> 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
>
>
>
> --
> NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
> always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
> available to advance understanding of
> political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
> believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
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> Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
>
> "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