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Q and A For
The People Of A Forsaken Republic
Addressing the origins of the Whose-Your-Daddy
Nation
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
10/02/07 "ICH"---
- 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?
The authoritarianism inherent to the structure of
multi-conglomerate corporatism is antithetical to the concept of
the rights and liberties of the individual. Most individuals --
bound by a corporation's secrecy-prone, hierarchical values --
will, over time, lose the ability to display free thinking,
engage in civic discourse, and even be able to envisage the
notion of freedom.
This is true, from the florescent light-flooded aisles of Wal*Mart
to the insular executive offices of Haliburton to the sound
stages of CNN and Fox News. Under the prevailing order, reality,
for the laboring class of the corporate state, has become debt
slavery; in contrast, the simulacrum of reality, in which, the
striver class exists, is a milieu defined by obsessive
careerism. Under the hegemony of corporatism, freedom might as
well be fairy dust. It only exists in an imaginary land, not the
places one arrives by way of one's morning and evening commute.
In addition, economically, by way of decades of financial
chicanery, perpetrated by the nation's business and political
elite, we are eating our seed crop, and the consequences of this
harvest of deceit have left the people of the US, intellectually
and spiritually malnourished.
As a result, many attempt to sate the keening emptiness and
mitigate the chronic unease by gorging themselves on the Junk
Food Jesus of End Time mythology, which is a belief system
wherein corporeal events and actions (personal and collective)
have no lasting consequence because even the human body is to be
cast aside, like a junk food wrapper, when the cosmic CEO
decides to make the earth a part of his heavenly franchise.
Accordingly, the corporate state requires modes of being that
evince obliviousness and obedience (the defining traits of the
US consumer) on the part of the majority of the populace. Ergo,
the rise of both Christian consumerists and the vast apparatus
of the right-wing propaganda matrix that dominates news cycles
via the electronic mass media.
All coming to pass, as George W. Bush -- the reigning mascot of
this fantasyland of infantile omnipotence and instant
gratification -- is rocked to sleep by his handlers cooing
preposterous tales of how history will place him in the pantheon
of those men whose greatness was unrecognized by the shallow and
petty minds of their own era.
When, in fact, Bush, whose ruinous wars of aggression,
deficit-ballooning tax breaks for the wealthy, and policies of
crony capitalism (that enabled the economy-decimating, easy
credit banking scams of the present) displays the character
traits of a man ridden with severe psychological trauma; his
attempts to tamp down immense inner turmoil, by means of his
grandiose bearing, his absolute certitude regarding his own
infallibility, and his bullying behavior, have resulted in an
exteriorizing of his pathologies on a global scale, and this is
playing out ugly, for all concerned.
Why do the people of the nation (for the most part) slouch,
slack-jawed and passive, before this assault upon their
collective integrity and personal dignity?
For generations, the ephemeral dazzle of pop culture paternalism
and tabloid Manichaeism, as confabulated by advertising and
public relations hacks and corporate news courtesans, has
overwhelmed gravitas, history, even self-awareness. As all the
while, shallow opportunists have been elevated to the status of
pundits, experts and sages. Withal, the present system
generously rewards those individuals who have mastered the art
of impersonating human traits and responses in utterly contrived
environments. As a whole, the majority of the populi have come
to garner information about the world at large, and, worse,
their own self-image, from a medium where phoniness is a
treasured commodity, while authentic human traits and responses
are banished to a beggar's road.
Is it any wonder that the media types who thrive in these
artificial settings have come to define authenticity as being
only those attributes that appear authentic on television?
Apropos, if you ask these "media personalities" about the
shortcomings and corruption of the present system, they will
plead the careerist's Nuremberg Defense ... of only being a
stormtrooper obeisant to the "bottom line."
Fantasy alert: One would hope that if one were to descend down a
ladder constructed of these layers upon layers of bottom lines,
one would arrive in a Hell reserved for those possessed with
such shameless cupidity.
Reality redux: Yet as much as the human heart might yearn for
such outcomes, there will never arrive the terrible majesty and
bitter reckoning of anything resembling Judgement Day, heralded
by celestial trumpets and legions of naked and cowering sinners;
instead, in human affairs, there arises dire exigencies that can
no longer be ignored nor explained away. The arrival of such a
moment for the US is nearly at hand.
When a nation manifests a mixture of mass ignorance and official
mendacity, in combination with uncheck power emanating from an
insular and arrogant elite, a golden age of peace and plenty is
as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami. As sure as a
village of desperate fools who devour their seed crop, a nation
that refuses universal health care to its children -- yet rushes
to the aid of its parasitic class of wealthy "speculators" and
"investors" from the consequences of their own greed-besotted,
fiscal debacles -- is doomed.
This is the classic pattern of collective immolation experienced
by a nation when power and privilege is increasingly
consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. In essence, this is the
key to the conundrum paralyzing the leadership of the Democratic
Party: In a culture in which an individual's worth is determined
by the degree one can be exploited by the corrupt interests that
control both the private and public sector, the public at large
has little value to the political establishment ... That is:
other than, every few years, being bamboozled for their votes in
the sham spectacles known as the US electoral process, a scam
mostly financed, hence controlled, by the aforementioned big
money interests.
In sum, this is the reason the Democratic Party feels little
allegiance to their base. In turn, the political classes
themselves are only of value to the big money corporate elite,
because, by their delivery of staggering amounts of pork,
massive tax cuts, and the passage of desired anti-regulatory
legislation, they serve as their errand boys.
Moreover, the corporate control of congress is a microcosm of US
society as a whole. Accordingly, the increasingly corporatized,
ever more submissive people of the US should be termed, the
Whose-Your-Daddy Nation.
Yet, since life does not exist in stasis, within this hierarchy
of deceivers and dupes, we will gnaw at one another's ankles
until the whole pathetic pyramid collapses.
All around us, we can feel the shoddy structure starting to sway
and buckle. Axiomatically, the value of the dollar is collapsing
like the smooth facade of a con man called-out by a group of
wised-up marks. At present, in the wake of the bust in the
housing market, repo men are retracing the tracks of real estate
grifters who fleeced legions of wishful thinkers who brought the
American dream and now only possess the misery of debt slavery.
One would think the time for insurrection has arrived -- that,
at long last, an awakened and enraged public would rise up and
foreclose on these reprobates and ne'er-do-wells squatting in
the White House and skulking through Congress. The power and
privilege of the corporately controlled elite of Washington
should be repossessed like the Lexises of Atlanta real estate
agents and the oversized pickup trucks of Tucson contractors,
confiscated in the wake of the collapse of the housing market.
Foreclosure signs and repossession notices should festoon the
whole of official Washington.
Turn about would be fair play. Since, the rise of Reaganism, the
financial sector has been engaged in selling off the assets of
the nation's public sector to the highest bidders. It is amazing
that, at this point, this klavern of kleptocrats haven't yet
torn from the walls and absconded with all the copper plumbing
fixtures and fittings on Capitol Hill.
Is a turnaround possible?
If we wake-up and smell the jackboot. From the miasma of
right-wing media propaganda, to the proliferation of predatory
capitalism, to the corruption and cupidity of the prison
industrial complex, to the pandemic of police brutality and the
trampling of the rights of the accused, to perennial civilian
shooting sprees, to the muzzling of descent, to the rise of the
national surveillance state, to the use and acceptance of
torture as state policy, to the adoption of an unlawful, immoral
foreign policy doctrine that promotes policies of perpetual war,
one is forced to conclude that bullying, and deferring to
bullies, has become the dominate mode of being in the US.
Remedy: In order to turn this trend around, the people of the US
must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian traits of empathy
and engagement. The gaining of empathy alleviates the
pathological need to be a bully, while social and political
engagement mitigates feelings of powerlessness that
authoritarian bully-boys, such as Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, et
al., exploit.
In short, remedial human lessons for the US population, in
general, and for the corporate and political classes, in
particular.
Let us start the process by having a period of grief and
repentance for the death and suffering that our government, in
our name, has inflicted on the people of Iraq. This should be
done as the US begins the process of a complete military
withdrawal from their decimated nation, and the bestowing of
economic reparations upon the millions of Iraqis who have
suffered under the brutal machinations and murderous mayhem
unloosed by our country's contemptible invasion and occupation.
To do so, might save the people of our next target, Iran (as
well as ourselves) a world of grief.
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
phil@philrockstroh.com
Visit Phil's website,
http://philrockstroh.com/
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