Mcmansions,
SUVs, Mega-Churches And The Baghdad Embassy:
Life Among Dim And Brutal Giants
By Phil Rockstroh
29 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In
microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring
classes, my parent's Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many
others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality -- disappeared
-- by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes
of the area are being "scraped" from the landscape as an infestation
of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard
and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses
of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as
the dreams of petty tyrants.
In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse
sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches
eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant
half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer
lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical
apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the
years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the
subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.
How could they not be? They've seized upon a fantasy that allows them
to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating belief system.
Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of their corporately circumscribed
lives, they wish for the destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their
escapist fantasy, by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous
-- apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The believer's
emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological giantism -- a phenomenon
that arises when one's worldview is too small to explain the larger
world. Therefore, a story must be created that contains violence and
terror on such a massive scale that its unfolding would kill off the
entire, problematic world. "That's right world, there's not enough
room on this planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go."
Upon the nation's roadways and interstate highways, the overgrown clown
cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and oversized pickup trucks also
evince hugeness to compensate for the feelings of those folks inside
the grotesque vehicles of being crushed down by alienation and isolation
-- not only while on the road -- but by the realities of an existence
within a hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against
the changing realities of the larger world.
In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs separate
them further from the general population of the consumer state (that
they take every opportunity to bamboozle) as the American public itself
grows fatter and fatter in body mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner
emptiness borne of their perceived helplessness before the predation
of corporate culture.
Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when completed, will
be the largest "diplomatic" compound on the planet is, in
fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless colossus the U.S.A. has
become. The structure is as accurate as the art of architecture can
be in its depiction of the spirit of a nation's people. As big and bloated
as our national sense of exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called
Green Zone of Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within
it -- not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly
fortified walls -- but from reality itself. A massive emblem of the
arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the noxious vapors
of cultural self-deception can be made manifest in reenforced concrete,
armed watchtowers and razor wire.
Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we Americans
dream these things into existence. Far from blameless, we continue to
allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we enable and sustain their
titanic sense of entitlement. In turn, we accept their paltry bribes
and, as a result, our banal, selfish dreams have conjured forth George
Bush from the zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism
is so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own
he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in Baghdad.
In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous
power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders
must be large: Only Macmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable.
We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to
be president -- with the length of his body being roughly the size of
Romney's head.
In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking point:
Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light torment the night,
scouring away the stars, estranging us from imagination, empathy, and
eros, and leaving us only with the insatiable appetites of consumerism.
Thus, around the clock, inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial
slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft
workers ply their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered
wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle trailer,
diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to sepulchral supermarkets
and charnel house restaurant chains. Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies
are provided with all the water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially
farmed, pesticide-laquered vegetables and starches -- The Cuisines Of
The Living Dead -- we could ever crave ... uum, uum, it's the Thanatotic
yumminess of empire's end. Try our convenient drive through window.
Would you like us to super-size your order of commodified death?
Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love with death.
Let's see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well over half
a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the continuing Iraqi
resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as well. Yet still, most
of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage over the din created by the
parade of killer clowns that we have mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.
How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these acts of
murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale? Truth is, we might
not be able to stop it, because this is what lies beneath our unlimited
sense of entitlement and self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that
manifests itself as exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by
means of imperial overreach -- which is, of course, the time-established
method by which empires dispose of themselves.
Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the narcissistic insularity
of our media elite. At the end of the day, it's their tumescent egos
that are distorting our societal discourse; their vanities and attendant
self-serving pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of
horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses -- jackasses
endowed with the singular skill of being able to read a teleprompter
... Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You have an important call
from Washington, DC.
Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the system's
structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of media imagery will
grow – and the more trivial its content will become. The closer
we come to systemic collapse the more we will hear about celebrity contretemps.
Cretinous heiresses and shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of
self-restraint, people the public imagination, because they carry our
infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn, suffer
public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to displace, upon them,
the humiliation of our own daily existence within the oppressive authoritarianism
of the corporate state.
Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to look) link
between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the two terms were interchangeable.
According to rumor, we defeated fascism, during the first half of the
20th century. Yet, at present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing,
soul-enervating corpocracy. To live under corporatism is, in ways large
and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday, hour by hour, the
exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work devours more and more of our
lives. As a consequence, the true self within is crushed to dust and
what remains rises as cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant
need for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the
well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly; in
short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.
Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by living
in the midst of life -- a mode of being that apprehends and is transformed
by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world. Conversely, authoritarian
societies are collectives of accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers,
where one must conceal one's essential self at all costs and the soul
falls into atrophy.
To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the individual
and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and witness the keening
wasteland our nation has become. Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be
filled by any amount of wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene
amounts of mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never -- can
never be -- enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is boundless.
In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a psychopath's emptiness.
Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to the boneyard, hoping he can ascend
to heaven by scaling the mountainous pile of corpses he's responsible
for placing there.
In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the
land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism
inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our
inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a
huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.
The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political classes
have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones, enclosed her in
an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous output of eggs. Yet,
nothing satisfies them.
Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk Insurgency,
hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly trivial as mere beans
-- our postings, exchanges and periodic meet-ups -- the fall of tyrannical
giants might begin.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag
monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York
City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]
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