What
Lies Beneath: Privileged Grotesques, Ordinary Monsters
And The Iraqi Deathscape
By Phil Rockstroh
12 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
At
present, George W. Bush is unpopular with the majority of the American
public not because of the murderous mayhem he has unloosed in Iraq;
rather, his standing has plummeted, due to the fact, he didn't deliver
the goods. Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage
using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as
long as "the mission" doesn't drag on too long or reveal too
much about ourselves.
How did we come to be a nation
of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others?
Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a
writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction
to describe it?
I'm afraid it's come to that:
We are a people who psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an
addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement. (Imagery of Smurfs
and Teletubbies won't rise to the analogy, albeit as terrifying as those
demons of hell-bound cuteness are.)
The corporate culture of
exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian
culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography
and displaced rage -- all the distortions of national character inherent
to privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.
A narcissist's actions are
monstrous because his only love is the image of himself wielding control
and power. (Does this remind you of anyone, perhaps someone who struts
about in a flightsuit -- someone prone to proclaiming himself "the
decider" -- someone who grows intoxicated to the point becoming
insensate from a whiff of his own pheromones as he swoons in macho-narcissistic
self-worship?)
And what about the everyday
monsters, those who feel nothing -- not outrage, not remorse, nor sorrow
-- by the conscience-devoid attempt made by our vampiric leaders to
sustain "our way of life" on Iraqi blood? Are you not a monster
as well when you feel nothing before immense human suffering? If you
are impervious to, grown inured of, or have chosen to remain ignorant
of the agony of the Iraqi people, then you might as well join the ranks
of the undead -- because the distant landscape of corpses in Iraq and
Afghanistan matches your internal deathscape.
In short, our empire's dependence
on the resources (the life's blood) of others renders us a nation of
vampires. Moreover, the corporatist character (our national character)
is defined by the vampire's trait of taking, never giving. Accordingly,
what do the big monsters at the top take from us, the little monsters?
To name one: our time, the
precious hours of our finite lives. The corporatists are Time Vampires:
For a moment, reflect on all the hours of life you've wasted away --
in office cubicles, in commuter traffic jams, in the addictive pursuit
of consumer dreck, or simply numbed-out and exhausted, rendered inert
from the incessant, soul-sucking stress of the corporate state.
The corporacracy devours
our time and, like the charges of a vampire, has made us dependent and
slavish in return. In our bloodless enslavement, we lose the vitality
borne of existing within life's inherent mysteries and grow estranged
from the deep resonances of participation mystique.
How does one begin to take
back one's soul from these elitist usurpers? Start with this: The ebullient
skepticism engendered from calling out soul-numbing, self-serving authoritarian
lies.
In an era as perilous as
ours, it's imperative we act with utmost urgency. Yet, tragically, the
exigencies of our age are being played out against a panorama of longer,
more stressful work hours, superficially ameliorated by a mass media
culture comprised of ceaseless trivia and mindless distraction.
This pathology began years
ago when our ancestors offered up their life's blood to the early corporatists
of the Industrial Age. Henry Ford was a gray ghoul who measured out
our flesh with his productivity-measuring stopwatch; he was a cunning
practitioner of the black art of convincing human beings they're mere
cogs in an inhuman machine. It was only a short trudge from there through
history's slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann, insulated within his vampire's
coffin of cold calculations that shielded him from the horrific implications
of the system of mechanized extermination he devised.
The corporate vampire's creed
is defined by ruthless efficiency; the fear of a "loss of productivity"
is the driving force of the death machine. The system is so ruthless
and inhuman that it must conceal its true face, hence the rise of the
telegenic undead known as the corporate media. Do not look to them to
report the facts of our condition: After all, a mirror can't reflect
the image of a vampire. A vampire is empty to the core; therefore, there
is nothing to reflect.
Furthermore, his emptiness
is the progenitor of his destructive nature. Rather than face himself,
his appetite for death will devour all in its path: rain forests, Arctic
glaziers, the people of Iraq, the hours of your life, as well as your
inner being.
It is the force that holds
Democratic politicians in the thrall of their own fecklessness, because
they answer to the same blood-sucking, corporate masters as the rest
of us. Quite simply, they're afraid of their bosses too. The Washington
Beltway is a version, in miniature, of the entire soul-dead, American
corporacracy. The careerist politicians within the Beltway are afflicted
with the same diminution of choice -- the same hyper-attenuation of
the will to freedom -- as the rest of us.
And what remains for us:
an existence (or lack thereof) within this hierarchical hellscape of
narcissists. What sort of a pathetic mode of being is this, a life shackled
to the service of a monstrous system wherein one must evince the obsequies
of a vampire's bloodless lackeys?
To reverse this situation:
Now is the time to drag the lies of the corporate state into the sunshine
where they will writher to dust. We are not powerless: We live in a
world where our collective, hidden intentions are made manifest by our
outward actions. This is why Gothic -- even b-movie -- metaphors are
not an overwrought description of our present condition. Ergo, by the
vehicle of cultural collaboration, we are a nation of world-destroying,
b-movie monsters -- we are a hack-scripted, second-billed feature at
the drive-in movie of existence -- a laughed-off-the-big-screen of the
cosmos, box-office poison of a people.
We are soul-sucking creatures
of kitsch. Flesh-eating zombies of conformity. Road-rage werewolves.
Right-wing, talk show demons whose wrathful voices rage into empty air.
Hungry ghosts wandering the aisles of supermarkets, convenience stores,
restaurant chains and the food courts of shopping malls. We are: The
Fat, Mindless Blobs That Ate the Planet.
To survive, first, we must
find the monster within, then drive a stake through its heart.
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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