May 13, 2008
posted by Phil Rockstroh
Here in this crumbling empire once known as the American Republic, here in a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones, whose architecture is being winnowed down to thriving rural meth houses and foreclosed upon suburban mchouses, whose corrupt corporate culture has bequeathed upon our suffering planet dying oceans and the hyper-caffeinated tsunami of Red Bull Capitalism — the essential question confronts us — how does one retain (not retail) one’s humanity amid the catastrophic machinery and inane accouterment of our age?
“Show your wounds,” exhorted the late 20th Century artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.
Out of painful truth, beauty is born. But, antithetical to the orthodoxies of consumer capitalism, there are no shortcuts.
According to legend, Faust sold his soul for a glimpse of eternal beauty and the hidden knowledge of the world. Sadly, we’ve done likewise (but worse, pathetically) for a glimpse of Paris Hilton’s privileged (but hardly gated and guarded) cooter.
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October 2, 2007
posted by Phil Rockstroh
“We must become the change we want to see.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“In any case, I hate all Iranians.”
–Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary to Defense Secretary, Robert Gates
How many times do we, the people of the US, have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of propaganda and militarism before we shout — enough! — then shutdown the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate it out of town? It is imperative the nation’s citizens begin to apprehend the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited by a populace with such a slow learning curve.
Over the last three decades, the authoritarian right has risen to create the nation they have been longing for since their humbling by the Watergate scandal. After being subdued and humiliated by the mechanisms of a free republic, the right has turned the tables — and subdued and humiliated the republic. If the trend continues, all but unchallenged and unabated, we might as well replace the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty with a taser.
How could it come to this? How did so many US citizens grow so apathetic, oblivious, if not flat-out hostile to the tenets of a free republic?
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September 22, 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
One would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org’s ad in the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against the holy name of some revered saint – General Mary Petreus, Mother of God.
The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.
Concurrently, a sense of unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times, and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism. (In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)
In this way, liberal paternalism is insufferable; worse, it is dangerous. This has been the right’s craftiest accomplishment: inducing “reasonable” liberals and “sensible” centrists to enable their crimes, from stolen elections to their present preparation for a massive bombing campaign of Iran, by intimidating them with the fear that any protest on their part will cast them among the ranks of America-hating, lefty moonbats, who wish to see the terrorist win, dumpsters piled high with discarded fetuses and metro-sexuality made the official state religion.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published August 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Given the nation’s tottering infrastructure, imperial overreach abroad and vandalized constitutional process by a lawless executive branch, what will it take to scare the general public, mainstream press and political classes into immediate action to bring about meaningful change? At this twilight hour of the American republic, there must come a paradigm shift of seismic proportions or else the republic will perish. I’m less than optimistic. Insomuch as I suspect, that if, during a rare press conference, George W. Bush’s face were to suddenly shed its skin right on camera, live on national television, on all channels, broadcast and cable, to reveal the countenance of a Gila Monster — the elitist beltway punditry would begin to catalog the merits of his reptilian single-mindedness. Then they would proceed to an interview with an “expert” from a right-wing funded zoological think tank, “The American Institute for the Advancement of Predatory Policy,” which would assure us that: “…in an era when evil is as proliferate as flies around the stinking dumpster of the world, Americans will be kept safe by a lizard-faced leader who eats flies for breakfast.” And the general public would only be concerned because the broadcast happened to preempt the finals of American Idol.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published July 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush Administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night? Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published July 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
At present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq; rather, his standing has plummeted due to the fact that he didn’t deliver the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as “the mission” doesn’t drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.
How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?
I’m afraid it’s come to that: We are a people whose psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs and Teletubbies won’t rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)
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September 22, 2007
Originally published June 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality — disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated McMansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.
In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as McMansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly, although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published June 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public?
Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It’s the world’s way of delivering the life lesson that it’s time to shed the vanity of one’s innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here’s lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It’s that simple.
Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they’re entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they’re better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.
Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they’re better than you.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published June 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power.
Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.
Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published December 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.”
– Bob Dylan
It has been reported that George W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation’s people) have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating policy and law.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published December 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
The Holiday Season has arrived, unfolding before us like a cheap vinyl wallet here in The United States of American Express. The days spill forth, their hours comprised of shopping and shooting sprees, of retail and retaliation. Jingle bells and the crackle of gunfire. This is the way an empire falls, with armies of confused killers abroad and legions of killer clowns at home.
A decade and half ago, we watched smugly as The Kremlin came undone. Yet, somehow we believe ourselves to be immune from the rot that causes empires to collapse from within.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published November 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Recently, we’ve been plied and pummeled with the absurd proclamation that “the system worked” — that our congressional representatives listened and took note of the collective, antiwar fulmination of the people, registered in our faux republic’s latest, sham plebiscite. Yes, I suspect, the political classes of Washington did hear the people’s thunder — and then went running for cover within the comfort zones of their sheltering smugness, constructed of the brick and mortar of arrogant power and inequitable privilege. Just ask Joe Lieberman. He’s the self-satisfied fellow seated comfortably upon the large, plush lounge chair, stuffed with campaign dollars, nearest the door with access to K Street.
But we must not let ourselves — the true beneficiaries of empire — off so easily: Our national tragedies (from all the corpses amassed, buried and forgotten in our imperial wars to our intransigence and denial regarding Global Warming) are a collaborative effort with our leaders — a joint and living lie of the mind, made manifest by collective desire and remorseless pursuit.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published November 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
“I don’t want to be part of your revolution if I can’t dance.”
– Emma Goldman
Rumsfeld is gone. Mehlman is gone. Delay is gone. Yet let’s not have our progressives’ version of a strutting on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier moment. Because mission has not been accomplished.
For those who haven’t noticed, while we were busy with other concerns, many of our rights and liberties went missing. Moreover, along with them have gone or are going fast: our planet’s polar ice caps; accountability of the corporate sector (our nation’s true power brokers); as well as, a sense of place, history, and even a cursory understanding, among a large percent of the populace of the US, of the precepts of civilization and of democratic discourse.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published November 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“If voting could change the system, it would be illegal.”
–Theodore Adorno
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
–Samuel Beckett
One’s actions grow out of one’s beliefs. Beliefs grow out of the ecosystem of our collective lives known as culture. In this way, cultures are organic: they germinate, sprout, grow, bloom, bear fruit, then fade in accordance with the climes and terrain of the times.
America now grows: paranoid delusions and wishful thinking. These are our national plant and staple crop, respectively.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published October 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts”
– Reuters headline
“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist, or too benumbed to resonate with their content.
Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatist States of America have experienced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee’s retirement accounts . . . sans conscience above — sans conscience below.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published October 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Day-to-day life within an empire consists of the deceitful leading the disengaged. Although when the artifice shielding a nation’s populace from the ruthlessness of their leaders begins to fall away, hysteria and displaced rage rises in the land. Ergo, in the American empire, we’re witnessing these demented days of congressional boy love and despotic rockets.
Day after day, the pace at which insane tidings arrive quickens: it’s as if we’ve become passengers on a high-speed train, commandeered by lunatics, that only stops at insane asylums in order to board more lunatics. Naturally, it follows that the train has gone runaway, careening down the buckling tracks, blue spark spraying from its steel wheels, while any approaching curve becomes a threat to derail the whole hurdling madhouse.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published October 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Many believe fascism will come to the United States of America resembling contrived spectacles such as The Super Bowl, The Academy Awards, and American Idol, with the proceedings intercut with teary, yet ultimately triumphant, Oprahesque tales of how redemption can be gained through the renunciation of one’s rights, liberties, as well as, the dutiful turning in of one’s subversive neighbors.
Don’t reach for that remote, folks: It’s already here.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published October 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that False Self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.”
– R. D. Laing
The pathology of American culture is as ubiquitous as its strip mall ugliness. It is abundantly evident in almost every aspect of contemporary life. From the predatory (to the point of psychopathic) practices of its morally scurvy pirates at the helm of the corporate/governmental ship of state, down to the pandemic enervation and proliferate anomie of its galley slaves languishing in their soulless cubicles — from the genitalia-devoid mascots at Disney World to the genitalia-obsessed torturers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo — the soul-sickness spreads before us like George W. Bush’s taunting, executioner’s smirk.
Ronnie Laing’s profound dictum leaves us confronting many poignant questions regarding the true nature of the psychic lives of us so-called ordinary citizens of The United States of America and our ability to function within this corrupt and crumbling empire. In short, is it sane to be able to adapt to an insane culture?
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September 22, 2007
Originally published September 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
— H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, 1920
As Americans Waddled into the new century, overweight, overworked, and as self aware as a cloister of sea slugs — so too arrived, affecting his bandy-legged, fake cowboy swagger, George W. Bush, to usher in this era of unquenchable, consumer craving and perpetual, martial emergency.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published September 2006
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“Mrs. O’Kelly, do you believe in fairies?” “No, I don’t — but they’re there.” –Irish aphorism
There is something missing in The Oakdale Estates subdivision. Oak Trees. Years ago, they were cut down to clear the property for development.
Is it possible the gated walls of Oakdale Estates are fitted with impenetrable irony shields?
There is something missing, as well, here in The United States of America, Land of The Free. Freedom.
Where are our much-vaunted freedoms in the present day United States? Are they, perhaps, hidden among the phantom oaks of Oakdale Estates?
Sadly, it appears, for a depressingly large percent of our citizenry, the loss of our rights and liberties are missed and remembered to the same extent as the felled trees of Oakdale Estates.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published September 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
At present, 46 percent of the American people hold the delusion
that Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001.
This statistic came to light as ABC/Disney aired last weekend a drama based on 9/11 containing the corresponding degree of historical accuracy regarding the circumstances leading up to the tragic events of that day as an average episode of The Flintstones in depicting daily life during the Stone Age.
What are the cultural circumstances that allow such mass deceptions to be perpetrated with seeming impunity? Will these Rovian prevarications, so rife within the corporate media bubble, continue to define our life and times? Will our destinies, both individual and collective, continue to be determined by these pervasive deceits — these pernicious narratives, concocted by cadres of elitist fabulists, perpetuated with the intention of frightening and distracting that portion of our population comprised of gullible, anxious, over-sized, over-aged, dim children?
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September 22, 2007
Originally published September 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water, sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off, incurred by the deluge, will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt, denial, and despair.
How did it come to this? How did we come to buy this worthless plot of swampland known as George Bush’s America?
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September 22, 2007
Originally published August 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“If he [Hugo Chávez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
– Pat Robertson
“Muslims want to rule the world. They want to take over the whole world. That’s their evil purpose … of them are very harsh. There’s no tenderness or love.” [Where do you get your information about the war?]
“The Bible and the 700 Club. I also listen to preachers who know what’s going on. Pat Robertson.”
– Mary Fowler, 54, Oklahoma Housekeeper, excerpted from Rose Aguila’s “Stories in America“
Listen up, Reverend Robertson, Mary Fowler — every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis — it’s time that you were called out.
The time is long past due the rest of us ceased our cowering and stood up to you Christo-fascists bullies. The hour has come round that we look you straight in your bulging, true believer eyes, and told you that we’ve had it with your smugness, with your blood-drenched crusades, with your victim mentality — and to wit the madness begot by this cracked-brain belief system of yours, which all began (according to your sacred delusions) more than two thousand years ago when, at the behest of a wicked cabal, a mob of mammon-worshipping, blood-lusting rabble went on a cosmic killing-spree and murdered your god.
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September 22, 2007
Originally published August 2007
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
The rising price of gasoline troubles Americans because it threatens the sustaining cultural illusion of our freedom of mobility — a commercial con job that, over time, has served to transform us from the citizens of a sprawling republic into de facto slaves of the corporate classes. Our masters have the mobility, we have a long commute.
How, in any way, shape, or form, are American freeways free?
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September 22, 2007
originally published August 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
In a small, prefab house on the coastal Carolina lowlands, an old man, the son of a son of a tobacco sharecropper, my wife’s father, lay dying. Even though the St. James Bible had been placed at his bedside, Fox Cable News served as his Psychopompus, conducting him up from this fallen world towards the flawless spires of the Beulah Land.
A vision: Across a blacktop highway, beneath a weather-flayed billboard that proclaimed “One Nation under God — Bush/Cheney 2004,” in a field of desiccated corn stalks, gaunt, bearded, mullet-haired, crackhead Jesus rose from the shrouds of coke smoke and drifted across the blacktop highway to raise the road kill from the dead.
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