-Caveat Lector-
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Sent: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:16 AM
Subject: Victory of the Bland
To Hell with Centrism: We Must Reclaim the Edge by Phil Rockstroh
November 15, 2006 http://www.opednews.com
"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 y!
ears 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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