August 22, 2010
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 you see me in the park flying my sorrow which I have folded into a soaring kite…. And with its taut string … am flossing the teeth of the grinning wind.
I have already adorned the park with statues carved from the fallen foundation of my failed potential and erected temples from the broken points of pencils.
I have been very busy since I composted the vegetable kingdom of my ambition. I heard: Late in God’s career as an artist he created the eyeball: He was and is very proud of this work and it is much on display:
Though the Eyeball Museums of heaven will mess with you: All that art staring back at you can set your nerves on end.
3
So you went out to capture and cage the heart of midnight and returned redolent with the perfume of shadows. You attempted to pretend the incident never happened but the next day you
were fired from your job as an assistant archivist in the Regrets Division of the Hall of Records. I understand this; it was under similar circumstances that I came to start carving my monuments
to failure in the park. Don’t you get snide with me: I knew you before you had two shadows to rub together…. And you never answered my question about sea slugs and parasols?
Yes, I know I can be overbearing at times — but I have not been the same since my name was libeled by moonlight and the condescending sky has not let me get a word in edge-wise since. O.K.,
that’s a slight exaggeration — but it doesn’t have to stare at me like that all day, does it?
4
It was nice of you, for a peace offering, to pack us box lunches for a picnic in the park … in which you lovingly prepared sandwiches made from the ingredients of our deaths: They were a tad
over-salted, and the bread, leavened with dread, was rendered slightly soggy from condiments of self-deception — but those slices of cherry apocalypse pie (with a scoop of lost love’s decay) were perfect. And
it did seem a pie-perfect afternoon until I noticed you were staring right past me into the orgy of shadows. And I knew there was nothing I could do to hold you. So I folded myself into the
evening air and slept awhile … dreaming I was a passenger on a night train traveling toward the distant mountains of my heart, but I lacked the fare to complete the journey and was tossed off the
train into a farmer’s field where they cultivate day dreams, fresh visions, and seasonal hallucinations.
5
You see, my love: The sum total of knowledge I have retained regarding the landscape of my heart is what a sea slug knows about the uses of a parasol. I knew there was a perfectly good reason I brought up the subject.
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August 19, 2010
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 behind the stagecraft is oligarchy. President Obama took millions from Goldman Sachs, et al. If there is a Captain Hook in this show, it is those Wall Street pirates who threw the global economy to the crocodiles for their ill-gotten gains.
Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool’s gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero — Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him — as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.
In Reagan’s case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn’t paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen … having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.
Such self-deception — played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft — is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic. When, for example, an American city drowns in floodwater and Americans are drowning in economic woes, US presidents know how to act like a president — but not act as president. The soundbites make the man; not the man makes the soundbites.
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August 4, 2010
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 settling in nicely, and had discovered that you could create living jewels from the dross of mortal dread.
Here, in this keening dimension of decay — we speak of you often: — about how you had hung in air like a music note, how you had lilted over the landscape of disappointment — weightless as the dreams of humming birds.
It was I … who tried to quantify your presence, tried to track your spoor across vast deserts of empty air … demanding from you that you chronicle for me the living history of drifting lint.
Instead, you turned to me, wordless, and said, “The stars are seedlings; they are only possibilities of what is to be.”
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August 4, 2010
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 — he would have thought he had entered some alternative universe inhabited by deranged grotesques. Resembling a dadist reality television program, a sizable portion of the populace of the US (save our ugly, contemporary, sweatshop-assembled clothing) could pass for George Grosz or Max Beckmann caricatures from Weimar Republic Germany.
In the few public spaces remaining, the time traveler would encounter an over-weight, ill-informed citizenry, staring, compulsively, at hand-held electronic appliances, as if the actual world, on the other side of the small, glowing screen, held no interest for them. He would bear witness to an age when mass media imagery has crowded out and colonized almost every area of life, both public and private, and is peopled with caricatures of willful ignorance and brainless self-regard such as Sarah Palin.
As is the case with individuals, every era is endowed with a distinct character, something near a personality, all its own. If that personality could, over time, gain a sense of self-awareness, our own would blush in embarrassment viewing Palin … Preening, sputtering her word salad palaver, resembling an aging prom queen turned infomercial spokesmodel and speaking as though she acquired the english language from shredded scraps of speeches by Ronald Reagan and random bits of Bazooka Joe bubble gum comix, she is possessed of such an extreme degree of incomprehensible self-regard it seems a form of derangement.
In little danger of gaining self-awareness, Palin both characterizes and is a caricature of the era: obsession with power and celebrity, mindless memes, and the endless, contrived drama and meaningless denouement on display in the short attention span theatre of corporate and social media — all its devices and collective derangement — that are reactionary in the shunning of substance and the determination to remain devoid of the deepening implications of human interaction. Ergo, these traits and characteristics are reflected in Palin and vice versa, then back again, ad infinitum, like distortions in carnival funhouse mirrors.
Does one get the feeling that the more powerless we feel, collectively, about the rising levels of economic exploitation exacted upon us and the accelerating rate of ecocide committed on the planet by corporate oligarchs, the more celebrity “news” and other tropes of empty distraction and denial will froth forth from the idiot imaginings of the pop culture douche-scape?
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July 13, 2010
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 fig trees had been planted and humming birds arrived, hung in air, and continued, southward.
This came to be after a cache of baby teeth, vouchsafed in a small jewelry box in 1904, was found in the attic’s crawl space and the stew had simmered throughout the day and the red ants had gathered their dead, drown in the sudden storm, and an after-image from the camera’s flashbulb winked to our retinas from eternity then fluttered on its way. It happen after the ice cream melted and the sea wall crumbled and last night’s left-leftovers were fed to the cat.
And, if memory serves me, it was after the fog had rolled in and the last of the grown children had left home and the emergency exits were pointed out to us by blasé flight attendants and the headlights of cars on the highway had spun shafts of light around our bedroom walls.
I recall it took place right after you cleared your throat and after marigolds had been bestowed with their stink and the musicians left the bandstand and the comet’s near miss nearly drastically altered the tale and after the muscadine grapes had dreamed of fabled hobos and the new carpet was laid and after a millennia-dead apostle had scanned the skies for signs of the second coming then had written in his private diary, “nothing again today.”
Do you remember when I told you that I must have mislaid my salvation and you suggested that I should, “try to think back to where you were the last time you remember having it with you?”
You see: It was after the snow had melted and the far-flung galaxies had cooled– and you had asked me after love-making, “Did that help you in your search?” And I replied, “nothing again today,” and you had left me alone to scan for signs of it here on the bed sheet with the amorphous, orange-tinged stain…
There may well be no second coming, this millennia or any other.
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July 13, 2010
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, for an individual, is profound … as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land … as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.
The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids — a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles … a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.
After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward … becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) — with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.
While above the street — corporate towers — that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension — blot the skyline … these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.
This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men … yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.
And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will … No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.
The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one’s heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.
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July 7, 2010
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 really all that long ago,
when we arrived in that lifeless land where wind-blown granules of your scorching, secret resentments flayed my skin to the bone? Then, you — empty obligation’s nimble seamstress — replaced my flesh’s memory with imprecations of woven thistle … hopes — dried to sloughed snakeskin … and this carapace persona I carry … Beneath: languishes: a convict dreaming of his prison constructed from his own bones.
It happens every time we go anywhere.
Remember that day on the beach in Nice … when we wandered through the detritus of fallen empires of epicurean evenings burnished down to polished beach glass.
Defiantly, opaque as beach glass, we held our smooth, green talisman up to the azure sky, believing this would protect us against the invective of shadowless noon. But, by afternoon, brooding shadows returned, pooling around us, as the sea darkened against our hubris.
Staggered … left bereft … by the storm we seeded: Our circular arguments were whirled into multi-dimensional helixes, connecting querulous dreams to infinite thunder. Even you could say nothing — Even you, High Priestess of the Python of Scorn — you — maker of the charms of eternal resentment — were struck speechless by the sight of the towering nimbus boiling with its casuistry-shattering syntax.
Then in Los Angeles: By the Venice canals, a mid-morning breeze had stippled our clothes with clinging ladybugs as we made promises to each other as empty as the narcissistic sky.
But by late afternoon, without warning, sans seeming causation, the narrative of reassurance ceased and Eternity’s scold returned.
The cold night air arrived like a ghost glazed in frozen rage … At day’s end in LA — that is not the chill of the wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean — it is the defeated exhalation of a million shallow desires repeatedly thwarted.
But I didn’t contact you to chronicle the banal details of our vainglorious wars waged against entropic rage, nor to recount the folly of our attempts to scale its eternal watchtowers manned by its conscripts of impersonal fury.
Instead, I have come to make amends to unseen things … senselessly annihilated during the din of that dim campaign:
To create an epitaph in lasting air: for friendships lost beneath oceanic contretemps, for dream animals addled into extinction by cataclysmic alarm clocks, for a million moments neglected in the pursuit of petty obsessions and for the folly of my relentless surrendering to tiny, moment-annihilating agendas, for flights of grandeur that were scuttled for the scrupulous acquisitions of piffle and waylaid by my enchantment with things obvious, safe and readily available.
This is my prayer of atonement to seeds not planted, to the Homeric Hymns ignored on every street corner, to the unknown universes bypassed by my carefully mapped, never wavering journeys through the tedious city of my habitual self-reference.
I offer this libation of fermented regret to all the raging ghosts haunting the stillborn air of lost potential.
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July 2, 2010
“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 that lived — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
This morning, as with so many mornings, as of late, I had to undertake an agonizing, intricate procedure to pull myself together, simply to extract myself from bed to face another day.
Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth’s warnings rising like musical notes … swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico … literally falling to earth as chemical rain.
I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me … It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.
Some mornings, I don’t think I can compose myself to face it.
But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind … take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me … attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread … console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed … torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing … in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire’s manifest death-urge revelry.
Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:
The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words — mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels — texted and twittered into meaningless air.
So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects … giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk — as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge — and the earth’s entropic furies gather.
We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever … mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.
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June 22, 2010
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 world reclaimed by
honey suckle, atavistic grasses, and the last hymns of honey bees? Why did you call this meeting, at this wounded hour,
at the advent of an era that is long past my end but is only the opening salutation of what is to be?
Why — daimon?
You– who hid the jewel box that opens into ancient skies.
You– who arrived late in the Cathedral of Coincidence and caused Time to implode in white flames.
You– stalwart traveler of the vast distances between heartbeats.
You– who caused my wounded heart to bleed starlight.
Once, you told me, “One gnarled oak tree holds up the heavens; all others are pretenders. Beware of those grandiloquent saplings who attempt to woo the untested sky of your fantasy-swooning forebrain.”
Since then, I have seen the sky crack under similar circumstances … the horizon, dawn after dawn, seared with regret.
Not that you were ever around to pick up the pieces; once again, you had given yourself to the morning rain.
What does it matter to you? Neither the Laws of Consequence nor the particulars of location apply to you.
You– who are neither living nor dead.
You– who can never be rattled nor roused from eternal reverie.
You– who, in an instant, grow flowers of infinity from your finger tips.
You– who– with a single raindrop– that dribbles from your shot glass– cause mountains to stagger home drunk, and extinct species to spend eons justifying the folly of their excess to judgmental generations of never-to be-born heirs.
Yet, then again: It was you– who taught me to be amused by the self-referential soliloquies of grandiose motes of coffin dust.
And to listen for the silence held in the womb of thunder.
You tried and failed to teach me to compose music that can only be played by musicians who were drowned in oceanic deliriums.
You made confetti of my convictions then showered them upon wedding processions of ghosts.
Then you cast my complexes in concrete:
Frozen in flesh: Now, I am too slow for you. Most days, you hate me the way a poem hates a poet.
When deracinated on the page, it will never know what it might have become.
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June 17, 2010
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.
Our kind … are dazzled by broken bits of the approving sun. Amassing solar shards the way bower birds shore glinting baubles, I’ve witnessed you bartering with penurious angels for a glimpse of the totality that caused their fall.
(What we won’t do for the buzz provided by primal grace. Although we carry Eden within us … knowing it is as provisional as paradise.)
Your need for recognition leaves you exhausted: At day’s end, you collapse upon sweat-sodden sheets, dreaming of your shit-dust empire … built from hoarded, moldering triumphs, the ash of incantatory wit, and the atrophied promises you made to your future self.
Your mind — such as it is — is an inhuman reflection cast by daemonic mirrors: You mistake the welter of fragmented drives and desires for the deathless dreams of numinous seeds.
Come morning, you negotiate your existence amid a city of visionary vermin and indifferent right angles; you drag your putrefying hopes down to the banks of the Eternity’s burning river. There, you turn, face east, and mutter your desperate prayer of entitlement to the distracted dawn.
A filthy breeze rises from the river in reply.
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June 2, 2010
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 expulsion, the inherent tragedy of nationalism based on the delusion of religious birthright. With much sorrow, I came to the sad realization that the dream of the State of Israel was based on European chauvinism and exceptionalism. This reckoning has been a difficult one for me to bear — the hardest awakening of my adult life.
My father was born on a Reservation in the American mid-west. His people, like the Palestinians, resisted invaders of European ancestry and were crushed. At present, both peoples remain exiled and caged in their native land.
The Jewish side of myself understands the historical traumas that gave rise to the yearning for a tribal Homeland. Atavistically, I suffer the Jewish state’s collective night terrors and reel in its daylight rationalizations for its brutalities. But the Native American in me knows the rage of those crushed by the heartless force of an invading people.
Neither my father’s peoples’ bows and arrows nor the “threat” of metal rods, clutched by a few activists aboard the illegally seized Gaza-bound Peace Flotilla, nor Hamas’ small rockets will change the tragic trajectory wrought by a tribalist land grab. History reveals a conquered and caged people will starve, in both body and soul, as they watch their hopes wither to dust. But I will not condemn them for their struggle, and even their “provocations” — dangerous and outrageous provocations … such as the desire not to live out their lives behind ghetto walls, and the actions they take accordingly. (Even though, a provocation will never soften the banal mind of a bully to end his reign of brutality.)
To this day, within me, there are traits of cultural Judaism that have not been washed away in the deluge of shame I experience when confronted by the actions of the state of Israel and the casuistry of her apologists. Deep in my genetic structure, I carry tribal memories of Diaspora and its concomitant feelings of alienation from majoritarian culture. Most often, I still apprehend human existence from the perspective of an alien and interloper, believing my survival is dependent upon knowing where I stand in hostile terrain. By rote, I play the role of the outsider, wary and savvy in my dealings with a hostile gentile world.
In this, I understand the paranoid nature of the Jewish state and the reasons underlying her supporters’ rationalizations of her many crimes. Self-deception is at the root of habitual deceit. Sadly, the true believers of the Zionist cause have become case studies in that tragic trait.
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June 13, 2009
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 polls show a majority of the American public hold the opinion that the all-American theme park of state torture, located at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open for business and continue to welcome guests from around the globe, taking them for the ride of their lives through the dark id of the American psyche.
These revelations should not come as a shock. Torture, official secrecy, and other sundry apparatus and accouterments of the national security state are about the only viable enterprises remaining in this declining nation.
Moreover, one of the defining traits of the insecure (both among men and nations) is to stand, bristling in a paranoid posture, with feet planted in stubborn defiance of changing circumstances, snarling at invisible threats and imagined affronts, as life moves on with indifferent grace.
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May 27, 2009
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, perhaps even in danger of being torn away. One stares into the abyss, until the abyss removes its dark shades and makes direct eye contact. The mind buzzes; one’s thoughts scuttle in circles like stunned insects.
On a collective basis, we as a nation are living through such a time. At present, we are witnessing the descending spiral of Icarusian Capitalism; our sacred delusion of the perpetual ascendancy of a god-like market place lies broken in the dust. Malls and Mcmansions stand abandoned, desolate as the edifices of forgotten gods, as the come-ons of the salesmen of deregulated capitalism are churned to spittle amid a cacophony of collapsing market platitudes.
And not an uptick in public optimism, nor a surge of euphoria on Wall Street, nor the “invisible hand of the marketplace” sprinkling pixie dust will bring back the Olympian days of 2005, when the wise men of Washington and Wall Street knew the force of gravity was just a myth believed in by those embittered prophets of doom whose only joy in life is fantasizing the fall of their wealthy betters. It does not matter a damn how many dollars our present day believers of neoliberal tall tales, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, pour into the hole in the ground where the crash occurred, a bean stalk, twining skyward towards a golden, debt-negating goose, will not flower forth.
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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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