Eating
The Planet Like
A Bag Of Doritos For Jesus
By Phil Rockstroh
20 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
"Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame."
--Bob Dylan
It has been reported that George
W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception
that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is
as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his
murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary
choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who
merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation's people)
have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend
their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating
policy and law.
There's a well-know witticism
from the 1980s about Ronald Reagan that played-off a ubiquitous television
commercial of the time that went, "Ronald Reagan is not the president:
He just plays one on TV." A similar trope can be said of the present
day United States. We're no longer an empire: We just resemble one on
TV.
How did it come to be that
our ability to apprehend reality is in such short supply, at a time
when the consequences of such dangerous folly will prove so tragic and
lasting?
At times, in equal degree
to the enormity of a given situation, there will come to exist an equal
degree of denial. If you ever have the desire for a bit of solitude,
when attending a social function, try this. Drop the small talk and
utter something along the lines of: "Our actions are causing ongoing
and exponentially increasing upheaval in the earth's ecosystem, due
to the effects of global warming." Or: "Did you know that
the earth's oceans and seas will be all but devoid of life in fifty
years?" Then there's the always reliable: "Because of our
national dependancy on the crack-house economics of a system based on
a need for an ever-increasing squandering of our planets finite resources
(maintained by a cross addiction to a global marketplace sustained by
petroleum) -- all of which has been inflicted on the planet by a class
of hyper-rich, psychotic death monkeys -- you have no more control over
your fate than some scrawny, brown-skinned feller strapped to a torture
table at Guantánamo."
As stated, if you give it
a go, you'll be afforded an abundance of personal space. Such utterances
have the terrible disadvantage of being the truth; as such, they're
guaranteed room-clearers. The largest social faux pas of all, in the
contemporary US, might be to remind a person of their powerlessness.
Understandably, we avoid
the knowledge of those things that inflict upon us the feelings of powerlessness
we experience when secured in a dentist's chair. In such circmstances,
the only question we're concerned with is: Will there be enough anesthetizing
agents available to numb out the anxiety and pain? Perhaps, this is
what underpins the reason we have become a people who've grown incurious
of the larger world around us to point of becoming all but insensate:
We need the equivalent of a root canal on a global-wide basis. Worse,
the drilling must start at the epicenter of the decay, right here in
The United States.
Accordingly, there are a
few facts it is imperative we face, immediately and unmedicated. Among
them: The changes to the earth ecosystem wrought by global warming are
neither a political opinion nor are the acts of a wrathful god in heaven,
but are a dynamic of nature set in motion by our actions -- and are
wholly indifferent to the fate of mankind.
The capitalist's drive for
endless abundance has allowed us to ascend the fast food chain, yet
we blink uncomprehendingly at the catastrophic algorithms of global
climate change. We -- the progeny of global corporatism -- in regard
to our acknowledgment of the dire events and pressing issues of our
time, our sense of collective narrative is, for all practical purposes,
about as keen as that of the creatures of the Cretaceous Period in regard
to their understanding of the earth-altering implications of planetary
collisions with comets. The size of our denial is as enormous as the
body of a brachiosaurus and our response to the dire situation has been
about as adequate as if we were using its walnut-sized brain.
Furthermore, we are the comet.
We are both the threatened, dominate species -- as well as the comet
of destruction that will end this Empire of Endless Burgers and Ceaseless
Bullshit. Our delusions of the sustainability of ever-expanding market-based
economies, wholly dependent upon a never wavering abundance of resources,
has rendered us as inflexible as the dinosaurs were before a global
wide, sky-occluding dust cloud. We're devouring the life-sustaining
resources of the earth as if it were a bag of Doritos. Our empty appetites,
engendered by global corporatism and its reliance on fossil fuels, is
leveling an effect upon our world tantamount to a slow motion collision
with a comet ... To survive, we must curb our appetite for this everyday
menu of death -- for these Valueless Meals comprised of the empty calories
of comforting lies proffered by the corporate state.
The present paradigm must
(and will) collapse: Rising gross national products, imaginative ad
campaigns and faith in some mythological being returning from the sky
will not cause the earth's rising oceans to recede nor its melting Polar
ice caps to reconstitute. Our advertising and public relations evangelists
here in the Empire of Endless Burgers cannot convert the forces of extinction
to marketplace pieties with new advertising slogans. Our redeemer gods
of product placement cannot provide our dying culture with longer shelf
life. Belief in these gods of the mall and empyrean may have banished
doubt and diffidence -- yet these myths cannot shelter us from the anonymous
fury of the exponential mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic
runaway.
All in all, our belief in
economic providence has proven our undoing -- our insistence on its
very existence left us mistaking a full stomach for a leveling portion
of divine grace. Our gods of commerce offered drive-thru-window epiphanies.
We believed our prayers would always be answered: Instantly -- came
the high priests of the consumer state's homilies of perpetual gratification
-- their voices crackling like a burning bush from the drive-thru order-box.
But now: Overcooked in arrogance
and oil: The Empire of Endless Burgers is char: Stick a fork in it --
it's overdone.
As our delusions bake to
ash, what shall we cry into the gathering darkness? Can our pleas be
heard over the thunderous machinery of the encompassing void?
What if the realization came
that our most sacrosanct beliefs -- both economic and epistemological
-- were but a musky collection of antiquated myths? To survive, our
blind faith-based suppositions must not be flattered by political opportunists
(I'm looking at you, Hillary and Obama) -- but allowed to rot into compost
then be buried. Because deep down, we already realize our allegiances
to the imaginary gods and saviors of long dead, desert tribalists not
only blind us to the dangers at hand but in large measure helped to
contribute to our troubles in the first place. Ergo, It's a fact: Jesus
will not descend and heal the earth's dying seas. We might as well hold
out for Little Folk, adorned with gossamer wings, to appear from the
gnome-haunted air and sprinkle Fairy Dust upon it.
Furthermore, there are no
Chosen People -- nor does there exist an Omnipotent Sky Daddy above
who could give a rodent's rectum about the oil-soaked real estate of
the Middle East nor any other plot of disputed ground on this cosmological
backwater of a planet.
It's time to wake up and
smell the mythology. God has no will. God has no more of a plan than
a tree has a financial portfolio. God does not say God bless you: Your
life is not an eternal sneeze in need of a perpetual gesundheit. And
there never was a character who rose from this sin-sullied earth and
took up residence in the starry filament named Jesus Christ -- who will
love you no matter how big of an asshole you are: That's the job of
your dog.
Perhaps such shocks to the
system might rouse us from that narcissistic swoon called "my faith",
might shatter our perennial delusions that God desires for us to conquer
and kill in his name, and might deliver us to the true Promised Land
-- the one that exists just beyond the limited sight-line of our systems
of belief.
And might banish the empty
mythos of instant gratification -- the guiding god of global capitalism
-- which is the force (in a toxic, paradoxical mixture with sexual repression)
that begot the fantasies of contemporary Christian Fundamentalism. In
essence, what is the Christian fundamentalist belief in the so-called
End Time, but a worldview that reduces mythic reality to channel surfing?
One moment you're watching the Armageddon Channel, then you click the
remote and you're in eternal RaptureLand. Then you click over to the
Fundie Porn Channel to view fantasies involving the instantaneous shedding
of your clothes, next you're being ejaculated from your body to engage
in a celestial orgy with Jesus -- whereas all of life on earth climaxes
with a cosmic money shot involving you and your fellow Christian's immortal
souls being splattered upon the face of God.
If it were possible for their
myths to be made manifest and Christ did return, not only would he make
a War on Christmas -- but on the death-lusting delusions of Christianity
itself.
What can lead people to such
belief systems? To understand, one must look at the poetic metaphors
that are literalized into religious faith.
Place, landscape, situation,
and the mythos of its people are inextricably bound. When I was a child,
growing up in the Deep South, on the occasion of fishing expeditions
and such, I would have contact with rural African American farmers who
still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century. We would
sit on wooden porches, snapping string beans, and I would listen as
they quoted scripture. Like their life-sustaining crops, the figure
of Christ was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath
the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed
to sustain their lives, then, like the figure of Christ, resurrected
as next year's seed crop. These tales held resonance for them because
they were suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria that they
lived everyday; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and
circumstance. Hence, Jesus was as real to them as the snap beans beneath
their fingertips.
And this is why megachurch
Christians and present day conservatives long for the release of death.
When passion, intimacy and hope are thwarted by pervasive feelings of
powerlessness, people will long for release into paradise. Life lived
under corporate hegemony is a cage: one that distorts the human animal's
instinctual longing for love, communal acceptance and freedom by providing
commercial facsimiles of those things -- and, as a result, delivers
the human animal to economic imprisonment. The bars of the cage might
be invisible -- yet the sense of confinement is palpable across our
utterly commodified culture, where, like convicts in the cell, longing
for release, Christian fundies long for the aforementioned carnal video
game of RaptureLand -- while consumers, confined in their work stations
and shackled by debt, long for vacations, enormous motor vehicles, porn,
and, paradoxically, yet more imprisoning consumer goods ... as George
W. Bush longs for his own idealized reflection to be mirrored by the
judgment of history.
And we, to paraphrase a Bob
Dylan song, shall be released -- just not in the manner in which we
pine. As recent history has shown, insularity is a chaos generator;
closed systems decay at exponentially increasing rates ... Hubris brings
the fall ... Sometimes, as a means of escaping the confinement of one's
own life-diminishing, self-proclaimed "morality", an individual
(or even a culture) will court destruction. (You may insert the name
of the disgraced, hypocritical Christian moralist of the moment here.)
Carl Jung asked the question:
Why would the story line of the Christian myth of Christ place the birth
of the savior of the vast cosmos in the remote hinterlands of the ruling
Roman empire, plus have that divine birth take place in the hinterlands
of those hinterlands, plus have the birth take place on the floor of
a barn, no less, amid the animal shit? Jung answered that the human
ego, as is the case with an overgrown, corrupt empire, will cast out
what it cannot exploit and subdue.
This is why every age presents
us with an imperial occupation of the mind. Yet, in our era, the stakes
could not be higher. From the deathscape we've made of the city of Baghdad,
to the dying oceans of the earth -- beneath our arrogance and carelessness
lies a culture in suicidal despair. Contemporary Christians may call
it faith, neocons may call it freedom, and corporatist might call it
market values -- but it smells like death.
There are occasions when
all other means have failed and circumstances have grown so desperate
that one, against all habit and will, is driven to face the truth. Where
I was raised such a situation is called a "come-to-Jesus moment."
Paradoxically, the come-to-Jesus moment we must embrace is: There is
no Jesus to come to -- only a host of unnerving facts we have banished
to the hinterlands of our minds. There will be no star blazing in the
eastern sky to guide us; no divine child vouchsafed in a boondocks manger
to genuflect before. All we can hope to gain is the opportunity for
renewal that flickers to life from ending the long, forced exile of
truth.
Phil Rockstroh,
a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist
and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at:
[email protected].
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights