America Has Left the Building: An Open Missive of Anger and Hope

By Phil Rockstroh
Created Nov 22 2006 - 9:07am

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.

Upon the occasion of our cultural confabulation of colonial hagiography
dubbed "Thanksgiving," a tradition when we stuff our overweight bellies by
devouring big, growth hormone-injected, flightless birds in order to
celebrate, what in truth was, a Thanks-taking of this land by our ancestors
from its original inhabitants -- (but a hearty salutation of "Happy Genocide
Day" doesn't exactly stimulate the appetite, does it?) -- I will address the
following missive to you -- my fellow unindicted (perhaps even unconscious)
co-conspirators in the crimes of our country.

Let's begin with the things nearest to us: The structures and objects we see
before us, everyday. And it's not a beautiful sight to behold.

Due to the banality, blandness, and flat-out ugliness of the stripmall/big
box store/fast food outlet, prefab nowhereland of our contemporary
landscape, life in the US under corporatism is as seductive as the glare of
florescent tube lighting in a convenience store.

The architecture of the US looks as if Aldophe Eichmann grew bored endlessly
calculating the human weigh capacity of death camp bound boxcars -- rose
from Hell -- and went into the prefab structure design business.

Now, don't get ugly, you admonish.

Tell me: What is truly ugly -- the composition and dissemination of a
heartfelt, political jeremiad (or even an angry rant) - or the squandering
of the passing hours of our finite lives within ugly suburban subdivisions,
oversized, ugly-ass motor vehicles, soulless stripmalls and sterile office
parks.

Man, have we let ourselves go: and its not only the sprawl around our
middle: it's the phony way we comport ourselves in manner and deed. Our
shallowness - our hollowness - our lack of conscience, self-awareness and
conviction ... all of which, the architecture and accoutrement of our
commodified nowhereland merely reflects.

Worse yet, we no longer even see it. We are inseparable from our environment
in the same manner e-coli bacteria are inseparable from feces ... The
nowhere-scape before us exists in equal measure to the nowhere-scape within
...

It seems as though: Our landscape has become so vapid and banal, it can't
even rise to the level of being tacky . Whatever the case -- even an attempt
at tawdriness would show some kind of low-grade involvement. Instead, there
is an overall feeling of flimsiness - a sense of a world devoid of
substance. And the pervasive unsubstantiality creates an underlying aura of
anxiety - the feeling that all of it can and will be leveled and scattered
in some approaching cataclysm ... In this way, we hear the death rattle
attendant to a closed system in entropic runaway ... The system is still
replicating itself, exponentially -- yet, in equal measure, it bears and
spreads the seeds of its demise.

This is why I have come to squat in your comfort zone, until you take
notice.

Because the manner we're living is as salubrious as a tsunami.

And is about as sustainable, body and soul, as Elvis Presley's final binge.

Our emptiness is compensated for by the gigantism we see everywhere around
us: from an epidemic of obese children to bloated McMansions. But whether
its wooly mammoths or SUVs -- or Elvis, stuffed into a sequined jumpsuit --
or the fate of unwieldy armies of over-extended empires, bogged down by
local insurgencies -- gigantism is a precursor to extinction. Worse, at
present, this phenomenon is transpiring on a global basis.

Corporatism has rendered us analogous to the last days of Elvis ... Puffy,
bloated -- we wheeze our way through our set ... Guarded gate communities
are our own private Graceland where we die in excess and isolation. The
electric lights sequined across the entire planet, now glow from space like
one of Elvis's Las Vegas costumes. But does no one see the dying man beneath
the jeweled jumpsuit? The land and The King are one.

America has left the building.

Because, like any disorder of the psyche, being the organic system a culture
is -- pathology will increase, exponentially. Inevitably, a collapse will
come ... Then it can and will get even uglier: Homegrown Brownshirts emerge,
brandishing bibles and automatic weapons (convinced when Jesus returns the
first thing he'll do is apply for membership to the NRA and then saddle-up
and ride a Cruise Missile, Slim Pickens-style, aimed at the false god
idolizing hordes of the Muslem world). Then will come detention camps, built
by Halliburton and guarded by Blackwater rent-a-thugs ... In time, the sky
will be darkened from the floating ash of the furnace-devoured flesh of
those pushed into the flames lit by collective psychosis.

Hyperbolic, you say. No, it's an understatement. Remember we're speaking
about the country that committed the most sustained, large-scale holocaust
in human history, right here on our own soil -- the genocidal destruction of
the Native American Nations. Happy Thanks-taking, America. Holocaust museums
should be as prevalent as shopping malls, upon the blood-sodden soil of this
land. In addition, while we're chronicling the carnage, let us not forget
that we're the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons as an act of war (the
most massive terrorist attack of all time) wherein we killed hundreds of
thousands of Japanese civilians for no other reason than to put Stalin on
notice that we were to be the lone colossus bestriding the war decimated
post-war world.

As the years have passed, we Americans now stand before a contemptuous
world: bloated in our subdivisions, waddling through Big Box retail stores,
languishing in ignorance and anomie -- living caricatures of the grotesques
of doomed empires. Therefore, we must take a long, revealing look at
ourselves: Our breath stinks of carbon monoxide -- it's like we've been
French kissing the tailpipe of a Humvee. Sometimes, I wish, America, you'd
just wrap your lips around that tailpipe and commit suicide by internal
combustion engine fellatio. (I mean it's coming to that anyway ... But must
we take the rest of the world with us when we go?)

Or: the process of awakening and renewal can begin. It's our choice,
collectively; It's our responsibility, personally -- to be aware of and then
widely proclaim the stakes involved.
First and foremost, it's up to political activists, artists, online
pamphleteers, et al to agitate against the neo-feudalist order of
corporatism.
The present order is anathema to the soul-making of creative endeavor.

Art movements, from Paris in the 1920s, to the Beats and hippies, to the
flannel-clad, guitar-poet wretches of the Northwest in the late 1980s and
early 90's had one common factor, in all those flowerings of life-vivifying
creativity -- cheap rent.

Rilke once said something along the lines of: Everybody has a letter written
inside their heart and if you don't live the life your heart yearns to live,
you won't be allowed to read this letter before you die ... Hence, we might
infer: There exist, across the land, dead-letter offices, vast and
cavernous, where our mail awaits, unopened and unread.

Ergo, one of the prevailing miseries of our era is: Most of us are to busy
earning a living to live. As rents go down, levels of risk and inspiration
rise. Moreover, we need the reflective power of art to end this impasse. It
is imperative that we awaken to the realities of this death-dreaming empire.

Apropos, forgive me (or don't) for the angry tone of this missive -- for I
am overwhelmed by the immensity of our nation's collective capacity for
denial, casuistry and flat-out lying in regard to the death and destruction
that has been inflicted in our names.

We must begin to grasp the unsettling knowledge that the things we, as a
nation, inflict upon the world -- we will eventually inflict upon ourselves.
It is imperative that we start to ask ourselves this question: When so many
external and internal forces work to thwart, degrade, and destroy our
essential selves -- hence the world -- what can help to restore us?

Therefore, I'm calling you out -- the hidden side of our national
character -- right here, right now. Show us who you are: reveal to us your
blank face, in all its banal symmetry - and finally, and at long last --
give us an accounting of yourself.

I'm not naive. I realize you feel you're under no obligation to do so. You
feel no more need to explain your actions than does Death itself.
Although you have many faces, deep down, we know who you are: You're a
clean-shaven lobbyist, a sharp-elbow careerist, a public relations expert, a
land-decimating real estate developer, a rent-inflating landlord, a cunning
advertising executive, a weapons designing technocrat, a pentagon planner --
you're the bastard driving the SUV who is perpetually tailing my ass in
traffic, you're my blank-faced, next-door neighbor, lacquering his hybrid
lawn in insoluble pesticides. -- In short, you're all the quotidian and
respectable -- therefore -- highly deceptive faces of Death. You're our own
face, personal and private, individual and collective: yours/ours is the
murder's countenance of empire.

Even though we all know the truth about you and our own complicity in your
crimes, we push the knowledge from our minds, as we trudge though our days.
And this is the reason: You promise us safety -- even as, you deliver us,
incrementally and ineluctably, to destruction.

How do I reach you - how do I beseeched you to cease the madness?

You name the place where I can confront you: On a thronging sidewalk on
Fifth Avenue, during evening rush, as we're brushed and buffeted by the
squalid grace of crowds. Perhaps, you might take the barstool next to mine
and speak too loudly in my ear, jabbing my chest with your bony index finger
to punctuate the pointless palaver of your self-justifying lies. How about:
Let's take a cross-country drive, you and I, and see the fever dream of our
sick nation unfurl before us through the dusty windshield of a grasshopper
green, 1975, AMC Gremlin ... so that we might have time to talk this all
through.

Because, I want you to realized this: There are hidden reservoirs of hope
within us: reservoirs as boundless as the reach of your ruthlessness. These
waters are as deep and potent as you are, at present, shallow and shameless.
Yet, they're inaccessible to you -- as long as you insist your drink of
choice will continue to be oil and blood, mixed with the runoff of melting
Arctic glaciers.

What you do not know is this: From these inner reservoirs emerge rivers of
renewal that run between all of those who turn away from the dry, dead
landscape of your lies.

These streams of inspiration and renewal silently flow between those who
have glimpsed this: That each generation must struggle against the soulless
seekers of absolute power, that each era is a wasteland, that every person
learns life is unfair, yet must seek to drink from the waters of hope -- so
that our tongues will not wither to cynical dust.

Empires rise and fall, but hope remains, flowing through time and place,
bearing all things to the sea and back again, perpetually returning,
bringing new life to the dry, dead land, slaking our thirst, cleansing our
wounds, delivering to us the strength to make and remake the world anew,
and, at day's end, lulling us to restful sleep to the timeless cadences of
its ceaseless currents.
_______
Phil Rockstroh

--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson