze down into the dark water of memory, remembering the water-deluged streets of the city…awash with bloated bodies, raw sewage, industrial sludge and the floating debris and submerge detritus of peoples’ lives.
Yet, to properly mourn what was lost to the storm (in the tradition of the city itself) one must allow one’s grieving heart to be seduced by the soul of the world. Personally, as is the case with many who knew the city, pre-Katrina — beautiful, disloyal, capricious creature she was (and remains) — I retain a lover’s ardor for her.
For: Being enveloped by the redolence of orange blossom and jasmine, held on her humid, late afternoon air, as I sat, swigging a Turbo Dog, on the banks of the Mississippi, as evening tilted over the Lower Ninth. For: The exquisite indifference of starlight above the Bywater, and the manner those distant, celestial bodies would stand in stark contrast to the redemptive immediacy of the sweat-soaked bodies near me, as we would lie on our backs, upon the sidewalk, watching steam (borne of the mass of humanity within) rise from the roof of Vaughan’s Lounge…listening, as inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers wailed into the early morning hours.
I suspect my years in New Orleans saved/cursed me from being agenda-prone. I’m not of the reductionist school. I’m drawn to swamps…not so much the muck — but the mindfulness needed to negotiate the terrain. Of course, swamps will bog one down; yet, I’m drawn to the cacophony and filtered light, to its minute gradations of green upon green … One is forced to slow down in order to take in the revealed beauty and hidden dangers therein.
Moreover, the swamp exists for its own sake and feels no obligation to explain its mystery. It can be known, but its mystery is just that … ever growing, always dying.
One must not, and this is a habitual misstep of the contemporary left, approach politics, personality and place as a strictly intellectual exercise — as a thought experiment that will yield to logic. If the swamp of the human psyche were that simple to negotiate, then life would be a dry, blood-bereft trudge indeed.
And yet, how the world wounds us; at times, delivering an aching sorrow that one will always carry. But rejoice in your wounded condition…for the open wound harbors a mouth to kiss…a womb from which to be perennially reborn. As Octavio Paz testifies, “Love is a wound, an injury…Yes, love is a flower of blood.”
As far as the struggle to be included in the present political narrative, we, on the left, remain marginalized to the point of near invisibility. But don’t lose heart: The problem is the solution. Apropos, empire carries the seeds of its own demise. Therefore, in the shadow of the house of cards economy, now tottering over the ruins and detritus of the nation’s shuttered factories, foreclosed upon farms, and abandoned mills, one should go about the business of working on what will replace the hollow and decayed system when it collapses from within.
Accordingly, Rainer Maria Rilke averred (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you refuse the life your heart wants to live, you don’t get to read this letter before you die. An individual must risk the world, with all its attendant woundings, or he risks having a dead letter office piling up lost correspondence from his neglected heart.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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December 8, 2011
Unpopular wars drag on, gas prices erratically rise and inexplicably fall, as clouds of cynicism, dark as Richard Nixon’s perpetual five o’clock shadow, brood over the length of the U.S. At times, it seems as though Nixon’s 1970s never ended: Only Ronald Reagan’s/Bill Clinton’s/Barack Obama’s Quaalude-laced, faux populist snake oil caused the nation collectively to slip into a soporific sleep — and now, with the effects of the drug wearing off, we begin to awaken…hung over, groggy, queasy…still in the midst of that ugly and odious era.
At least, that’s the encrypted message I’ve deciphered using my Super-Secret, Zeitgeist Decoder Mood (disorder) Ring, special limited, Michele Bachmann edition. [ "Everybody has far too much Nixon in them." ] Mojo Nixon (no blood relation, I suspect) sang, “Everybody has a little Elvis in them.” Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: “Everybody has far too much Nixon in them.”
Thus far, in this dismal century of the nation’s history, both men who have occupied the office of the U.S. presidency, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, are as much products of the 1970s as were Naugahyde pit group sofas and outbreaks of the Herpes Simplex Retrovirus at Plato’s Retreat. From a historical perspective, future generations will regard the Bush Administration and its Democratic Party doppelganger as the Dacron Polyester of American presidencies: Bush’s legacy will carry all the beauty, style, and enduring appeal of a powder blue Leisure Suit — and Obama will be remembered as the Pet Rock of the U.S. oligarchic class.
Accordingly, if there is a presiding spirit possessing our age, it is the gray ghost of Richard Nixon who sat, stoop shouldered and scheming, in the Oval Office, in the early 1970s, as the U.S. began hitting the limits of its imperial might and economic power, and who set the tone of duplicity and denial that define daily life in the nation to this day.
During the Watergate Era, Karl Rove and other ruthless sleight-of-hand artists of the politics of demagogic distraction and displacement grasped this fact, so troubling in its implications that it was banished from the official narrative: Nixon was not driven in disgrace from office because the people of the U.S. were troubled by having a sick, corrupt bastard as their president; in truth, most simply found the situation embarrassing…to have the curtains of the living quarters of the White House pulled open, thus allowing the world to witness the dismal spectacle of Nixon…pacing the floors, draped in a dingy bathrobe, muttering whisky-fueled expletives at the yellowing wallpaper.
“Now, Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” — excerpt, Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Moreover, Rove perceived that Nixon’s paranoia, rage, envy, and resentment merely mirrored those of the white, U.S. middle and laboring classes. Nixon knew from the depths of his black spleen to the tips of his twitching nerve endings the hidden in plain sight, ugly side of the American character and how the pathologies therein could be exploited for political gain.
Nixon’s legacy remains our lode star because most of the U.S. populace accepted the false narrative that Watergate and Vietnam were aberrations, and that, by Nixon’s resignation from office in August of 1974, the country’s psyche had been purged of the demons…conjured and given sustenance by U.S. global-wide imperium and that still abide within the collective psyche of the nation — an unseen, insidious presence to this day.
Ergo, even after Nixon was exiled to San Clemente, and the nation’s citizenry was induced to take up the mantra, “the system worked…time to move on…Our long national nightmare is over” — Americans remained uneasy, clinging to the casuistry that we were mere bystanders when the crimes were committed — and, as a consequence, we transformed ourselves into willfully ignorant marks for political flimflammers (embodied by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama et al) whose comfortable lies exalt the inviolable grace of our collective cluelessness.
Otherwise, we would have been forced to face our individual complicity in Nixon’s crimes; otherwise, a million Vietnamese corpses would have risen accusingly in our dreams — as tens of thousands of Iraqi and Central Asian dead would haunt our sleep tonight.
At present, Democratic Party apologist for U.S. military imperium seem to have little inclination to lament the deaths of the children of Central Asia, whose bodies have been ripped asunder by attacks by U.S. predator drones, because (Could they possibly believe?) their lives were violently torn from this world by the policies of a Nobel Peace Prize winner — not Bush nor Cheney nor any (admitted) neocon.
In the compartmentalized confines of their casuistry, how is it possible that Obama’s liberal supporters actually believe that the souls of these children are now at peace only because they had not befallen the misfortune of having been slaughtered, by say, the caprice of a President Perry or Bachmann?
The demonstrable madness of the Republican party’s presidential hopefuls serve as living emblems of the forces of negative entropy riddling the empire. Accordingly, Michele Bachmann embodies its urge towards outright self-destructive mania. In contrast, Barack Obama’s style is axiomatic of the effects of its all-encompassing, reality-denying PR apparatus i.e., reality viewed as a mere marketing problem.
Moreover, as the tattered veracities of U.S. exceptionalism continue to be buffeted by the realities of the wider, indomitable world, political types, such as Obama and Bachmann, both scions of the nation’s dismal and deranged political class — risen from the political landscape since the 1970s — will embody the cognitive dissidence inherent to declining empire.
The larger the specter of decline looms, the more desperate the political and economic elite have become…contriving to consolidate even more outrageous amounts of wealth and power, hence further circumscribing the already severely diminished societal milieu of the less privileged classes of the nation.
Such desperate circumstances can bring peril: The rights and liberties of a nation’s people can be forsaken, like good music and a sense of fashion in a 70′s era disco, when a group of fanatical outsiders (for example, rank and file teabagger types) forge ad hoc alliances, based on political and economic expediency, with a corrupt business and political, ruling elite.
“I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind/ I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes/ don’t look into mine.”
–Bob Dylan, excerpt, Idiot Wind
In my own experience, I first began to take note of the acceptance of authoritarian impulses in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s. I noticed my peers (teenagers born during the peak years of the Baby Boom) were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as our beleaguered authoritarian elders had feared. Instead, we were the free floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic e.g., unlike our predecessors in the 1960s, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion; rather, they were appropriated as apolitical agents of anesthetization.
Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions, our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) — our surface-level rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking exterior, the metastasizing of an insidious indifference — to a large measure a radical renunciation — of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones.
Our mode of being, even then, revealed our obsession with comfort, the devices of escapism and an avidity for insularity — our right to the pursuit of numbness. We were fledgling Weimar Republicans, clad in faded, frayed bell-bottom jeans…primed to surrender freedom to the corporate/national security state for the illusion of safety and control.
All along, beneath the pot reek, redolent on polyester fabric…the Muscle Car rumble…Quaalude spittle…the tribally-administered, prototypical serotonin/dopamine/ norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (perhaps precursors of the Huxleyesque pharmaceutical authoritarianism to come) we baby boomers were scions of the Cold War military/industrial/consumer empire’s death-sustained dynamo.
The empire is as noisy, distracting and meaningless as a vintage, 1970s pinball machine — as self-aware as a baby boomer, suburban pothead teenager who, as the years have passed, transformed into a self-absorbed, Starbuck’s-slurping, SSRI-popping consumer zombie, possessed of mindless appetite, begot by deep, inner desolation who has spent his existence devouring the resources of the entire planet in the manner he devoured food from his mother’s pantry while possessed of a bad case of reefer munchies in the 1970s.
As the decades have passed, an internalize mall and mcmansion — an architecture of instant gratification and compulsive insularity — has supplanted primordial forests of collective imagination; hence, our roots no longer reach deep into the dark, renewing loam of ancestral intelligence; our branches no longer lift towards the sky of possibility. We feel devoid of nourishment and hope, because the internalized empire has clear cut it all, reducing sequoia forests to toothpicks in order to pick the bits of charred flesh of those slaughtered in our wars of imperium from its rotting teeth.
Consequently, if our corrupt political parties did not exist, we would need to invent them, for they are emblems in the flesh of the true face of U.S. empire…What rises from the toxic soil of the inverted totalitarian powers of the corporate/military state.
Yet, more than likely, the readers of this essay are as mortified, heartsick, and enraged by the actions of the U.S. government and the corporate overlords who own and operate it, as is this writer. Nevertheless, we carry U.S. imperium within us as deeply as we hold the imprint of our parents’ faces. The empire is too pervasive and invasive to avoid our being carriers of its proliferate pathologies; this system weaned us and socialized us, and, even when we rebel against it, our actions are generally restricted within limits set by it.
Otherwise, the consequences would be too crushing for most of us to endure: financial ruin, destitution, homelessness.
Accordingly, here’s a plot spoiler regarding the stagecraft of the next presidential election cycle. Republicans — Bachmann, Perry et al will play their roles as scary, scary psychos — escapees from the Right Wing Christian Madhouse For Social Program Ax Murderers — as Obama will play the calm, reasonable, deliberate authority figure who, after the crazies are dispatched, will calmly and deliberately slash to bits Social Security and Medicare — and then feed the remains to the economy-devouring cannibals on Wall Street.
Mojo Nixon (no blood relation, I suspect) sang, “Everybody has a little Elvis in them.” Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: “Everybody has far too much Nixon in them.” Internally (even those born long after the 1970′s) in larger and smaller degrees, carry Nixon’s dismal legacy.
Apropos, proceed to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and repeat the risible (as well as demonstrably false) phrase, “I am not a crook”– then, at long last, face the Richard Milhouse Nixon within, and thus come face to face with the cause of why, collectively, we in the U.S. seem perpetually in the thrall of the corrupt political forces and degraded social criteria that have gripped and grappled us since Nixon slunk from the scene in the summer of 1974.
Phil Rockstroh
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
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August 18, 2011
As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers…even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug.
According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders.
Regardless of the propaganda of “free market” fantasists, the great unspeakable in regard to capitalism is its wealth, by and large, is generated for a ruthless, privileged few by the creation of bubbles, and, when those bubbles burst, the resultant economic catastrophe inflicts a vastly disproportionate amount of harm upon those — the laboring and middle classes — who generate grossly inequitable amounts of capital for the elitist of the fraudster class…by having the life force drained from them by the vampiric set-up of the gamed system.
Woody Guthrie summed up the situation in these two (unfortunately) ageless stanzas:
“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a sixgun,
And some with a fountain pen.
“And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”
–excerpt from Pretty Boy Floyd.
Although, at present, U.S. bank vaults contain little tangible loot for a Pretty Boy Floyd-type outlaw to boost. How would it be possible for an old school bank robber such as Floyd to make-off with a haul of funneling electrons?
Here’s the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That’s the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake.
Consequently, in the U.K. (and beyond): When poor people’s hopes dry up, cities become a tinderbox of dead dreams, and we should not be stricken with shock and consternation when these degraded places are set aflame, nor should we be surprised when the bribed, debt-beholden and commercial media propaganda-bamboozled middle class (who helped create the wasteland with their arid complicity) cry out (predictably) for police state tactics to quell the fiery insurrection.
There have been incidents in which a fire has smoldered for years in an abandoned, sealed-off mineshaft, and then the fire, traveling through the tunnels of the mine, and up the roots of dead, dried trees have caused a dying forest to bloom into flames. The rage that sparks a riot can proceed in a similar manner — and the insular, sealed-off nature of a nation’s elite and the willful ignorance of its middle class will only make the explosion of pent-up rage more powerful when it reaches the surface.
We exist in a culture that, day after day, inundates its have-nots with consumerist propaganda, and then, when the social order breaks down, its wealthy and bourgeoisie alike express outrage when the poor steal consumer goods — as opposed to going out and looting an education and a good job.
Under Disaster Capitalism, the underclass have had economic violence inflicted upon them since birth, yet the corporate state mass media doesn’t seem to notice the situation, until young men burn down the night. Then media elitists wax indignant, carrying on as if these desperate acts are devoid of cultural context.
A mindset has been instilled in these young men and boys that they are nothing sans the accoutrements of consumerism. Yet when they loot an i-Phone, as opposed to creating economy-shredding derivative scams, we’re prompted by the corporate media to become indignant.
When the slow motion, elitist-manipulated mob action known as our faux democratic/consumerist culture deprives people of their basic human rights and personal dignity — then, in turn, we should not be shocked when a mob of the underclass fails to bestow those virtues upon others.
The commercial mass media’s narrative of narrowed context (emotional, anecdotal and unreflective in nature) serves as a form of corporate state propaganda, promulgated to ensure the general population continues to rage against the symptoms rather than the disease of neoliberalism. The false framing of opposing opinions — of those who state the deprivations of neoliberalism factor into the causes of uprisings, insurrections and riots as being apologists for violence and destruction is as preposterous as claiming one is an apologist for dry rot when he points out structural damage to a house due to a leaking roof.
Because of the elements of inverted totalitarianism, inherent within the structure of corporate state capitalism, and internalized within the general population by constant, commercial media re-enforcement, one should not be surprised when a sizable portion of the general populace is inclined to support police state tactics to quell social unrest among the disadvantaged of the population.
Keep in mind: When watching the BBC or the corporate media, one is receiving a limited narrative (tacitly) approved by the global power elite, created by informal arrangements among a careerist cartel comprised of business, governmental and media personality types who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, in doing so, they serve as operatives of a burgeoning police state.
Accordingly, you can’t debate fascist thinking with reason nor empathetic imagination e.g., the self-righteous (and self-serving) pronouncements of mass media representatives nor the attendant outrage of the denizens of the corporate state in their audience — their umbrage engineered by the emotionally laden images with which they have been relentlessly pummeled and plied — because their responses will be borne of (conveniently) lazy generalizations, given impetus by fear-based animus.
Through it all, veiled by disorienting media distractions and political legerdemain, we find ourselves buffeted and bound by the predicament of paradigm lost…that constitutes the onset of the unraveling of the present order.
“The kings of the world are growing old,
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from The Kings of the World”
Yet, while there is proliferate evidence that, even as people worldwide are rising up against inequity and exploitation, the economic elite have little inclination to do so much as glimpse the plight of those from whose life blood their immense riches have been wrung, nor hear the admonition of the downtrodden…that they are weary of life on their knees and are awakening to the reality that the con of freedom of choice under corporate state oligarchy is, in fact, a life shackled to the consumerism-addicted/debt-indenturement that comprises the structure of the neoliberal, global company store.
“The rotten masks that divide one man
From another, one man from himself
They crumble
For one enormous moment and we glimpse
The unity that we lost, the desolation
…Of being man, and all its glories
Sharing bread and sun and death
The forgotten astonishment of being alive”
–Octavio Paz, excerpt from “Sunstone”
Accordingly, the most profound act of selfless devotion (commonly called love) in relationship to a society gripped by a sociopathic mode of being is creative resistance. Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard; mouth, full of ashes; heart, a receptacle for dust.
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August 12, 2011
At present, most of us negotiate our days so distracted, disillusioned, dazed, buffeted, bought or marginalized by the corporate state/ mass media hologram — the multi-headed, awareness-addling Hydra that guards contemporary precincts of perception (apropos, the “debate” involving the so-called debt ceiling “crisis”) — it is difficult to apprehend what we are up against i.e., the forces of consolidated and calcified power that degrade almost every aspect of life in the nation.
In contrast, throughout this past year, popular uprisings of varying scope and degree of success have been unfolding worldwide. And the genie is not going back in the neoliberal bottle. The global power elite might not like it, but (unlike the general population of the U.S., whose view of life has been conditioned by the inundating, thus internalized, narcissism proffered by media age hyper-commercialism, and who have come to exist as self-involved consumer state dystopias of one) — large numbers of the people of the world are declaring to their overlords: We’ve had enough of the world you’ve created…time to make it our own.
With this in mind, let us take a moment to pity our own poor, little, economic despots…from the start, so misunderstood…they only built the U.S. on the bones of African slaves and watered the soil with the blood of murdered Indians, and, from that time on, proceeded to pile corpses to the sky, only so they could climb atop and look out for us lesser folks.
And from the soil rose a culture of kitsch, unhealthy food, and creepy, over-priced banal distractions. Consequently, the U.S. seems an over-priced, downscale theme Park — Six Flags over Denial and Decay — a grotesque, kitsch-bewitched land of negative enchantment…unprepared for the gathering, denial-sundering storm that, from all indications, will leave the nation devastated.
What are the forces and factors that have wrought this circumstance?
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July 29, 2011
As of late, Pat Robertson has been waxing apocalyptic regarding mankind’s imminent reckoning with wrathful divinity, while liberals have been sharing scary bedtime stories by the ghostly light of computer screens…telling sleep-banishing tales of Michele (“Crazy Eyes”) Bachmann, now stalking primary states, assailing common sense and chewing the scenery of sanity during appearances on the twenty-four/seven Creature Feature Theatre, otherwise known as, Cable News programming.
Granted, the sense of unease displayed by right wing, fundamentalist Christians regarding the state of the nation is understandable; although, their attribution as to the origin and cause of the destructive drift of U.S. culture is so far off the mark they would fail to get wet if they fell into a baptismal pool the size of Lake Michigan.
Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson et al, these late empire zealots of shopping mall, militarism, and heterosexual hegemony, harbor a comic, yet mortifying vision of the conditions they believe would bring rebirth and renewal to the nation. Believing, it seems, all that is good and decent can be salvaged, if only the U.S. would be transformed into an earthly analog of their fantasy of an immaculately scrubbed and deodorized, caucasoid heaven (which, of course, to all others, seems a nightmare world where W.A.S.P. faces are permanently affixed on the whole of multi-visaged humanity — a death mask made of white bread) — a creepy, blood-bereft, restricted country club Hyperborea, sustained by holy militarism, where well-turned out, obedient children of the lord await the Second Coming — a cartoon universe deus ex machina — vis-á-vis the arrival of their version of Jesus Christ — who seems to resemble a cross between a muscle-blessed, Hollywood super hero and an eternally vigilant, sin-scouring Tidy Bowl Man.
Invoking an impassioned narrative of blood, thunder and descending, supernatural balm, fundamentalism is an attempt, albeit desperate and misguided, to mitigate the uncertainty and angst incurred by the poetry-decimating literalism of the industrial/consumer age.
This system of belief, internalized in the psyches of the populace of the U.S., falls into the Calvinist/Puritan tradition and therefore carries a nostalgic longing for the imagined innocence of lost paradise, regards imperfection as sin and the imagination as suspect, and believes that a vengeful, omniscient God banished humanity from paradise because of our serpent-gifted lust for life and longing for knowledge.
These lost souls of wanting credulity and noxious certitude believe their shame is their ticket back to paradise…If only they could just hate themselves (and the world enough) — then they will be made perfect in the perfect love of The Lord. They are, of course, insane.
Accordingly, what events and circumstances are responsible for this free-floating psychotic episode extant as the belief system of contemporary, fundamentalist Christianity?
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July 29, 2011
Late last month, poet, musician, and self-termed “bluesologist,” Gil Scott-Heron exited the hologram and returned to the source…to begin chanting, eternity will not be televised.
In an earlier era, Stephen Spender feted the following tribute to those who fell resisting Francisco Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. His lines of verse serve as an apt epitaph to all those souls who devoted their art and labor to the ceaseless struggle against the perennially risen, death-besotted forces of coercive power: “The names of those who in their lives fought for life,/Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center./Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,/And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”
At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman’s undergarments and the concomitant, predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.
By finger wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.
To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals…true, but only their own problems.
How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that “the issue of character” should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.
Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy. Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such propitious misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.
A more profound “character issue” here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular — their greed for ratings. And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories — their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry — but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence?
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May 27, 2011
“Human language is like a cracked kettle drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.” –Gustave Flaubert
Descartes, I’ve heard tale: On the night before you published your treatise, Rules For The Direction Of The Mind, you dreamed: Walking a city street, you found yourself leaning so far to the right, that, as you proceeded along the sidewalk, your head and body were positioned almost parallel to the ground…er…excuse me, but can we talk about this, René?
Shortly thereafter, you insisted that: Dreams were as dead as dust — and proclaimed animals are machines, neither worthy of names nor worth consideration, other than for commodification.
Instead, can we collaborate on a dream in which we create a legacy in lasting air so that we might chronicle the world before us…its ceaseless proliferation and its ceaseless culling — its ever-present laugh of triumph and elegy without end?
Amid this: René, we are, like you, so baffled by who we are in relationship to the world, it is difficult to meet life head on…verities buffeted, we are blown, this way, then that…upended, directionless in a landscape of veritable regret and fleeting revelry…regardless, we trudge on.
Did wielding the cutlery of glinting certitude banish trepidation, as you cut down opaque existence and evanescent identity to manageable bits?
Yet ensnared in the algorithms of the machine mind, days are denuded…night is banished.
The bee-loud grasses have been rendered mute as the buzz of Predator Drones rises.
Dualist mind, enchanted by your mastery of things you deem dead, you have bred seething clouds of black flies infesting Cartesian slaughterhouse holding pens and bequeathed to us dying oceans and endless wars waged from vast distances by bloodless technocrats within cubicles.
Because you averred that the only way to know ourselves is to mince the living and the dead into tiny bits, I was trained to rip myself asunder and serve my lifeless heart to my betters.
You — frenzied maenads turned wine-to-blood, reductionist clinicians — that is my head in your hands — worse, that is the dream body of the world you have torn to tatters.
Yet the ashes of your charnel house aspirations hang in air like musical notes…and, like all night music, will dissolve into earth at dawn.
Thus you and I must keep reminding ourselves to weep for the things of this world that suffer; otherwise, we mistake the earth’s impersonal dreaming for our own.
Adjust your body back to the left, René, face forward, meet the world’s gaze at eye level, and more might be revealed.
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May 24, 2011
There is a block long hole in the earth on the east side of 1st Avenue at the upper 40s running parallel to the FDR and the East River…a much delayed or (hopefully) abandoned, bubble-era, real estate swindle, I suppose.
Among the broken earth and detritus, sea birds rest and roost. Among them: Seagulls.
Gulls, perhaps, are better suited for the times than we…foraging upon the scraps of empire’s end…with their powerful stomach acids, their stalwart bodies breakdown the hideous fare that has transformed us into a gallery of bloated grotesques.
Our tough brethren at empire’s end — they are fearless and cunning birds: I once witnessed one steal a french fry straight from the hand of a distracted beach goer.
Gulls make a mockery of our empty appetites and endless entitlement — and drop it back upon us…pelting us from above with their liquid, avian shiftings.
I should tell my friend, afflicted with “treatment resistant depression,” of what I have witnessed there on 1st Avenue.
If I possessed the powers of an aboriginal shaman, I would sent him a winged bouquet of seagulls to lift his spirits.
They would inform him of his true condition…share their strong stomach acid insights with him…to help him digest the landfill cuisine of empire’s end.
And impart to him that his suffering is not misplaced; it is only his interpretation of his auguries that is off-the-mark. His perception is accurate: He has only mistaken the tragic story of the times for his own tale.
Clip of a cunning gull making a mockery of the corporate state:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7577577.stm
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May 24, 2011
“Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial: we want to re-establish things as they used to be, to put the country back where it was.” — James Hillman
Most of the men I grew up with in Alabama and Georgia deny the veracity of climate change. They are unwilling to make the connection between their ownership (actually the bank’s) of SUVs and oversized pickup trucks and the super storms and massive floods that, now with alarming regularity, ravage the region.
Because their besieged sense of self is intermeshed with their motor vehicles, they hold fast to these symbols of the fading world they know. In their imaginings, these gruesome, noxious (and obnoxious) machines represent power and mobility — exactly the aspects of their lives that have been diminished by the demands and degradations of oligarchic capitalism.
By their self-imprisonment in these sorts of compensatory fantasies, they choose to risk their children’s future, rather than, as one victim of his own curdling testosterone expressed to me recently on FaceBook, ” and drive a 4-wheel vagina, algore-mobile.”
A deep-rooted, malignant anger regarding their diminished sense of manhood seethes at the core of pronouncements such as that, and the following, shared on my FaceBook scroll, this past Earth Day: “Happy Earhart day!!! How did you celebrate? I clubbed an adorable baby harp seal, dumped a barrel of waste oil down the storm drain, and started a giant tire fire!!! Good times….”
The sentiment expressed above is an imprecatory prayer, borne of uneasy submission i.e., the callow voice of deep denial, a manifestation of a culturally re-enforced, self-protective cynicism — a reflexive negation of novel ideas that masks a besieged psyche; it is the nihilistic rage appropriated by the powerless serving as a bulwark against the anxiety created by shifting circumstances and buffeted verities.
In the U.S., life keeps changing for the working class — and not for the better. Hence, an inner voice of doubt and despair falsely informs these men that the agents and effects of change will be of no help to them personally…that no one (especially smug, know-it-all liberals) can be of service to you, and, worse, what little you have amassed will be lost.
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May 17, 2011
Osama bin Laden is dead. And so is the U.S. republic. We had to destroy our freedoms in order to save them. What is left to save from the next rampaging dragon when the knights, sworn to kill the monster, destroy everything in their path in the pursuit of him? One killer is dead. Now what are we going to do with all the killers in our midst who killed him.
Since 9/11/2001, due to the lust for revenge of the people of the U.S., hundreds of thousands of innocent Islamic people are dead. These human beings were killed in our name. Be very careful when you proclaim: “I’m glad ‘we’ got bin Laden. He deserved it.” Be very grateful most of us don’t get what we deserve.
To appropriate a classical understanding of the situation: Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, dramatized that civilization begins when (in fact, civilization is not even possible until) retribution yields to justice i.e., The Furies, goddesses adorned with serpent-seething headdresses and an abiding passion for retribution, must be transformed into the Eumenides (the kindly ones). They must cease their seeking of revenge (which engenders endless revenge cycles, inflicting a trauma-wrought callowness on the people of a culture) and become the enemies of those who bear false witness and stand against the democratic process.
In contrast, in the U.S., a state policy of genocide against its native inhabitants determined the geographical dimensions of the nation itself, and, in many ways, determined the inner dimensions of its collective mindscape, which created and maintains the death cult calculus of U.S. militarist imperium. (The U.S. military still envisages its enemies as “Red Indian savages.” Witness: Osama bin Laden having been given the moniker, “Geronimo.”)
Hence the isolated, alienated U.S. populace (its males in particular) clutch, to the point of fetishizing, their guns, because they feel powerless before the depravations of an exploitive system rigged to benefit a small class of privileged insiders. Much damage is done by this compensatory fantasy: Vulnerable children and teens are bullied by their troubled peers to the point of clinical depression and suicide; in domestic situations, crimes of passion take deadly turns; and episodes of mass shootings erupt across the landscape of exploitation, alienation and anomie.
The collective mode of mind of the corporate consumer/militarist empire leaves both the hoi polloi and the privileged unable to even approach the problem of their alienation…thick walls of self-protection must be breached…In the U.S., individuals have become so withdrawn into themselves, it seems as if Home Depot outlets sell ready-to-assemble, prefab bubbles of self-enclosure, with optional mounted gun turrets.
How is it possible for troubled individuals to live in a culture in which the response of their government (mirrored in its movies, television programs, and video games) to almost every problem abroad involves military force and imperialist coercion — and not have these death-leveling policies leave their mark on the psyches of the populace?
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May 16, 2011
Like postmodernist architecture, in which the aesthetic criteria of a structure’s exterior often possesses little correlation to its interior function, media age journalistic and political style exhibits a similar disparity between facade and content: The political content aired by mass media institutions and the cant of the governmental class are the political equivalent of the useless ornamental pediments, context-devoid cupolas, and empty atriums of postmodernist architecture.
It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has been responsible for having erected some of the gaudiest, emptiest, architecturally dishonest structures, blotting the landscape, east of the Atlantic Ocean, west of the sands of Dubai.
Citizen Trump is a human analog of these characteristics: a man possessed of an extroverted, confident public persona that serves as cover for an interior emptiness. In fact, he is possessed of an unswerving self-regard (as extreme as it is inexplicable) that seems a form of derangement.
From Sarah Palin to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, these personality types, minted and forged within the aggressive superficiality of the current era, are going to be as good as it gets. These are the varieties of ciphers, confidence artists and quislings who will front the present day corporate order of Botox Politics, the quintessence of an era that has conjoined the shallow and the grotesque in a marriage made in the witless limbo of the media hologram.
Born into wealth and privilege, Trump — this cross-hatched haired, reality television popinjay – is marketed as a man of the multitudes. Perhaps, he is: On one dismal level, he is the very emblem of the callow, infantilized, highchair tyrants spawned by the Viagra Capitalism of late U.S. empire.
Strange and amusing, in a grimly ironic way, unlike Trump, it is the political left, bereft of power in the structure of corporate oligarchy, who stands accused of being out of touch elitists. In a political culture as far down the rabbit hole as the one that exists, in the U.S., the surest way to be branded an elitist is to refuse to serve the elite.
All who are reading this article are, therefore, excused if the Bilderberg Group calls while you’re in mid perusal of it…Rather, on second thought…let them wait; they’ll just want you all the more for it.
President Obama, on the other hand, could never be accused of failing to serve his true constituents – the moneyed elite. Accordingly, insofar as coming to the aid of oppressed, suffering working people, he could be termed the anti-Tom “I’ll be there” Joad. He has not been present in body nor spirit for the less-than-privileged classes of the declining nation. Rather than serving contemporary versions of the downtrodden denizens depicted in The Grapes of Wrath — Obama has chosen to be of service to the high-flying connoisseurs of the fermented grapes of Château Mouton-Rothschild.
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April 14, 2011
The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of Mexico and Japan serve a dangerous addiction, an addiction to blind optimism, a habituation of mind that allows us to dwell within provisional comfort zones but renders vast spaces of the world into death realms.
After each catastrophe, there ensues a scramble to contain the damage leveled, as, concurrently, the apologists of the present system explain the anomalous nature of the event.
Yet, this much should be obvious: Attempting to clean up the mess, after it occurs, as oppose to altering the way of life that incurs the damage, is analogous to an addict believing a few days in detox will serve as a solution to his addiction.
In the same way drug dealers are reliant on an addict’s unwillingness to reflect on the carnage created in his life, as well as the havoc reaped in the lives of those near him, engendered by his addiction, the small group of hyper-wealthy elites who benefit from the current system rely on collective cognitive dissonance (or, as it has been termed, the fear of fear itself) to dissuade the public at large from peering deeply into the pernicious situation.
One of an addict’s biggest obstacles is his optimism i.e., he is convinced he can figure out somehow, someway to use his drug of choice in a less destructive way … and, by reflex, rebels against the deepening sorrow that he must change.
When large, powerful corporations create messes beyond their ability to control the damage wrought by their institutional cupidity, those in charge spare no expense aggressively confronting the problem … that is, of course, by means of public relations blitzes aimed at the general public, while tsunami-sized waves of campaign contributions flood the coffers of elected officials.
Apropos, a school of thought has developed in which framing the perception of a catastrophe supersedes all other considerations. An after-the-fact casuistry, possessed of crackpot optimism similar to the following, is affected: Dated technologies were at fault in that particular mishap, but, not to worry, in the near future, new innovations will safeguard against similar calamities.
Sure thing: The future will be bathed in the benign light of new technological wonders; our dread will be washed away by sparkling clean coal. Magical technological innovations will soon render nuclear power so safe that the only danger to the general public will be posed by the risk of being smothered by its profoundly huggable properties.
Such are the free market capitalist’s versions of End Time belief systems, a variation of the type of magical thinking that induces an individual to scan the empty sky, waiting for Jesus to float earthward and redeem the ceaseless folly perpetrated by mankind.
If we are willing to accept being lulled back into our comfort zones by such fantasies (that are as craven as they are preposterous), we might as well wait around for hazmat crews of leprechauns atop flying unicorns to arrive on the scene and clean up the messes that corporate capitalist greed-heads inflict on our increasingly besieged planet.
In a manner similar to how the indefatigable salesmen of the consumer state sell optimism, but, in reality, deliver anomie, the propagandist of the neo–liberal paradigm promise peace and prosperity — yet their shock troops, comprised of the political and media elite, instead level class warfare at home and perpetual war abroad that renders landscapes blighted and mindscapes shell-shocked.
Among their most pernicious contrivances has been to convince the passengers seated aboard the runaway train of the corporate state that the blur of landscape out the train’s windows is caused by their own poor vision and the impending crash will be due to their negative thoughts.
The implicit message imparted is: “If only you would have thought more optimistically and worked harder, you’d have been one of life’s winners and you would have been cruising above the impending carnage in your private jet. How sad for you, loser. And, by the way,” they lie, “did you know socialists are manning the controls of the doomed train?”
While these practitioners of the art of weasel word wizardry insist they sell hope, in reality, they sell shame.
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April 12, 2011
Are our convictions the traveling light of dead stars? Before me, a vase of weeping roses shakes the late evening air.
Translated: Their lamentation avers:
Live out your heart’s purpose. Don’t delay. Allow your fear-driven mind to yield to a compass of pothos. Your purpose is as evident as the night sky. There exists no counterfeit midnight.
This insurrection of roses opens like a wound for your heart’s yearnings. Fake roses may fake contentment; they do not weep because they cannot be wounded.
The moon doesn’t chant positive affirmations to the prey hunted by the merciless beauty of her light. Antidepressants will not convince the ocean to open its tomb.
If life is a horror to you, my friend– then you are close to the beating heart of the monster of the world.
The monster shows his most ferocious face the closer you move towards beauty, for he believes she is his and his alone.
Of course, you will insist she is yours. You are both mistaken. All three of you are the story. The tale both ends in tragedy and ends well.
When I was three, I was led by my parents through Terminus Station in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. As I toddled along, I gazed upon the polished floor of the terminal– dazzled– lost in a wilderness of glinting mica. But when we ascended the massive granite steps and arrived in the lobby of the train station, I beheld the eternal monster: a five foot-plus statue of Mr. Peanut. I cried out in mortal terror. Wordlessly imploring: What is this — an alien-insect God of Death?
This legume-shaped, spindly-armed, top-hat and monocle-bedecked shill for salted nuts seemed to me the emissary of a predatory race. The sight of this looming, plastic statue overwhelmed me with primal terror. I found myself thrust into the ancient landscape of instinctual intelligence. A larger order had been revealed. Like the sudden appearance of the shadow of a swooping hawk, glimpsed by a field mouse, I had no doubt of its tangible danger.
The perdition of aging has played out for me in a similar manner. This has become my church, within holding a flimsy, wooden alter where I offer my meager alms …This is the closest I can come to the ancient knowledge of the unbearable beauty of god.
I am inconsolable when I witness how predatory time has descended upon the dreams of my friends. Mr. Peanut’s hand can be seen in this.
The song of glinting mica attempts to bring me solace: It sings: It is not personal.
It sings: Fate is as indifferent to your torment as are the midnight stars. Light-years pass between heart beats.
The tale unfurls, as galaxies spiral, and I close the musty photo album and brush the cosmology of conviction from my eyes.
Yet the monster’s raging stirs the dust…the heart quickens. It is a privileged to stand so near what cannot be known.
It is enough to be a part of the mystery, and, from time to time, remain mindful enough to finesse a strand of narrative from the unfurling fury of all things.
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December 29, 2010
Traveling US interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression. Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon. Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all to often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.
“Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?” Rainer Maria Rilke
Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.
The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseum, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.
When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . a task now nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.
Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of psychic unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.
Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, “Private, why are you running?” The soldier replied, “General, I’m running ’cause I can’t fly.”
The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one’s rear.
Depression is what catches us.
I have been accused being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feeling: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity — or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.
The salesmen of the eternal, big happy … are just that — salesmen … One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart … The commercial come-ons insist that the heart’s grief and a lost soul’s emptiness and panic can be “fixed” by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, “hope and change.” By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of “Happiness “Uber Alles” what is, implicitly, imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated — even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude — all the specious homilies and vestments of the consumer state.
“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”–Carl Jung.
What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job — until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall … clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one’s jowls. Aint that the life — or what? We must preserve the deathstyles of empire.
This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature or the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage of civic life … Wherein, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.
Like interstate travel, the mode of mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase … But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
–Samuel Beckett
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December 21, 2010
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present. Among the scent of pine trees and the reek of southern denial. The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio. But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves?)
If these Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada. Don’t you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man’s war is a virtue; don’t buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth”
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