When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside-down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

There is no reality-based argument denying this: The present system, as defined by the neoliberal economic order, is as destructive to the balance of nature as it is to the individual, both body and psyche. One’s body grows obese while Arctic ice and wetlands shrink. Biodiversity decreases as psyches are commodified by ever-proliferating, corporatist/consumer state banality.

But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.

When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it.

— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark

What “tangible” and “constructive” things can a poetic sensibility contribute to everyday existence? Here’s one: The atomized denizens of neoliberal culture are in dire need of a novel yet durable sensibility, one bearing the creativity and stamina required, for example, to withstand the police state rebuffs inflicted by the ruthless authoritarian keepers of the present order…as is the case when OWS dissidents initiate attempts to retake, inhabit, and re-imagine public space.

Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.

The crackpot realist’s notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one’s existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the 1%.

Resultantly, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in lofty but content-devoid Obama speechifying and the clown car demolition derby of Republican politics) spends its days in a broken tower of the mind, insulated from this reality: The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, ecocide) created by the excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to theirs foundations, and, will inevitably caused the structures to totter and collapse.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals…And I, their sexton slave!

– Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower

We have been “sexton slave” to this destructive order long enough; its lodestar is a death star.

In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.

Often we’re not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us.

— Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O’Donnahey)

In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring “concrete” answers to polite dialog–I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege?

Carl Jung averred, when a disconnect occurs between the inner life of the individual and the outward exigencies of daily life that “the Gods […] become diseases.” One way, this assertion can be taken is: There are multiple forces, tangible and intangible, in play in our lives and the trajectory of events; e.g., the personal, in the form of the ghosts of trauma that haunt individual memory, but there exist, as well, extant and within, the collective spirit of an age. Tragically, in our own time, within the precincts of power, our national house of spirits has become a madhouse.

Yet beneath the gibbering cacophony of the insane asylums of past eras, beneath the haze of pharmacologically induced stupors of the institutions of the present, there exists much pain. This is the toll taken by a manic flight from honest suffering. At present, this is what we’re given in our age of cultural and political disconnect and its attendant sense of nebulous dread.

Paradoxically, while the forces of nature are impersonal, the dilemma feels very personal. Therefore, on this journey to the end of empire, when impersonal elements are in play, one can become alienated from the dehumanizing trajectory of the times. Likewise, as exemplified by the U.S. political system, what process is more impersonal than the process of decay? Apropos, the air is permeated with a reek of putrefaction.

Yet the earth is kind, for one can use putrescent material in the process of renewal. The loam of earth is enriched by the rancid…just don’t swallow it down whole…doing so, will cause you to become ill.

Importantly, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed “soul-making”. Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire…is a loss of collective soul; e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth’s enveloping soil…to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.

As circumstances stand, at present, for the 1%, their refusal to accept the inevitable has yielded grave ramifications for the people, fauna, and flora of the planet. Although, due to their seemingly vacuum-sealed insularity, ensured by vast wealth, the economic and political elite have yet to be touched by the consequences of their actions, much less forced down to earth.

Of course, this behavior defies logic, is in breach of the law, and is an affront to any workable code of ethics–as well as stands in defiance to the laws of nature, including the force of gravity. But you can count on this, “the unseen hand of the market” (actually the buckling backs of the 1%) can’t hold up the 99%’s swaying tower of hubris for much longer, and when it comes down, stand clear, for there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles.

“That’s just the way it is.”

As exhibited by the often bland, “normal” outward appearance of a serial killer, when the apologists and operatives of an exploitive, destructive system appear to be reasonable, they can go about their business without creating general alarm. By the same token, while many present day Republicans are zealots–barnburners raving into the flames of the conflagrations created by the militarist/national security/police/prison industrial state–Barack Obama and the Democratic Party serve as normalizers of the pathologies of late empire.

In this manner, atrocious acts can be committed by the state, with increasing frequency, because, over the passage of time, such outrages will have been allowed to pass into the realm of the mundane, and are thus bestowed with a patina of acceptability.

In nineteenth century Britain, the sugar that sweetened the tea of oh-so civilized, afternoon teatime was harvested by brutalized, Caribbean slaves, who rarely lived past the age of thirty, as, for example, in our time, in our blood-wrought moments of normalcy, we trudge about in sweatshop sewn clothing, brandishing i-Phones manufactured by factory enslaved teenage girls who are forced to work 14 hour plus shifts.

“That’s just the way it is” might be one of the most soul-defying phrases in the human lexicon.

Contrast this with the OSW slogan, “The beginning is near.” Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.

Yet Newt Gingrich’s booty calls are forgivable. Stones shall not be cast. His transgressions humanize him and the balms of forgiveness of Christian believers rising from this sin-buffeted earth cause the Baby Jesus to coo into the dawn of a coming golden age.

When Bush/Cheney sat at the helm of empire and plundered foreign lands and breached the rule of law, Democratic partisans insisted that constitutional order be reestablished by having Bush et al marched in shackles from the halls of power. To do anything short of this was to risk the foundation of the republic being crushed to rubble and silt beneath the boot of tyranny.

Yet, we critics of duopoly are accused of being impractical sorts who don’t dwell in this world, the world of the possible. Although, it seems that political partisans give themselves permission to dwell, simultaneously, in two worlds: This one, as well as a Bizarro World — the parallel universe limned in comic books — where all things are done in reverse, where true is false and false is true, as well as, apparently, a realm where Newt Gingrich is a shining standard bearer of moral rectitude and a defender of faith and family and President Obama is a protector of constitutional law and a friend of the downtrodden.

According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77% of the citizens of the U.S. expressed the belief that the massive power imbalance in place in the nation is a direct result of the vast wealth inequity between the 1% and the 99%. In addition, according to a poll by Time Magazine, 86% of Americans held the conviction that Wall Street and its lobbyists exert undue influence over the U.S. political class.

Still, both major U.S. political parties remain unmoved by the opinions of their constituents and unresponsive to their needs. By having the right to vote under present day, political duopoly, one is granted the right to co-sign the ongoing fraud that the nation is a democratic republic. To vote for either a Democratic or Republican candidate (i.e., the well vetted stooges of the 1%) is to cast a vote in favor of the only political party allowed in the rigged process — The Big Money, Perpetual War Party.

Believing that replacing one of these candidates with the other…is in any way propitious is analogous to believing that the hanging of new wallpaper within a house with a rotted-out foundation constitutes renovating the structure.

Memo to those who cling to the hope you can change the order of a calcified system from within;  e.g., the U.S. political, corporate and governmental order:

What has caused you to believe you can change the insatiable appetite of a mindless beast from within the belly of said leviathan? Seemingly, your predicament presents you with these alternatives: 1) paste up some soothing wallpaper. 2) Learn to play the xylophone on its ribcage (i.e., turn your powerlessness into the stuff of art). 3) Light a fire and have the creature vomit you to freedom. Otherwise, you’re going to be digested; you will lose your mind and body to the dehumanizing system and become part of its monstrous form.

As they embody the Spiritus Mundi of empire’s end, Obama builds towering monuments of verbiage into empty air while Mitt Romney bores the soul of liberty into a soporific state, causing her to sleepwalk into a bottomless abyss of bland.

Obama and Romney manage to hide the malevolent, hungry ghost of empire behind a veneer of soul-defying, daylight normalcy. But Newt Gingrich’s bloated carcass displays imperium’s murderous id. What has become of the diminishing resources of the world? Newt grows ever fatter and more grotesque as he greedily devours these things. What terrible fate befell the U.S. constitution? Newt dry humped it to dust.

Regarding the mindset, libido, and modus operandi of the 1%: We are confronted with types who would clearcut the last tree standing in the last forest on earth to render down to toothpicks used to pick scraps of flesh from the teeth of the members of their class who just dined on the last Bird of Paradise.

To resist, we, as individuals and en masse, are advised to mitigate our sense of powerlessness by occupying our own libido, thereby allowing oneself to be drawn into the élan vital of the world…to ride the zeitgeist, embodying the eros of resistance and renewal, and, in so doing, refusing to defer to the corrupt-beyond-redemption machinations of the U.S. political and big media classes.

Ask yourself and those around you Rainer Maria Rilke’s deceptively simple question: How shall I spend my days?

To appropriate Cornell West’s phrase, launch yourself into the midst of “the funk of life” by means of the gritty sublime of cultural eros…This act is a marriage of earthly complaint and winged aspiration — both a lamentation and goof take — a conversation/a collaboration/a spirited debate between what has been lost to indifference, exploitation, and cupidity — and the insistent eros of the breathing moment — a commitment to occupy life’s restive pantheon of purpose and decay.

Show your face to the world. Occupy libido by acts large and small, public and private.

Conversely, in what way is it attractive, healthy, or even interesting to willingly submit to the dictates of a culture that has conjured from the zeitgeist the likes of Gingrich — a high chair tyrant of the lowest order — a grotesque man-brat banging on the sides of his elevated seat, insisting that all the things of the world he sees are, “MINE!”

Why did the zeitgeist regurgitate Gingrich into our midst? Newt embodies the misappropriated libido and attendant, oceanic sense of entitlement of the corporate consumer state; i.e., modes of being conjured by the dark magicians of advertising and finance to enslave the 99%, as, all the while, the system’s rapacious verities and doomed vectors serve as the lodestar and raison d’être of the 1%.

Eric Hoffer advised, “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.”

William Butler Yeats, on the subject of being overwhelmed by abundance:

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

– excerpt: Sailing to Byzantium

One’s character is forged amid this agon of excess and restraint; e.g., of discerning the difference between the habitual excesses of consumer addiction and the callings of one’s character; life lessons that are arrested by the shallow compulsions and time-sucking demands of the current neoliberal order.

As things stand, there exists no panacea to prevent this dilemma. Yet the messy, learning process known as creative resistance will suffice; i.e., a type of endeavor similar to an artist’s approach to his craft, involving his working with the materials at hand…At present, those materials being: you–your longings, your inspiration, your aspirations, your defeats, your mindful refusal to accept the diminished and demeaning status quo, and, of course, the found material of the status quo itself.

As revealed by the deeds of OWS, promoting a dialog between individual and cultural forces leaves one receptive to the transformation that unfolds when enjoined in the conversation of the times. Don’t allow the soul of discourse to be dominated by the half-mad, hungry ghosts possessing empire’s end.

Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, if only for a moment … What was at first the man’s obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself … [Resistance] lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel–therefore we exist.

— Albert Camus

The notion of even possessing a preference as to whom should be president of this crumbling, faux republic is a bit like asking what color uniform one would prefer that the crew tasked with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic should don as they go about their duties.

In times such as these, when escaping into one’s comfort zone is no longer a viable option, one is advised to evince the audacity of hopelessness, because the act leaves one desperate enough to embrace this daunting proposition:

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32

Although, for the present and foreseeable future, the propitious aspects of the sentiment will not hold true for Bradley Manning…whose plight displays the punitive, hyper-authoritarian nature of late U.S. empire. As is the case with Manning, in a national security state, few acts will cause one to lose his freedom in a more rapid manner than to reveal the secrets of lawless, ruthless power.

Apparently, Bradley Manning guarded secrets of his own–not shameful ones–but traits that would cause him to become subject to derision if revealed.

Manning desired to practice transvestism. This U.S. Army private was privy to illusion. Innately, he grasped how being coerced into suppressing one’s secrets damages one’s soul. Manning merely harbored the desire to practice a bit of gender bending; in contrast, the operatives of empire demand that they be allowed to bend and twist the world itself towards their exploitative ends.

To live in empire–in the service of its imperial military or in the thrall of the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumerist compulsions–is to live a selfish lie, day in and day out.

Rupaul (Andre Charles) averred, “We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag.”

We all make choices as to what form of drag we practice. Does my lie promote the truth? Is my act educational, entertaining or edifying? Does it allow me to inhabit my true self yet transcend my narcissism? Does my act and attendant actions bring balm or does it deliver more suffering than necessary to a world where it is impossible to escape suffering?

Ask yourself and those around you these questions in regard to Private Manning and the operatives and denizens of U.S. Empire.

On the subject of identity, authentic or dubious: Even after being an almost constant public presence for more than half a decade, Barack Obama’s true nature and authentic identity remains elusive. After all this time, he still seems less man than marketing rollout, less of a political leader than an object lesson in product placement. The situation is like having the role of chief executive of the nation filled with a disposable razor or a heavily hyped iPhone application.

The U.S. presidency, as is the case with almost all aspects of life in the corporate consumer state, has become increasingly dominated and defined by commercial/public relations-type legerdemain. The constant commercial come-ons of the media hologram mask its hollow core; the proliferation of weightless lies serves to overwhelm the gravity of perilous times.

Obama’s nebulous nature works to ensure the continued irrational ardor of his supporters, who, against all evidence, insist on clinging to fantasy and projection regarding the president’s much in evidence anti-democratic tendencies; hence, progressive types seem prone to project their own redeeming qualities on the blank slate that Obama creates and deploys as his public persona–a method similar to that used by con artists who exploit the decency of their marks to achieve their criminal ends.

Apropos, this indefensible, Bush-era type of deceit connecting 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq:

“The war in Iraq will soon belong to history. Your service belongs to the ages. Never forget that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.”— President Obama speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., December 14, 2011

In this instance, the shape-shifter Obama morphs from hollow man to Death’s slick, narrow-ass, public relations representative.

I’ve noticed that debates with Obama’s apologists have a very similar trajectory as those with Republican partisans. Because partisans are hard pressed to explain away the affronts to truthful discourse and good governance displayed by the politicians they support, any attempt to engage them in debate involving the merits (or lack thereof) of the policies of said politicians (e.g., their unwavering support of the 1% and U.S. militarist imperium)–quickly devolves into volleys of ad hominem attacks launched from the ranks of their supporters.

For example, from the right, OWS activists are labeled dirty, America-hatin’ hippies who supports swarthy terrorists, yet from the liberal camp, OWSers who refuse cooperation with the Democratic Party are cast as purer-than-thou types–too above it all to sully themselves by an acceptance of the pragmatic nature of political reality.

What is the reason for this irrational response from liberals–from folks who scoff at tea partyers and religious fundamentalists for their less than sane and sanguine approach to political discourse? There is simply no reasonable way to defend the acts of our blood-sustained empire abroad and the machinations of a predatory economic elite at home; hence, the testiness evinced by the enablers of the duopolistic state.

Withal, when I post an article or FaceBook status critical of President Obama–the tone and tenure of the ensuing debate with his defenders takes on a Bush era aura. As a general rule, when the rationalizations of both Bush and Obama supporters are countered with facts regarding their dismal governance, the invectives fly. Granted, the grammar and syntax of Obama apologists is superior to that of Republican loyalists–but their fallacy arguments are every bit as dodgy.

Consequently, the policies of both parties (bulwarked by the concretized support of partisans) translate into unnecessary suffering and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of the oligarchic/imperialist state. And sorry, Obama loyalists–your man is not the lesser-of-two evils candidate: He is among his peers. In many ways, he has proven himself a more deceitful, ruthless crime boss than his predatory, Republican predecessors, in other words, the chief executive of a militarist empire.

The 1% and their advocates and operatives in the U.S. political class have thrown us to the wolves. How does one make an ally of uncertainty and keep close the verities of the heart while negotiating this howling political wilderness?

Even in this era of oversized fear and diminished imagination, there are some among us–nonconformists, creative thinkers, artists and occupiers–who welcome (rather than cower before) the metaphorical image of wolves (that are recognized as fellow outcasts). Instead of being shamed by outsider status, they have been suckled and raised by wolves–i.e., by embracing their fate of having been cast-out into the wilderness.

Nourished by the spirit of defiance, some thrive when freed from the constraints of a habitual adherence to groupthink. The dark terrain of societal abandonment becomes their natural habitat: They howl at the moon; they reject the daylight world of bland consensus; they learn to see in the dark, apprehending their own interior darkness and, as a result, gaining understanding into the hearts of darkness beating within those in power.

The wilderness of political activism, of poetry, of art becomes their home: They don’t clean-up nicely for the polite company demanded by political duopoly; they don’t let themselves be bred down (as a few domesticated wolves did) to yapping Toy Poodles, in exchange for a few food scraps.

When you’re looking at a Toy Poodle–you’re looking at a former wolf, as, for example, when your looking at corporate press members, you’re looking at folks whose ancestors long ago were journalists.

One moment, you’re loping through the woods, snout held high, smelling the scent of fresh game on the wind, but the next thing you know–you’re being led around on a leash and collar, encrusted with tacky rhinestones, and you’re salivating at the sound of an electric can-opener. One moment, you’re a child, entranced in play, hardwired to eternity–next moment, you’re sitting at work and your passions, hopes and yearnings have been shrunk down to Toy Poodle-sized agendas . . . You’re truckling for your boss’s approval; you’re counting the minutes until break time. Like domesticated livestock and unfortunate animals incarcerated in zoos, you are no longer a noble animal–you have become a Thing That Waits For Lunch.

To resist, we must cast off the fear of being an outcast. The signs bode well for us: Over the last few months, in the company of the OWS pack, I have witnessed the awakening of many…have been graced with the privilege of being in their lupine company as we howled defiant into the darkness of the corporate state night.

One must remember this: We human beings are of nature as well. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, our authentic nature will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake the lost landscape of our collective humanity, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, imperium-countenancing, sick puppies.

“I can’t go on; I go on.” — Samuel Beckett

All alive are tasked with the challenge of, not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one’s own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression.

As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of “big government”; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex. The “big government” narrative is a misdirection campaign — a smoke screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of every day life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1% who own and operate it will allow it to be.

Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur. Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings — by occupations, by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.

Yet, this will be an organic process… unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.

The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised…was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide. Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st century version of company town despotism; e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion.

This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state’s 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are “living the dream”. As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.

That’s right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom…They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers. Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters.

Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire…as far as empires go.

To the contrary, the nation’s post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled deathscapes abroad, corrupted the society’s elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population. From the soulless, dehumanizing nothingscapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douchescapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire’s legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.

And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.

Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies. In the age of corporate state dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits — elitist bully boys and gals — i.e., the bigot whispers of the right — continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments.

In turn, little bullies, out in the U.S. spleenland, rendered resentful and mean of spirit by the incessant humiliation leveled by a class-stratified, exploitive economic system take up these self-defeating talking points that serve the 1%. Accordingly, when, for example, participants in the OWS movement question the present social and economic structure, these downscale denizens of oligarchic rule personalize the critique; their identification with the system is so complete that they feel as though they have been attacked on a personal basis.

As a consequence, all too often their defenses are raised and they return volleys of ad hominem attacks that serve to defend a status quo that demeans them. This psychological phenomenon could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) — a pathology suffered by personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who endeavor to remedy the wounding and humiliation inflicted by a brutal, degrading order by identification with their oppressors.

To wit, the lack of outrage exhibited by the general public regarding the nations trudge toward a police/national security state. For example, the lack of deference displayed by city officials and local police forces regarding the First Amendment rights of OWS participants.

First off, let’s clear the pepper spray-fogged air on the matter: The vast majority of rank and file police officers do not now and, most likely, never will view themselves as part of the 99%. Simply stated, police officers identify with their fellow cops. The vocation, by its institutionalized, militaristic, tribal nature, creates a wall of separation between its insider members and outsiders; i.e., the civilian population at large.

It is an act of self-deception to insist that rank and file police officers, the so-called blue shirts, might even be tacit supporters of the 99% movement.

Good luck with that. But don’t be surprised if your entreaties are answered in the form of concentrated mists of pepper spray. In fact, as of late, that is exactly the reply we have received from the police, many times over.

Most police officers do not much identify with civilians. They harbor fealty to their careers and are indoctrinated to evince unquestioning loyalty to the department. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse:

“Because the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same” — from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”.

On a cultural basis, after years of hyper-authoritarian indoctrination by mass media sources and political influences, few, among the general public and in the political realm, seem willing to demand openness and accountability from law enforcement organizations. All too often, police (and U.S. soldiers as well) are viewed by a large percent of the general public as selfless heroes, noble souls, protecting life and liberty. And no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, this image holds.

How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers — grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state sanctioned violence and oppression — are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?

How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation…deserving of the violence inflicted upon them?

Let’s have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.

Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public’s right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, “Don’t get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don’t want any people coming that close to me.”

In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X influenced stance of “by any means necessary”, the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody — or worse.

At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world. Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.

These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage. In general, the middle class can be counted on to detest the poor…blaming those born devoid of societal advantage and political influence for the impoverished circumstances that were in place long before the happenstance of their birth. Moreover, in a bit of noxious casuistry, as despicable as it is delusional, all too many members of the middle class have been induced by grift artists, employed by the ruling elite, to blame their own declining social status and attendant beleaguered existence on the poor.

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” — John Donne

This has proven to be an effective, time-tested grift: Because as long as the animus of the middle class remains fixated on the poor, the criminal cartels known as the economic elite can continue to ply their trade. Of course, in reality, by their greed and complicity, what the middle class has gained is this: trustee status in the capitalist workhouse.

Although, there is no need to fret: The run of neoliberal capitalism is about over. Don’t mourn: This late stage, rapacious, mutant economic strain has leveled destruction on community and the planet itself as well as the hearts and souls of too many of those imprisoned within its paradigm.

At this point, the situation comes down to this: paradigm shift or perish.

The hour is amenable to reevaluate, reorganize and re-occupy. Doing so will prove helpful in withstanding false narratives.

Apropos: As of late, in my hours spent at Liberty Park, I’ve been witness to increasing numbers of tourists wandering in and repeating derisive, right-wing distortions regarding the OWS movement and its participants. For example, they are a collection of whiny college students who want taxpayers to be responsible for picking up the tab for their student loans because they are too lazy and spoiled to work off their debt. These tales are variations of the old canards involving welfare queens, mouths gleaming with taxpayer financed gold teeth, arriving at grocery stores lounging behind the steering wheels of late model Cadillacs, and proceeding to purchase steaks and fifths of gin with food stamps.

Ronald Reagan spoke of this mythical figure often, affording her near supernatural powers: She, through indolence, guile and a welfare state-bestowed sense of limitless entitlement, was the near singular cause of the nation’s economic woes; her very existence, not only depleted the U.S. Treasury of dollars, but drained the U.S. free enterprise system of vitality and the very will to compete. She was a succubus who arrived in the socialist haunted night to feed on and zap the very virility of capitalism.

Because of the wealth inequities inherent to capitalism, in order to prevent social unrest, the system is reliant on creating false narratives that foster misplaced and displaced class resentment. These tales are very potent, because they serve as palliatives for the enervating states of shame inflicted on the population at large by their enslavement to the free market. Accordingly, because the vast majority of the populace are deemed “losers”, due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created and maintained to displace the rage, borne of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system’s exploited underlings.

OWS is beginning to change the narrative, align it with reality–and that is an alarming development for the 1%; hence, the retooled, amped up propaganda campaign we’re seeing signs of at present.

This is the reality the 1% endeavor to obscure: Capitalism is a pyramid scheme; by its very structure, only a few will ever receive its bounty that is wrung out of the exhausted hides of the vast majority. Fact is, capitalism, the neoliberal variety or otherwise, has never worked as promised; its innate structure ensures exploitation and inequity. Therefore, time and time again, adding aspects of socialism (e.g., New Deal era programs and reforms) have saved capitalism from itself. But, after a time, the plutocrats regroup and begin anew to launch a big money-financed, slow motion coup d’état of government (e.g., the Reagan Revolution).

A vast disparity of wealth within a nation will all but ensure this societal trajectory. But that isn’t going to happen, this time. The planet cannot endure the assaults wrought by a system that requires exponential growth to be maintained. The run of capitalism is nearly over. A more sustainable economic system, based on horizontal rule, is being developed, globally (e.g., the Icelandic model).

The vertical structure inherent to capitalism brings about the self-perpetuating reign of an insular elite who choose to go the route of empire and, by doing so, overreach and bring themselves down, but only after much unnecessary suffering, exploitation and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of imperium.

Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one’s situation–beginning to question how one arrived at one’s present station in life–will engender anxiety, anger and regret.

Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life’s winners.

But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem–not the dishonest economic setup–and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can’t get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.

And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned…have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs–all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I’ve adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.

Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.

What an unnerving task that would prove to be…an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone.

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” — Albert Camus

Accordingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-rewarded, professional dissemblers of the political right, imploring them to dissolve my doubts and dread. To escort and ensconce my troubled form back into my comfort zone by telling me the problem is not the iron boot of the corporate state upon my neck; rather, my oppression stems from the barefoot hippie lefties of OWS “who need a bath and a job”; it is their odious presence in our lives that has subdued my happy capitalist destiny by the pernicious act of laying down an effluvia (more demobilizing than pepper spray) of patchouli musk and has caused capitalism itself to weaken into an enervated swoon.

Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my oppression. Those America-hating Occupy Wall Street hippies are actually the hidden hand that controls the global order and who possess a craven desire to smelt down the gleaming steel of the humming engines of U.S. capitalism into creepy, Burning Man statuary, who want to hold 24/7 Nuremberg-style rallies in the form of annoying drum circles.

In reality, it is those dirty hippies who are actually “The Man.” Withal, hippies crashed the global economy and pinned the blame on the selfless souls who ply their benign trade on Wall Street.

Now, you know why conservatives harbor such animus towards hippies. Don’t claim that Fox News et al–those selfless souls–who only desire to protect the glories of the present order, and who only have your best interest in mind, didn’t try to warn you.

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” — Mark Twain

To cite only a few examples, by means such as, “zero tolerance” policies in public school systems, to “no knock” warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks–daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom. In fits and starts, by law and deed, the U.S. has moved closer in the direction of a panopticon-prone, brutality-leveling, waking authoritarian nightmare than a democratic republic devoted to erring in the direction of the ideals of justice and liberty.

Granted, such ideals will never exist in pure form. Still, by the same token, the sane neither shill for utopia nor become adapted to tyranny.

The act of pepper spraying peaceful protesters by the enforcers of official power should not be viewed as an incidental occurrence. Conversely, the act is emblematic of a mode of mind gripping the nation and one that must be challenged in the streets.

Memes are ever-replicating, exponentially reproducing, collectively evolving bits of human thoughtware–while our bodies are the hardware. If their resonances remain strictly in the realm of pixels and soundbites, a meme will translate into little more than pop culture ephemera. Memes must be carried by flesh into the non-virtual world; their human carriers might even be peppered sprayed themselves and carted off to jail, if it comes to that.

Otherwise, as is the case at present, memes dissipate…dissolving amid the ever-proliferating mirages of the commercial hologram. Thus the tragedy of the consumer state: The manner the present age of media-borne illusion usurps our instinctual drives and individual longings–the appetites and imaginings–that compel our life force to its zenith–but instead will induce us to spend our lives in the pursuit of careerist vanity and consumer dreck, and, in so doing, serves to deliver our passions to a wasteland of electronic dust.

When the inhuman demands of a seemingly implacable system control the lives of a people, an aura of nebulous fear, nettling resentment and habitual passivity, alternating with impulsive aggression, will seize the spirit of a culture. This is what Walker Percy wrote of a similar internalized landscape:

Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them. –excerpted from Percy’s novel, The Second Coming

In a declining culture, the vitality available within daily experience withers and falls away, and is soon supplanted by the dismal scions of the death genes. As reflected by the architecture (e.g., bland, prefab retail strips; shoddily built subdivision housing; sterile office parks) of late capitalism, beauty and common communion holds no dominion. As a consequence, fecund dreams dry to dust and rise from the arid land as blinding squalls of displaced fear and anger.

Antithetically, as an antidote, on Thanksgiving Day, my wife and I trundled by subway train down to Zuccotti Park for a taste of liberty. Of course, this particular national holiday is the marking and celebration of an age of genocide in regard to native folk.

My father is half Comanche; he was born on a reservation in the U.S. midwest. In general, on Thanksgiving Day, at least one-fourth of my blood (and the rest of the three-fourths of my humanity, and all of my soul) finds the task of remaining a polite dinner guest a bit difficult when people insist on being toxically (at times, belligerently) ignorant on the subject.

Significantly, by their ongoing acts of aggression perpetrated against the OWS denizens in Liberty Park in lower Manhattan (which, in itself, is an indigenous name, Manna-hata, meaning, “island of many hills”) the mayor of New York City and the NYPD have revealed that they regard the area as Injun’ Country. From the start of the OWS occupation, the protectors of the present order surrounded the “dirty, dangerous savages” within Liberty Park by blue uniform-clad troops and by force attempted to drive them off the land–land that is as much ours to appropriate as it is their own or anyone else’s.

And don’t talk to me about private property…The land in question was stolen from the get-go in a shady real estate swindle. Moreover, the OWS movement is a challenge to those types of societal notions that have bestowed legitimacy on larceny.

Regarding the almost exclusive exploitation of land for commercial exploitation e.g., the practice of claiming as private property, inflating the price of, and ceaselessly turning over for profit parcels of real estate has proven an enterprise that has degraded both landscape and soulscape, and has proven to be a less than propitious practice in regard to the health of the community at large and the planet itself. Withal, this mode of mind has engendered a culture in which the brutal and ruthless thrive…has enabled the rise of psychopathic personality types to positions of unapproachable power whose creed is, “all the things of the earth are ‘mine’ to exploit and it is my right to bring to submission, lest I’m entitled to destroy, those things I cannot possess and control.”

Conversely, my hours spent in Liberty Park have done my partial native blood good. Why? Because we are a veritable Injun’ uprising. And that is why they fear us and have tried to silence our drums and our mic-check, tribal gatherings and they have torn down our Tepee-like tents. Caucasian swindlers scammed the native people of this island in the first place; hence, the scam artists of Wall Street are only the latest incarnation of that European cultural trait–and that is the true tradition of Thanksgiving. But, they are discovering that another, lost tradition is coalescing across the land–the tradition of resistance.

The actions of and reactions to the OWS movement serve to reveal the hypocritical core of the present duopolistic political system. For example, if the recent brutal, police “crackdowns” (in truth, outright abuses of constitutionally granted rights) on the OWS movement had been coordinated and perpetrated under the Bush administration, Democratic Party partisans would have been calling for hearings of impeachment to be convened against George W. Bush. The lack of outrage among liberal insiders regarding recent events is an object lesson into the invidious nature of duopolistic rule. What Democratic Party partisans warn against–the big business beholden, freedom phobic, Republican agenda–is advanced in a more efficient manner when a Democrat is installed by the 1% in the U.S. presidency. Apropos, Democratic Party apologists are as guilty of carrying the agenda of the national security/corporate state as are oligarch-duped teabagger sorts.

More and more, nationally, as well as globally, people are catching on to the machinations of the 1%, to the scams of crime syndicates such as Wall Street and the IMF, to the means by which we have been coerced, by debt enslavement to neoliberalism’s global company store, into spending the fleeting days of this finite life working for the inequitable power, wealth and privilege of these ruthless few.

At present, growing numbers have taken heed of the situation and are fighting back. Within the span of a few short months, the narrative of the corporate media has, to a limited extent, been altered. Yet, at this point, the development is merely background noise: The neoliberal order is collapsing; capitalism itself is nearly at the end of its five hundred year run.

OWS is part of a global movement of resistance that is laying the groundwork for a new paradigm. Although, change will not come without struggle and suffering, without defeats, betrayals and moments of despair. But, given the unsustainable nature of the present order, a shift in both perception and practice is inevitable. Yet when there are this many variables (known and unknown) in play, gazing darkly or through rose-tinted eyewear will prove neither adequate nor helpful.

Finally, engaging in acts of resistance are often not about winning or losing a particular battle; rather, it is the propitious manner the act transforms one’s character by drawing one out of isolation and into the heart of life.

By such acts, we are strengthened. Our resistance to the present order has deepened our character and strengthened our resolve, and has bestowed upon us the courage to care deeply about the lives and fates of others as well as the imperiled state of our planet’s environment. We can–and we will–meet one another in reclaimed public space, and, finally, and, at long last, take up residence in a life-vivifying landscape where the death genes grip is loosened and where the wit of the world remains.

Nonsense.

The OWS movement is not a distraction from—but serves as an alternative to—the disingenuous theatrics staged by the political hacks of this faux republic. Conversely, movement members have grasped that it is the hollow grandstanding–the modus operandi of the present U.S. political system itself–that serves as distraction from the realities of the day.

Those drawn to the OWS movement realize this: Vast sums of money are required to get the attention of and gain influence over the entrenched class of self-serving political insiders who hustle their wares in Washington, D.C.

Year after year, election cycle after election cycle, Washington’s political class has revealed whose interests it serves. Accordingly, let the 1% and their political operatives continue on their present myopic, self-serving, society-decimating course: By doing so, they will just bring more outraged people into the streets and hasten their own undoing.

Yet, because arrogant power, girded by duplicity and ruthlessly maintained, does not yield without a fight, we should expect more of the following:

Stories are circulating that Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford, a well-connected Washington lobbying firm, with ties to the financial industry, have floated a $850,000 plan to pillory Occupy Wall Street. This should not come as a surprise. Living in a society dominated by the power of massive corporations, and the inequitable wealth these self-perpetuating organizations have at their disposal, we will be relentlessly subjected to the narratives they generate.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko

Since birth, most of us have been enveloped by the consumer state’s commercial hologram. Almost every daily act we perform and attitude we evince is in some measure determined by the dictates, demands and the incessant, commercial come-ons (the defacto propaganda) of the corporate state e.g. from what time you rise in the morning, to the food you eat, to what you clothe yourself in, to how you spend your days, to what time you go to sleep at night, to what stories you are audience to–the cultural myths you have internalized–by means of mass media saturation, to the manner you celebrate festivals and holidays, to how your illnesses and of those around you will play-out, even the circumstances of how you will approach and succumb to your death.

Because these are the waters in which we swim, most will accept societal and cultural circumstances as a given…believing, for example, that when they posit a political utterance that the opinion expressed has been formed exclusively of their own mind, by the exercise of free will.

Accordingly, a large percent of the populace of the U.S. believes consumerism is a form of freedom…that the exercise thereof mainly involves being at liberty to trundle to a mall and be in possession of the right to choose between a big-ass cookie or a giant Cinnabon…that freedom of choice is expressed by over-priced running shoes–or security can be found in a massive SUV.

In this manner, the propaganda campaigns of the corporate/national security state have proven effective at promoting and perpetuating the inequitable status quo in place at the present time. Do not underestimate the well-rewarded, professional con men employed in the criminal enterprise known as “public relations.” Remember, these masters of deceit sell wars, fought by the poor, in which, the underclass kill and die for the profits of a ruthless few. War is a money train for the rich and connected but a death wagon for the rest of humankind.

Ready yourself to be buffeted by a barrage of virtual reality blunderbuss–volley after volley of mainstream media launched Big Lies–and the ground fire of social media small distortions. Don’t walk unarmed into the line of fire.

Remember this: Most likely, the corporate state has, to some degree, colonized your mind, as it is well on its way to destroying the ecosystem of the entire planet.

Conversely, let your soul occupy you. While there might be an ongoing effort to scour Liberty Park of liberty, they cannot do likewise to your heart without your consent. Turn the tables on them: Evict the corporate occupiers from the public realm within–as all the while, you challenge propaganda whenever it crosses your path…on the streets, at your workplace, at family gatherings, and on social media– because a lie left unchallenged begins to be accepted as truth. And worse, invades, colonizes and exploits (and often kills) a portion of the soul of the world.

Importantly, do not underestimate the ruthless nature of calcified power.

Regarding the subject: On Thursday, Nov. 17, near Foley Square, there was blood on Broadway. At the scene, I witnessed thuggish, NYPD motorcycle cops driving directly into groups of peaceful demonstrators, with the intent of antagonizing those gathered, and when people stood their ground and refused to be bullied–then phalanxes of blue shirt bastards, swinging nightsticks, waded into the crowd.

Even with my wife, tugging at the back of my jacket, attempting to tow, as we say down south, my narrow ass away from the direction of injury or jail, I could not contain my outrage; I growled at a smirking cop, gloating over the carnage, “just keep it up, you mindless thug, when you get folks angry enough, the boot just might be on the other neck…namely yours.”

In hindsight, in my own defense: Being on scene and witnessing peaceful people attacked and brutalized, one is apt to become seized by rage.

But what is the mayor of New York City and his Police Commissioner’s excuse?

Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelley and the ranks of NYPD have proven themselves willing to barricade and checkpoint the city into chaos…as opposed to enduring ongoing moments of freedom of assembly and free expression.

And this is why we must not retreat. Their tactics of repression are very expensive to the city budget, and money is the only thing they love.

Hence, they have, in turn, provided us with a tactic we can use; we can hit them where they feel it. (Conversely, they can take blow after blow to their dignity–because they are devoid of that character trait.)

The ground is shifting below our feet and this phenomenon involves more than the echoing footfalls of marchers and the trudging of militarized formations of riot cops on city streets worldwide.

The first vibrations, closer to tremors, transpired because the ground below us has been fracked of dreams…the void engendered seismological activity. Now, from Cairo, Egypt’s Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece to Liberty Park, in New York, New York to Oscar Grant Park, in Oakland, California, we have become like tuning forks, in sympatico with the resonances of the tormented earth.

Subsequently, the walls of the neoliberal prison are cracking…We are no longer isolated, enclosed in our alienation, imprisoned by a concretized sense of powerlessness; daylight is beginning to pierce the darkness of our desolate cells.

“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.” ~ Utah Phillips

U.S soldiers died protecting what and who again? These actions should make this much clear: The U.S. military and the police exist to protect the 1%. At this point, the ideal of freedom will be carried by those willing to resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who have struggled and often died for freedom–but scant few were clad in uniforms issued by governments.

Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms–so they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it crushed.

When anyone tells you that dead soldiers and veterans died for your freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at some point, gain their freedom.

I was born in Birmingham Alabama, at slightly past the mid-point of the decade of the 1950s. Many of my earliest memories involve the struggle for civil rights that was transpiring on the streets of my hometown.

My father was employed at a scrap metal yard but also worked as a freelance photojournalist who hawked his work to media photo syndicates such as Black Star who then sold his wares to the major newsmagazines of the day. A number of the iconic photographs of the era were captured by his Nikon camera e.g., of vicious police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators; of demonstrators cartwheeled down city streets by the force of fire hoses; of Dr. King and other civil rights marchers kneeled in prayer before arrays of Police Chief Bull Connor’s thuggish ranks of racist cops.

In Birmingham, racist laws and racial and economic inequality were the progenitors of acts of official viciousness. The social structure in place was indefensible. Reason and common decency held no dominion in the justifications for the established order that was posited by the system’s apologists and enforcers; therefore, brutality filled the void created by the absence of their humanity.

And the same situation is extant in the growing suppression of the OWS movement in various cities, nationwide, including Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan. The 1% and their paid operatives–local city officials–are striving to protect an unjust, inherently dishonest status quo. Lacking a moral mandate, they are prone to the use of police state forms of repression.

Dr. King et al faced their oppressors on the streets of my hometown. Civil Rights activists knew that they had to hold their ground to retain their dignity…that it was imperative to sit down in those Jim Crow-tyrannized streets when necessary in order to stand up against the forces of oppression.

At present, we have arrived at a similar moment. If justice is to prevail, it seems, the air of U.S. cities will hold the acrid sting of tear gas, the jails will again be filled, the brave will endure brutality–yet the corrupt system will crumble. Because the system’s protectors themselves will bring it down by revealing its empty nature, and the corrupt structure will collapse from within.

Yet, when riot police attack unarmed, peacefully resisting protesters, the mainstream media often describes the events with standard boilerplate such as “police clash with demonstrators.”

This is inaccurate (at best) reportage. It suggest that both parties are equal aggressors in the situation, and the motive of the police is to restore order and maintain the peace, as opposed to, inflicting pain and creating an aura of intimidation.

This is analogous to describing a mugging as simply: two parties engaging in a financial transaction.

Although mainstream media demurred from limning the upwelling of mob violence at Penn. State as involving any criteria deeper than the mindless rage of a few football-besotted students unloosed by the dismissal of beloved sport figure.

Yet there exists an element that the Penn. State belligerents and OWS activists have in common: a sense of alienation.

Penn State students rioted because life in the corporate state is so devoid of meaning that identification with a sports team gives an empty existence said meaning…These are young people, coming of age in a time of debt-slavery and diminished job prospects, who were born and raised in, and know of no existence other than, life as lived in U.S. nothingvilles i.e., a public realm devoid of just that–a public realm–an atomizing center-bereft culture of strip malls, office parks, fast food eateries and the electronic ghosts wafting the air of social media.

Contrived sport spectacles provisionally give an empty life meaning…Take that away, and a mindless rampage might ensue…Anything but face the emptiness and acknowledge one’s complicity therein, and then direct one’s fury at the creators of the stultified conditions of this culture.

It is a given, the cameras of corporate media swivel towards reckless actions not mindful commitment…are attuned to verbal contretemps not thoughtful conviction–and then move on. And we will click our TV remotes and scan the Internet–restless, hollowed out,eating empty memes–skimming the surface of the electronic sheen.

These are the areas we are induced to direct our attention–as the oceans of the earth are dying…these massive life-sustaining bodies of water have less then 50 years before they will be dead. This fact alone should knock us to our knees in lamentation…should sent us reeling into the streets in displays of public grief…

Accordingly, we should not only occupy–but inhabit our rage. No more tittering at celebrity/political class contretemps–it is time for focused fury. The machinery of the corporate/police state must be dismantled.

If the corporate boardrooms have to be emptied–for the oceans to be replenished with abundant life–then so be it. If one must go to jail for committing acts of civil disobedience to free one’s heart–then it must be done.

Yet why does the act of challenging the degraded status quo provoke such a high decree of misapprehension, anxiety, and outright hostility from many, both in positions of authority and among so many of the exploited and dispossessed of the corporate/consumer state.

For example, why did the fatal shooting incident in Oakland, California, Nov. 1, that occurred near the Occupy Oakland Encampment–but, apparently, was wholly unrelated to OWS activity cause a firestorm of reckless speculation and false associations.

Because any exercise in freedom makes people in our habitually authoritarian nation damn uneasy…a sense of uncertainty brings on dread–the feeling that something terrible is to come from challenging a prevailing order, even as degraded as it is.

Tyrants always promise safety; their apologist warn of chaos if and when the soul-numbing order is challenged.

Granted, it is a given that there exists a sense of certainty in a prison routine: high walls and guards and gun mounts ensure continuity; an uncertainty-banishing schedule is enforced. Moreover, solitary confinement offers an even more orderly situation…uncertainty is circumscribed as freedom is banished.

The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.

A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.

As with human perception of life itself, experiencing freedom carries an ineffable quality, a wordless grandeur.

“Human language is like a cracked kettle drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.” — Gustave Flaubert

Through it all, the immanent quality of and inchoate longing for freedom remains within us: Although present, it is not always in plain view. Its presence in our lives is, perhaps, best summed up by this Irish aphorism:

“Mrs. O’Kelly, do you believe in fairies?”
“No, I don’t — but they’re there.”

Over and over again, too many well-intentioned sorts continue to insist that it is imperative that we inform the nice people of the middle class (nice people who, given the nature of imperium, willingly feed off the blood of empire like the charges of a vampire) that there are well mannered working people on site at OWS encampments–not only spittle-launching, leftist radicals.

Excuse me, but, for many years now, so-called “crazy” leftist radicals have been damn near the only ones who have had the clarity of mind to give a cogent critique of empire, have been willing to point out the exploitive, soul-demeaning mode of existence inherent to the militarist/national security/corporate/consumer/ duopolistic state–and, as a result, we have been marginalized, entirely excluded from mainstream debate and discussion.

Let us have a little rendezvous with reality; otherwise, the operatives of the status quo will frame the narrative, once again, and will claim victory by co-option. This is the method by which the capitalist status quo has maintained its inverted totalitarian set-up since the popular uprisings of the 1960′s, by means of generous economic rewards (the perks and privileges of the corporate state) for its defacto propagandists and exclusion from the official narrative for dissenters. Don’t buy into the false narrative.

Personally, I refuse to eschew the designation of anti-capitalist radical. You cannot shame me for knowing where the bodies of empire are buried and who laid them in their graves. To the landfill of history with capitalism–the wasteful, cracked-brained economic system that created said landfill.

The preening liars at Fox News and other well-rewarded propagandists of state capitalism will disseminate lies, big and small, regardless of our actions; that is what they do. Be cautioned: Never tap dance for the approval of a lying, manipulative, power mad fascist. Once, you begin to do so you co-sign his narrative–thus he owns your hapless ass.

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life- 
and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” — Georgia O’Keefe

Accordingly, the lessons of the 1960s, e.g., COINTELPRO operations reveal that when street and riot police are ordered to pull back, as in Oakland, agent provocateurs will infiltrate mass political gatherings. Withal: You can bet those masked bastards shouting hate-speak and breaking windows are cops. He is there to draw the cameras of the corporate media towards the scenes of chaos and strife that he seeds in order to turn bourgeois sentiment against reform movements that might change their lives for the better, to create the false narrative that the police are the only bulwark the middle class has against destruction-sowing crazies, who, if given free reign, will leave in rubble and ashes everything they hold dear.

To avoid being falsely labeled: First, endeavor, by inward searching and outward (even failed) endeavor, to know who you are. Then lay claim to your own identity. Otherwise, garnering the clarity required to apprehend what you’re up against becomes difficult.

The Greek word for one of the three figures representing The Fates is Moira–which translates into portion. And that is key to grasping what is happening from Cairo to Athens to New York City to Oakland. Ergo, people are rising up and fighting for the rightful and just portion of their lives and fates that have been increasingly commandeered and controlled by a corrupt elite whose rule has, heretofore, been sustained by a disproportionate distribution of wealth, privilege and power.

Across Greece, people have awaken to the knowledge that passivity is slavery–that capitalism is economic cannibalism. State capitalism, also, devours the dignity of its victims. Yet, after a time, a number of people will rise up against exploitation and will demand their portion of fate.

At this point in time, the term “general strike” holds a deep and resonate appeal. The word “general” suggests that the isolation of daily life experienced under the atomizing circumstances of globalized corporate capitalism can be upended–that there can be a sense of unity–that a movement en mass is possible (yet not a mass movement to war, but a movement en mass towards equity and fairness) by beginning, at long last, to “strike” back–to counterpunch with focused blows those who have kept the harsh, inequitable order of the present era in place by means of intimidation and bribery.

Capitalism–you are a rotting, flesh-eating zombie–there are sacred spark stippling the air around you; these sparks are borne of flames of sacred vehemence. For too long, people have been bled dry by the heart-desiccating aspirations and dehumanizing modes of economic coercion that maintain the neoliberal paradigm. Moreover, the flames of resistance are only fanned when your apologists claim that the system in place provides the best, in fact, the only way to exist in the world and attempt to smother its growing fury with police state tactics.

The stakes are great. Much has been stolen from us: essential qualities, more valuable than money. As the populace of the corporate/consumer state, we have been induced, by means of small bribes and hyper-authoritarian coercion, to sign a social contract that sells our essential nature on the cheap i.e., to be defined (hence diminished) as a consumer, a commuter, an employee, a Republican, a Democrat, a member of a demographic group, a cipher, a sucker, a bystander in one’s own fate.

Don’t let any system define you, narrow, then appropriate, your innate and essential self towards exploitive agendas, as does the present societal set-up, for the incommensurate profits of a self-serving few–who, in turn, insist that your objections to the situation are unreasonable, outrageous, untoward–too crazy to be uttered in decent company. In short, a system in which its operatives demand that you stay in your place and not question the motives and actions of your betters.

In contrast, a radical sensibility insists you must inhabit an inner landscape wherein no state, corporation–nor any type of extant system holds dominion over your essential self–that you inhabit a landscape that is best navigated by your own interior lode star. Therefore, you have no obligation to justify your existence to any man or system. To even attempt to do so would deliver an injustice to your heart, for this is a state of being as impossible to quantify as a flight of imagination–yet it exist within as immanent as the architecture of desire.

“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what would you say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?” — Foucault

Who will you meet, where will you travel, what battles will be enjoined and what loves surrendered to as you write the Book of Your Being? What thoughts and feelings will be discovered therein?

Will the words you etch upon the finite moments of your time on this earth evoke deep yearning, like Wordsworth’s limning of his longing to see beyond the prison walls of quotidian experience?

[…]I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
excerpt, The World Is Too Much with Us

–William Wordsworth

Or will you refuse to rise, when commanded to do so, as did Rosa Parks on her fateful bus commute through the Jim Crow-demeaned streets of 1950s Montgomery, Alabama; or will you be seized by holy lamentation, like Allen Ginsberg, as he howled anguished prosody into the pity-devoid face of the devouring Moloch of the commodified empire; or will your genius be revealed like the impertinent flutter of Groucho Marx’s eyebrows on the screen of Depression era movie houses; or will you reclaim your own heart by the act of telling off some son-of-a-bitch of a boss, as you quit a dead end, heart-deadening job and then resolve to join the defiant multitudes at an OWS encampment?

Mainly, are you prepared to surrender to the everyday miracle that transpires when one, fleetingly, finds the resolve to open one’s being to the uncertainties of freedom–when one chooses to break the hold of those fear-bestowing, resentment-besotted demons of banality known as Easy Cynicism, Displaced Resentment, and Habitual Passivity–those disingenuous, corporate/consumer state bards of the Bardo–whose (extant and internalized) narratives have sustained late capitalism.

“Cynicism is just another mode of conformity”. — Theodor W. Adorno

Don’t delay: Act as if your life–if not the survival of the planet–depends on it, because, at this point, it does.

Behind the bland face of the political establishment (purchased by the bloated profits of the plundering class) are riot cops, outfitted and armed with the accoutrements of oppression, who are ready and willing to enforce the dictates of the elitist beneficiaries of the degraded status quo. In deed and action, as of late, the police state embedded within neo-liberal economic oligarchy is showing its hyper-authoritarian proclivities to the world.

In general, existence within the present societal structure inflicts on the individual a sense of atomization and its concomitant feelings of alienation, vague unease, free floating anxiety and anomie. The coercion is implicit and internalized.

Because of its mundane, ubiquitous nature, the system is reliant on an individual’s sense of isolation (even ignorance of the existence of the structure itself) to remain in place. In short, the exploitive system continues to exist because its denizens are bereft of other models of comparison.

The public commons inherent in the OWS movement provides a model of comparison. Apropos, that is why we are beginning to receive reports such as the following:

On Tuesday Oct. 25, 2011, the Oakland Tribune reported that police raided and demolished the local OWS encampment after declaring the area a “crime scene”. This is revelatory regarding the character of the enforcers of the present order: Those in positions of power within a police state view freedom of assembly and freedom of expression as a punishable offense.

It is a given that: Authoritarian personality types take particular umbrage when citizens are expressing their displeasure with official abuses of power and begin to do so in an effective manner.

Too many in the U.S. have bought the fiction that the nation was, is and will remain a democratic republic. Therefore, by drawing its brutal operatives and mendacious apologist into the open, the state will reveal itself in all its ugliness. As a result, all concerned will be able to observe the true nature of the police/national security/oligarchic state in place in the U.S.

Ideally, few illusions will remain intact regarding the ruthless, brutal forces against which we struggle.

Moreover, the actions of the police in regard to public protest are premeditated tactics aimed at the suppression of the right to public assembly. The goal of the power brokers, their political operatives and police enforcers is to render one’s (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed right to dissent too prohibitive to be practiced. 



The economically dispossessed and members of minority communities have known for many years what OWSers are suffering, presently, at the hands of official power and its enforcers. 



In turn, individual police officers are well aware of whom they are sworn to protect (and it isn’t those who desire to exercise their rights to free assembly and free speech). In most cases, if an individual police officer ever refused an order to make an unconstitutional arrest, he/she would be committing an act of careercide; their chance of advancement within the department would have to be scraped off the sidewalk on the spot and transported to the city morgue.

Are you willing to leave the confines of your comfort zone and go to jail for justice?

Rarely, does reform arrive without the arrest of frontline agitators. Power does not yield without a fight, without attempting to silence dissent by brutality and forced detention. The powerful demand that those of us who notice their excesses and crimes be placed out of sight and out of mind.

Hence, in Oakland, the local corporate news affiliates, to their shame, turned off their cameras when the violent attacks and mass arrest of protesters began.

Are you willing to risk injury to body and reputation to bear witness? The survival of the OWS movement depends on having bodies on the ground and eyes (as well as cameras) on the thugs in uniform.

True to form, a servile corporate media will proclaim how unsightly dissenters are, inferring that sensible folk, simply as a matter of good taste and public propriety should disregard the protesters’ entreaties and that these malcontents and cranks should be denied entrance into the realm of legitimate discourse, that these disheveled interlopers be barred by walls of silence.

To be in the world is to be confronted with walls. How we respond to these barriers is called character and art.

Many brave souls have confronted walls such as these.

Often, as I gaze upon the blue wall of mindless repression surrounding Zuccotti Park and reflect on other OWS sites nationwide, I am induced to feel the sadness and longing of the repressed souls of the earth, of those throughout time who have met walls of blind hatred, of economic exploitation, of institutional repression….

I empathize with all of those who faced walls of smug indifference, walls of internalized shame and walls of official lies–those who stood powerless before the stark reality of seemingly implacable circumstances. I reflect upon the lives and work of itinerate blues musicians of the U.S. Deep South and the manner they met walls of both official repression and collective blind, ignorant fear and hatred, and how they transformed those prison walls into the numinous architecture of The Blues…How they alchemicalized the barriers into guitar technique.

Musical instruments, like word meeting meter to a poet, serve as both barrier and salvation; the limits of the self are tested, explored, and by effort, failure and moments of elation are transformed by confrontation and union with the instrument, personal circumstance and audience. 


As is the case with those on the front lines of OWS encampments, millions of people throughout history have met seemingly implacable barriers in the form of walls of human brutality e.g., Jim Crow laws, union busting management goon squads, the Zionist apartheid wall, various secret police and public bullies–but they weren’t going to let the bastards “turn them ’round…”

If you choose to resist entrenched power, when confronted by mindless authority, your heart will know the drill; it will guide you–its natural trajectory is towards freedom. Hence, you will know what to do when the moment arrives–and will gain the knowledge that your predecessors discovered in their struggle for justice…that the cry arose forth from deep in their souls, “We shall not be moved.”

The practitioners of the Delta Blues came upon walls of oppression–walls of raging hatred, and responded by passing through those walls–to inhabit a landscape more alive, more resonant, more ensouled than their oppressors will ever know possible. They occupied their own hearts and draw us still into the immediacy of the world by their victory over their degraded circumstances by their appropriating the very barriers that were placed in their path by their oppressors and transforming the criteria of their oppression into the living architecture of the soul.

Those who know this–have already won, have already overcome.

Lorca limned the situation (one extant as well in the enfolding OWS movement) in his theory of “the duende”. His concept of the duende reveals why people, when faced by the ossified order of an inhuman system, either become caught up–even compelled–by the challenge to begin to make the world anew–while others are seized with mortification, indifference, resignation and hostility.

In which direction does your soul wend? 

”The arrival of the duende always presupposes a transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly created rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” — from The Havana Lectures, Federico Garcia Lorca.

When I witness police harassing, arresting and brutalizing those exercising their rights to free assembly, I find myself gripped by a surge of rage…The rage rises in me in an animalistic fury–an urge to fight tooth and nail, to tear at the throats of these vicious intruders into the territory of authentic social discourse. 



As of late, instead of pushing down the fury rising from within me or acting upon it, I let it inundate my being. As a result, the coursing rage transforms into a penetrating, powerful force–enveloping and demarcating the geography of my convictions…arriving to bring acceptance and to define and defend the contours of my true self.

Rage can appear as an angel of self-definition, the protector of one’s authentic nature and a source of personal power, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me ’round …”

One’s anger is vital to one’s existence; it is a valuable gift; therefore, it should not be squandered…no need to waste it on fools and idiots. 



When rage arrives, invite him in; his presence will fill the room with alacrity, and his surging vitality will allow you to push farther and deeper into the unexplored regions of your soul.

In contrast, the world of the neoliberal oligarchs, the duopolistic political class and of the cops has been called into question. They have grown accustomed to having their way, of having a compliant and complicit peasantry. In this they are not unique; what they are experiencing is universal: The world we know (or at least believe we do) and struggle to maintain, from time to time, is apt to reveal an aspect of itself that seems alien and unmanageable e.g., the growing dissent across the nation, perhaps too vast and potent to be kettled, penned, tear gassed, cuffed and detained. The otherness of the world seems too large…has become an army of aggrieved angels

I once saw a Great Dane on Second Avenue attempt to engage in canine communion with his fellows. In order to display his intentions were benign, friendly, he crouched down on the sidewalk, making his massive frame as small as possible, even placing his large head on the concrete…doing all he could to produce the artifice of submission, to even the smallest dog that approached him. 

In other words, to enlarge his world he created the illusion of smallness. He did not reduce his essence; he created the artifice of smallness so he could grow larger than himself by his union with the otherness of the world.

We are not requesting that cops crouch before us. They just need not bristle so. 

To grow in each other’s presence, we are required to meet the other at eye level, even if one has to descend a bit from a habitual position of power and authority.

Officers, your guns, rubber bullets, nightsticks, pepper spray–the looming wall of blue intimidation that you brandish merely creates the illusion of strength. If you truly want to grow strong, meet us on these sidewalks, sans the display of empty power.

As Autumn stands before us, it will be helpful to allow illusions to fall away like dying leaves. Summer is kind to fools, but winter insists on clarity. Let the old delusions blaze out in Autumnal splendor, and then be mindful of winter’s stark perfection, its demarcations, rendering bare branches against a bleak sky.
 

Know this: The illusions of the corporate empire can no longer provide shelter; the elite and operatives of economic imperium can no longer raid and plunder the easy pickings of summer…hoard and squander its bounty. Therefore, to quote the poet, at present, “One must have a mind of winter” to navigate the white-out winds of new realities.
 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
 Of any misery in the sound of the wind […]
– Wallace Stevens, excerpt from The Snow Man

 
 
Yet, with the rise of that wing of the privileged class known as the corporate media, we receive the opposite; instead, we are enveloped within a hothouse bloom of hype, surface-level, adrenaline-activating content bearing misleadingly narrowed context.
 
On January 17 1991, at the start of the U.S.’s formal military hostilities against Iraq in the first Gulf War, the “folk rapper”/performance poet Chris Chandler and I were in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Chris pounded and thrashed at his battered guitar and recited talking blues protest ditties that we composed on the spot.
 
We were among a crowd of well over a couple of thousand demonstrators, plus scores of homeless people shared the surroundings as well. Shortly after the bombing of Iraq began, many in the park joined in an impromptu march around the metro D.C. area where thousands more protesters joined our ranks.
 
As we wended our way back to Pennsylvania Avenue, we were met, a block from the White House, by a phalanx of police i.e., full riot gear-clad storm troopers and mounted sons-of-bitches on horseback who charged the crowd.
 
The following is a close approximation of the account of the events as reported in the next day’s Washington Post: “A few dozen ragged protesters hobbled up Pennsylvania Ave. throwing rocks and taunting the police…”
 
Bearing that in mind, here is the opening graph of the account of the events on the Brooklyn Bridge, where on Sunday, Oct 2, 2011, demonstrators were herded, kettled and arrested by police:

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

 
Buyer beware: If the corporate press reports a breaking story with any degree of accuracy, the act is to be viewed as a fluke and certainly not as an act of honest intention by the reporters, producers and editors involved. On a personal basis, I have yet to be part of an unfolding news story in which the version of events created by these courtesans to power do not seem simply cut out of whole cloth, as they truckled to create an inoffensive narrative for the ruling elite.
 

Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that are alive — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Living in New York City, as I do, brings into stark relief the fact that the city operates as a defacto banana republic/police state. In the same manner that the mission of the police force is to protect the power and privilege of the moneyed classes, mainstream journalists work within the boundaries of its acceptable narratives for the purpose of job security and a bit of privilege.
 
The general population, buffeted by economic insecurity, at least, up to this point, has remained docile, and, to mitigate the anxiety and depression caused by feelings of powerlessness, many have become addicted to the small perks and bribes and endless distractions of the corporate/consumer state.
 
Furthermore, these bubble-enclosed states of being constitute addiction in a literal sense: Ergo, the compulsive mechanisms of addictive behavior are an attempt to ease an individual’s abiding sense of powerlessness and the attendant feelings of anxiety and despair experienced in the midst of uncontrollable circumstances and to quell troubling, obsessive thoughts and feelings of acute emotional discomfort by an habitual reliance on mood altering substances such as alcohol, food, gambling, work, hoarding, lust for power, wealth and privilege.
 
Addictive actions arise from the drive of libido, but its energy is usurped and exploited by the relentless will of a rigid, turned in on itself ego…”Self will run riot,” as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous poetically puts it.
 
Addiction is a pathology of the mechanistic mind; an addict’s disregard for his own body and his exploitative attitude towards the world at large is a microcosmic version of the economic designs of the global economic elite. Apropos, the world is mine to abuse, not to engage — to exploit from within a protective bubble of privilege and entitlement, not to be enjoined with in common communion.
 
The demands of the addicted mind are analogous to that of a bratty child, a high chair tyrant, “his majesty the baby,” who is convinced that his wants are the end all be all of all things. Therefore, a childish addict must grow up and ask himself this question: How do I transform my obsessive wants into the rage of my dharma, my un-reflective compulsions into the steady work of my soul.
 
In our time, when nearly all the apparatus of the corporate/consumer state exist and are maintained by the demeaning, soul-defying dynamics of addiction, as an act of defiance, one should attempt to get drunk on clarity–which is a different matter than a priggish, “dry drunk’s” hyper-moralistic refusal of excess, for the primary option does not constitute a puritanical refusal of the world–but, instead, is an embrace of the sacred quality of life, a respect for the finite quality of our fleeting passage through this life.
 
The voice of addiction (both internal and extant in the consumer state) will say anything and will go to craven lengths to continue on. Withal, its narrative will insist its path is the only passage possible…that its doomed trajectory must be maintained. And when its flimsy, desperate arrangements do collapse, it will insist that it must be propped back up so it can topple once again (or as this destructive act of enabling was called, a few years back, “The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008″).
 
Let the stock market hit bottom and allow “consumer confidence” to plummet…allow the psyches’ of consumers, addicted to distraction, to spiral into the abyss. Because, in so doing, one may be compelled to find and grasp onto one’s essential self, as the persona of one’s false self, addicted to the present order, disappears into the void.
 

To truly embrace the possibility of change, it is essential to allow putrefied habits to compost into the rich loam that will nourish reborn understandings. Apropos:
 

I felt a Funeral in my Brain
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading–treading-till it
seemed That Sense was breaking through”
– Emily Dickinson, opening stanza from “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”

Yes, this is a grievous event, a time of tears, confusion and lamination. Yet:
 

Let the young tears come
Let the calm hand of grief come
It is not as evil as you think.
– Rolf Jacobsen, excerpt from “Sunflower”

 
Within the present societal structure of the corporate state, “learned helplessness” is encouraged (as opposed to embracing reflective sorrow and deploying focused rage). Because it sustains itself by exploiting an individual’s instinctual drives and human longings, the present order of late capitalism is depended upon allowing an individual to possess just enough libido to vampirize–but not to retain enough élan vital to be roused to rebellion against the corporate state’s relentless practices of economic coercion.
 
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.” –Ivan Illich  
 
I have noticed that often what is (unconsciously) beneath paranoia is envy. Envy…that others are taking up one’s space in the world and are plotting to maintain the arrangement. Solution: Punch a hole in bubbles of denial and addiction and take a look for yourself. Insist on your portion of life — your portion of fate.
 
Many situations in this life are rigged e.g., the gamed system of the corporate state. But life itself is too vast, too intricate to be rigged; it is truly too big to fail. Now: To the streets, glistening with renewing rain, to the flaming barricades, its flames caress the future. Come out of self-exile; you are the change you can believe in.

In our era, in which our mind’s are distracted and circumscribed by relentless, manic formations of instant information and evanescent imagery, we too often dwell in domains devoid of musk and fury, of the implications carried by mind meeting flesh; therefore, one is often nettled by an abiding hollowness resultant from voluntary exile in these weightless realms of electronic ghosts.

The events unfolding in this place bear little resemblance to contrived reality TV tawdriness or pro sports/corporate rock, empty spectacle. Although some of the event transpiring here have been broadcast, webcast and tweeted in “real time” — in vivid contrast — events are unfolding in time that is real.

In Liberty Plaza, both the winged spirit of commitment and the rag and bone shop of the heart abide. Acting upon the human yearning not to live in chains, those assembled here are attempting to navigate their way out of the wasteland of isolation and alienation inflicted by the inverted totalitarianism of the corporate/consumer/national security state.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11297615@N03/6209845775

“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” — Wendell Berry

The barriers: This photo (of Occupy Wall Street protesters entrapped on the Brooklyn Bridge by the NYPD) is emblematic of existence within the constraints of inverted totalitarianism. The image is evocative of how the present order works to contain and narrow (if you will, kettle and cage) our conception of both the right to free expression in the public sphere and, by implication, within the psyche of an individual.

For instance: Notice, under “normal circumstances,” how even the thought of pamphleteering or making an attempt at public oration in those areas of hyper-commercialized commerce — e.g., malls, big box retail stores and sports arenas — squatting upon most of the landscape of the U.S. is summarily dismissed. An individual who attempts to exercise his right to free speech and free assembly in those locations is expelled on sight by private security types maintaining that the reach of one’s rights to free expression ends where private property begins.

In general, in daily life, living under the inverted totalitarian nature of the corporate state, the walls that imprison an individual are invisible to the eye, even as they create bleak barriers within. For example, if you are arrested while exercising your (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed rights during an act of public protest, future employers will be privy to the information and chances are that such information will not be exactly helpful in your attempt to gain employment; hence, many are dissuaded from protest.

Yet, the New York City power elite can be thanked for the following: By actions such as these, captured in photos like below, they reveal to us the true nature of the society that they have created, both extant and internalized within.

And this is what the implicit oppression of the corporate oligarchic state transforms into when challenged. Take a good look, then, ask yourself, as the song goes, which side are you on?

The agenda of the parasitic corporate and criminal Wall Street elite (whose financial power and political influence has increased unchecked for more than thirty years) has been: to attain maximum profits by maximum exploitation of labor and resources. To ensure the labor pool remains submissive, the corporate class tyrannizes the workforce with threats to their job security and other Shock Doctrine strategies designed to beat an individual down, as all the while, their PR flacks promulgate the Orwellian doublethink at the empty core of corporate/consumer state propaganda i.e., submission to exploitation will, one day, yield to financial freedom…that the economic shackles that yoke an individual to a life of “free” market-enforced submission are, in fact, his wings of liberty.

And that is something one should bear in mind when considering the subject of the attitudes and actions of the NYPD regarding popular uprisings such as the one ongoing in Lower Manhattan.

In the first few days of the occupation of Liberty Plaza, I stopped by and spoke with protesters and police. (The latter only agreed to speak to me, with much hesitation, and, in a few cases outright contempt, if I promised not to record them or reveal their badge numbers.) I told them that I understand and experience the sort of fear that such dictates, issued from above, level upon a person. I averred the fear instilled in rank and file officers by their “superiors” in the department is similar to the fear that folks in the park possess for police in general.

And the fear is identical to that OWS protesters hold in regard to the power Wall Street exerts over their lives.

In this, we, the beleaguered “99 percenters,” share a common plight–an affinity of fear instilled within us by economic coercion.

One cop told me it was nothing personal: He appreciated the protest because of the overtime pay he was pulling as a result of it. I asked him if he feared that Wall Street might squander his pension fund, and that, “if you come down with a case of ‘billy club elbow’ from beating on the folks here… that the crooks on Wall Street might make off with your medical benefits.”

Moreover, that if he saw a man trying to rob the pizza restaurant on the end of the block, he had the power to make an arrest, and, by that token, would it be possible for he and his crew – who it appeared didn’t have a lot to do at Liberty Plaza – could see fit to move down the street a bit… to where the real criminal activity comes down – billion dollar heists, in fact – and make a few arrests when the banksters open for business tomorrow? He said he couldn’t comment on the subject — but I could tell he found the fantasy appealing.

But, bear this in mind, when considering the uncivil attitudes and unconstitutional actions of the NYPD regarding street protest such as the Occupy Wall Street activities ongoing in Lower Manhattan, in particular, and the lack of deference to the rights of the public, in general, displayed by police agencies, at both the local and federal level: Police forces, by and large, are bureaucratic organizations, comprised of authoritarian personalities who evince a topdown, militarized organizational structure. Most of the individuals therein harbor a hierarchical concept regarding the exercise of power and possess an unquestioning fealty to the maintenance of order.

Therefore, the police will serve as a defacto private security force for the corporate oligarchs and Wall Street elite, as well as the structure of the National Security State. Accordingly, the safeguarding of individual rights and providing security for those groups and individuals bereft of power means little to them. Even if an individual officer harbors sympathy for those who dissent, his mission is not to protect the powerless; conversely, the mission of police organizations is to maintain the status quo; and the status quo of the present order translates into vast wealth inequity created by an entrenched system in place to protect the powerful (in this case Wall Street Banksters) from the consequences of their criminal activities.

(Apropos, the 4.6 million dollars with which J.P. Morgan Chase, last week, greased the palm of the NYPD.)

Thus Freedom will be pepper sprayed and thrown face first upon the pavement, while Wall Street Banksters’ Gulf Stream Jets lift off from the ground and slice the clear, thin air.

There is a sign in Liberty Plaza proclaiming, “occupy everything” and its sentiment arrives at the essence of the situation. Yes, occupy everything, starting with your own heart. Otherwise, it will be commandeered by the forces of the church, the state, the corporation, the bully on your block, the passive-aggressive friend who is “just here to help”, even the demands of your own egoist agendas that bore to indifference the heart of the world and soul of the age. If you don’t recognize your humanity, who will? Who is more qualified to occupy your life than you? Who is closer to the situation? Who else is qualified to arrive at an original take of the question at hand?

And you might find the place to make a stand in the struggle to retake your essential self is in public space, among throngs of others engaged in likeminded struggle…among others who have heeded a similar call and thus have arrived in those equally troubled locations — the U.S. public arena and the American heart.

Occupy your own heart; the soul of the world longs for your companionship.

“The question is not what am I doing in here, but what are you doing out there?”
– Henry David Thoreau

One contributing factor involves the sterile cultivation of the persona of the “reasonable liberal,” a type favored and rewarded by the status quo-protective power brokers of the Democratic Party and by corporate media organizations that find useful his trait of rendering himself feckless (e.g., the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) by the passion-annihilating (but self-serving) device of his preening amiability?

But in so doing, the self-gelded liberal has sacrificed libido and discarded sacred vehemence for careerist privilege. Worse, the rest of us are advised to follow suit… that, in order to gain credibility, one must slouch towards center-hugging irrelevance.

We are counseled that in order to navigate this age of corporate dominance that one’s irascible apprehensions and unruly aspirations must be suppressed, for such passions are deemed too radical for mainstream sensibilities, and are therefore regarded as impractical as they are untoward by the crackpot realists of the corporate bottom line whose dictates dominate the political discourse and economic arrangements of our time.

“Prune down [a human being’s] extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”
– William James

Yet these self-termed “realists,” by means of their ad hoc machinations and hidden-in-plain-sight schemes, are responsible for the creation, promotion and maintenance of a financial system (and its attendant economic, political and ecological consequences) that is as sound as the flight plan of Icarus.

When a nation displays this degree of a noxious mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, an age of peace and plenty becomes as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami.

Yet facing folly is difficult. Stunned by the implications of one’s mistakes and misapprehensions, initially, one will reel in the direction of a familiar road–or be seized by an impulse to retreat from the casuistry-sundering fury of the larger world. Yet, as Thomas Paine averred, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” And as Albert Camus counseled, “Freedom is the right not to lie.”

With this in mind, shall we blunder off-road into the landscape of unquestioned narratives?

For example, the following is a topic, when broached, that rarely fails to incur the manipulative rage of the perpetually adrenaline intoxicated right and causes liberals to drop to their knees in penance for sins never committed: The questioning of this culture’s reverential, unflagging “support of our troops” blunderbuss and attendant comic book hero-level palaver, such as, “all good Americans stand firm in our support of our troops and our war against the forces of international terrorism.”

A bit of personal perspective as to why I demur: Forty-eight years ago, this month, four young girls were murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Ala. At the time of the tragedy, I was a child living in Birmingham. I remember the event to this day. My father, freelancing as a photojournalist at the time, arrived on the scene not long after the blast. I remember him coming home shaken and pale. The event is seared into my memory: how the blind hatred of the vicious can erupt into daily life and inflict irreparable harm and abiding sorrow.

Accordingly, this is why I can not abide U.S. wars of imperium e.g., its Shock and Awe bombing campaigns, the same modus operandi of those despicable, redneck bombers.

The dead of Iraq, Central Asia, and Libya were no more responsible for committing acts of terrorism against the people of the U.S. than those little girls, readying for a choir performance in the basement of that church in Alabama, were guilty of any crime perpetrated against the “white race.”

Moreover, the attacks staged on 9/11/2001 did not “change everything.” The event merely sped up the trajectory of the national security state/military industrial complex towards the landfill of history.

For more than a century, whether the propagandists of U.S. Empire promulgate the subterfuge of fighting “to make the world safe for democracy” or defending against “the evil empire,” or waging a “war on terror”–the objective remains, to secure resources for the U.S. homeland. And that is what we, the populace of empire, can “thank a veteran” for providing.

From the Blue Coats at Wounded Knee to the baby-faced tools of imperium at My Lai and Fallujah to the predator drones scouring Central Asia, the U.S. is the single largest perpetrator of terrorism worldwide. As all the while, guilty by their complicity citizens of the U.S. sit on their sofas, oblivious or unmoved by any event transpiring beyond their self-circumscribed field of reference. There should be a monument erected to the tragic legacy wrought by the acts of terrorism at “Ground Zero”–and it should be a statue representing a willfully ignorant fat-ass sitting on his couch, TV remote in hand, Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of his mouth.

Granted, Lower Manhattan took a tragic hit, a decade ago, and many people suffered as a result (I know I live a couple of neighborhoods upwind) but none worse than the people of Iraq and Central Asia. Somehow, I suspected (and was proven sadly correct) that their experiences would not be evoked, as part of the 9/11 hagiography foisted and verbal monuments cast to sacred victimhood, as part of the official ceremony commemorating the event.

Moreover, not long after 9/11, an attack was launched from Lower Manhattan that collapsed the global economy. I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about that.

By parroting the self-serving hagiography of 9/11/01, as well as, “I support the warrior, but not the war” type fallacies, liberals continue to play right into the sustaining narratives of the national security state.

Case in point, the empty, oft-heard, liberal pundit assertion, “My idea for a 9/11 tribute would involve bringing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan home, with proper benefits.” Nonsense. Worse than nonsense: Precious, cloying, self-congratulatory piffle. The statement is axiomatic of the feckless calls and specious cries common to that species of walking cliché known as “troop-supporting” liberals.

As far as I’m concerned, “our troops”–human delivery systems of U.S. government sanctified terrorism–can walk home; that way, maybe, they might learn something about the larger world, other than their mission to kill the people they happen upon without question, and then share with their fellow belligerently ignorant countrymen what they learned about life (its sacred quality) on their long, Odysseusian journey home.

Apropos, reasonable liberals counsel such declarations serve as “bad public relation” tactics. “Don’t you realize that you risk alienating Middle America? Remember, the reactionary fallout created by the radicalism of the 1960s?”

The fact is: The passionate questioning of the entire war effort in Southeast Asia, the role of soldiers included, helped to bring an end to the war and factored into the soldiers’ rebellion at the later stages of the protracted conflict. In increasing numbers, the conscripts began to refuse to kill and die for a dubious cause, they went hippie on the ass of the military state.

The activist left ended the war; self-serving liberals blew the peace.

The “bad PR” involving “spitting on the troops” was after the fact, rightwing confabulation, promulgated to intimidate liberals into shamed silence, and, of course, liberals being liberals, it worked. True to form, they “distanced” themselves from the “troop-demoralizing radicals of the irrational left.” In reality, they fled in fear from arrays of rightwing created strawmen.

PR itself is the dubious craft of professional lying–corporate era legerdemain. In fact, the craft is the opposite of the resonate truth carried by deepening poetry, poignant prose and challenging political speech–the near exclusive domain of the left in the 1960s.

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend
What makes me shudder so
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

–William Bulter Yeats, except from “Mad As The Mist And Snow”

The inspired, enduring (very threatening to some) art, music and political action of the era were not the result of liberal accommodation and compromise. Antithetically, the cause of peace and justice (briefly) made some headway despite liberals not because of them.

As a famous literary drunk once quipped, “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.” Change will not come with a victim-centered view of the world…including viewing the nation’s toxically innocent, economic conscripts as mere victims of circumstance. Yes, young people make stupid choices–but treating them as victims does not serve them or the nation well.

“Liberal compassion” should not be extended to countenancing acts of mass murderer. Time and time again, liberals play into rightist propaganda, by allowing the discussion of U.S. militarism to be framed as exclusively pertaining to the sacrifices of individual soldiers, whose fates, in the larger context of events, have been appropriated a device of imperial plunder. By truckling to this narrative, liberals play into the propaganda of those who prosper by the homicidal designs of the present day U.S. military state.

Instead, let us endeavor to disabuse the culture of the delusion that there exists noble sacrifice in the act of killing and dying for the agendas of empire. When an individual U.S. soldier begins to stagger in the direction of his own humanity (renouncing his complicity in the death-sustained system, as many did during the Vietnam era) then we should open our arms and embrace him with a fierce compassion.

On a personal basis, my family had little money. And I made many self-destructive choices, but I also had tenacious mentors who challenged me, called me on my destructive nonsense, pointing out the bulwark of denial and hubris that sustained its shabby, ad hoc structure. Making a home in being lost, I took up residence in the enduring structure of poetry, literature and music: Whitman, Kerouac, Rilke, Dylan, the Allman Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and others too numerous to name taught me to question, as the expression went, “everything.”

This is not rocket science; this is far more important; this is the essential subject matter that informs the propulsion and guidance systems of the human heart. Withal, instruct the young how to build and inhabit the structure of a cogent argument and to navigate a soul-suffused landscape of poignant verse, lyric, and insight.

To do so, one must not shy away from confrontation. During the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War era, before the left was manipulated into fearing the libido borne of sacred vehemence, stupid opinions were not coddled; they were challenged.

Feelings were hurt. Egos were bruised. But an illegal war was shortened and a number of (long over due) rights were granted.

[…]Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

–Wendel Berry, excerpt from “Ripening”

At present, among the things we can ill afford are fantasy prone kids, duped into believing modern soldiering bestows nobility and involves heroic sacrifice. Instead, the times call for brave misfits, encouraged to embrace rejection by a dysfunctional society and primed to endure the inherent bumps and buffeting inflicted from a culture that has gathered into the formation of a flying wedge of self-destructive, crash-fated crazy.

The excursion did us some good, in particular, leaving insular Manhattan, and facing the faded, crumbling Industrial Age grandeur of Pittsburgh. Walking, once again, among the plaintive rasps of the ghosts of the devastated laboring class (the social setting of our youth) provided us with a humanizing contrast to our present day circumstances stranded amid the manic chattering of the preening demons of banal self-regard possessing Manhattan careerists.

Nowadays, the island of Manhattan is tediously bright and shiny — a sterile, oligarchic controlled dystopia. Accordingly, any sign of redemptive decay and hint of shabby ass human glory has been banished by official caveat and collective collusion.

In contrast, while in Pittsburgh, because I was born in a steel and coal town, Birmingham, Alabama, I shuffled among familiar shades. Deep in my being, I know the social setup — once manifested in forged steel, living flesh and human longing — now lost to the ravages of time (more accurately, the consequences of neo-liberal economic doctrine).

In Birmingham, under the statue of the Roman god of the forge, Vulcan, his mortared gaze lording over the city from atop Red Mountain, I witnessed men, hardened by years of grinding labor and demagogic political manipulation, sacrifice their bodies to (Pittsburgh plutocrat-owned) mines, foundries and smelting plants for subsistence pay.

In childhood, when I watched local men labor in the city’s metal foundries, their sweat-lacquered faces, reflecting the fiery glow of smelted steel, seemed to glisten with rage, as angry blue sparks showered the heat-seared air around them.

These were hard-drinking, short-tempered men who were calloused of hand and possessed of humiliation-hardened hearts — rendered so, by a life of the strenuous labor, mandated by an exploitive economic system that bequeathed to them little but a hard scrabble existence — and the promise of a future bearing more of the same.

Little wonder, they swore into the soot-choked air, brawled among themselves, and clutched (self-defeating but politically useful to the ruling elite) racial animus, as their vitality was harnessed to build the structure and infrastructure of the industrial state and increase the wealth, privilege and political power of steel and coal plutocrats up in Pittsburgh (the absentee owners of the area’s coal and iron mines, smelts, and processing plants) — but, in so doing, we locals further diminished the steerage of the course of our lives.

I learned early the girding lie that sustains the oligarchic state i.e., the illusory promise: Work hard and you will set yourself free. In fact, as was the rigged economic setup of the Birmingham of my youth, the harder one works within the inverted totalitarian structure of the corporate state, the more one increases the wealth, hence the political power of the ruling elite…by enabling the parasitic class to consolidate yet more power. Therefore, by working harder and longer for their benefit, one further diminishes one’s control over the trajectory of one’s fate.

(Caveat: This is not to be confused with hard work and diligent effort — a million acts of responsibility create freedom. The distinction being…be aware of who benefits from your efforts and mindfully choose where to apply your labors.)

At present, in cities such as Birmingham and Pittsburgh, the structures, built in the mechanized fury of the Industrial Age, stand idle…decaying around legions of the unemployed and the woefully underpaid and under-compensated. In the oxidized scream of rust, one can almost hear the wails of rage of those souls who surrendered their life force to erect and work the now abandoned factories, mills and foundries of the nation.

Outsourcing, downsizing, work speed-ups, i.e., the most recent mechanisms of capitalism’s death cult of dehumanizing efficiency goes all but unchallenged in the official narrative of the corporate state. By means of intimidation and the proffering of small bribes, the work force is induced to transmute their body’s vitality and soul’s pothos into the profits of an advantaged, ruthless few. In this way, one’s pothos (Greek: yearning plus libido) is rendered into the convenient pathos (alienation, paranoia, displaced rage, consumer addiction) of the corporate age.

Why do so many in the U.S. accept this pernicious, self-defeating setup? Perhaps, because they have been convinced by constant saturation by the commercial propaganda of the consumer state that capitalism will bestow to those who abide by its (rigged) rules and (gamed) economic arrangements everything one could possibly need and desire.

Accordingly, all an individual needs to know and experience is at his impulsive, electronic mass media-happy fingertips. He can click from virtual reality enactments of explicit porn to obscene interpretations of Christian prophecy (e.g., the present field of Republican presidential hopefuls) thus, in an instant, transmigrating from fake sin to phony salvation … What more, in the whole of boundless creation, could one possibly want?

Yet, where does a veritable (as opposed to virtual) sense of place exist in social and economic arrangements such as these?

The present era of weightless perception serves to obscure the crushing consequences of the short-sighted cupidity of both the economic elite and underclasses alike. Reflecting this, wealth now exists as constellations of electrons; money is no longer the vaulted riches of miserly plutocrats nor payday cash of the laboring class burning in the pockets of worn work clothes.

Currency exists in precincts of pixels–a fever dream of appliances — the effluvia of the schemes of the elitist illusionists of high finance whose machinations have wrought an age of electronic razzle-dazzle and devastating real world consequences — whereby the solid architecture and durable accoutrement of the Machine Age, manifested as the sturdy structures of Industrial Era cities, such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, has been transmuted into the manic, evanescent imagery of the mass media hologram.

In the years since Katrina, I’ve been known to rage at the indifferent sky, why the Hell (or, at least, its earthly exurb: Houston) did nature’s impersonal fury have to descend on New Orleans, about the last outposts within this corporate simulacrum of a country where an individual pulse and collective heart beat could be found — where the primordial songs of bone, heart and flesh — of the arias rising from steam-caressed sidewalks and the riffing currents of rivers — have not been forced into the Clear Channel/Disney/Time-Warner überculture blandification machine?

In order for the U.S. — a nation whose populace possesses the collective capacity for cognitive depth and emotional resonance of a Louisiana gnat flurry in high summer — to rise from its destructive swoon of insularity-engendered anomie, the embrace of a view of the world imbued by anima mundi, embodied in the living architecture of a city like New Orleans, is essential.

In New Orleans, interred corpses will not remain buried in the earth…the water sodden ground causes the dead to rise to the surface. Axiomatically, we must not deep-six our grief and rage. In the name of Katrina’s dead and walking wounded, we must not allow the casuistry-shattering verities of the human heart to be buried and forgotten nor allow mass media schlock to drown out the lamentations of the city’s restless dead from memory.

To honor her dead, displaced and deeply scarred, we must remember the mortifying sights and heart-shaking sounds of both the natural disaster that was Katrina and the official shit storm of human negligence, flat-out deceit and malevolence that rendered the Crescent City a corpse-choked drowning pool. Instead, we must gaze down into the dark water of memory, remembering the water-deluged streets of the city…awash with bloated bodies, raw sewage, industrial sludge and the floating debris and submerge detritus of peoples’ lives.

Yet, to properly mourn what was lost to the storm (in the tradition of the city itself) one must allow one’s grieving heart to be seduced by the soul of the world. Personally, as is the case with many who knew the city, pre-Katrina — beautiful, disloyal, capricious creature she was (and remains) — I retain a lover’s ardor for her.

For: Being enveloped by the redolence of orange blossom and jasmine, held on her humid, late afternoon air, as I sat, swigging a Turbo Dog, on the banks of the Mississippi, as evening tilted over the Lower Ninth. For: The exquisite indifference of starlight above the Bywater, and the manner those distant, celestial bodies would stand in stark contrast to the redemptive immediacy of the sweat-soaked bodies near me, as we would lie on our backs, upon the sidewalk, watching steam (borne of the mass of humanity within) rise from the roof of Vaughan’s Lounge — listening, as inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers wailed into the early morning hours.

I suspect my years in New Orleans saved/cursed me from being agenda-prone. I’m not of the reductionist school. I’m drawn to swamps, not so much the muck — but the mindfulness needed to negotiate the terrain. Of course, swamps will bog one down; yet, I’m drawn to the cacophony and filtered light, to its minute gradations of green upon green. One is forced to slow down in order to take in the revealed beauty and hidden dangers therein.

Moreover, the swamp exists for its own sake and feels no obligation to explain its mystery. It can be known, but its mystery is just that — ever growing, always dying.

One must not, and this is a habitual misstep of the contemporary left, approach politics, personality and place as a strictly intellectual exercise — as a thought experiment that will yield to logic. If the swamp of the human psyche were that simple to negotiate, then life would be a dry, blood-bereft trudge indeed.

And yet, how the world wounds us; at times, delivering an aching sorrow that one will always carry. But rejoice in your wounded condition…for the open wound harbors a mouth to kiss…a womb from which to be perennially reborn. As Octavio Paz testifies, “Love is a wound, an injury… Yes, love is a flower of blood.”

As far as the struggle to be included in the present political narrative, we, on the left, remain marginalized to the point of near invisibility. But don’t lose heart: The problem is the solution. Apropos, empire carries the seeds of its own demise. Therefore, in the shadow of the house of cards economy, now tottering over the ruins and detritus of the nation’s shuttered factories, foreclosed upon farms, and abandoned mills, one should go about the business of working on what will replace the hollow and decayed system when it collapses from within.

Accordingly, Rainer Maria Rilke averred (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you refuse the life your heart wants to live, you don’t get to read this letter before you die. An individual must risk the world, with all its attendant woundings, or he risks having a dead letter office piling up lost correspondence from his neglected heart.

At least, that’s the encrypted message I’ve deciphered using my Super-Secret, Zeitgeist Decoder Mood (disorder) Ring, special limited, Michele Bachman edition.

Thus far, in this dismal century of the nation’s history, both men who have occupied the office of the U.S. presidency, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, are as much products of the 1970s as were Naugahyde pit group sofas and outbreaks of the Herpes Simplex Retrovirus at Plato’s Retreat. From a historical perspective, future generations will regard the Bush Administration and its Democratic Party doppelganger as the Dacron Polyester of American presidencies: Bush’s legacy will carry all the beauty, style, and enduring appeal of a powder blue Leisure Suit — and Obama will be remembered as the Pet Rock of the U.S. oligarchic class.

Accordingly, if there is a presiding spirit possessing our age, it is the gray ghost of Richard Nixon who sat, stoop shouldered and scheming, in the Oval Office, in the early 1970s, as the U.S. began hitting the limits of its imperial might and economic power, and who set the tone of duplicity and denial that define daily life in the nation to this day.

During the Watergate Era, Karl Rove and other ruthless sleight-of-hand artists of the politics of demagogic distraction and displacement grasped this fact, so troubling in its implications that it was banished from the official narrative: Nixon was not driven in disgrace from office because the people of the U.S. were troubled by having a sick, corrupt bastard as their president; in truth, most simply found the situation embarrassing…to have the curtains of the living quarters of the White House pulled open, thus allowing the world to witness the dismal spectacle of Nixon…pacing the floors, draped in a dingy bathrobe, muttering whisky-fueled expletives at the yellowing wallpaper.

“Now, Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth.” — excerpt, Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd

Moreover, Rove perceived that Nixon’s paranoia, rage, envy, and resentment merely mirrored those of the white, U.S. middle and laboring classes. Nixon knew from the depths of his black spleen to the tips of his twitching nerve endings the hidden in plain sight, ugly side of the American character and how the pathologies therein could be exploited for political gain.

Nixon’s legacy remains our lode star because most of the U.S. populace accepted the false narrative that Watergate and Vietnam were aberrations, and that, by Nixon’s resignation from office in August of 1974, the country’s psyche had been purged of the demons…conjured and given sustenance by U.S. global-wide imperium and that still abide within the collective psyche of the nation — an unseen, insidious presence to this day.

Ergo, even after Nixon was exiled to San Clemente, and the nation’s citizenry was induced to take up the mantra, “the system worked…time to move on…Our long national nightmare is over” — Americans remained uneasy, clinging to the casuistry that we were mere bystanders when the crimes were committed — and, as a consequence, we transformed ourselves into willfully ignorant marks for political flimflammers (embodied by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama et al) whose comfortable lies exalt the inviolable grace of our collective cluelessness.

Otherwise, we would have been forced to face our individual complicity in Nixon’s crimes; otherwise, a million Vietnamese corpses would have risen accusingly in our dreams — as tens of thousands of Iraqi and Central Asian dead would haunt our sleep tonight.

At present, Democratic Party apologist for U.S. military imperium seem to have little inclination to lament the deaths of the children of Central Asia, whose bodies have been ripped asunder by attacks by U.S. predator drones, because (Could they possibly believe?) their lives were violently torn from this world by the policies of a Nobel Peace Prize winner — not Bush nor Cheney nor any (admitted) neocon.

In the compartmentalized confines of their casuistry, how is it possible that Obama’s liberal supporters actually believe that the souls of these children are now at peace only because they had not befallen the misfortune of having been slaughtered, by say, the caprice of a President Perry or Bachmann?

The demonstrable madness of the Republican party’s presidential hopefuls serve as living emblems of the forces of negative entropy riddling the empire. Accordingly, Michele Bachmann embodies its urge towards outright self-destructive mania. In contrast, Barack Obama’s style is axiomatic of the effects of its all-encompassing, reality-denying PR apparatus i.e., reality viewed as a mere marketing problem.

Moreover, as the tattered veracities of U.S. exceptionalism continue to be buffeted by the realities of the wider, indomitable world, political types, such as Obama and Bachmann, both scions of the nation’s dismal and deranged political class — risen from the political landscape since the 1970s — will embody the cognitive dissidence inherent to declining empire.

The larger the specter of decline looms, the more desperate the political and economic elite have become…contriving to consolidate even more outrageous amounts of wealth and power, hence further circumscribing the already severely diminished societal milieu of the less privileged classes of the nation.

Such desperate circumstances can bring peril: The rights and liberties of a nation’s people can be forsaken, like good music and a sense of fashion in a 70′s era disco, when a group of fanatical outsiders (for example, rank and file teabagger types) forge ad hoc alliances, based on political and economic expediency, with a corrupt business and political, ruling elite.

“I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind/ I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes/ don’t look into mine.”
–Bob Dylan, excerpt, Idiot Wind

In my own experience, I first began to take note of the acceptance of authoritarian impulses in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s. I noticed my peers (teenagers born during the peak years of the Baby Boom) were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as our beleaguered authoritarian elders had feared. Instead, we were the free floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic e.g., unlike our predecessors in the 1960s, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion; rather, they were appropriated as apolitical agents of anesthetization.

Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions, our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) — our surface-level rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking exterior, the metastasizing of an insidious indifference — to a large measure a radical renunciation — of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones.

Our mode of being, even then, revealed our obsession with comfort, the devices of escapism and an avidity for insularity — our right to the pursuit of numbness. We were fledgling Weimar Republicans, clad in faded, frayed bell-bottom jeans…primed to surrender freedom to the corporate/national security state for the illusion of safety and control.

All along, beneath the pot reek, redolent on polyester fabric…the Muscle Car rumble…Quaalude spittle…the tribally-administered, prototypical serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (perhaps precursors of the Huxleyesque pharmaceutical authoritarianism to come) we baby boomers were scions of the Cold War military/industrial/consumer empire’s death-sustained dynamo.

The empire is as noisy, distracting and meaningless as a vintage, 1970s pinball machine — as self-aware as a baby boomer, suburban pothead teenager who, as the years have passed, transformed into a self-absorbed, Starbuck’s-slurping, SSRI-popping consumer zombie, possessed of mindless appetite, begot by deep, inner desolation who has spent his existence devouring the resources of the entire planet in the manner he devoured food from his mother’s pantry while possessed of a bad case of reefer munchies in the 1970s.

As the decades have passed, an internalize mall and mcmansion — an architecture of instant gratification and compulsive insularity — has supplanted primordial forests of collective imagination; hence, our roots no longer reach deep into the dark, renewing loam of ancestral intelligence; our branches no longer lift towards the sky of possibility. We feel devoid of nourishment and hope, because the internalized empire has clear cut it all, reducing sequoia forests to toothpicks in order to pick the bits of charred flesh of those slaughtered in our wars of imperium from its rotting teeth.

Consequently, If our corrupt political parties did not exist, we would need to invent them, for they are emblems in the flesh of the true face of U.S. empire…What rises from the toxic soil of the inverted totalitarian powers of the corporate/military state.

Yet, more than likely, the readers of this essay are as mortified, heartsick, and enraged by the actions of the U.S. government and the corporate overlords who own and operate it, as is this writer. Nevertheless, we carry U.S. imperium within us as deeply as we hold the imprint of our parents’ faces. The empire is too pervasive and invasive to avoid our being carriers of its proliferate pathologies; this system weaned us and socialized us, and, even when we rebel against it, our actions are generally restricted within limits set by it.

Otherwise, the consequences would be too crushing for most of us to endure: financial ruin, destitution, homelessness.

Accordingly, here’s a plot spoiler regarding the stagecraft of the next presidential election cycle. Republicans — Bachmann, Perry et al will play their roles as scary, scary psychos — escapees from the Right Wing Christian Madhouse For Social Program Ax Murderers — as Obama will play the calm, reasonable, deliberate authority figure who, after the crazies are dispatched, will calmly and deliberately slash to bits Social Security and Medicare — and then feed the remains to the economy-devouring cannibals on Wall Street.

Mojo Nixon (no blood relation, I suspect) sang, “Everybody has a little Elvis in them.” Nowadays, regrettably, we must sing: “Everybody has far too much Nixon in them.” Internally (even those born long after the 1970′s) in larger and smaller degrees, carry Nixon’s dismal legacy.

Apropos, proceed to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and repeat the risible (as well as demonstrably false) phrase, “I am not a crook”– then, at long last, face the Richard Milhouse Nixon within, and thus come face to face with the cause of why, collectively, we in the U.S. seem perpetually in the thrall of the corrupt political forces and degraded social criteria that have gripped and grappled us since Nixon slunk from the scene in the summer of 1974.

According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders.

Regardless of the propaganda of “free market” fantasists, the great unspeakable in regard to capitalism is its wealth, by and large, is generated for a ruthless, privileged few by the creation of bubbles, and, when those bubbles burst, the resultant economic catastrophe inflicts a vastly disproportionate amount of harm upon those — the laboring and middle classes — who generate grossly inequitable amounts of capital for the elitist of the fraudster class…by having the life force drained from them by the vampiric set-up of the gamed system.

Woody Guthrie summed up the situation in these two (unfortunately) ageless stanzas:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a sixgun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

– Excerpt from “Pretty Boy Floyd”

Although, at present, U.S. bank vaults contain little tangible loot for a Pretty Boy Floyd-type outlaw to boost. How would it be possible for an old school bank robber such as Floyd to make-off with a haul of funneling electrons?

Here’s the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That’s the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake.

Consequently, in the U.K. (and beyond): When poor people’s hopes dry up, cities become a tinderbox of dead dreams, and we should not be stricken with shock and consternation when these degraded places are set aflame, nor should we be surprised when the bribed, debt-beholden and commercial media propaganda-bamboozled middle class (who helped create the wasteland with their arid complicity) cry out (predictably) for police state tactics to quell the fiery insurrection.

There have been incidents in which a fire has smoldered for years in an abandoned, sealed-off mineshaft, and then the fire, traveling through the tunnels of the mine, and up the roots of dead, dried trees have caused a dying forest to bloom into flames. The rage that sparks a riot can proceed in a similar manner — and the insular, sealed-off nature of a nation’s elite and the willful ignorance of its middle class will only make the explosion of pent-up rage more powerful when it reaches the surface.

We exist in a culture that, day after day, inundates its have-nots with consumerist propaganda, and then, when the social order breaks down, its wealthy and bourgeoisie alike express outrage when the poor steal consumer goods — as opposed to going out and looting an education and a good job.

Under Disaster Capitalism, the underclass have had economic violence inflicted upon them since birth, yet the corporate state mass media doesn’t seem to notice the situation, until young men burn down the night. Then media elitists wax indignant, carrying on as if these desperate acts are devoid of cultural context.

A mindset has been instilled in these young men and boys that they are nothing sans the accoutrements of consumerism. Yet when they loot an i-Phone, as opposed to creating economy-shredding derivative scams, we’re prompted by the corporate media to become indignant.

When the slow motion, elitist-manipulated mob action known as our faux democratic/consumerist culture deprives people of their basic human rights and personal dignity — then, in turn, we should not be shocked when a mob of the underclass fails to bestow those virtues upon others.

The commercial mass media’s narrative of narrowed context (emotional, anecdotal and unreflective in nature) serves as a form of corporate state propaganda, promulgated to ensure the general population continues to rage against the symptoms rather than the disease of neoliberalism. The false framing of opposing opinions — of those who state the deprivations of neoliberalism factor into the causes of uprisings, insurrections and riots as being apologists for violence and destruction is as preposterous as claiming one is an apologist for dry rot when he points out structural damage to a house due to a leaking roof.

Because of the elements of inverted totalitarianism, inherent within the structure of corporate state capitalism, and internalized within the general population by constant, commercial media re-enforcement, one should not be surprised when a sizable portion of the general populace is inclined to support police state tactics to quell social unrest among the disadvantaged of the population.

Keep in mind: When watching the BBC or the corporate media, one is receiving a limited narrative (tacitly) approved by the global power elite, created by informal arrangements among a careerist cartel comprised of business, governmental and media personality types who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, in doing so, they serve as operatives of a burgeoning police state.

Accordingly, you can’t debate fascist thinking with reason nor empathetic imagination e.g., the self-righteous (and self-serving) pronouncements of mass media representatives nor the attendant outrage of the denizens of the corporate state in their audience — their umbrage engineered by the emotionally laden images with which they have been relentlessly pummeled and plied — because their responses will be borne of (conveniently) lazy generalizations, given impetus by fear-based animus.

Through it all, veiled by disorienting media distractions and political legerdemain, we find ourselves buffeted and bound by the predicament of paradigm lost…that constitutes the onset of the unraveling of the present order.

The kings of the world are growing old,
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from “The Kings of the World”

Yet, while there is proliferate evidence that, even as people worldwide are rising up against inequity and exploitation, the economic elite have little inclination to do so much as glimpse the plight of those from whose life blood their immense riches have been wrung, nor hear the admonition of the downtrodden…that they are weary of life on their knees and are awakening to the reality that the con of freedom of choice under corporate state oligarchy is, in fact, a life shackled to the consumerism-addicted/debt-indenturement that comprises the structure of the neoliberal, global company store.

The rotten masks that divide one man
From another, one man from himself
They crumble
For one enormous moment and we glimpse
The unity that we lost, the desolation
…Of being man, and all its glories
Sharing bread and sun and death
The forgotten astonishment of being alive”

–Octavio Paz, excerpt from “Sunstone”

Accordingly, the most profound act of selfless devotion (commonly called love) in relationship to a society gripped by a sociopathic mode of being is creative resistance. Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard; mouth, full of ashes; heart, a receptacle for dust.

In contrast, throughout this past year, popular uprisings of varying scope and degree of success have been unfolding worldwide. And the genie is not going back in the neoliberal bottle. The global power elite might not like it, but (unlike the general population of the U.S., whose view of life has been conditioned by the inundating, thus internalized, narcissism proffered by media age hyper-commercialism, and who have come to exist as self-involved consumer state dystopias of one) — large numbers of the people of the world are declaring to their overlords: We’ve had enough of the world you’ve created… time to make it our own.

With this in mind, let us take a moment to pity our own poor, little, economic despots — from the start, so misunderstood — they only built the U.S. on the bones of African slaves and watered the soil with the blood of murdered Indians, and, from that time on, proceeded to pile corpses to the sky, only so they could climb atop and look out for us lesser folks.

And from the soil rose a culture of kitsch, unhealthy food, and creepy, over-priced banal distractions. Consequently, the U.S. seems an over-priced, downscale theme Park — Six Flags over Denial and Decay — a grotesque, kitsch-bewitched land of negative enchantment, unprepared for the gathering, denial-sundering storm that, from all indications, will leave the nation devastated.

What are the forces and factors that have wrought this circumstance?

One progenitor of the defiant idiocy of the general population of the U.S. can be traced to the tendency of the consumer state to induce impulsivity rather than reflection i.e., rendering individuals self-involved, infantilized monsters of the id, dazzled by and perpetually reaching for the next bright and shiny.

Antithetically, if a critical mass of the populace of the nation ever gained a semblance of self-awareness that included traits of foresight, critical thinking, empathy, self-restraint and a sense of conviction regarding, for example, the dire state of the planet on an ecological basis, as well as an apprehension as to their position as wage slaves/debt serfs to their corporate overlords — the corporate/consumer paradigm would be in danger of collapse. While it is true, government is often behind assaults on common sense and common decency, the slickest, most self-serving ploy monopolistic capitalist pulled off against the tenets and foundation of a just, equitable society has been in their cunning framing of the situation e.g., the sales pitch of one of their most effective salesman, that “government is the problem, not the solution.”

Ronald Reagan was half right; only, he, conveniently, left out the following: In particular, when the politicians who operate the system are beholden, as he was (and, at present, Barack Obama is) by game-rigging operatives of the moneyed elite.

Ergo, the so-called “debt crisis” involved a similar dance of deceit and distraction. As was the case, early into the Obama presidency, with the healthcare “debate,” the deal was struck before the faux rancorous music began. The fix was in. The moneyed class works the system and those without power and influence get worked over.

Regarding the persistent, liberal fallacy: Obama needs to stand up for his convictions. Correction: Throughout his presidency, he has been standing upon his convictions i.e. standing on the throats of the powerless as we’re being mugged by his elitist benefactors.

Moreover, how does he or anyone “change the tone” of political polarization so evident in the nation, when the right is a walking landfill of noxious arrogance and inexplicable self-regard? If contemporary conservatives showed any indication of harboring even a molecule of humanity or self-awareness then a dialog might be possible.

But we’re dealing with grownups who believe God is some kind of cosmic CEO — folks who are certain, if one listens closely, one can hear him counting his money.

Therefore, we’re warned: not voting for Democratic Party (lesser-of-two-evils) candidates is a treacherous decision, and we’re advised we must goad President Obama to govern as the man he sold himself as during the 2008 presidential election campaign. Given the realities of political life within the age of corporate dominance, in which reality is defined and distorted by the media hologram, hasn’t the thought occurred to progressive types that the sales pitch is, in fact, inseparable from the product, and, consequently, to the most media-savvy mountebank will go the spoils?

O.K. then, you’ve been betrayed. Good. Such a turn of affairs serves as a good vehicle for clearing away toxic innocence.

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread

Than climb across the moment

And let our illusions die. –W.H. Auden¹

Next step: Let the Democratic Party die and allow a true progressive party to rise from the ashes.

Although, first, the hidden in plain sight, inverted totalitarian powers at large need to be drawn into the open e.g., as Dr. King did in regard to Jim Crowe in the U.S. Deep South in the 1950s and 60s.

There is so much more at stake than simply a “debate” regarding the alleged debt ceiling.

To cite one collective peril: The oceans of the earth are the matrix of life on our planet. As did all life on land, we human beings emerged from ancient seas. And we will not survive for long by dramatically altering its nature by the short sighted greed and hubris of the present time. We will be pulled to our death by its destruction, like Ahab lashed to Moby Dick.

Given the degraded quality of life in the nation, why do the people of the U.S. stand for this culture of exploitation and diminished prospects?

We resist the dread incurred by an attempt to climb our way past the proliferate distractions of the moment thus avoiding this extant state of affairs: Beneath the shimmering sea of the media hologram, a monstrous virulence glides. Belying our consumerist habit of mind (evinced in traits of feigned insouciance and blithe disregard) yawns a system sustained by the blood and treasure-depleting apparatus of militarism and economic exploitation — a system that is reaping vast destruction upon the ecological balance of the earth, the foundation of community, and upon individual psychological wellbeing.

Accordingly, a gnawing emptiness is the constant companion of the denizens of the corporate/militarist/consumer state. This emptiness is the progenitor of its destructive nature. In a vain attempt to sate the hollow ache and banish the gathering dread, the rapacious appetite of empire rises and is perpetually reinforced.

There is the banality of evil and then there is the evil of banality. Witness: The present banality of our ecocide-inflicting mode of being — one that reduces the world to only those things that can be commodified and thus reduces earth, sky and psyche to controllable (dreamless and dead) bits. We stare at our appliances as exquisite things are extinguished, forever — mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

On a personal basis, the present system levels this dismal legacy upon the nation: Minds made of internalized shopping malls; bodies built by junk food; libidos informed by celebrity porn; agendas driven by a crass, good versus evil, winners and losers, cartoon cosmology. Congratulations, America, we’ve done the architects of the republic proud.

Some people are fragile, and the system breaks them for life. In contrast, others are resilient, but will grow callous and conformist. Yes, life is a fistfight and a marriage and a dull evening of laundry and a trundle through trivia and a flight of the sublime. The point: Be alive within life; don’t submit to any ass-backwards, assembly line-modeled mode of being, gridded by comforting casuistry, maintained by hierarchies of bullies, and settled for due to fear or convenience.

“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” –Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Insulated in our landscape of silence, we demand the ground beneath us be salted with deceit, begetting the bone-dry wilderness of ignorance and duplicity we know as late, neoliberal empire. Otherwise, fiery incantations of outrage would bloom from within us — a combustive wildfire immolating to ash our tinderbox rationalizations… perhaps, leaving an ash-fall to nourish sleeping seeds of renewal.

“What is to endure light must endure burning.” — Victor Frankl

Yet, this writer is bereft of a plan to redeem humankind. Who can afford such hubris? In contrast, I negotiate the world with my heart and head, and I sing of its joys and sorrows. Apropos, within the kingdom of this breathing moment, I hear arias rising, auguring the decay of this nation. In short, I am a poet and an essayist not a civic planner.

Accordingly, here are a few heart-wrought observations from the personal ash heap of my poetically archaic sensibility and sent out to the fear-bandying cynics of the elitist political and economic classes — to those who reduce all of life to the economic sophistry of Disaster Capitalism (who have been disingenuously warning, “run for your lives; the debt-ceiling is falling”) — who just can’t envisage a world that is not as degraded as their own mindset — to those in positions of insular, arrogant power who inflict great harm upon those bereft of privilege and then proclaim, “this is just the way things have to be.”

False, that is merely the way things exist in the confines of your miserable cosmology. To the contrary, the world is a vast, ever-changing tapestry that you merely perceive as a dung rag for your exclusive use.

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.” — Carl Jung

We have a daunting struggle ahead of us. Therefore, I proffer the following short message to those purer-than-thou souls who counsel that art (including the arts of political resistance) should only be uplifting, moderate, and beautiful:

Art (reflecting our world) is often sublimely ugly, monstrously so. The image of a monster opens the soul to awe. Note: The word “awe” is the prefix for both awesome and awful). Often, creating ugliness carries as much purpose as creating beauty.

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre’s words notwithstanding, I am often asked by readers “practical” questions such as: “You view the empire to be in a state of profound decay, beyond repair and reclamation — then how should we proceed from here?”

I answer, appropriating a phrase from James Hillman: simply proceed into “the thought of the heart and the soul of the world.” The problem contains the solution. The poison serves as its anecdote. The vastness and complexity of life that (seemingly) endeavors to destroy me (in contrast) renders me more like myself, and therefore I become more fit for the struggle ahead.

Accordingly, Rainer Maria Rilke, from the opening stanza of the Duino Elegies:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

greater existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it serenely disdains

to destroy us.

1. Excerpt from: The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

Dante evoked the descent into the underworld to intimate the understanding that darkness is an aspect of human nature and that self-awareness arrives only after an exploration of the hidden, self-censored regions of one’s psyche. Only after passing through the inner most circle of the frozen hellscape does it become possible for Dante to look upward and gaze upon Beatrice’s splendor among the spheres of Heaven.
 

His Journey began, lost in a dark woods, with his path blocked by a hungry she-wolf and fierce lion. Then, led there by the pagan poet, Virgil, the adamantine gates of Hell (posting that famous sign regarding hope forever abandoned) slammed shut behind him. But the poet’s descent deep into the unsavory aspects of his nature made possible those glimpses of beatific light.
 

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world, 
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
 
But the darkness pulls in everything — 
shapes and fires, animals and myself, 
how easily it gathers them! — 
powers and people –
 
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me
 
I have faith in night
 
– Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Otherwise, as is the case with the Puritan/Calvinist imagination, an individual risks becoming purity-obsessed and light-intoxicated i.e., lacking in the will and ability to see the dark side of their nature; hence, one is prone to project one’s own motives on the actions of others.
 
Possessed by this state of mind, an individual is capable of inflicting a great amount of damage on his own psyche. Witness: the raging, lower order demons, inhabiting their own personal hellscapes, as channeled by the likes of Bachmann, Palin, and the Reverend Robertson.
 
Yet, rationalistic devices such as reductionist reasoning and humanistic psychology have proven useless in breaching the high walls of delusion bulwarking fundamentalist, free-floating crazy.
 
Why? Reductionism is a bi-product of the western Puritan/Calvinist tradition, and as such is prone to the pathologies inherent in the cosmology…wherein there exists: an habitual winnowing down of perception to controllable, exploitable bits; the dismissing of all things (the veracity of imagination, the emanations of nature and the souls of animals) that do not serve narrowed agendas (which are defining characteristics of its scion — the corporate state — and those within its institutions who have internalized its raison d’être).
 
Both Fundamentalist and reductionist mindsets are cemented in certitude. In fact, each is the shadow side of the other; hence, hyper-rationalists and religious literalists are locked in contemptuous embrace. Both evince, with their obsession with the other, a longing for rapprochement with their missing half, yet their encounters become a courtship dance of animus and antagonism, whereby their mutual yearning for union is expressed as a compulsion to transform the other.
 
Therefore, the rationalist is driven to proffer balms of superstition-purging logic, as, in turn, the religious true believer frets over the doomed-to-eternal-damnation, mortal soul of the salvation-bereft rationalist. Yet both causation-clutching logicians and credulous lambs of the lord share this trait: both have banished from their respective belief system the appropriation of empathetic imagination and a poetic approach to mystery.
 
Accordingly, the ideal use of poetic insight, intellectual rigor, and quicksilver wit is to deploy these tools (at times, weapons) of the mind — in the manner the hubris-hating gods intended — to confront bullies, rednecks, liars, prigs and hypocrites (including our own self-serving casuistry), to disarm (or, at least, annoy) the brutal, conniving and witless, and, in general, paraphrasing Whitman, “to cheer up slaves and to horrify despots.”
 
Yet, today, if a poet were to merge his body with the body of America, instead of discovering a Body Electric, he would find himself endowed with the hulking, putrefying corpse of a shambling zombie. Accordingly, he must tear a rotting arm from the monster and beat his own laughing corpse with it. Creating a movable autopsy, a Book Of The Dead for a dying empire.
 
Worse, in the world beyond U.S. self-reference, the earth’s oceans are dying — as, on a personal level, Fukushima’s isotopes penetrate our bones like parasitic beetles boring into the trunks of dying trees
 
And this is not simply a view of the world. In fact, this is the state of the world.
 
Don’t defend the indefensible — the soul-defying banality of the present system. The neo-liberal superstate is unsustainable and will bring on its own demise.
 
Instead, like a mourner in a New Orleans funeral march, dance with the dread involved. The music of sorrow is more real than the magical thinking required to believe an insane system is salvageable. Don’t stand, back pressed to the wall, frozen in rationalization and equivocation…Exalt in the unfurling mystery of it all.
 
Crackpot realists demand solutions and Christian Fundamentalist pray for finality. I demur. I stand in awe of the ragged glory immanent in sublime futility.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett

I suspect this attitude arrives from the southerner/Native American collision of genes in me. One’s broken places allow the spirit in. No need to fix the problem, for the problem is the solution. No call for satanic caulk to seal the cracks in one’s soul that reveal one’s character.
 
And why is this important, particularly, at a time when our opponents are unflagging in their certitude? Because even when our reason to fight has merit, and nuance is banished, the larger truth that life itself contains paradox and is comprised of ambiguity remains. Thus, fascist fantasies of infallibility are toppled and the misguided trudge toward the mirage of paradise is waylaid…perhaps leveling a measure of humanizing grace.
 
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
– Goethe

As was the case with any imperium throughout history, the present order is maintained by state-sanctified homicide. To exist in empire, one is induced to deaden ones heart. The act of having internalized (albeit inadvertently) the propaganda of the militaristic/corporate state and thereby cling to its provisional comforts…is to clutch a handful of dust. And what is the mode of being to which so many cling:

Shuffling the floors of some suburban turdbox, within a gated “community” where one rarely sees, much less speaks to one’s neighbors; spending hours at a time, anxious and irritated (if not outright enraged) in soul-grinding commuter traffic, listening to the observations and pronouncements of inspired souls such as Morning Zoo Crews and deep thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio, hate merchants; then languishing all day in a cubicle just to turn around and do it all again.
 
Is it any wonder so many in the U.S. consider “our way of life” non-negotiable? What kind of a miserable, bitter malcontent would wish to challenge and change such a life-enhancing, soul-vivifying mode of being? There is just no pleasing some people.
 
A loss of empathetic imagination is endemic to the consumerist mindset of the mechanized era. This form of pathology began, years ago, when our ancestors offered up their life’s blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age.

I attack all those persons/ who know nothing of the other half,/ the half who cannot be saved,/ who raise their cement mountains/ in which the hearts of the small/ animals no ones thinks of are beating.
– Federico García Lorca, New York (Office and Attack)

Henry Ford and the rest of the Industrial Age’s klavern of gray ghouls measured our flesh, muscle and bone with a productivity-measuring stopwatch. Cunning practitioners of the dark art of convincing human beings they were mere cogs in a soulless machine, it was only a short trudge from that blood-bartering viewpoint of existence through history’s slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann’s cold, corpse-rendering, mathematical constructs.
 
Insulated, as he was, within his fortified tower of mortared casuistry, Eichmann proved adept at emotionally shielding himself from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he helped devised. From individual alienation to planet-wide ecocide, Hannah Arendt’s insights, regarding Eichmann’s psyche in her seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, applies to our present condition: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”
 
Accordingly, to lose the green fuse of transformation, implicit in interpersonal relationships, is to be driven by dehumanizing engines of annihilation.
 
In regard to the consumerist-colonized psyches of the populace of the U.S., an inner architecture is in place — an internalized shopping mall (complete with sub-cretinous security crews trained to shut down political speechifying and pamphleteering — but who seem unwilling or unable to subdue the impulse to buy, on credit, unnecessary items).

Conversely, for a culture to thrive, a vital agora and public square is required. Given the agora has been replaced by mall and social media’s weightless pixels of narrowed apprehension (an almost all-encompassing, amateur improvisational theatre for those with short attentions spans) can there be any chance of an awaking, even an uprising, against such life-negating forces?
 
Using any metric, the present system, based upon a zombie-like proliferation of exponential growth is unsustainable. By the destruction leveled on nature and public space, in combination with, the usurpation of time and identity (individual and collective) — the very structure of the present system creates alienation and anomie.
 
Moreover, the root of Puritan panic (including the constant upwelling of sexually related scandal) is caused by its compulsion to winnow down the human psyche and its attendant drives, actions, and enterprises to only what is deemed pure and practical; hence, panic ensues when the musk and fury of the larger world (even one’s own thoughts and desires) rudely breaches the life-denuded contours of its cordon sanitaire.
 
The anecdote: Don’t tiptoe through your life like a ninny nor become a finger-wagging scold, so mortified by your appetites and desires you would scour the messiness of the world into a sterile prison of self-deprivation. Like Emerson, we must insist: we have a life to live — not a perpetual apology.

Poetry and music can awaken imagination and induce empathy, therefore are potent provisions that sustain one while carrying the darkness. However, first one must engage the struggle, to face the everyday monster whose name is, “That is just the way it is and must remain” — even to risk having one’s concept of self devoured by the task. To paraphrase Lorca: to know oneself by drawing near to the beating heart of the monster of the world.
 

But the Duende — where is the Duende? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child’s spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.
– Federico García Lorca, The Duende: Theory and Divertissement (1930)

 
One cannot kill nor banish personal demons but one can give them supervised work to do (that way one can keep an eye on them).
 
(Knowing one’s demons also provides insight when dealing with adversaries and can prevent one from being drawn into the self-serving ploys of mass media vampires of mind and spirit who retail sexually related scandals that bring glee to the bloodless.)
 
Personally, it could trouble me less if the sky shook, thick as seething locust, with a pixel-borne pestilence of suggestive photos of political sorts. Funny, the same crowd of fundamentalist, petty moralists who believe that global warming is the result of natural forces insist the heat of human libido is what will bring on man’s doom i.e., greenhouse gasses aren’t melting the polar regions; instead, Climate Change is caused by the hot breath of Satan himself tweeting pictures of his lust-scorched undergarments.
 
In times such as these, one is advised to embrace both mystery and logic — both élan vital and logos. Be both apprehensive and comforted by the unknowable, ineffable quality of existence; thereby, one comes to be moved by a poetic approach to mystery, and the realization arrives…that one is vividly alive even amid dismal, alienating circumstance, and, as a result, that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization is, to a degree, mitigated.
 

Although one’s suffering is uniquely one’s own, one remains part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet. This is how Wallace Stevens delivers, in verse, the case for acquiring and maintaining a view of the world by means of empathetic imagination (that can serve as a panacea to the preening narcissism inherit in toxic innocence). I’ll give him the final word:
 

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one …
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
 
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
 
– “Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour”

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial: we want to re-establish things as they used to be, to put the country back where it was.

– James Hillman

Most of the men I grew up with in Alabama and Georgia deny the veracity of climate change. They are unwilling to make the connection between their ownership (actually the bank’s) of SUVs and oversized pickup trucks and the super storms and massive floods that, now with alarming regularity, ravish the region.

Because their besieged sense of self is intermeshed with their motor vehicles, they hold fast to these symbols of the fading world they know. In their imaginings, these gruesome, noxious (and obnoxious) machines represent power and mobility — exactly the aspects of their lives that have been diminished by the demands and degradations of oligarchic capitalism.

By their self-imprisonment in these sorts of compensatory fantasies, they choose to risk their children’s future, rather than, as one victim of his own curdling testosterone expressed to me recently on FaceBook, “[give up his over-sized pick-up] and drive a 4-wheel vagina, algore-mobile.”

A deep-rooted, malignant anger regarding their diminished sense of manhood seethes at the core of pronouncements such as that, and the following, shared on my FaceBook scroll, this past Earth Day: “Happy Earhart day!!! How did you celebrate? I clubbed an adorable baby harp seal, dumped a barrel of waste oil down the storm drain, and started a giant tire fire!!! Good times….”

The sentiment expressed above is an imprecatory prayer, borne of uneasy submission i.e., the callow voice of deep denial, a manifestation of a culturally re-enforced, self-protective cynicism — a reflexive negation of novel ideas that masks a besieged psyche; it is the nihilistic rage appropriated by the powerless serving as a bulwark against the anxiety created by shifting circumstances and buffeted verities.

In the U.S., life keeps changing for the working class — and not for the better. Hence, an inner voice of doubt and despair falsely informs these men that the agents and effects of change will be of no help to them personally… that no one (especially smug, know-it-all liberals) can be of service to you, and, worse, what little you have amassed will be lost.

It is a common (unspoken) fear of the men I grew up around down south that if they were to let go of what little they clutch, nothing would arrive to replace what would be lost. There will be no place reserved for them and their families in the new situations and novel arrangements that (by their addled take on the situation) elitist environmentalist snobs contrive to force upon them.

Moreover, in the corporate state, the loss of community, in combination with the commercially rendered sameness of the environment and the all-encompassing, manic insistency of mass media — both of which are so devoid of depth, context and meaning — it has become increasingly difficult for an individual to gain then retain the sense of self necessary to know where one exists in relationship to time, place, and changing social and political circumstance.

How is it possible to move in the direction of propitious change when the demands and distractions of the corporate/consumer state have negated one’s ability to remain still and focus long enough to even grasp the nature of the problem?

The relentless exploitation of both earthscape and timescape has had a catastrophic effect upon the inner realms of thoughts, dreams, and imaginings of the citizen/consumers of the neo-liberal economic superstate.

Loss of place and an attendant crisis of identity are inextricably bound to the angst and anomie so evident in the present neo-liberal epoch: Being bereft of connection to land, sky, sea, and polis creates a profound sense of unease.

In contrast, a powerful sense of presence rises from within when standing before oceans, rivers, mountains, and even amid streams of human currents traversing the streets and boulevards of great cities. Conversely, where are we, in relationship to the truths of our being, when we are waiting for an order of processed, fast food in a line of automobiles idling at a drive-thru window or we are engaged in hollow communion with the sundry, glowing screens of information age appliances?

One’s sense of self and one’s beliefs, as well as, the mythos and traditions of a people are inextricably bound with place, landscape, and social situation. When I was a child, growing up in Alabama and Georgia, on occasions such as backcountry fishing expeditions, I would, at times, come in contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally, taking refuge from the afternoon heat of high summer, we would lounge on wooden porches and snap green beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.

The Jesus of their belief system was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed so they may live, then, like their life-sustaining crops, was resurrected as next year’s seed crop. Suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria they lived day to day, these tales held resonance for these rural, farming people; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. The figure of Christ was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.

Now, in an era in which the destination of most all of our objects and accoutrement is the landfill, Deep South mega-churches espouse a cosmology that resonates from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus…when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.

All in all, for both Christians and for secular-minded, market economy true believers, a belief in economic providence has proven our undoing — an insistence on its miraculous influence left us mistaking ad-hoc, bubble-borne affluence for a soul-vivifying portion of divine grace. The corporate/consumer state’s trickster gods of fast buck commerce offer drive-thru-window epiphanies. Members of the congregation of the Church of Free Market miracles believe their prayers will always be answered: Instantly, the consumer state’s homilies of perpetual gratification arrive — their voices crackling like a burning bush from drive-thru order-boxes.

Yet the redeemer gods of product placement cannot provide our dying culture with a longer shelf life. Belief in the deities of empyreal marketplace might provisionally banish doubt and diffidence — yet this mythos cannot shelter us from the anonymous fury of the exponential mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic runaway.

Although every generation inherits a howling wasteland and dwells in structures constructed of the bleached bone legacy of past generations — you’d have to go back to Late Cretaceous to find a generation that stands at the threshold of a mass die-off as we human beings do at present.

The Greek tragedians would have grasped the manic and destructive nature of late capitalism, how an obsessively heroic quest for victory carries the seeds of one’s undoing; ergo, by an over-reliance on his strengths and virtues the classical hero brought on his own demise — because the habit of heroic action rendered him closed off to novel awareness.

Victory is a closed system; in contrast, defeat opens one to the possibility of new adaptations.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYou win a while, and then it’s done –
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYour little winning streak.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspAnd summoned now to deal
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspWith your invincible defeat,
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Leonard Cohen

In the case of Greek tragedy, the hero (even the collective mindset of a people) cannot, in the long run, thrive evincing victory-engendered hubris. He will wend towards tragedy; he, with each successive triumph, will become so self-encapsulated with self-regard that only trauma will reopen his heart to the intimacies availed by earth and eternity

Jason will ignore all council and bring his trophy of war, Medea, back to Corinth, setting events in motion that will cause him to lose everything he loves. He will die alone, in demented revelry, crushed beneath the rotting stern of the Argo, the ship that bore him to glory.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYou lose your grip, and then you slip
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspInto the Masterpiece.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Leonard Cohen

Apropos, facing tragedy, to paraphrase Camus, is the opposite of naivety. Yet we go on, even though we think we cannot, when we bear the knowledge of the ultimate futility of our aspirations. Although struggling against overwhelming power and collective delusion seems futile, such endeavors thwart one’s drive for perfection: When we seek paradise, we find paradox. Over the long term, the manner we receive, respond, and are changed by these exchanges with the world is called (our) character.

In the sorrow of defeat, one gains the possibility of identification with the oppressed people of the earth. Loss brings an intermingling with the inherent beauty of the neglected things of the world.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspIt’s evident
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspthe art of losing’s not too hard to master
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspthough it may look like (Write it!) a disaster. 

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Elizabeth Bishop

In my better (too rare) moments, I take Walt Whitman’s approach: I believe an individual should endeavor to connect, mingle, even merge one’s broken heart with the various and varied things of the world… polis, people, and landscape.

There are many things, although vile and ugly, I remain on speaking terms with, extant and within me. Although, our cities are decayed, people troubled and landscapes degraded, I don’t avoid those places and situations — because this is the criteria with which I was given to work, by time and circumstance.

Even, at present, towards empire’s end, when we find ourselves bearing much grief, we are stranded amid ferocious beauty.

Where does one find succor and seeds of renewal in times such as these?

It might prove helpful to glance back at what has been dubbed the “do-it-yourself-art” practiced by the pioneers of Punk Rock.

Bored blind by tedious, onanistic guitar solos of the arena rock era, they approached their instruments with a minimalistic aesthetic. In other words, many burned with such fervor to seize back rock and roll from the stultifying, velvet rope elitism of the period that they had neither the time nor inclination to master more than three cords on their instruments — which they played very fast — and did for scant financial compensation, and even less acclaim, in shot-out clubs in decayed downtown locations such as Manhattan’s Bowery district, thus reintroducing the dirty, lowdown exuberance and subversive intimacy of early rock and roll, plus establishing the enduring principle that being an imbecilic, rock and roll egoist should be a democratic process — not exclusively limited to guitar technocrats or even those individuals possessed of the tyranny of talent.

Accordingly, we can cultivate gardens (individual and communal) appropriating the ash of yesterday’s excesses and the mulch of victories long past; we can plant heirloom seeds, both terrestrial and mnemonic. Thus beginning to allow our lives to become imbrued with the purpose and meaning that arrives when one’s labors are directed at making the world anew. While one cannot know the future, one can begin to move away from a reliance upon a dysfunctional present.