"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.
There's a well-know
witticism from the 1980s about Ronald Reagan that played-off a ubiquitous
television commercial of the time that went, "Ronald Reagan is not the
president: He just plays one on TV." A similar trope can be said of the
present day United States. We're no longer an empire: We just resemble one on
TV.
How did it come to
be that our ability to apprehend reality is in such short supply at a time when
the consequences of such dangerous folly will prove so tragic and lasting?
At times, in equal
degree to the enormity of a given situation, there will come to exist an equal
degree of denial. If you ever have the desire for a bit of solitude, when attending
a social function, try this. Drop the small talk and utter something along the
lines of: "Our actions are causing ongoing and exponentially increasing
upheaval in the earth's ecosystem, due to the effects of global warming."
Or: "Did you know that the earth's oceans and seas will be all but devoid
of life in 50 years?" Then there's the always reliable: "Because of
our national dependency on the crack-house economics of a system based on a
need for an ever-increasing squandering of our planets finite resources
(maintained by a cross addiction to a global marketplace sustained by
petroleum) -- all of which has been inflicted on the planet by a class of
hyper-rich, psychotic death monkeys -- you have no more control over your fate
than some scrawny, brown-skinned feller strapped to a torture table at
Guant�namo."
As stated, if you
give it a go, you'll be afforded an abundance of personal space. Such
utterances have the terrible disadvantage of being the truth; as such, they're
guaranteed room-clearers. The largest social faux pas of all, in the
contemporary US, might be to remind a person of his/her powerlessness.
Understandably, we
avoid the knowledge of those things that inflict upon us the feelings of
powerlessness we experience when secured in a dentist's chair. In such
circumstances, the only question we're concerned with is: Will there be enough
anesthetizing agents available to numb out the anxiety and pain? Perhaps, this
is what underpins the reason we have become a people who've grown incurious of the
larger world around us to the point of becoming all but insensate: We need the
equivalent of a root canal on a global-wide basis. Worse, the drilling must
start at the epicenter of the decay, right here in the United States.
Accordingly, there
are a few facts it is imperative we face, immediately and unmedicated. Among
them: The changes to the earth ecosystem wrought by global warming are neither
a political opinion nor are the acts of a wrathful god in heaven, but are a
dynamic of nature set in motion by our actions -- and are wholly indifferent to
the fate of mankind.
The capitalist's drive for endless abundance has allowed us
to ascend the fast food chain, yet we blink uncomprehendingly at the
catastrophic algorithms of global climate change. We -- the progeny of global
corporatism -- in regard to our acknowledgment of the dire events and pressing
issues of our time, our sense of collective narrative is, for all practical
purposes, about as keen as that of the creatures of the Cretaceous Period in regard
to their understanding of the earth-altering implications of planetary
collisions with comets. The size of our denial is as enormous as the body of a
Brachiosaurus and our response to the dire situation has been about as adequate
as if we were using its walnut-sized brain.
Furthermore, we are
the comet. We are both the threatened, dominate species -- as well as the comet
of destruction that will end this Empire of Endless Burgers and Ceaseless
Bullshit. Our delusions of the sustainability of ever-expanding market-based
economies, wholly dependent upon a never wavering abundance of resources, has
rendered us as inflexible as the dinosaurs were before a global-wide,
sky-occluding dust cloud. We're devouring the life-sustaining resources of the
earth as if it were a bag of Doritos. Our empty appetites, engendered by global
corporatism and its reliance on fossil fuels, is leveling an effect upon our
world tantamount to a slow motion collision with a comet . . . To survive, we
must curb our appetite for this everyday menu of death -- for these Valueless
Meals comprised of the empty calories of comforting lies proffered by the
corporate state.
The present
paradigm must (and will) collapse: Rising gross national products, imaginative
ad campaigns and faith in some mythological being returning from the sky will
not cause the earth's rising oceans to recede nor its melting Polar ice caps to
reconstitute. Our advertising and public relations evangelists here in the
Empire of Endless Burgers cannot convert the forces of extinction to
marketplace pieties with new advertising slogans. Our redeemer gods of product
placement cannot provide our dying culture with longer shelf life. Belief in
these gods of the mall and empyrean may have banished doubt and diffidence -- yet
these myths cannot shelter us from the anonymous fury of the exponential
mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic runaway.
All in all, our
belief in economic providence has proven our undoing -- our insistence on its
very existence left us mistaking a full stomach for a leveling portion of
divine grace. Our gods of commerce offered drive-thru-window epiphanies. We
believed our prayers would always be answered: Instantly came the high priests
of the consumer state's homilies of perpetual gratification, their voices
crackling like a burning bush from the drive-thru order-box.
But now, overcooked
in arrogance and oil, the Empire of Endless Burgers is char: Stick a fork in it
-- it's overdone.
As our delusions
bake to ash, what shall we cry into the gathering darkness? Can our pleas be
heard over the thunderous machinery of the encompassing void?
What if the
realization came that our most sacrosanct beliefs -- both economic and
epistemological -- were but a musky collection of antiquated myths? To survive,
our blind faith-based suppositions must not be flattered by political
opportunists (I'm looking at you, Hillary and Obama) -- but allowed to rot into
compost, then buried. Because deep down, we already realize our allegiances to
the imaginary gods and saviors of long dead, desert tribalists not only blind
us to the dangers at hand but, in large measure, helped to contribute to our
troubles in the first place. Ergo, it's a fact that Jesus will not descend and
heal the earth's dying seas. We might as well hold out for Little Folk, adorned
with gossamer wings, to appear from the gnome-haunted air and sprinkle Fairy
Dust upon it.
Furthermore, there
are no Chosen People -- nor does there exist an Omnipotent Sky Daddy above who
could give a rodent's rectum about the oil-soaked real estate of the Middle
East, nor any other plot of disputed ground on this cosmological backwater of a
planet.
It's time to wake
up and smell the mythology. God has no will. God has no more of a plan than a
tree has a financial portfolio. God does not say, "God bless you."
Your life is not an eternal sneeze in need of a perpetual gesundheit. And there
never was a character who rose from this sin-sullied earth and took up
residence in the starry filament named Jesus Christ -- who will love you no
matter how big of an asshole you are: That's the job of your dog.
Perhaps such shocks
to the system might rouse us from that narcissistic swoon called "my
faith," might shatter our perennial delusions that God desires for us to
conquer and kill in his name, and might deliver us to the true Promised Land --
the one that exists just beyond the limited sight-line of our systems of
belief.
And might banish
the empty mythos of instant gratification -- the guiding god of global
capitalism -- which is the force (in a toxic, paradoxical mixture with sexual
repression) that begot the fantasies of contemporary Christian Fundamentalism.
In essence, what is the Christian fundamentalist belief in the so-called End
Time, but a worldview that reduces mythic reality to channel surfing? One
moment you're watching the Armageddon Channel, then you click the remote and
you're in eternal RaptureLand. Then you click over to the Fundie Porn Channel
to view fantasies involving the instantaneous shedding of your clothes, next
you're being ejaculated from your body to engage in a celestial orgy with Jesus
-- whereas all of life on earth climaxes with a cosmic money shot involving you
and your fellow Christian's immortal souls being splattered upon the face of
God.
If it were possible
for their myths to be made manifest and Christ did return, not only would he
make a War on Christmas, but on the death-lusting delusions of Christianity
itself.
What can lead
people to such belief systems? To understand, one must look at the poetic
metaphors that are literalized into religious faith.
Place, landscape,
situation, and the mythos of its people are inextricably bound. When I was a
child, growing up in the Deep South, on the occasion of fishing expeditions and
such, I would have contact with rural African American farmers who still lived
by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century. We would sit on wooden
porches, snapping string beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.
Like their life-sustaining crops, the figure of Christ was born of humble
beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of
maturity, was cut down, sacrificed to sustain their lives, then, like the
figure of Christ, resurrected as next year's seed crop. These tales held
resonance for them because they were suffused with a metaphoric analog of the
criteria that they lived everyday; the metaphors resounded with the verities of
place and circumstance. Hence, Jesus was as real to them as the snap beans
beneath their fingertips.
And this is why
megachurch Christians and present day conservatives long for the release of
death. When passion, intimacy and hope are thwarted by pervasive feelings of
powerlessness, people will long for release into paradise. Life lived under corporate
hegemony is a cage -- one that distorts the human animal's instinctual longing
for love, communal acceptance and freedom by providing commercial facsimiles of
those things -- and, as a result, delivers the human animal to economic
imprisonment. The bars of the cage might be invisible, yet the sense of
confinement is palpable across our utterly commodified culture, where, like
convicts in the cell, longing for release, Christian fundies long for the
aforementioned carnal video game of RaptureLand, while consumers, confined in
their work stations and shackled by debt, long for vacations, enormous motor
vehicles, porn, and, paradoxically, yet more imprisoning consumer goods . . . as
George W. Bush longs for his own idealized reflection to be mirrored by the
judgment of history.
And we, to
paraphrase a Bob Dylan song, shall be released, just not in the manner in which
we pine. As recent history has shown, insularity is a chaos generator; closed
systems decay at exponentially increasing rates . . . Hubris brings the fall . .
. Sometimes, as a means of escaping the confinement of one's own
life-diminishing, self-proclaimed "morality," an individual (or even
a culture) will court destruction. (You may insert the name of the disgraced,
hypocritical Christian moralist of the moment here.)
Carl Jung asked the
question: Why would the story line of the Christian myth of Christ place the
birth of the savior of the vast cosmos in the remote hinterlands of the ruling
Roman empire, plus have that divine birth take place in the hinterlands of
those hinterlands, plus have the birth take place on the floor of a barn, no
less, amid the animal shit? Jung answered that the human ego, as is the case
with an overgrown, corrupt empire, will cast out what it cannot exploit and subdue.
This is why every
age presents us with an imperial occupation of the mind. Yet, in our era, the
stakes could not be higher. From the deathscape we've made of the city of
Baghdad, to the dying oceans of the earth, beneath our arrogance and carelessness
lies a culture in suicidal despair. Contemporary Christians may call it faith,
neocons may call it freedom, and corporatist might call it market values, but
it smells like death.
There are occasions
when all other means have failed and circumstances have grown so desperate that
one, against all habit and will, is driven to face the truth. Where I was
raised such a situation is called a "come-to-Jesus moment."
Paradoxically, the come-to-Jesus moment we must embrace is: There is no Jesus
to come to, only a host of unnerving facts we have banished to the hinterlands
of our minds. There will be no star blazing in the eastern sky to guide us; no
divine child vouchsafed in a boondocks manger to genuflect before. All we can
hope to gain is the opportunity for renewal that flickers to life from ending
the long, forced exile of truth.
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.