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Mcmansions, SUVs,
Mega-Churches and the Baghdad Embassy
Life Among Dim and Brutal Giants
By Phil Rockstroh
06/29/07 "ICH"
-- -- 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.
How could they not be? They've seized upon a fantasy that allows
them to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating
belief system. Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of
their corporately circumscribed lives, they wish for the
destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their escapist fantasy,
by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous --
apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The
believer's emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological
giantism -- a phenomenon that arises when one's worldview is too
small to explain the larger world. Therefore, a story must be
created that contains violence and terror on such a massive
scale that its unfolding would kill off the entire, problematic
world. "That's right world, there's not enough room on this
planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go."
Upon the nation's roadways and interstate highways, the
overgrown clown cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and
oversized pickup trucks also evince hugeness to compensate for
the feelings of those folks inside the grotesque vehicles of
being crushed down by alienation and isolation -- not only while
on the road -- but by the realities of an existence within a
hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against
the changing realities of the larger world.
In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs
separate them further from the general population of the
consumer state (that they take every opportunity to bamboozle)
as the American public itself grows fatter and fatter in body
mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner emptiness borne of
their perceived helplessness before the predation of corporate
culture.
Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when
completed, will be the largest "diplomatic" compound on the
planet is, in fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless
colossus the U.S.A. has become. The structure is as accurate as
the art of architecture can be in its depiction of the spirit of
a nation's people. As big and bloated as our national sense of
exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called Green Zone of
Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within it --
not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly
fortified walls -- but from reality itself. A massive emblem of
the arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the
noxious vapors of cultural self-deception can be made manifest
in reenforced concrete, armed watchtowers and razor wire.
Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we
Americans dream these things into existence. Far from blameless,
we continue to allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we
enable and sustain their titanic sense of entitlement. In turn,
we accept their paltry bribes and, as a result, our banal,
selfish dreams have conjured forth George Bush from the
zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism is
so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own
he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in
Baghdad.
In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of
righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off
fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Mcmansion-like men,
such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich
is too diminutive in physical stature to be president -- with
the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney's head.
In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking
point: Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light
torment the night, scouring away the stars, estranging us from
imagination, empathy, and eros, and leaving us only with the
insatiable appetites of consumerism. Thus, around the clock,
inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial slaughterhouses and
meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft workers ply
their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered
wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle
trailer, diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to
sepulchral supermarkets and charnel house restaurant chains.
Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies are provided with all the
water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially farmed,
pesticide-laquered vegetables and starches -- The Cuisines Of
The Living Dead -- we could ever crave ... uum, uum, it's the
Thanatotic yumminess of empire's end. Try our convenient drive
through window. Would you like us to super-size your order of
commodified death?
Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love
with death.
Let's see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well
over half a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the
continuing Iraqi resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as
well. Yet still, most of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage
over the din created by the parade of killer clowns that we have
mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.
How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these
acts of murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale?
Truth is, we might not be able to stop it, because this is what
lies beneath our unlimited sense of entitlement and
self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that manifests itself as
exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by means of
imperial overreach -- which is, of course, the time-established
method by which empires dispose of themselves.
Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the
narcissistic insularity of our media elite. At the end of the
day, it's their tumescent egos that are distorting our societal
discourse; their vanities and attendant self-serving
pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of
horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses --
jackasses endowed with the singular skill of being able to read
a teleprompter ... Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You
have an important call from Washington, DC.
Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the
system's structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of
media imagery will grow â?" and the more trivial its content
will become. The closer we come to systemic collapse the more we
will hear about celebrity contretemps. Cretinous heiresses and
shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of self-restraint,
people the public imagination, because they carry our
infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn,
suffer public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to
displace, upon them, the humiliation of our own daily existence
within the oppressive authoritarianism of the corporate state.
Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to
look) link between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the
two terms were interchangeable. According to rumor, we defeated
fascism, during the first half of the 20th century. Yet, at
present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing,
soul-enervating corpocracy. To live under corporatism is, in
ways large and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday,
hour by hour, the exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work
devours more and more of our lives. As a consequence, the true
self within is crushed to dust and what remains rises as
cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant need
for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the
well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly;
in short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.
Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by
living in the midst of life -- a mode of being that apprehends
and is transformed by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world.
Conversely, authoritarian societies are collectives of
accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers, where one must
conceal one's essential self at all costs and the soul falls
into atrophy.
To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the
individual and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and
witness the keening wasteland our nation has become.
Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be filled by any amount of
wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene amounts of
mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never -- can never
be -- enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is
boundless. In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a
psychopath's emptiness. Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to
the boneyard, hoping he can ascend to heaven by scaling the
mountainous pile of corpses he's responsible for placing there.
In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine
withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly,
the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass
Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our
landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system
that devours our time, health and humanity.
The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political
classes have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones,
enclosed her in an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous
output of eggs. Yet, nothing satisfies them.
Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk
Insurgency, hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly
trivial as mere beans -- our postings, exchanges and periodic
meet-ups -- the fall of tyrannical giants might begin.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag
monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in
New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com
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