As many wags have noted, the disclosures of Wikileaks have subjected the US Empire and its operatives to a full-body scan. Turnaround is fair play, because, until now, in the US, the powerless masses are subject to arbitrary pat downs and body scans, while the powerful and connected are massaged by privilege and ensconced in [...]

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Examples of magical thinking: Jesus will return — therefore, there is no call to action on environmental destruction; Space brothers will arrive in an armada of UFOs and bring universal love and world peace; by voting, the citizens of the US will change the trajectory of empire and end corporate oligarchy. …… Fox News wouldn’t [...]

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Once again, partisan Democrats are reeling in shock and humiliation, boggled by a familiar scenario — the sheer velocity of their reversal of fortune and the Republican right’s perennial ascendency. Democrats implore, why is it voters occupying less than privileged positions in the economic order evince such ardor embracing the principles of a political creed [...]

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I grew up, less than privileged, in the deep south, in working class and lower middle class neighborhoods. At the time of her birth, my wife’s family was dwelling in a generations old tenant farmer’s shack in the South Carolina Low Country … In her teen years, the family move to a Jim Walters prefab [...]

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I was born, at slightly past the midpoint of the Twentieth Century, in the Deep South city of Birmingham, Alabama — “The Heart of Dixie.” My earliest memories are of a time of societal upheaval and cultural trauma. At the time, as the world witnessed and history chronicles, Birmingham could be an ugly, mean place. [...]

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There is little reason to frequent Democratic Party partisan sites such as Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos … that is unless you wish to explore the uninspired mindscape of the faux progressive side of the internet. Daily Kos is the very embodiment of the insular, pixel fiefdoms that foists empty memes above insightful vision and grinds [...]

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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, and its [...]

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for Adam Engel Grief casts us into a one-sided confrontation with our mortal limits. In these precincts, with our will thwarted, we meet the spindling worm at the edge of the mind. The worm, who tunnels through countless worlds, avers: “All concepts are compost.” He reviews my tale: “You are being carried along by the [...]

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As many of you know, Labor Day,  I was crossing 42nd St. and 2nd Ave., with the light in my favor, and was struck by a car … I went to the hospital, and my wounds are healing, but our beloved dog, Anna Maria, was killed. I have been shaking my fist at the indifferent [...]

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                      1 What would a sea slug do with a parasol?                     2 If I were to attempt to show you the contours of the grin of the wind would you make some hasty excuse to leave the premises and throw away my address and phone number? You might avert you’re gaze when [...]

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The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children’s theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell. “Children, you have to believe — you really, really have to believe in Tinker Bell.” But [...]

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Since, we buried you, last summer, in the baked, early August earth  — I have dreamed, night after night, of a bone white creature, with glinting eyes of Edenic green … offering me fruit, ripening in his fecund palms. Denizen of a deathless world — he brought news of you … news that you were [...]

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Given the level of cultural absurdity at large, both the commercially tormented landscape and the mass media dominated mindscape of the United States seem a Gogol goof-take. If a person had traveled forward in time, arriving from even the recent past, of say, twenty-five to thirty-years ago, and looked upon the present day United States [...]

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You see: This took place long after the snow had melted and the far-flung galaxies had cooled and the jism on the bed sheets had dried to an amorphous, orange-tinged stain. It occurred after the relatives arrived and departed and drifted to their respective graves. This happened after the native grasses had vanished and the [...]

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In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost … marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self. Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, [...]

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Nettling memories returned, as I bent forward to sniff the cactus flower blooming in our desiccated conservation. Forgotten … reign of redolence: Expunged from the singing narrative of troubadour air … purged, since the advent of that shivered era when the potentate of provisional remembrance banished all memories of the mercies of rain. Was it [...]

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“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 [...]

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Making a fetish of phantasms– I catch glimpses of you reflected in store windows of archived avenues… as the earth burns with composting memory, we listen to the wind-pitched speech of rifting rain. From the mere notion of you, much less your arrival, I wonder: Why did you call me to this place … a [...]

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Although, I have made my home in being lost, I recognize you: You are: The homunculus of my aspirations, lost as well, squatting amid the ruins of my towering rage. Granted, like you, my prevailing sense of self has been besieged by contretemps and coincidence; even more like you, I am enraptured by the distraction. [...]

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Although my mother fled Nazi Germany, as a child, on a Kindertransport, with a few family valuables sown into her clothing, and I was brought up on the myths and hagiography of the Zionist state, I, over time, came to recognize the folly of the whole colonialist enterprise — the folly of ethnic exclusion and [...]

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Even as President Barrack Obama waxed eloquent in Cairo, Egypt, on the moral imperatives of the community of nations, public opinion polls released in the United States revealed that, by a substantial percentage, its citizens believe torture is an acceptable option for interrogation of suspects deemed terrorists by various U.S. governmental agencies. In addition, other [...]

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From time to time, events unfold that are so large in scope, so all-encompassing in their implications that one’s initial response is muted by an inability to categorize it all within the realm of experience. Previous reference points prove of little service. One’s image of oneself and one’s place in the world is under siege, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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