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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Originally published August 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
An unpopular war drags on, gas prices rise and rise, as a cloud of scandal gathers over Washington D.C. At times, it seems as though the 1970s never ended: it’s just Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s Quaalude-laced, faux populist snake oil caused us to sleep through the 80s and […]

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Originally published July 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“Despite a nearly 500% increase in mental health drugs being prescribed to children in the previous six years, the NFC [New Freedom Commission on Mental Health] recommended a plan of mandatory mental health screening for all public school students and follow-up treatment with drugs when needed.
“The fact is, this […]

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A Conversation About Culture with John Steppling Part II
Originally published January 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
Odd coincidence: I was thinking of cell phones and Aeschylus, on and off, all day. I had not connected the two, mind you…until your missive.
You’re right, John — cell phones make the world before you disappear. A few years back, I […]

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A Conversation About Culture with John Steppling Part I
Originally published January 2005
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“It is uncertain whether art is still possible; whether, with its complete emancipation, it did not sever its own preconditions.”
—Adorno
“So all things hobble together for the only possible.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Murphy, 1938
It seems that man has always searched, both collectively (both […]

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Originally published November 2004
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
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. […]

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(For Tom Butcher) Originally Published August 2003
Posted by Phil Rockstroh
“On reflection, the work we did on this given day, maybe that was the product that came out of that phase some time in the past when we were ostensibly incredibly idle.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“I don’t want to be part of your revolution if I can’t […]

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