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by Phil Rockstroh
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act".
-George Orwell
"I don't want to be part of your revolution if I can't dance."
-Emma Goldman
Rumsfeld is gone. Mehlman is gone. Delay is gone. Yet -- let's not have our progressives' version of a strutting on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier moment. Because mission has not been accomplished.
 For those who haven't noticed: While we were busy with other concerns, many of our rights and liberties went missing. Moreover, along with them, have went or are going fast: our planet's polar ice caps; accountability of the corporate sector (our nation's true power brokers); as well as, a sense of place, history, and even a cursory understanding, among a large percent of the populace of the US, of the precepts of civilization and of democratic discourse.
These circumstances, like the melting of the polar ice caps, have transpired, incrementally, and have been going on for longer than that Reign of Terror in Tiny Town known as the Bush presidency. For example, regarding the increasingly authoritarian terrain we negotiate our way through daily: In American work places, bosses routinely snoop into underlings' personal e-mails and monitor our web-surfing practices. How did it come about that so many Americans have grown to accept such demeaning intrusions into our privacy?
In such a repressive societal milieu, there is no need to threaten
would-be dissidents with old school totalitarian measures such as
forced deportment to Siberian labor camps. Threats, overt and covert,
to one's economic security and social standing serve to dissuade most
of us from political and social dissent. In the class stratified
structure of the US work force, where the personal consequences borne
of financial upheaval are swift, punitive and severe, the implicit
threat of being deported to America's urban gulag archipelago of
homelessness renders most of us compliant to the exploitive dictates of
corporate oligarchy.
Where did this all begin? How did it all get away from us?
Furthermore -- why do we stand for it -- when these practices are
antithetical to everything we claim to believe in as a nation?
In part, the proto-fascistic transgressions of corporate rule
have made these circumstances all but inevitable, because our concept
of what it means to be a human being has been incrementally defined
downward. There has been much discussion of the dumbing down of
American life. And these assessments are accurate and unnerving. (How
else does one explain that 37% of those Connecticut voters who cast
ballots for Joe Lieberman did so believing he was the peace candidate?)
But there has been little discourse given to the pervasive corporate
blandification of American life -- the manner in which its criteria
both numbs out the personality of an individual and renders the
nation's landscape monotonous and ugly.
The effects of corporatism are insidious. In such an
environment, there is no need for mass rallies replete with bon fires
blazing against the totalitarian darkness: Corporatism establishes an
authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit
threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to
become fearful and cautious -- and, after a time, flattens out one's
inner drives and longings. As a result, a Triumph of the Bland comes to
pass, internally and externally.
Ergo, the oligarchs atop the present order have no need for
reeducation camps nor the ever-vigilant gaze of neighborhood block
captains. We have become our own, ever-vigilant minders; within us, we
have in place vast networks of secret police informers -- our own
personal bully boy enforcers of blandness who leave us as passionless
and empty as the architecture of the corporate nothingscape that
surrounds us.
In addition, corporatism demands employees render themselves
fecklessly pleasant. One doesn't want to be caught being "negative" nor
be accused of the treachery of not being "a team player." Such
accusations bring to an individual a similar decree of ignominy as
being denounced as a counterrevolutionary under the fallen regime of
the former Soviet Union.
Accordingly, despite their midterm election victory, this
problem remains mirrored in the leadership of the Democratic party --
most of whom are the bought and sold products of corporatist rule and,
therefore, have been trained to act with the kind of ersatz public
congeniality demanded of all underlings in the corporate state.
Apropos, the odd combination of fecklessness and smugness they delude
themselves into believing is conducive to steering a course of
"sensible centrism." From refusing to fight stolen elections -- right
up to the present Democratic leadership of congress stating they will
not press for the impeachment of the most corrupt president in the
history of the republic -- we bear constant witness to it.
In this regard, it's very considerate of congressional
Republicans who, in synergy with the Bush cartel, perpetrated one of
the most vicious, vindictive and exclusionary reigns in congressional
history to now want to play nice and "reconcile." It's very magnanimous
of them to forgive us leftists for being right on all fronts -- and
generous of them to forgive the majority of their Democratic peers in
congress for cowering before them, day in and day out, for the past
four years of one party rule.
Moreover, it was we leftist outsiders -- not reasonable,
accommodating liberals -- who were right about the disastrous
consequences that would befall an invasion of Iraq; as we were and
remain right in our revulsion to the fascistic fraud that is the
Patriot Act and the War on Terror.
This is the reason we're not let into the closed club of
mainstream punditry. Although, to avoid being cruel, such an event
might prove to be unfair to the slow children therein. We'd be hurling
our ninety mile-an-hour, progressive fast balls past them -- while
they're playing tee-ball ... Only the insularity inherent to a life of
privilege can render folks as outright slow to the realities of the
outside world as evinced by our present day pundit class. Is it any
wonder they've enabled Duyba for so long. He's on their tee-ball team.
The little Beltway Oligarchs.
In short, mainstream Democrats and self-proclaimed centrist
pundits have adapted the mandatory mode of being that is demanded of
corporate underlings: self-annihilation by habitual amiability. It
remains to be seen whether this habit can be broken or modified. I have
my doubts.
Yet, one aspect of election day 2006 was indisputably
salubrious for us -- the powerless rabble crushed beneath the corporate
class: Owing to the fact, that, at least, for one day, the act of
voting served to pry our sagging asses off our sofas and out of our
office cubicles -- and into the soul-reviving vastness of life.
And this point gets to the heartless center of the tragedy of
corporate hegemony: The manner in which the system's monomaniacal drive
for excessive profits and the habitual consumerism mandatory to sustain
it serves to usurp our essential longings and passions. The absence, in
contemporary life, of (non virtual) public space, wherein human to
human discourse can flourish has created the social conditions inherent
to the rise and pernicious influence of anti-democratic institutions
such as so-called megachurches. This loss of communal connection, in
confluence with consumerism and the influences of American Puritanism
and Calvinism, has wrought, within the US populace, a desperate longing
for group involvement -- even for those ecstatic states involving the
immersion of one's rational mind found within the excesses of a
totalitarian mob.
Likewise, the phenomenon plays into the pernicious sin/shame
continuum, psychologically, at the root of the present genus of
Protestant fundamentalism arising from the toxic soil of the corporate
state.
Huge, corrupt and bloated out, like Elvis in his final years,
this is how religions die. As was the case with Elvis, Christian
Fundamentalists believe they're bigger than ever, but the course
they've taken begets self-destructive behavior: Given the fact that
being a consummate consumer/religious zealot implicitly demands one be
prone to excess (from their enormous, Graceland-gaudy churches to their
over-the-top myths of world-wide, time-ending wars) -- a scenario plays
out, time and time again -- whereby a Saved*Mart devotee breaches the
rigid moral code of the group, then, overwhelmed by shame must submit
and surrender to public confession and other exhibitionistic displays
of phony redemption.
Within this paradoxical dynamic, the
corporate/consumer/quasi-theocratic state compels one to live
excessively, yet, simultaneously, dictates one suppress one's lusts and
passions, hence creating an unbridgeable psychological splitting
process. As a consequence, many are bound to stray into the realm of
the forbidden (because almost everything is forbidden) and with this
comes the aforementioned need for a come-to-Jesus repentance.
Conveniently, the whole sick symmetry serves as a means by which the
individual can be controlled by the unscrupulous personalities at the
head of fundamentalist organizations -- who play Colonel Tom Parker to
the hapless flock's Elvis.
These ruthless phonies, in combination with the cunning
apparatchik of the UberCulture, have become adroit at controlling any
untidy outbursts of freedom of expression that might threaten their
cultural hegemony. They have far too much at stake -- too much money
and power might be lost, if freedom's voice were to be heard
unfettered; hence, they serve up the spurious ecstatic states proffered
by both pop culture and megachurch hucksterism.
These are the regions of the national soul we on the left must
reclaim. Traditionally, music has aided progressives in the struggle.
Accordingly, Woody Guthrie believed all songs are political. Songs take
up residence in our hearts and in the non-verbal areas of our minds
where we harbor our deepest longings. There, they inform our
perceptions of the world. It is this sublime terrain, existing beyond
the material, that progressives have abandoned to the frauds and
flimflammers.
Lost, in our retreat, has been our affinity with the spirit of
defiant longing for release from hard labor beneath the unforgiving
Mississippi sun that found voice in the late night, crossroads barroom
freedom of Delta Blues -- or the likes of our finding refuge from the
dehumanizing, daylight demands of mid-twentieth century, industrial,
urban existence in the midnight transcendence of Bebop and Free Jazz.
Also missing has been an atmosphere (cultural and personal) of creative
risk and abandon, whereby Jimi Hendrix would conjure and fuse the urban
and rural spirits of Robert Johnson and John Coltrane, plus toss some
Malcolm X into the mix -- and, a short time later and further down a
southbound road, Duane Allman would resurrect a redneck hippie, guitar
Jesus who fed the post-honkey tonk multitudes Orange Sunshine as he
delivered an electric guitar Sermon On The Georgia Red Dirt Mount
fusing the spirits of Tim Leary, Martin Luther King, and the Carter
Family. Then, a few years later, across the gray Atlantic, the Sex
Pistols would howl like Post-Industrial Age demons, trapped within the
detritus of the crumbling British Empire ... much like, nearly a decade
and a half later, Kurt Cobain would have his short, Icarian flight
across the flaming-out sun of the American Empire.
In addition, the realm of sexuality has been claimed and
exploited by moralizing hypocrites and opportunists. Hence, it's high
time, we progressives ceased to be such priggish ninnies -- and
challenged the Puritan/Calvinistic delusion that the worst aspects of
sinfulness can be traced to the fleshy themeparks of the human
genitals. It's time we addressed and confronted the (mundane but far
more deadly) sin of obliviousness to the larger world existing beyond
one's immediate shallow, self-serving needs, concerns, and compulsions
-- the outright careless disregard of anything on this living earth
that does not serve the cravings of a culture overrun by overgrown
infant tyrants dropped from the poisonous womb of corporatism.
Possibly, in this light, the words sin and sinners are too loaded with
cretinous religious connotations and, accordingly, their meanings
should be reinterpreted more along the lines of "self-centered
fuck-ups."
In order to bring freedom and its full range of ecstasies and
excesses back to American life, we must not only wrest back ecstatic
states from the bible-brandishing, brown shirt-prone class -- but the
very definition of what constitutes spirituality, passion and sin as
well. We’re not talking about so-called blue states or red states here
-- but states of inspiration. Very few folks are ever moved to change
their lives by the promulgating of wonky statistics or even well
reasoned arguments. That's not how human beings are made up -- Praise
be! -- to the happenstance of evolutionary grace.
In conclusion, we must strive to live with the same degree of
passion and fervor as fundamentalist Christian preachers do -- when
they're seeking out converts and hookers.
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