Wal
Mart Nihilism Versus
The Punk Rock Of Blogging
By Phil Rockstroh
01 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The
Holiday Season has arrived, unfolding before us, like a cheap vinyl
wallet, here in The United States of American Express. The days spill
forth, their hours comprised of shopping and shooting sprees, of retail
and retaliation. Jingle bells and the crackle of gunfire. This is the
way an empire falls, with armies of confused killers abroad and legions
of killer clowns at home.
A decade and half ago, we
watched smugly as The Kremlin came undone. Yet, somehow we believe ourselves
to be immune from the rot that causes empires to collapse from within.
The Social Realist poets
of the former Soviet Union made themselves the objects of much (deserved)
derision, when, in the service of the dogmatic dictates of state communism,
they penned poetic odes to crop yields, tractors and other farm implements.
When a Russian attempts to
convey his passions, his soul is prone to reach inward seeking poetic
depths. In contrast, nowadays, in situations of crucial importance,
such as the anxious waiting in long lines involved when attempting to
procure PlayStation 3s among the throngs of their fellow Home Entertainment
Unit-lusting Fred C. Dobbs types, Americans express their ardor -- by
reaching for a gun. For we all know that The Baby Jesus would find the
sound of Yuletide gunfire to be as soothing as a celestial lullaby.
Back down here on earth,
while it was damn silly for Soviet aesthetes to go into a poetic swoon
over farm equipment, somehow, the act of going collectively round-heeled
over electronic appliances (including jealous rages that lead to homicidal
outbursts) doesn't seem like the sort of communal practices that will
allow an empire to endure for long.
The former Soviet Union had
the risible excesses of her Social Realists -- but what is one to make
of our culture of Wal*Mart Nihilists. Although, these acts are revelatory:
These are the kinds of "crimes of passion" that contemporary
Americans perpetrate. Such actions reveal what it is we truly care about,
deep down. And, sadly, our concerns have little to do with being the
keepers of Liberty's flame -- or even being good stewards of our children's
future.
The frustrations of a life
defined by the narrow confines of corporatism produces these lethal
states of mind, whereby the homicidal urges that are encoded into the
genetic makeup of all human beings become magnified into impulses both
monstrous and preposterous: Resultantly, many Americans view life and
death issues as having the weightless consequences of a thrill-kill
video game.
Yet, most citizens of our
moribund republic, because they've internalized the system, remain in
denial regarding the authoritarian deathscape the nation has become.
Moreover, they have nothing to contrast it with ... What they feel is
a sense of underlying unease which the consumer state (palliatively)
remedies with meds and media distractions. What else could drive people
insane enough to shoot each other over consumer goods? Not to mention
the emptiness and desperation involved with the compulsion to line up
lusting after electronic junk in the first place. I just want to shout
out to such folks -- I'm so sorry your life has come to this.
And don't bandy back at me
inane platitudes such as, "these are the necessary risks and excesses
inherent to 'the free market' system" -- and other such manifestations
of willful ignorance and flat-out deceit. Your so-called free market
has caused our nation to become imprisoned in debt, including our collectively
becoming obeisant to China, who now owns our shabby asses and dwindling
assets, like some global village pawn broker, by the purchase of our
national debt.
(And we know those in positions
of power in China lie awake at night ruminating on the well being of
the citizens of The United States. Yes, probably about to the same degree
Dick Cheney lies awake at night agonizing over the effect of a blast
of buckshot delivered to the face of an elderly hunting companion.)
To escape the knowledge of
our enslavement and its concomitant sense of powerlessness, emptiness
and hopelessness, we have become obsessed with the pursuit of piffle.
Yet we cannot consume away the pervasive sense of unease. Moreover --
following Eric Hoffer's dire dictum -- "You can never get enough
of what you really don't want" -- we're driven to "develop"
more soulless subdivisions, open more lifeless Big Box stores and compulsively
throw ourselves in to the thrall of even more mindless consumerism.
Ivan Illich averred: "In
a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners
of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Hence, like all hopeless
addicts, in reality, what we're seeking is the serenity of the grave.
Look at the evidence: We're
engaged in an ongoing act of murder/suicide by our engagement in a state
of perpetual war termed the War on Terror. In this way, our unconscious
wishes are being granted in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and we're, most
likely, not done yet. Accordingly, our need to relieve our sense of
emptiness and powerlessness has grown so insatiable that we roam the
world, relentlessly, in search of the means of mollification: But where
we go, we leave a wasteland in our wake, including the manner we have
fouled our own nest.
Furthermore, I'm willing
to hazard a guess that neither industry, nor thrift, nor a PlayStation
3's razzle dazzle, nor another round of lowered interest rates nor a
surge of consumer spending, nor a miracle military victory in Iraq,
nor a sleepless fleet of terrorist-spotting spy satellites in space,
nor a billion surveillance cameras trained on every person, place and
thing on the planet could keep the oceanic vicissitudes of earthly existence
from rising, nor the gales of contretemps from blowing, nor the casuistry-sundering
storms of uncertainty from making landfall -- and could, at this late
date, keep the American Empire from collapsing from the rot festering
within its spoiled rotten populace.
This is due to the sad fact
that, thus far, all our attempts to defeat our feelings of powerlessness
and sate our emptiness have been vain, shallow, self-serving and authoritarian;
hence, our acts have only managed to defeat and suppress the life-vivifying
forces of freedom and imagination within us. We may give lip service
to Jesus, but we outright worship the spurious Eros of the corporatist
advertising/entertainment/consumer paradigm -- and it has risen before
us as manifest Thanatos.
In spirit-desiccating accommodation
to this punitive and petty age, we have merely managed to submerge our
fires of authentic human passion. This is a gambit fraught with hidden
danger. I've heard stories of fires that burned unseen in sealed-off,
abandoned mines -- wherein years later, miles from the original location
of the blaze, dead trees burst into flames...the fire having traveled
underground the length of the mine and up the dry kindling of the tree's
root system to explode in open air. We witness these sorts of sudden
conflagrations, constantly: road rage, workplace and school shooting
sprees, spittle-spraying right-wing pundits, George Bush's oscillations
between dead-eyed blankness and prickly anger (I don't know which state
is more terrifying) and a culture that willingly accepts the outright
murder of civilians, for no discernible reason. As if there exists a
good one.
If the fires of passion burn, unseen and untended, in subterranean denial
-- how can an individual or a culture learn to temper those raging fires
of passion into warmth and compassion? Hence: the coldness of the corporate
culture and the lifelessness of existence in contemporary America, resulting
in chronic dissatisfaction (the feeling something is missing) and the
attempts to ameliorate the discomfort with the dark Eros of perpetual
war and enslavement to the shallow distractions of the consumer state.
The fire, next time -- indeed.
The corporate media is never
going to level with you on the subject: It would put them out of business.
Such a development is about as likely as the arising of a mass social
movement, led by pimps, called, "The Pimp's Crusade For The Promotion
of Universal Abstinence."
Accordingly, in our shallow
and self-defeating era, a million lies are told; a million promises
are broken. The poor starve; the rest of us rot from within. As everything
we hold precious is imperiled, as we engage in a planet-destroying struggle
for the attainment of junk.
Yet, it need not play out
this way: For our minds are honeycombed by multiple universes of possibilities,
ideas, and imaginings. Accordingly, we sense that the "information"
we receive from the commercial media, official Washington, and the business
sector is far from complete -- that it is merely a few, meretricious
fragments of a subjective account, splintered from a small shard of
a hasty conclusion, broken from a vast mosaic of a larger prevarication.
But like the dimwit protagonists
of a Country and Western song, too many of us plead to be plied with
sweet lies. Pervasive corporatism creates the illusion we have little
choice in the matter. Freedom is no more available to us than finding
undying love in a Honky Tonk.
Moreover, the ideas contained
in The Bill of Rights and the tenets of The Enlightenment are quaint
notions to corporatists. Within our empire of mammon, cant and incommensurate
privilege, concepts such as freedom and liberty lie forgotten, languishing
like the statues of forsaken gods within the crumbling temples of some
dead religion.
I often receive emails from
readers who ask, in essence:
And what of those of us --
those who remember and grieve our republic's passing. Is there some
place of sanctuary where we could rally our spirits; a place where we
might gather our strength -- where we might have a rapprochement with
our own hopeful hearts, where we might rise in the cool air of morning
in some location no longer haunted by the malicious and manipulative
spirits who have usurped our names and stolen our country. Is there
any place on earth where we might dodge the mind-grinding, soul-killing,
death-worshipping legacy of the militarist/corporatist/consumerist state?
Don't you see, Phil, these
readers implore and admonish me: We're besieged and outnumbered by the
mindless worshippers of Death around us -- and, by the way, fella, your
incantatory prose will not move, nor even interest them.
I'll answer these entreaties
by quoting from a documentary, "Punk: Attitude," I viewed,
recently, in which independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch posited that art
movements (and political ones as well) don't need the masses, they just
need a committed 5 percent ... the masses will follow. There is no need
to inform the mob; a mob, by its very nature, is uninformed -- and unteachable.
The belief in the existence of an informed mob is like believing in
the existence of that chimera called compassionate conservatism -- and
we've seen where credulity to that sort of crazy talk leads.
As was the case with Punk,
which Jarmusch termed, "do it yourself art" -- one needs passion,
commitment, conviction -- tempered by an ability to apprehend and uniquely
interpret changing realities and circumstances -- plus an inner reservoir
of courage and follow through. These things can't be bought retail:
And that is exactly the advantage we hold.
Hence, it might be instructive
to look at the mode of being evinced by the pioneers of Punk Rock ...
Tired of endless guitar solos and of Arena Rock and Roll's egomaniacal
inanities, they learned to play three cords -- real fast -- and would
play for little or no money in shot-out downtown clubs -- thereby reintroducing
the danger and allure of the subversive intimacy of early Rock and Roll
to a new generation -- and forever establishing the enduring principle
that being an imbecilic Rock and Roll egoist should be a democratic
process -- not limited to only corporate, guitar technocrats (or even
those individuals possessed of the tyranny of talent).
Point of clarification: I'm
not speaking here of literally becoming a punk rocker. (Although, a
convincing argument can be made that: independent websites and blogs
are the new Punk Rock.) I'm talking about the initial passion of the
progenitors -- not the conformist banalities displayed by their mindless
followers ... I'm speaking of the mode of being of the folks who created
the art form -- not the hollow mimicry of those who mummify it into
dogma.
The do-it-your-self-art idea
being the key that unlocks the barred door of the commodified prison
of a corporatist state of mind and allows one's life to be created --
not by narrow careerist agendas -- but by the surrender to all it takes
to be free.
To do this, sometimes, you
must follow your inspiration so far off the path -- you have to blaze
your own path to make your way back.
It's not the outcome of your
endeavors, but the life lived. If you live with such ardor -- who knows
who and what you'll effect. We must be like the monks of The Dark Ages,
copying books for generations yet unborn, preserving what we can of
our humanity and passing it on.
I believe hope arises in
organic ways before it makes its way into political platforms, is implemented
into policy, and, finally, imprisons us in dogma -- thus allowing a
new generation to engage in the soul-making of sedition against its
ossified order.
Let's get to it.
Or else, pack your firearm
of choice and line-up for a PlayStation 3. Although, it's all good:
Because, someday, an era may arrive when sanity prevails and future
generations will have a nice laugh at your expense -- a generation of
clowns who would kill (even destroy the world) for an appliance.
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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